Read an Excerpt
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?”
Copyright © 2001 by Alice Randall
Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.
