Wind Done Gone

African-American writer, Alice Randall, lives in Nashville, Tennessee, and is writer-in-residence at Vanderbilt University. A Harvard University graduate and former country music writer, The Wind Done Gone is Randall’s first book. The novel is a reinterpretation of Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novel, Gone with the Wind. It tells the same story, but from a different perspective—that of Scarlett’s half-sister, Cynara, an enslaved woman. In this excerpt from The Wind Done Gone, Cynara mourns her mother, Mammy’s, recent death and learns new information about the planation’s origins that make her question, for the first time, the supremacy of her white father.

Excerpted from Alice Randall, The Wind Done Gone (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2001), 48-64.

25

Garlic dug the grave. We had our service early in the morning, Garlic, his wife, Miss Priss, and me. Just dawn. The time of day when even servants rest. Maybe. I wanted an hour she had been at rest on earth, and I couldn’t find one. Only in the lazy drag of her feet, the slow trifling ramble on any one of so many errands, did she save herself just a little from work-hard-work-long exertion, a slave’s exertion.

There are two cemeteries on the place. Out back of where the cabins used to be, over a mile from the house, there is a slave cemetery. A concentration of round fieldstones (some still in stacks) and branches lashed together to create crude crosses mark for still blinking eyes the territory of the enslaved dead. It helps to squint. The ground is soft here, damp. Some suspect an underground spring. A blanket of wild grass and wild flowers covers this ground most of the year, protecting, concealing.

Closer to the house—you can see it from the porch—is the family burial ground: a rising mound of red earth beneath a tall, limb-spreading tree. In this mound are carved stones of pink Etowah marble. Pink stones, head and feet, red earth, green tree, sprigs, and odd blades of grass. Nothing much could grow in that shade. Nothing grows in this shade but names and dates and ghosts. A low wall of flat stones piled one on top of the other, a slave wall, hedges the ghost in, hedges the visitors out.

We buried her in the family plot.

Of course, Other wants Mammy buried beside Lady. What she doesn’t know is a long time ago Lady’s grave and Planter’s were changed, looking toward just this day. Mammy be lying down beside Planter. He got himself in the middle, in death just like in life. Only the folk at the early service know that—Garlic, his wife, Miss Priss, and me.

Garlic spoke over the body. When Lady and Mammy come to the place, Garlic was there. He had chaperoned their entire journey from Savannah to the grave. He brought them to this side of the piney woods where both women got knocked up so big and quick. Everybody suppose Garlic put it to Mammy; the master’s valet follows the master and chooses the mistress’s maid. Oh, peculiar economy! It was a way of making sure there was milk for the baby. Somebody plants a seed in the going-to-be-wet-nurse, and then you starve that child if you have to, like they starved Miss Priss’s younger brother. Garlic knew what not to say and what to say so that people would say less.

He braided what he could remember of the words from the Episcopal prayer book with his own words.

“You might could say we was the whole Trinity around this place, me, Mammy, and Miss Priss.” His wife frowned, but we all knew what he meant. Garlic was right. Mrs. Garlic had bearing, height, and a kind of beauty that grew with age, but she had changed nothing of significance in any of our lives. Her stature was only apparent. Mrs. Garlic always stood in a kind of second command to Mammy, a shadow echo of a greater strength. Ultimately it was Miss Priss, so insignificant-seeming, so shrill, so silly, who completed the triangle that walled Cotton Farm off from the world.

Garlic was wearing the watch that I wanted for mine. I saw the golden keys hanging from it. “I was with Planter the night he won this place in a card game. Way back when. Ain’t nobody on this place know what I know ’cept Sister—that’s what I came to call her—and now she gone. What I have to say I say for her. And I say it for me, ’cause when it comes time to lay me in this ground, ain’t none of ya’ll be knowin’ what to say.

