When the Congressman raised my hand to his lips, to kiss in greeting, I shook so hard, I was embarrassed. I flushed. I don't remember what words he said. But he offered me his arm, and we walked together into the Douglasses' garden. As we walked, he talked. He said . some surprising't things.

The girls from Fisk, teased again into song, had launched into "Go Down, Moses." I was amazed by their performance-the haunting combination of the raw and the refined. I told him so.

"Be not amazed," chastised the Congressman. "Be not " amazed.

"They will amaze the Queen. Why not me?”

“Who is Victoria compared to you? You've seen more than she. We see it daily. We are the chosen ones, the ones who sometimes snatch victory from the jaws of tragedy.”

“To what tragedy do you refer ? “

“Do you require a particular tragedy?" For a moment he allowed himself the pleasure of being amused by the rhetorical question; then he waxed earnest. "Until it is transformed by our own energy, our own muscle, our own brain, every second of our very existence on these shores is tragic." I hated hearing those words. I wanted to put my hand on his mouth and whisper, "Hush." Like I was Mama and he was Baby. But he's a man and I'm no mother, and he just kept talking. "And once transformed, even the least little bit, one drop of transformation, in the entire body of a life, makes the life victorious." He touched the hard round muscle in the top of my arm, that golden hill of my inheritance, legacy of my childhood labor. Then he kissed his fingertips and pressed the kiss to my arm.

The release was as powerful as a little death on the green velvet couch. I was tired and wanting to hear more. He told more: "Just like one drop of blackness in the entire body of a man make him black." What would it be like to have a drop of him in me? To keep from fainting, I changed the subject and gave him my most frozen smile.

Now he talked to me of the events of the day, expecting me to be proud of his accomplishments. I didn't know enough of the events of the day to truly value his part, but I knew enough of men to value the way he held his self-the way even Douglass deferred to him and leaned closer to hear what the Congressman had to say when he allowed his voice to drop down low.

In that moment, the very moment Douglass leaned toward him to claim some word of his as their secret, I wondered if the Congressman could be mine. And I laugh at myself for wondering. I have been R.’s, but no one had ever been mine. I have never possessed a man. I had never hoped to possess a man. Never even wished to possess a man's soul, for it seemed too close to slaving. But now I am wondering if he could be mine, and if I knew if he could be mine, I might attempt possession.

And wondering if I could possess the Congressman (as I turned away from him, all the time stealing sideways glances back at him, while moving back toward Douglass's son) raises the possibility of me possessing R.

Everything about ownership is changing: land, people, money, gold into foreign currency, foreign currency back into foreign gold, and gold back into money in our banks. It doesn't seem in this time of hurricanes and storms and other acts of God, with winds of every sort of change in the air, that hearts would be any different. Why couldn't she who couldn't own, who now owned forty acres and a mule-if I could own a former plantation-could I not own a planter's heart?

R. needs to get home soon. I've sent him a note. "I need what a man who's gone can't do. I love you. Speed your return." I wrote those words in my head while I was looking at Douglass, looking at the Congressman, and some young fool was mumbling to me. Could he, either he, which he, if both could be mine, who would I have? Could I have either?

But the gap-too the girl, now in a cloak, caught the Congressman's eye, and he moved away, leaving the party with only a distant bow in my direction. And I was left to lesser pleasures of observation.

The dresses were modest and trim; there was an abundance of simple good food. Plates were eaten off laps on stairs after folk were seated on every available chair. Many of the young gentlemen stood.

Douglass has traveled to England and has many English friends. One English gentleman referred to the streamers down the back of a rather saucy bonnet as "follow-me-my-lads," and the back porch burst into laughter as the brown girl in question gaily skipped across the lawn.

These are new and lighter days.

Several of the visitors were students at Howard University. Some, as I have already written, were visiting from down South.

I am trying to suck it all in deeply. Trying to feel how this place feels different from the farm when all the white folks were away.

That's when we had our holiday, not Christmas. There were times when all of them went to Atlanta or Savannah or Charleston, when the overseer was suddenly taken sick up in bed. Strange how overseers so often took sick when the family was away during the holidays. That is when we had our Christmas.

