Handful
Missus sent me and mauma to the market for some good cotton to make a
dress for Nina. She was growing out from everything. Missus said, get
something pastel this time and see about some homespun for Tomfry and
them to have new vests.
The market was a row of stalls that ran all the way from East Bay to
Meeting and had whatever under the sun you wanted. Missus said the place
was a vulgar bazaar, that was her words. The turkey buzzards wandered
round the meat stands like regular customers. They had to keep a man in
there with a palm branch to shoo them. Course, they flew to the roofs and
waited him out, then came on back. The smells in there would knock you
down. Ox tails, bullock hearts, raw pork, live chickens, cracked oysters,
blue crabs, fish, and more fish. The sweet peanut cakes didn’t stand a
chance. I used to go round holding my nose till mauma got some eucalyptus
leaves to rub over my top lip.
The slave sellers, what they called higglers, were shouting their wares,
trying to out-do each other. The men sang out, “Jimmie” (that’s what we
called the male crabs), and the women sang back, “Sook” (those were the
females). “Jimmieeee . . . Soooook . . . Jimmieeee . . . Soooook.” You
needed something for your nose and your ears.
It was September, and I still hadn’t laid eyes on the man mauma had
told me about, the lucky free black who won the money to buy his freedom.
He had a carpenter shop out back of his house, and I knew every time she
was let out for hire or sent to the market without me, she was dallying with
him. One, two times a week, she came back smelling like wood shavings,
the back of her dress saw-dusted.
That day, when we got to the piece good stalls, I started saying how he
was made-up. “Awright then,” mauma said. She grabbed up the first pastel
she saw and some drab brown wool and we headed outside with our baskets
loaded. A block down, they were selling slaves right on the street, so we
crossed the other way toward King. I patted the pass inside my dress pocket

three times and checked to see did mauma still have her badge fastened on
her dress. Out in the streets, I always had the bad feeling of something
coming, some meanness gathering. On Coming Street, we spotted a guard,
couldn’t have been old as me, stop an old man who got so nervous he
dropped his travel pass. The guard stepped on it, having his fun.
We walked in a hurry, outpacing the carriages. Mauma didn’t use her
wooden cane anymore except special occasions. Those came along when
she needed a letup from missus. She’d tell her, “Looks like the cure I
prayed for my leg has worn off. I just need to rest up and pray for a few
days.” Out came the cane.
Mauma’s free black man lived at 20 Bull. It was a white frame single
house, had black shudders with the paint flecking off and scruffy bushes
round the porch. She shook the powder shell from the street off her hemline
and said, “If I stand here, he see me and come right out.”
“So we’re supposed to stand here till he looks out the window?”
“You want me to go up there and knock on the door? If his wife come,
you want me to say, ‘Tell your husband his girlfriend out here?’”
“How come you’re fooling with somebody who has a wife anyway?”
“They not married legal, she his free-wife. He got two more of ’em, too.
All mulatto.”
As she said the word, mulatto, he stepped from the house and stood on
the porch looking at us. A bull of a man. I wanted to say, Well he sure does
live on the right street. He was thickset and solid with a big chest and large
forehead.
When he came over, mauma said to him, “This my girl, Handful.”
He nodded. I could see he was stern, and proud. He said, “I’m Denmark
Vesey.”
Mauma sidled up to him and said for my benefit, “Denmark is a country
next to France, and a real fine one, too.” She smiled at him in a way I had to
look away from.
He slid his hand up the side of her arm, and I eased off down the street.
If they wanted to carry on, all right, but I didn’t have to stand there and
watch it.
In the coming year, we’d make this visit to 20 Bull more times than I
care to tell. The two lovebirds would go in his workshop, and I’d sit outside
and wait. After they were done, he’d come out and talk. And he could talk,
Lord, could that man talk. Denmark the man never had been to Denmark

the country, just the Danish Islands. To hear him tell it, though, he’d been
everywhere else. He’d traveled the world with his owner Captain Vesey,
who sailed a slave ship. He spoke French, Danish, Creole, Gullah, and the
King’s English. I heard him speak every one of these tongues. He came
from the Land of Barbados and liked to say Charleston didn’t trust slaves
from there, cause they’d slit your throat. He said Charleston wanted
saltwater blacks from Africa who knew rice planting.
The worst troubling thing he told me was how his neighbor down the
street—a free black named Mr. Robert Smyth—owned three slaves. Now
what you supposed to do with something like that? Mr. Vesey had to take
me to the man’s house to meet the slaves before I allowed any truth to it. I
didn’t know whether this Mr. Smyth was behaving like white people, or if it
just showed something vile about all people.
Denmark Vesey read the Bible up and down. Give him five minutes and
he’d tell you the story of Moses leading slaves from Egypt. He’d have the
sea parting, frogs falling from the sky, firstborn baby boys stabbed in their
beds. He mouthed a Bible verse from Joshua so many times, it still comes
to me in full. They utterly destroyed all that were in the city, both man and
woman, both young and old. The man was head-smart and reckless. He
scared the wits out of me.
The two of us had a clash the first day we met. Like I said, I’d eased off
down the street to let them know I didn’t have a need to see their urges. The
street was busy, everybody from free blacks to the mayor and the governor
lived on it, and when a white woman came along, walking in my path, I did
the common thing you do—I stepped to the side to let her pass. It was the
law, you were supposed to give way on the street, but here came Denmark
Vesey charging down to where I stood with fury blowing from his nostrils,
and mauma looking panic right behind him. He yanked me by the arm,
yelled, “Is this the sort of person you want to be? The kind that steps aside?
The kind that grovels in the street?”
I wanted to say, Get your hand off me, you don’t know nothing about
me, I bathe in a copper tub, and you’re standing here and stink to heaven.
The air round my head turned thick and my throat tightened on it. I
managed to say, “Let me go.”
Behind him, mauma said, a little too sweet for my taste, “Take your
hand off her.”

He dropped his grip. “Don’t let me see that from you again.” Then he
smiled. And mauma, she smiled, too.
We walked home without a word between us.
Inside the Grimké house, the door to the library was open. The room
was empty, so I went in and spun the globe. It made a screech sound. Like a
nail on a slate board. Binah said that sound was the devil’s toenail. I looked
over all the countries on the globe, round the whole earth. Denmark wasn’t
next to France, it was up by Prussia, but looking at it, I knew why mauma
chose him. He’d been places, and he was going places, and he set her alight
with the notion she’d go places, too.