“Planter won me in a poker game. My old master was a rich young planter from St. Simon’s island. Good-looking, good-mannered, we went everywhere, Charleston, N’awlins, Washington, D.C. I been to Marse Jefferson’s Monticello; you name it, I been there. I was with him when he went to Harvard. I stood in the square and got me some education while he graduated on time, not like those twins from ’round here who tumbled in and out of every college. Young Marse was something else. So much so I couldn’t be nothing. I stood in the Yard and he went to the classrooms. Yeah. Now this man heah’’ (tapping his toe on Planter’s grave) “was a different matter. He didn’t know nothing. He didn’t have nothing but his white skin, spirit, and work-hard. He needed me. And I needed him, ’cause I had a vision of a place I wanted to live.

“So I mixed my young master’s drinks heavy and poured my hoped-to-be-master’s drink light. Wasn’t good luck won Planter me. It was me poisoning Young Marse’s cup. Later, Young Marse offered twice the money to get me back, and I was scared. But my new master, my soon-to-be Planter, was too proud of his first slave to let me go. I played the same trick when we won this land, but Planter was in on it. And it was me who told him when it was time for us to find a wife with a good group of house Negroes. I knew Mammy. When we first came to Savannah, Mammy told me all ’bout Lady and her troubles, and I told Planter what he need to know. I wanted Mammy for this place.”

“There was no architect here. There was me and what I remembered of all the great houses on great plantations I had seen. Bremo. Rattle-and-Snap. The Hermitage. Belgrove. Tudor Place. Sabine Hall. I built this place with my hands and I saw it in my mind before my hands built it. Mammy and me, we saved it from the Yankees not for them but for us. She knew. She knew this house stood proud and tall when we couldn’t. Every column fluted was a monument to the slaves and the whips our bodies had received. Every slave being beat looked at the column and knew his beating would be remembered. I stole for this place and I got shot doing it. We. Mammy and me, kept this place together because it was ours. Here I raised my family. Right this morning we’re burying the real mistress of the house.”

Right then I cried.

Later we had the official funeral. Other cried and cried. We were a pathetic band. Dreamy Gentleman bereft of Mealy Mouth, and Other absolutely confused, confused as to why R. wasn’t there. She believed it to have something to do with Beauty, that “waddling woman, with the powdered face and the colored hair.”

Dreamy Gentleman had come, of course, bringing his heir and his baby; bringing Other’s surviving children. There was the most exquisite kind of pain in Dreamy Gentleman’s eyes when he looked into Miss Priss’s face. Other saw Dreamy Gentleman looking at Priss and almost hissed. Then she saw, with her memory, what he saw: a beautiful boy’s face from long ago. The face of Miss Priss’s brother appeared in his sister’s face when she flared her nostrils in any show of arrogance or anger. For the very first time, Other saw it, and I saw her see it. Other didn’t see me at all; it was as if I didn’t exist.

R. couldn’t come because I was there. So Other looked down the road for him, harder than she had ever looked for Dreamy Gentleman. And she had looked hard down that road when the war was over and nobody knew who was coming home alive and with what body parts.

Dreamy Gentleman read properly from the Book of Common Prayer and gave a little talk about how we were laying to rest the last of a vanished species and culture—the loyal old servant who, Christ-like, sacrificed herself for others. He believed every word. He believed my mother to be an unselfish woman. He believed her to be a loving beast of burden without sex or resentment. He knew nothing of her at all.

And Other knew only bits more. Now, as I think back on what I saw of her at the grave, I am struck by the truth of her grief. I wonder what she would feel now if she knew, if I told her, if she ever come to understand that Mammy used her, used her to torment white men. Other was Mammy’s revenge on a world of white men who would not marry her dark self and who had not loved her Lady. Did Other see how she had been weaned to pick up hearts and trained to dash them down, both with casual ease? Who convinced her to conquer? Had Mammy ever told Other the truth about Dreamy Gentleman? No. Watching Other stand by the grave, I knew for sure that Mammy had stopped wearing the mask and the mask had worn her. By the time we were born, choosing between Other and me was like choosing between paper dolls, and Other had the prettier clothes.

