He didn't see me hiding behind Lady's skirts or see the look Mammy gave me over Other's head. Planter only saw his daughter taking pleasure where he himself had done.

Now I'm Mammy grown, I wonder what Lady saw. She was just the oldest child on the porch, seventeen, with a three year-old daughter. Never certain of feeding, I did not welcome hunger. I looked and wanted to suck; Lady looked and wanted to suckle-feed. We were both envious.

Later, when it looked like the four o'clock flowers opened their faces to the sun, but really when they smiled their relief to the arriving shade, when the baby of the house, Other, slept on a cool soft pallet and I tried to sleep on a hot rug in the kitchen, Lady called for a basin of water and a glass of sweet milk, and I was roused to serve it.

Or was it when Other was napping on a pallet in her room and I was one of the children fanning the flies away from little Miss while she slept, that Lady called from the next room, "Mammy, send Cindy up with some cool water and a glass of sweet milk. I'm thirsty and I want a sponge bath." I walked in with what she wanted. Lady made herself comfortable in her rocking chair. "Are you hungry?" I nodded. She handed me the glass of milk. I hesitated. "You can drink it." I took the glass and drank. She took the glass from my hand and drank right after me. I was surprised. Really I was astounded. I didn't know the word then, but that's what I was.

"Help me unbutton my dress; I want to wash." I helped her take off her dress. Her bared breast was just a little thing with a dented nipple almost as big as the circle it stood in. The circle was that tiny. "Are you still hungry?" I nodded again.

She pulled me onto her lap and I suckled at her breast till her warm milk filled me. As always, it was a cheering surprise for both of us.

We had been sharing these little spurred-by-envy suppers all my memory, but each time the milk came and how long it came without running out was a mystery to us both. Later, when I slept beside her, she said, "You're my little girl, aren't you?" Mammy worked from can't-see in the morning to can't-see at night, in that great whitewashed wide columned house surrounded by curvy furrowed fields. The mud, the dirt, was so red, when you looked at the cotton blooming in a field it brought to mind a sleeping gown after childbirth-all soft white cotton and blood.

If it was mine to be able to paint pictures, if I possessed the gift of painting, I would paint a cotton gown balled up and thrown into a corner waiting to be washed, and I would call it "Georgia." Mammy never knew rest, but she is no fool. I believe she knows why R. doesn't give a damn about Other anymore. Mammy knows that he's in love with me, and after the Tragedy there's nothing to keep us apart.

The Tragedy, yes, that is what it was. I cried when that child died.

R. thought she was beautiful, and Other thought she was spoilt. Neither one of them was right. Everything that was gold and bold lived big in Precious. She looked too much like my Daddy to be pretty. Except when she kissed me and I would pull her curls. Precious: that's what I called her. Her grandfather would look right through me, but she would run to me and throw her arms around my waist. I got his hugs from her, and they were sweet to me, precious. She gave me my Daddy's kisses. She was his grandchild and they were my kisses, and her mouth looked just like his mouth. Not like Other's or Lady's or R.’s. She had Planter's mouth, and she gave me Planter's kisses.

The night Precious died, R. tried to plant a child in me. Most every other time, he pulled out, making a mess on my belly that shamed me. He didn't want any bastards, beige or white.

They thought he stayed alone with her, his dead Precious, in that room those days between her death and the burial. But I was there. I was there. I held his hand in the burning light, because Precious was afraid of the dark.

In that room we were a family. Grief will form one family just the way it will destroy another. It's a primary force.

What did he lose when he lost her? What do I know 'bout what runs between a daddy and his daughter? Not very much. R. didn't know why Precious cried in the dark, and I don't know either.

Georgia is dirty laundry what needs washing.

I told that to R. last evening. We were out walking in Oakland Cemetery. Oakland Cemetery may well be the prettiest garden in Atlanta. And the dead don't care who's out walking with who and if their colors match. Plenty folks, black and white, pack picnics and make a feast of a visit. All those gravestones got us to talking 'bout whether I should or should not run home to Mammy.

I have my reasons for not going and I have his. His reason is Other.

