Handful
Didn’t my Lord deliver Daniel?” Denmark Vesey shouted.
The whole church answered, “Now he’s coming for me.”
Must’ve been two hundred of us packed in there. I was sitting in the
back, in the usual spot. Folks had started leaving it free for me, saying,
“That’s Handful’s place.” Four months I’d been sitting there and hadn’t
learned a thing about mauma, but I knew more than missus about the people
God had delivered.
Abraham, Moses, Samson, Peter, Paul—Mr. Vesey went down the list,
chanting their names. Everybody was on their feet, clapping, and waving in
the air, shouting, “Now he’s coming for me,” and I was smack-dab in the
middle of them, doing the little hopping dance I used to do in the alcove
when I was a girl singing to the water.
Our reverend was a free black man named Morris Brown, and he said
when we got worked up like this, it was the Holy Ghost that had got into us.
Mr. Vesey, who was one of his four main helpers, said it wasn’t the Holy
Ghost, it was hope. Whatever it was, it could burn a hole in your chest.
The heat in the church was awful. While we shouted, sweat drenched
our faces and clothes, and some of the men got up and opened all the
windows. The fresh air flowed in and the shouting flowed out.
When Mr. Vesey ran out of people in the Bible for God to deliver, he
went along the benches calling names.
Let my Lord deliver Rolla.
Let my Lord deliver Nancy.
Let my Lord deliver Ned.
If he called your name, you felt like it would fly straight to heaven and
hit God between the eyes. Reverend Brown said, be careful, heaven would
be whatever you picture it. His picture was Africa before the slaving—all
the food and freedom you wanted and not a white person to blight it. If
mauma was dead, she would have a big fine house somewhere and missus
for her maid.

Mr. Vesey, though, he didn’t like any kind of talk about heaven. He said
that was the coward’s way, pining for life in the hereafter, acting like this
one didn’t mean a thing. I had to side with him on that.
Even when I was singing and hopping like this, part of me stayed small
and quiet, noticing everything he said and did. I was the bird watching the
cat circle the tree. Mr. Vesey had white wooly nubs in his hair now, but
beside that, he looked like before. Wore the same scowl, had the same knife
blades in his eyes. His arms were still thick and his chest big as a rain
barrel.
I hadn’t mustered the nerve to talk to him. People feared Denmark
Vesey. I’d started telling myself the joke was on me—maybe I’d come to
the African church for the Lord, after all. What’d I think I could learn about
mauma anyway?
Nobody heard the horses outside. Mr. Vesey had a new chant going—
Joshua fought the battle of Jericho, and the walls came tumbling down.
Gullah Jack, his right-hand man, was beating a drum, and we were
stomping the floor. Jericho. Jericho.
Then the doors busted open, and Gullah Jack’s hands stopped pounding,
and the song died away. We looked round, confused, while the City Guard
spread along the walls and in the aisle, one at every window, four barring
the door.
The head guard marched down front with a paper in one hand and a
musket gun in the other. Denmark Vesey said with his booming voice,
“What’s the meaning of this? This is the house of the Lord, you have no
business here.”
The guard looked like he couldn’t believe his luck. He took the butt of
the gun and rammed it in Mr. Vesey’s face. A minute ago, he’d been
shouting Jericho, and now he was on the floor with a shirt full of blood.
People started screaming. One of the guards fired into the rafters,
sending wood crumbs and smoke swirling down. The inside of my ears
pounded, and when the head man read the warrant, he sounded like he was
at the bottom of a dry well. He said the neighbors round the church found
us a nuisance. We were charged with disorderly conduct.
He stuffed the paper in his pocket. “You’ll be removed to the Guard
House and sentenced in the morning with due and proper punishment.”
A sob drifted from a woman on the far side, and the place came alive
with fear and murmuring. We knew about the Guard House—it was where