When the service was over, Other was awarded pride of place at the head of the line of mourners. I was to follow right behind. She marched straight ahead to the house, allowing the wind to carry her words back to me. “You should be ashamed of neglecting Mammy.”

I went back in the house, sneaked into Lady’s room, crawled into our bed, and cried.

26

In the afternoon, Other and Dreamy Gentleman went out driving in her carriage. When the driver come back, he say he took them over to where the house we called Twelve Slaves Strong as Trees once stood. I have forgotten their name for it. What I remember is this: there were twelve columns across the front of that slave-built house. They stood for the original twelve dark men who cleared the land. And the lines, the flutes, on those columns stood for the stripes on those slaves’ hacks. They didn’t know any of that, but we did. The last sermon I heard my preacher in Atlanta preach, he said, “We don’t need any new members; we need disciples!” Twelve slaves, twelve columns, twelve disciples. Twelve memories. The driver overheard Other say to Dreamy Gentleman she’s going to build that house back up again, for him, in remembrance of what had been.

The driver say, ‘“Dey ack jes lak brutha ’n sista now, not lak how she usta ack.” There’s a new understanding between them, and I’m not the only one to see it.

I take my rest in the overseer’s house. Miss Priss watches Dreamy Gentleman’s children. Lord have mercy! Other’s son and daughter keep quietly to themselves. For the boy, born after his father died, every funeral is his father’s funeral. For the girl, so young when her father was killed riding out with the Klan, every funeral is her father’s funeral. And though their fathers were different men, this grief, more than their mother’s blood, has become the bond between them.

Soon they will all be deeply asleep, sleep they need, asleep for the whole long night. After all this sorrow, God knows they need the comfort of Garlic’s soup. And if God doesn’t know, Garlic knows. And I need the house to grieve.

27

We were sitting together at the kitchen table, me, Garlic, Mrs. Garlic, and Miss Priss. The rest of them had gone to sleep, won’t wake till morning. Was Mrs. Garlic’s kitchen now. Mammy’s cap and Mammy’s apron had been removed, and were already washed, folded, and put away; she had been sick a spell. Eating cornbread straight out of a skillet, drinking coffee from cracked cups. These events had never occurred in Mammy’s kitchen. Chitlins on the stove were stinking up the place. If Mammy had ever wanted to eat chitlins, she would have cooked them out in the cabins. Freedom had a flavor, and we were tasting it. I breathed in the pungent aroma of change. I had to ask. Everything was different, so maybe now was my chance. “Tell me about those little boys buried out there under the tree? Lady’s boys.”

“What dey der da tell?” asked Mrs. Garlic, handing me a steaming howl of pig entrails.

“You tell me,” I said, hands still limp in my lap. My hunger for knowledge was sharper than my hunger for midnight food. I looked—forlornly, I hope—into Mrs. Garlic’s eyes.

Miss Priss’s arm shot out; she grabbed the first bowl for herself. Between noisy chomps she declared, “You should a figured it out already.”

I am still hungry. I wanted to slap Miss Priss. Slap her hard. But I didn’t do it. It always been this way with me. I’ll call another girl “bitch’’ before you blink, but I don’t like to hit a woman. I guess it always felt like too much of a man to do it. Strange enough. Strength always seemed to rob the girl out of me, so I always take care to keep it hid. I let my eyelids rest heavily upon my eyes and close.

Garlic’s chomping down on his bowl of tripe. “Yah shouda’ akse me.”

“Would you tell me?”

“I knows all about it.”

