The Wind Done Gone

A Novel

Alice Randall

• Publisher: Amistad
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN:
  9780618219063
• eBook ISBN:
  9780547524931
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

In this daring and provocative literary parody which has captured the interest and imagination of a nation, Alice Randall explodes the world created in GONE WITH THE WIND, a work that more than any other has defined our image of the antebellum South. Taking sharp aim at the romanticized, whitewashed mythology perpetrated by this southern classic, Randall has ingeniously conceived a multilayered, emotionally complex tale of her own - that of Cynara, the mulatto half-sister, who, beautiful and brown and born into slavery, manages to break away from the damaging world of the Old South to emerge into full life as a daughter, a lover, a mother, a victor. THE WIND DONE GONE is a passionate love story, a wrenching portrait of a tangled mother-daughter relationship, and a book that "celebrates a people's emancipation not only from bondage but also from history and myth, custom and stereotype" (San Antonio Express-News).

1

Today is the anniversary of my birth. I have twenty-eight years. This diary and the pen I am writing with are the best gifts I got—except maybe my cake. R. gave me the diary, the pen, and the white frosted tiers. He also gave me emerald earbobs. I think maybe my emeralds are just green glass; I hope maybe they be genuine peridots.

I was born May 25, 1845, at half-past seven in the morning into slavery on a cotton farm a day’s ride from Atlanta. My father, Planter, was the master of the place; my mother was the Mammy. My half-sister, Other, was the belle of five counties. She was not beautiful, but men seldom recognized this, caught up in the cloud of commotion and scent in which she moved. R. certainly didn’t; he married her. But then again, he just left her. Maybe that means something to me. Maybe he’s just the unseldom one who do recognize.

2

If I strip the flesh off my bones, like they stripped the clothes off my flesh in the slave market down near the battery in Charleston, this would be my skeleton: childhood on a cotton farm; a time of shawl-fetch slavery away in Charleston; a bare-breasted hour on an auction block; drudge slavery as a maid in Beauty’s Atlanta brothel, when Milledgeville was the capital of Georgia and Atlanta was nothing; a season of candle-flame concubinage in the attic of that house; a watery Grand Tour of Europe; and, finally, concubinage in my own white clapboard home, with green shutters and gaslights, in the center (near the train depot) of a fast-growing city that has become the capital of Georgia, concubinage that persists till now. How many miles have I traveled to come back to here?

3

They called me Cinnamon because I was skinny as a stick and brown. But my name is Cynara. Now when I tell it, I say they called me Cinnamon because I was sweet and spicy. Sweet, hot, strong, and black—like a good cup of coffee. Leastways, that’s how Planter liked his coffee.

Planter used to say I was his cinnamon and Mammy was his coffee.

He said those words a day I had gotten into trouble dashing before Other upon the stained-glass colored light that fell in rows of blue and pink diamonds down the wide hall of the big house. If I was ten years old, it must have been 1855. I bumped into the leg of the Hewitt sideboard. Other was ten years old too. It was one of those days we had back when everything seemed it would always be just as it has always been. Everything and everyone had a place and rested deep in it, or so it seemed that day to would-be knights and ten-year-olds. Then I bumped into that carved leg, and the shell-shaped bonbon dish jumped off Lady’s sideboard as if it just wanted to split into a hundred porcelain shards on the lemon-oiled pine floor. Something had changed, and I had changed it. Someone wanted to beat me. Mammy said she’d beat me good, with a belt. Other lied and said she’d knocked into the table. Said it ‘cause she knew it would pain Mammy to give me a whipping.

And sometimes Planter said it when he heard me making up little rhymes to sing to myself. Sometimes when Mammy was putting Other to sleep on a day pallet for a nap, he would call for me to sit at his feet on the broad porch and sing my little songs to him. “Cindy, come sing, come sing! Ain’t you my Cinnamon and she my coffee?” he’d ask. And I’d be slow to go, because I knew someone might be missing me.

