Handful
I twined red thread round the trunk of the spreading tree till every last bit
had come off the spool. Mauma watched. It was all me and my idea to make
us a spirit tree like her mauma had made, and I could tell she was just
humoring. She clutched her elbows and blew fog with her breath. She said,
“You ’bout got it? It’s cold as the blue moon out here.”
It was cold as Charleston could get. Sleet on the windows, blankets on
the horses, Sabe and Prince chopping firewood daylight to dark. I gave
mauma a look and spread my red-and-black quilt on the ground. It made a
bright spot laying under the bare limbs.
I said, “First, we got to kneel on this and give our spirits to the tree. I
want us to do it the way you said granny-mauma did.”
She said, “Awright, let’s do it then.”
We dropped on our knees and stared at the tree trunk with our coat
sleeves touching. The ground was hard-caked, covered with acorns, and the
cold seeped through the squares and triangles. A quietness came down on
us, and I closed my eyes. Inside my coat pocket, my fingertips stroked Miss
Sarah’s silver button. It felt like a lump of ice. I’d plucked it from the ash
can after she cast it off. I felt bad she had to give up her plan, but that didn’t
mean you throw out a perfect good button.
Mauma shifted her knees on the quilt. She wanted to make the spirit tree
quick, and I wanted to make the minutes last.
I said, “Tell it again how you and granny-mauma did it.”
“Awright. What we did was get down like this on the quilt and she say,
‘Now we putting our spirits in the tree so they safe from harm, so they live
with the birds, learning to fly.’ Then we just give our spirits to it.”
“Did you feel it when it happened?”
She pulled her headscarf over her cold ears and tried to bottle up her
smile. She said, “Let me see if I can remember. Yeah, I felt my spirit leave
from right here.” She touched the bone between her breasts. “It leave like a

little draft of wind, and I look up at a branch and I don’t see it, but I know
my spirit’s up there watching me.”
She was making all this up. It didn’t matter cause I didn’t see why it
couldn’t happen that way now.
I called out, “I give my spirit to the tree.”
Mauma called out the same way. Then she said, “After your grannymauma make our spirit tree, she say, ‘If you leave this place, you go get
your spirit and take it with you.’ Then she pick up acorns, twigs, and leaves
and make pouches for ’em, and we wear ’em round our neck.”
So me and mauma picked up acorns and twigs and yellow crumbles of
leaves. The whole time, I thought about the day missus gave me as a present
to Miss Sarah, how mauma told me, It gon be hard from here on, Handful.
Since that day a year past, I’d got myself a friend in Miss Sarah and
found how to read and write, but it’d been a heartless road like mauma said,
and I didn’t know what would come of us. We might stay here the rest of
our lives with the sky slammed shut, but mauma had found the part of
herself that refused to bow and scrape, and once you find that, you got
trouble breathing on your neck.

PART TWO
February 1811–December 1812