Garlic was playing with me like a cat hatting at cobwebs, and I was dissolving and falling to the ground with each bat. I hate to be denied. I don’t ask for things I can’t have. I couldn’t say more. But I was racing ‘round the furniture in my mind, trying to find a chair to sit on. Why do I always think of it just that way? Is thinking truly like house cleaning? Finally I stumbled into an observation of Beauty’s: “It’s like a bad taste in your mouth to be the only person who knows something, something good or something bad. Being the only one is bitter. Being one of two is sweet.” “I’ll keep your secret with you,” I offered.

Garlic say nothing.

I rose as if to walk away. I said, “It’s like starting to disappear at your beginning end. Ain’t it?”

“What?”

“Forgetting. If I forget what happened to me in Charleston and you don’t know it to remind me, it’s gone. A year of my life gone like termites eating out the middle of a wood board, vanished into a mouth and flown away. Gone with the wind.”

“When ebrybody knowed what happened and why is dead.”

“You remember who I used to be. I got nobody in ’lanta to do that for me.”

“Now you admittin’ that it you what needs me. I’m surrounded with memory.” Garlic pulled me by the arm into his life, pushing me into a closer chair.

“We’ve spent enough time in this kitchen,’’ said Mrs. Garlic. Wife and daughter got up and left us alone.

28

I’ve always been afraid of Garlic. He never treated me warm-like. I remember seeing him toss other children on the place—black and white—into the air to catch in his powerful arms. I remember seeing him sneak lumps of sugar to Jeems when he was about the place, but not to me.

Garlic poured a lot of milk in a cup, into which he stirred sugar, then a splash or two of coffee. Something in the way he slurped disturbed me. His lower lip poked so far out, it grabbed at the cup as if it were a third thumb. ”How many time I sit in dis kitchen with huah when all de house sleep?”

“How many times?”

“You think you smart?”

“I hope I am.”

‘‘Dat’s da trufe. When we brought ya Mama to de house, it was huah and me late nights in dis kitchen. First you was coming. I hoped you were my baby. But then you came with what dey called peridot green eyes. Pallas cried when she saw you wrapped in the little blanket. You were so clear white till your color came in. As little of it as you got.”

He laughed. I had never heard Garlic laugh before. It was a rolling, gutbucket cough of a laugh, like the clacking together of bones in a jar.

“What was it like when you first came here?”

‘‘I didin know nothin’ but slavery times. I was born in this here country. All I could see to lifting me up was pulling real close to a powerful man and teasing him into thinking my thoughts was his own. Your daddy was the man I found. Together we found Pallas. That was your mother’s name. She had already found Lady. Now Pallas, she had it kinda easy, but it’s easy what will corrupt you. Lady was cut from a strange cloth, and I guess it was Pallas what cut her.”

Pallas. My mother’s name is Pallas. Not Mammy, Pallas.

As he told the story, Lady was fifteen years old, a heart-heavy virgin, when they came upon her. ‘‘A heart-broke child, something just like her first girl is now.” Other, he was talking about. “It was a stroke of good luck that boy bein’ kilt.”

“Good luck?”

“Feleepe, dyin ‘. Lady loved her some Feleepe, and Mammy sho did love Lady. But Feleepe had money, and slaves of hid own, and he want to live right up dere in Savannah. If Lady a married him, Pallas a been a slave. When he got kilt, Pallas was sorry for Lady, but she saw her own good chance. If Lady married a man on a lonely place, a man with no people, Pallas could run the place, and she’d he free, free as she was going to be. And I knew me a man just like that.”

Mammy put the idea of the convent in one of Lady’s ears and the idea of Planter in the other. Then she took her chance. Lady was leaning toward the convent. But her Daddy, he hated the Catholic Church more than he hated Catholics, and Planter was one. He couldn’t bear to see his little gal given over to the Catholics. So she married Irish Planter, and if she didn’t care, it was because Pallas kept feeding her something by the spoonful that didn’t make your pain go away but made you stop caring that you hurt.