On the day Planter told me I was leaving the place, I asked him what he had meant when he said that I was his cinnamon and she was his coffee. He said to me, “I mean a man can do without his cinnamon but he can’t do without his coffee.” I poked my lip out. “I mean you’re a gracious plenty.”

“I belong here?”

“Gracious plenty foreign to me child.”

R. says Planter was an Irishman and all Irish are shiftless, lazy crackers, no matter how rich they get. He always wants me to look outside the neighborhood for models of my deportment. He often mentions that Georgia was once a penal colony. The first time he said it, I didn’t know what a “penal colony” was. He says only the English and the French know anything about gracious plenty. He says when Planter and Mammy got together, they cooked a broth too rich for potato-water blood.

It was Planter who sent me away, but he got the go-ahead from Mama. It was the year his third son died, and he said it would be a good turn for me. I was thirteen the day they rode me off. It was 1858.

Mammy was my Mama. Even though she let me go, I miss her. I miss her every time I look into a mirror and see her eyes. Sometimes I comb through my long springy curls and pretend that the hand holding the comb is hers. But I don’t know what that looks like. Then I wish I was Other, the girl whose sausage curls I’ve seen Mammy comb and comb. I wish for the tight kinks of the comber or the glossy sausages of the combed. I wish not to be out of the picture.

Mammy always called me Chile. She never called me soft or to her softness. She called me to do things, usually for Other, who she called Lamb. It was “Get dressed, Chile!” and “What’s mah Lamb gwanna wear?”

4

I have tried to forget the place I was sent from, Cotton Farm, and the house in which I was born, Tata. If Sherman had burned it down to the ground, I believe I would not have labored in vain. I believe I would have succeeded. I believe I might have attained my own personal succession. But he didn’t. And I keep thinking that God saved it for some purpose, but it wasn’t God who saved Cotton Farm; it was Garlic, when he flapped like a fool and begged the Union troops to carry him away from all the fever and dying in the house. Every time he’d approach a Union horse and rider, they’d buck back farther away. Nobody wanted to get close enough to any of the buildings to rescue a slave or make a “building barbecue” possible. So, after all that I have forgotten, I still remember the place. The place, and the people who sent me away.

5

They called her Mammy. Always. Some ways I like that. Some days when it was kind of like we—she and me—had a secret against them, the planting people, I like it. Different days, when it feels she wasn’t big enough to have a name, I hate it. I heard tell down the years they compared her to an elephant. They shouted down to their ancestors: She was big as an elephant with tiny dark round eyes. But she wasn’t big enough to own a name. To me she was big as a house. Big as two houses. I’d be scared to be that.

Scared to be bigger than a minute and a snap of dark fingers. “She’s no bigger than a minute,” Mammy would say, snapping her thick, strong-as-branches fingers, stealing words from him whose watch Garlic inherited. Him who was my Daddy and never gave her or me nothing like time, Planter.

Anyways, Mammy’s eyes are big, just like mine. Garlic used to tell me that all the time. Garlic was Planter’s valet, and he liked women with great big legs. If I ever started to get big, R. would let me go.

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Even Other called Mammy out of her name. Other, who loved my mother; Other, who ran to her Mammy like I never seen nobody run to anybody, or anything, for the more significant matter, ran to Mammy like she was couch and pillow, blanket and mattress, prayer and God. Other rested her head on Mammy’s brown pillow breasts, snuggled in beneath a blanket of fat brown arm, breathed in the prayer of Mammy’s breath and out the god of her presence, never came to know there was any reason to give Mammy Planter’s watch. So Garlic got it. Garlic wears it. Other owns Mother by more than ink and law.

6

This is my book. If I die tomorrow, nobody’ll remember me except maybe somebody who find this book. I read Uncle Toms Cabin. I didn’t see me in it. Uncle Tom sounded just like Jesus to me, in costume. I don’t want to go in disguise. I don’t want to write no novel. I’m just afraid of forgetting. I don’t talk to anybody save Beauty and a few folks, so nobody remembers what I am thinking. If I forget my real name, won’t be anybody to tell it to me. No one here knows. I’m going to write down everything. Something like Mr. Frederick Douglass.