Chivalry dictates that his wife and his mistress do not meet. I said, "Georgia is laundry what needs washing." He put one of his manicured hands over each of my ears and pressed. "Peanut head," he said. I couldn't tell if it was a joke or an insult, he was pressing so hard. I didn't like the fact he wouldn't acknowledge my truth.

Georgia is dirty laundry what needs washing.

If I didn't want to back down, I knew I had to turn my taunt into a joke. "I've got a big head. A watermelon head, more likely. Too big for ladies' hats. At least a walnut. You can crack open a peanut, so easy," I said. "You can do it with your fingers.”

“You're too smart for your own good." I smiled; he dropped his hands to his side. "I sent you on that Grand Tour as a jest," he said.

I wasn't smiling anymore. "Charleston's dirty laundry too. All of South Carolina." No sooner than I said it, he slapped me. He had never hit me before. No man had.

"The only thing you can beat out of me is my love for you." Beauty taught us to say that, and say it quick. It was the first sentence she taught every girl in her house. It stopped a lot of fights; it stopped her from having to shoot a man or two. It was an easy sentence to remember and a hard sentence to forget, especially with a palm print on your face. Anyway, it wasn't me he wanted to slap. But he couldn't slap Other. "I ain't taking her licks," I said.

I walked away from him. The red imprint of his hand was raised across my cheek. I traced the outline of it with the tip of my finger. Mammy had slapped me too many times to count. I knew well this vanishing brand. Invisible but searing.

Strange how you bring things to you. I think of the white house and Mammy, and I get slapped. Just what I was afraid of happened before I could even go home. How strange that just when I might go, Other had got there first. Run back to the house because R. left her. I had asked him to tell me what he said, what she said, how it looked, a dozen times. He didn't tell me anything. He only told me it was over.

But the walls have ears, and her maid told my maid, and my maid told me, that Other had run back from Mealy Mouth's deathbed to find R. already packed. That she had declared her love and pleaded with him.

That he had cursed her but called her my darling or dear, but he told her he didn't give a tinker's damn what happened to her. When he walked out, she sat down on the stairs and cried. Then she ran home to my mother. That was just a month ago.

I will go to see Beauty today. I met R. under her whorehouse roof.

Simple as that. I was fourteen years old. It was just before the war.

Beauty needed a maid to pick up after her girls, so she bought me in the slave market down on the water in Charleston. I had an answer when any blue-blooded gentle boy at Beauty's would ask, "How a fine piece of embroidery like you get beyond white columns and painted walls?" They didn't expect an answer, but I had one. A fancy sentence I had practiced to show I was somebody: "A strange series of deaths in rapid succession following an influenza epidemic left a trail of inheritances that led me to the flesh market with a stop of work with a family who couldn't afford to keep a second ladies' maid." My twenty-dollar sentence was usually good for a laugh and a nickel tip.

Truth was, everybody was too busy nursing the sick, mourning, and grieving to write Planter and tell him that his old friend was dead, that the friend's son had died before he could marry, that I was living with a family who needed money, and would he like to buy me back. I didn't know how to write then; I couldn't tell the news that might have saved me.

Beauty bought me to serve in her place as a girl-of-all work but there was so much dirty laundry, all I ever did is wash soiled sheets, bleach sheets, iron sheets. You paid for pussy at Beauty's or you didn't get any, and the planters that came to Beauty didn't need to pay for poon tang they could steal back at home, so I was most usually the only female virgin in the house. Males of that persuasion were frequent visitors. Mainly the planters liked their meat what we liked to call pink-before a girl began to bleed. They had less brats around the place that way. I think Beauty thought of buying me because she wanted to feel like more of a lady to R. I'm going to stop writing and go right now.

Walking to Beauty's, my face still stung where R. slapped me. But his words had stung me more. My Grand Tour was rivers: the Thames, the Seine, what do they call all those canals in Venice? What name did that water go by? What destinations were in that book, Murrays Infallible Handboot? Rivers and the lake at Como. Atlanta is a landlocked place, a rail terminus, really and only. If it becomes a great city, it will be one of the first not built on a river. I ain't seen a big body of water in a time, but I still have my memories.

Something that I cherish so much cannot have been a joke.