The Gilda Stories by Jewelle Gomez Page A

really worry about who Gilda and Bird were. Her concern was what would become of this Girl on her own.
    On a day soon after Gilda took the Girl and Bird with her to the farmhouse, Minta stood by the empty horse stall nearest the road. Her face was placid, yet she was again bent at the waist as if still whispering. The Girl caught a glimpse of her when the buggy rounded the bend in the road, and she leaned over looking back. She was excited about this journey away from the house, but Minta’s warnings itched her like the crinoline one of the girls had given her last Christmas.
    The evening sky was rolling with clouds as they drove the buggy south to the farm, yet the Girl could feel Gilda’s confidence that there would be no storm. They talked of many things but not the weather. Still, from simply looking into Gilda’s eyes and touching Bird’s hand she knew there was a storm somewhere. She felt a struggle brewing and longed to speak out, to warn them of how much everyone in town would need them when the war came. She knew that would not be the thing to say—Gilda liked to circle her point until she came to a place she thought would be right for speaking. It didn’t come on the road to the farmhouse.
    When the three arrived at the farmhouse, the Girl stored her small traveling box under the eaves in the tiny room she slept in whenever they visited here. She wondered if Minta knew Gilda spoke without speaking. That might be the reason she had cautioned her. But the Girl had no fear. Gilda, more often aloof than familiar, touched the Girl somehow. Words were only one of many ways of stepping inside of someone. The Girl smiled, recollecting her childish notion that Gilda was a man. Perhaps, she thought, living among the whites had given her a secret passage, but knowledge of Gilda came from a deeper place. It was a place kept hidden except from Bird.
    The fields to the north and west of the farmhouse lay fallow, trimmed but unworked. It was land much like the rest in the Delta sphere, warm and moist, almost blue in its richness—blood soil, some said. The not-tall house over the shallow root cellar seemed odd with its distinct aura of life set in the emptiness of the field. Gilda stood at the window looking out to the evening dark as Bird moved around her placing clothes in chests. Gilda tried to pull the strands together, to make a pattern of her life that was recognizable, therefore reinforceable. The farmhouse offered her peace but no answers. It was simply privacy away from the dissembling of the city and relief from the tides, which each noon and night pulled her energy, sucking her breath and leaving her lighter than air. The quietness of the house and its eagerness to hold her safe were like a firm hand on her shoulder. Here Gilda could relax enough to think. She had hardly come through the door before she let go of the world of Woodard’s. Still her thoughts always turned back toward the open sea and the burning sun.
    The final tie was Bird. Bird, the gentle, stern one who rarely flinched yet held on to her as if she were drowning in life. Too few of their own kind had passed through Woodard’s, and none had stayed very long. On their one trip west to visit Sorel, neither could tolerate the dust and noise of his town for more than several weeks. And until the Girl’s arrival, Gilda had met no one she sensed was the right one. To leave Bird alone in this world without others like herself would be more cruel than Gilda could ever be. The Girl must stay. She pushed back all doubts: Was the Girl too young? Would she grow to hate the life she’d be given? Would she abandon Bird? The answer was there in the child’s eyes. The decision loosened the tight muscles of Gilda’s back as if the deed were already done.
    The Girl did not know why they had included her in the trip to the farmhouse this time. They rarely brought her along at mid-season. The thought that they might want