 

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R. visits my house more now, much more than he did before he quit Other. These days the sun sets with him sitting on my long wide porch turned toward the sideyard. Many nights now, he sleeps here. He says, “I love this house.” I say, “You designed it.” I don’t say, “And you paid for it,” but that’s another reason to love a thing. He says, “It’s quieter than the other house.” He doesn’t speak her name. The architecture of my home is a bow to R. and what he remembers of the houses of Charleston. I don’t want to remember anything of Charleston at all, but the houses were cool, and R. wouldn’t approve a cupola for the hot air to rise into, so I have turned my house away from the street.

It’s a pity my street sees only the short side of me. It’s a lovely brown street that didn’t exist, even in dreams, before the war. There’s a new church for the colored, First Congregational, a colored druggist, colored grocers, colored undertakers, colored schoolteachers down from Canada. Thanks to white women who want to improve the lot of what they are always calling “our children,” R. is not, when he stays over, the street’s only white resident. And I’m not sure how long he will be its only millionaire. There’s a dusky man lives on this road who sells insurance. Many folk believe that man will someday soon be a millionaire. And there’s more than one university for colored people springing up. With R. here more, I miss some of the neighborhood gossip, but I catch some from across town. There’s a drink like something a root doctor would make, dark, with bubbles all sugared up to keep the swamp taste down, and the white folk are paying plenty pretty money to drink it. I’ve never tasted it. Only white folk go into the pharmacy where they sell it. R. says he’s going to bring me a taste.

7

I almost never hear from Cotton Farm. More and more rarely someone will stop by my kitchen window and call, “Homefolks say hey.” They can’t write, and I don’t expect them to. So when the letter came, I was afraid of tearing its seal.

Mammy is dying and she want me to come home before she go. I ain’t saying yes, and I ain’t saying no. I’m saying, I ain’t stood on Cotton Farm since I was still saying ain’t, and I don’t know if I want to go back there.

Mammy is dying surrounded by homefolks. I got no feet to take me there. Mammy is dying and I don’t want to go home. No more than she ever wanted to come see me under this fine roof. Mammy is dying and I want to touch her but I don’t want her to touch me.

I’m going to die one day; this is telling me that. When I was a girl, I say to myself, “I won’t hold you when your hair turn gray and your skin turn gray, when your eyes glaze over blue like old folks’ eyes do. I won’t make a pillow for your head. I seen rheumy eyes like hardboiled eggs, deep green circles glazed over white, and I think those will be your eyes one day. I won’t hold you and I will never eat eggs again.” Like a prayer of protection I said those things, and now it is not the threat I meant it to be. It’s just a prescient prophecy, just a curse on me.

Mammy, Mama, I have no more idea how to hold you old than you had how to hold me young. All I got is ambition to love you more than you loved me.

8

Last night I dreamed of Cotton Farm.

I was serving at table, pulling the silken cord of the shoofly as guests dined, as they spoke of shopping in New Orleans, of buying furniture, and wallpaper, and silver. As they ate Mammy’s dinner, I pulled the cord again and again; the cord pulled the silk brocade flap cantilevered above the table and fanned the guests from Savannah and Annapolis. As I performed my duty, I heard planters speak of turning cotton into silver. Someone pronounced “alchemy of slavery,” and a shining coffeepot, candlesticks, and saltcellars changed before my dreaming eyes into little piles of cotton balls flecked with seed. Then I looked at my arms, and they changed too. The two golden brown little hills, one in the top of each of my arms, grew into little mountains as I pulled the cord and Mammy smiled, passing the green beans.

