Handful
Mauma was gone sure as I’m sitting here and I couldn’t do a thing but walk
the yard trying to siphon my sorrow. The sorry truth is you can walk your
feet to blisters, walk till kingdom-come, and you never will outpace your
grief. Come December, I stopped all that. I halted in my track by the
woodpile where we used to feed the little owl way back then, and I said out
loud, “Damn you for saving yourself. How come you left me with nothing
but to love you and hate you, and that’s gonna kill me, and you know it is.”
Then I turned round, went back to the cellar room, and picked up the
sewing.
Don’t think she wasn’t in every stitch I worked. She was in the wind
and the rain and the creaking from the rocker. She sat on the wall with the
birds and stared at me. When darkness fell, she fell with it.
One day, before they started the Days of Christmas in the house, I
looked at the wood trunk on the floor, shoved behind mauma’s gunny sack.
I said, “Now, where’d you go and put the key?”
I had got where I talked to her all the time. Like I would say, I didn’t
hear her talk back, so I hadn’t lost my sanities. I turned the room upside
down and the key was nowhere. It could’ve been in her pocket when she
went missing. We had an axe in the yard shed, but I hated to chop the trunk
apart. I said, “If I was you, where would I hide the key that locked up the
only precious things I had?”
I stood there a while. Then, I lifted my eyes to the ceiling. To the quilt
frame. The wheels on the pulley were fresh with oil. They didn’t make a
peep when I brought the frame down. Sure enough. The key was laying in a
groove along one of the boards.
Inside the trunk was a fat bundle wrapped in muslin. I peeled back the
folds and you could smell mauma, that salty smell. I had to take a minute to
cry. I held her quilt squares against me, thinking how she said they were the
meat on her bones.

There were ten good-size squares. I spread them out cross the frame.
The colors she’d used outdid God and the rainbow. Reds, purples, oranges,
pinks, yellows, blacks, and browns. They hit my ears more than my eyes.
They sounded like she was laughing and crying in the same breath. It was
the finest work ever to come from mauma’s hands.
The first square showed her mauma standing small, holding her mauma
and daddy’s hands and the stars falling round them—that was the night my
granny-mauma got sold away, the night the story started.
The rest was a hotchpotch, some squares I could figure, some I couldn’t.
There was a woman hoeing in the fields—I guessed her to be my grannymauma, too—wearing a red head scarf, and a baby, my mauma, was laying
in the growing plants. Slave people were flying in the air over their heads,
disappearing behind the sun.
Next one was a little girl sitting on a three-leg stool appliquéing a quilt,
red with black triangles, some of the triangles spilling on the floor. I said, “I
guess that’s you, but it could be me.”
Fourth one had a spirit tree on it with red thread on the trunk, and the
branches were filled with vultures. Mauma had sewed a woman and baby
boy on the ground—you could tell it was a boy from his privates. I figured
they were my granny-mauma when she died and her boy that didn’t make it.
Both were dead and picked bloody. I had to walk out in the cold air after
that one. You come from your mauma, you sleep in the bed with her till
you’re near twenty years grown, and you still don’t know what haunches in
the dark corners of her.
I came back inside and studied the next one—it had a man in the field.
He had a brown hat on, and the sky was full of eyes sitting in the clouds,
big yellow eyes and red rain falling from the lids. That man is my daddy,
Shanney, I said to myself.
One after that was mauma and a baby girl stretched on the quilt frame. I
knew that girl was me, and our bodies were cut in pieces, bright patches
that needed piecing back. It made my head sick and dizzy to look at it.
Another square was mauma sewing a wild purple dress covered with
moons and stars, only she was doing it in a mouse-hole, the walls bent over
her.
Going picture to picture, felt like I was turning pages in a book she’d
left behind, one that held her last words. Somewhere along the way, I
stopped feeling anything, like when you lay on your arm wrong and wake

up and it’s pins and needles. I started looking at the appliqués that had taken
mauma two years to sew like they didn’t have any belonging to me, cause
that was the only way I could bear to see them. I let them float by like panes
of light.
Here was mauma with her leg hitched up behind her with a strap,
standing in the yard getting the one-legged punishment. Here was another
spirit tree same like the other one, but it was ours, and it didn’t have
vultures, only green leaves and a girl underneath with a book and a whip
coming down to strike her.
Last square was a man, a bull of a man with a carpenter apron on—Mr.
Denmark Vesey—and next to him she’d stitched four numbers big as he
was: 1884. I didn’t have a notion what that meant.
I went straight to stitching. Hell with missus and her gowns. All that day
and far in the night, I pieced mauma’s squares together with the tiny stitches
you can’t barely see. I sewed on the lining and filled the quilt with the best
padding we’d saved and the whole collection of our feathers. Then I took
shears to my hair and cut every bit of it off my head, down to a scalp of
fuzz. I loosed the cut hair all through the stuffing.
That’s when I remembered about the money. Eight years, saving. I went
over and looked down in the trunk and it was empty as air. Four hundred
dollars, gone same as mauma. And I’d run out of places to look. I couldn’t
draw a breath.

Next day, after I’d slept a little, I sewed the layers of the quilt together with
a tacking stitch. Then I wrapped the finish quilt round me like a glory cloak.
I wore it out into the yard where Aunt-Sister was bundled up chopping cane
sugar, and she said, “Girl, what you got on you? What’d you do to your
head?”
I didn’t say nothing. I walked back to the tree with my breath trailing
clouds, and I wrapped new thread round the trunk.
Then the noise came into the sky. The crows were flying over and
smoke from the chimneys rising to meet them.
“There you go,” I said. “There you go.”

PART THREE
October 1818–November 1820