“I rode wid ‘em up country. It was me and Mammy up front with Planter and Lady behind.” On the honeymoon, Planter came to the room and found Lady knocked out, completely drunk, sleeping in Mammy’s arms. ‘‘I wa’ standin’ right outside the door in case things didn’t go right,” Garlic told me. He said, ”Mammy say to Marse, ‘Do yah bidness and git out.” He didn’t see what happened, and the room was quiet. Later, Mammy told him. She washed Lady’s body and carried her back to her bed after she, Mammy, change the sheets. Then Mammy went to Planter in his room and gave him what he wanted in his bed. She gave it so good, he never complained. Mammy say Lady came to think of her baby as an immaculate conception like the priests in Savannah gabbled about. Between them, they called Lady “Virgin Mary.’ She like to pray, and she got her babies without ever knowing a man.

That’s all I can write down now.

29

The bottle I took from the sideboard is almost empty. If I stay here much longer, I’ll need another one. I’ve got to write this down. But I don’t want to.

“What did she say when she found out they sold me?”

“She didin know.”

“She didin know.” Those three words mean more to me than “I love you.” And they just as hard to believe. Garlic would lie for Mammy. Love. Ignorance. Lying. How you supposed to know anything? God? Springs of faith? Weed patches of blindness with pretty little dandelions growing in them? I like to think, I would like to think, she didn’t know. I see into this thing too deeply. Maybe she sent me away, for me. Once I was gone, she had to forget me, or she, Pallas, would a died of pain. I know all about it. Didn’t I do the same? Forget or die of pain. Die of pain while I learned to forget?

Miss Priss came back to the kitchen for her cup of coffee. Miss Priss looked at me hard. She asked if she could read my palm.

“What do you see?’’ There’s something sly and intelligent about Miss Priss, but the whites don’t see it.

“Not’ing, I see not’ing.”

“Why you shivering?”

“It gives me the heebie-jeebies to stand out in that graveyard. It’s strange, all those little boys buried right next to your Mama.”

“Why strange?”

Garlic tried to silence Miss Priss with a look, but she kept carrying forward, and he just banged out of the room, taking a cup of coffee out to his wife in the parlor. Miss Priss let her voice drop real low, low in pitch and low in loudness. She kind of hissed into my car. “Your Mama killed those boys soon as they were born.’’

“Why would she do that?”

“What would we a done with a sober white man on this place?”

30

Me gone to sleep and got up again. The house, Garlic’s house, is cold, silent, dark. It feels so different to know this was Garlic’s dream and not Planter’s. Not my father’s.

Garlic pulled the string, and Planter danced like a bandy-legged Irish marionette. Everything but the horseback riding. That was his. There was always something African about Planter, and Garlic was it. Even Planter’s love of the land had something African in it. Black people are ancestor worshippers. And they have the sense of sacred places. Me heard the stories. My heart is still crick-crack-breaking. There’s a bright bitter feeling snaking down my chest. I don’t feel my heart beat, but I want to.

My forehead sweats hot beads, my hands sweat cold. My nose is beige and my mother’s black. I look at my fingers and sometimes I think the tips of them are purple. I look at my face and see a faint redness on the cheeks, as if a scarlet butterfly landed on my face while I was sleeping and left its rouging flying-dust.

Now what has Garlic told me? That he helped Planter win him in a card game by poisoning his old master, Planter’s opponent. That he chose to work for Planter because Planter was an impotent man. Oh. God! What God do I now imagine in heaven? Where are his hair of gold and eyes of blue? My Daddy’s eyes. The only God I knew built Cotton Farm, ran the slaves on this place. Now that ain’t Planter. Ain’t Daddy. Now what? Now Planter was a man without position or land who Garlic manipulated with his black hands into winning our land from another white man in a card game. Garlic the poisoner. I would laugh if it were not so sad. I would laugh if every laugh didn’t jostle loose bitter burps of knowing, leaving vinegar vapor on my tongue, the only vestige of the illusion of my father’s power.