As I continued to fan and the guests continued to eat, Other appeared at the table, and the wallpaper began to move. In my dream, just as in life, the dining room wallpaper is painted all over with the story of Telemachus, in the land of the enchantress Calypso, searching for his father, Odysseus. Garlic once told me he had seen paper just like it in the home of President Jackson. I didn’t believe him. Presidents don’t invite folk like Planter to dinner. At eleven I’d seen enough of “the quality” to know that. But I liked his story. And in life I liked the wallpaper. In my dream it wouldn’t stop moving, and I started to hate it. Didn’t I know what it was like to live in the land of an enchantress and to long for your father?

My eyes turned from the wallpaper to the windows, my arm still pulling, still fanning. There were many windows. The house was built to let the outside in, the fragrance of peach and plum, the outside light after it is tinted by the colored glass of the windows. But I am inside looking out, toward the distant cabins.

Through the pink glass I see black smoke from a cabin chimney. I see into the cabin itself: I see a baby gently rocked in the arms of her mother.

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I am still fanning as my mother serves Other a choice piece of dark meat. There is a painted porcelain bonbon dish on the sideboard behind them. It falls from the sideboard and shatters. Over and over it falls. And I keep fanning.

I wake up screaming. R. says, Strong meat tastes sweet.

9

If I go back there, I’m going to get my Daddy’s watch and have it engraved to read, TO R.B. FROM M.E. I don’t feel like laughing, but I can just see R. laughing at my joke. I can just see him open the satin-lined leather box. He’ll understand; he expects me to play with letters. He taught me how to read in bed. I praised him for it. His stomach was my first paper, lip rouge was my pencil, and the cleaning rag was my tongue. We learned me well. R. gave me the tools. I learned to write, right on his belly.

He’s used to buying women and ladies and buying them jewelry. I’m going to give him some of his own back. I like to give R. things. I like to give him what he’s used to paying for.

Sometimes when we are in bed and he’s sucking on one of my breast, pulling hard and steady so the pull only brings me the pleasure, sometimes when he’s nursing on me, I smile, because he can’t get what he wants here. I’m dry. But I let him suck himself to sleep. And sometimes there comes over his face a look of peace. Sometimes when I’m riding astride him and my gals dangle toward his face, he snaps at them like the foxes snapping at grapes dangling just above their mouths, and I laugh. Once, just after that, he pushed so hard into me that something broke inside and we were touching without anything between us, like a fever came over me, and he had the same sickness. Then I closed my eyes and I saw Other.

She was old enough to walk. She walked right past me, past Lady, she walked right past Lady and me, over to Mammy, reached up for Mammy, and my Mama reached down to pull Other up onto her hip. Other reached into the top of Mammy’s dress and pulled out my mother’s breast. “I want some titty-tip,” she said, and I ached in some place I didn’t know I had, where my heart should have been but wasn’t. I’ve come to believe that was the very first time I ever felt my soul, and it was having a spasm. It clinched again, pushing the air out of me in a hiccup. I flushed in a rage of possession as those little whit...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contents
• Copyright
• Notes on the Text
• Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae *
• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5
• 6
• 7
• 8
• 9
• 10
• 11
• 12
• 13
• 14
• 15
• 16
• 17
• 18
• 19
• 20
• 21
• 22
• 23
• 24
• 25
• 26
• 27
• 28
• 29
• 30
• 31
• 32
• 33
• 34
• 35
• 36
• 37
• 38
• 39
• 40
• 41
• 42
• 43
• 44
• 45
• 46
• 47
• 48
• 49
• 50
• 51
• 52
• 53
• 54
• 55
• 56
• 57
• 58
• 59
• 60
• 61
• 62
• 63
• 64
• 65
• 66
• 67
• 68
• 69
• 70
• 71
• 72
• 73
• 74
• 75
• 76
• 77
• 78
• 79
• 80
• 81
• 82
• 83
• 84
• 85
• 86
• 87
• 88
• 89
• 90
• 91
• 92
• 93
• 94
• 95
• 96
• 97
• 98
• 99
• 100
• 101
• 102
• 103
• 104
• 105
• 106
• 107
• 108
• 109
• 110
• 111
• 112
• 113
• 114
• Postscript
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Connect with HMH
• Footnotes