And now it should be Christmas every day, but it is not. What it is, is the days before. Working, getting ready. Everything now is expectation, hope, waiting for Christmas to come but we don't know when.

This morning I went out walking in my new neighborhood, Georgetown, and I came upon Tudor Place. It's just a house. Just another rich man's house, but I wanted to weep. Weep for beauty, weep for home, weep for not believing Garlic when he told about all the places he had been and what he had seen. Here was the model for our round porch with columns.

Here a different variation of the theme of five portions. Garlic's building, Tata, is much more beautiful. It's not just what will they let us be; it's what will we let ourselves be.

I wish I was a man and I could vote. I'd be a man if I could vote now.

So much of who we will let ourselves be will be decided by who we will vote for and will we vote and how long will they let us vote.

There's a cartoon I cut out of Harper'sweetly I'm looking at it now.

It's a drawing of Jefferson Davis, him that was the President of the Confederacy, Davis, with a big cloak wrapped all around him. His face is long and thin, his eyes so dark, when you glance at the drawing it looks like a skull with a hat and hair, like a skeleton wearing a cloak. And this Jefferson-I like to call him by his first name-he looks like a figure on stage, like a demon sneaking off to do wrong, except he's in the center of the picture, but off to the side is the center of this picture, and Jeff, he was standing there, looking back into the Senate chamber at a Negro man taking his seat, his Senate seat. A deep dark Negro man surrounded by compatriots is what it looked like. And the Negro man is reading. His hands are on one book, and another book has slid off his table to the floor at his feet. He's propped up and on books. His colleagues are turned to question him, and he's ready.

That's what it looked like to me. There's a caption: TIME WORKS WONDERS. I do not know if it was meant to be for or against this dark legislator. Certainly it was the truth. Under that title was written the words of Iago, and between Iago's name and his speech was inserted, in parentheses, the name "Jeff Davis." I read Othello again after I saw this cartoon. The speech says, "For that I do suspect the lusty Moor hath leapt into my seat: the thought whereof both like a poisonous mineral gnaw my inwards." If I had been Othello's friend, Desdemona would still be alive, and they'd have plenty of pretty babies.

Othello's just a creation. Maybe just like me. But __ Robert B. Elliott be real. He be born in Massachusetts. He studied at Eton College in England and now he's in the Congress. Robert B. Elliot be real and my Congressman knows him. James Rapier studied in Canada and now he's in Congress. He's another "historical figure." And my Jeems, his beloved Smalls, I've found all about him now, for Jeems's sweet sake. Smalls was wholly self educated and wholly factual. He taught himself to read and write. How you do that? John Roy Lynch, he worked in a photographer's studio and he looked across an alley into a white schoolroom and followed his lessons from a distance right into the Mississippi house and on into the Congress of these United States.

He merits a line in anybody's history of these United States. But it's one thing to read about them and quite another to smell a man's scent, hear his quicker mind responding to your own quick thought. Tick-tock.

It's an altogether different thing.

There are facts can poison you dead as arsenic. I have long known this to be true. There are facts can get you drunker than sipping whiskey straight. This is a sweet and new discovery. O brave new world! Sweet Jesus! Let me know some more about it! Please God!

R.’s returned. He looks a thousand years old. His hair is turning white, and he has let it grow long. This is a Southern city, but he doesn't fit in here. He strides about in black silk and velvet and looks like the ghost of the Confederacy, a sauntering relic haunting the place. Like the evil Godmother at the baby's christening. Why do I write that? I feel like the princess who is cursed at birth. And they try to change the curse, try to move her to safety. Why does R. look like the evil Godmother? Who looks like the prince? Who does R. look like?

His face looks so different in this light. I call out to myself, "Who is this man I lay with?" and I have no response. This man is unknown to me. Perhaps even unknowable by me. And maybe that is exactly what I love about my man. Not knowing him feels so familiar, as familiar as the smell of whiskey, and leather, and horses, and a certain cologne, yes. He is the stuff of Lady's dreams, my dark-eyed gambler and arrogant risk-taker. The arrogance was essential ... If he has anything to say to me, he should just say it.