they held the lawbreakers, black and white, till they figured out what to do
with them. The whites ones stayed till their hearings, and the black ones till
their owners paid the fine. You just prayed to God you didn’t have a stingy
master, cause if he refused to pay, you went to the Work House to work off
the debt.
Outside, the moon looked weak in the sky. They gathered us in four
herds and marched us down the street. A slave sang, Didn’t my Lord deliver
Daniel? and a guard told him to hush up. It was quiet from then on except
for the clopping horses and a little baby tied on its mother’s back that
whimpered like a kitten. I craned my neck for Mr. Vesey, but he wasn’t
anywhere to see. Then I noticed the dark wet spatter-drops on the ground,
and I knew he was on up ahead.

We spent the night on the floor in a room filled with jail cells, men and
women crammed in together, all of us having to pee in the same bucket in
the corner. One woman coughed half through the night and two men got in
a shove-fight, but mostly we sat in the dark and stared with flat eyes and
dozed in and out. One time, I came awake, hearing that same little baby
mewing.
At first light, a guard with hair scruffing his shoulders brought a pail of
water with a dipper and we took turns drinking while our stomachs rumbled
for food. After that, we were left to wonder what was coming. One man in
our cell had been picked up by the Guard six times and he told us the facts
and figures. The fine was five dollars, and if your master didn’t pay, you got
twelve lashes at the Work House, or worse, you got the treadmill. I didn’t
know what the treadmill was and he didn’t say, just told us to beg for the
whip. Then he lifted his shirt, and his back was grooved like the hide of an
alligator. The sight brought bile to my throat. “My massa never pay,” he
said.
The morning stretched out and we waited, and then waited some more.
All I could think about was the man’s back, where they’d put Mr. Vesey,
how his bashed face was holding up. Heat cooked the air and the smell
turned sour and the baby started bawling again. Somebody said, “Why
don’t you feed the child?”

“I can’t raise no milk,” its mauma said, and another woman with stains
on her dress front said, “Here, give me the baby. Mine’s back home and all
this milk with nobody to suck it.” She pulled out her brown bosom, clear
milk leaking from the nipple, and the baby latched on.
When the long-hair guard came back, he said, “Listen for your name. If
I call it out, you’re free to leave and go home to whatever awaits you.”
We all got to our feet. I said to myself, Never has been a Grimké slave
sent to the Work House. Never has.
“Seth Ball, Ben Pringle, Tinnie Alston, Jane Brewton, Apollo
Rutledge . . .” He read the names till it was just me and the scarred man and
the mauma with the baby and a handful of others. “If you’re still here,” he
said, “your owner has decided the Work House will put you in a wholesome
frame of mind.”
A man said, “I’m a free black, I don’t have an owner.”
“If you’ve got the papers that say that, then you can pay the fine
yourself,” the guard told him. “If you can’t pay it on the spot, then you’re
going to the Work House with the rest.”
I felt genuine confused. I said, “Mister. Mister? You left off my name.
It’s Hetty. Hetty Grimké.”
He answered me with the thud of the door.

The treadmill was chomping and grinding its teeth—you could hear it
before you got in the room. The Work House man led twelve of us to the
upper gallery, poking us along with a stick. Denmark Vesey came behind
me with the side of his face swollen so bad his eye was shut. He was the
only one of us with shackles on his hands and feet. He took shuffle-steps,
and the chain dragged and rattled.
When he tripped on the stairs, I said over my shoulder, “Be careful
now.” Then I whispered, “How come you didn’t pay the fine? Ain’t you
supposed to have money?”
“Whatever they do to the least of them, they do it unto me,” he said.
I thought to myself, Mr. Vesey fancies himself like Jesus carrying the
cross, and that’s probably cause he doesn’t have five dollars on him for the
fine. Knowing him, though, he could’ve been throwing his lot with the rest
of us. The man was big-headed and proud, but he had a heart.

When we got to the gallery and looked over the rail at the torment
waiting for us, we just folded up and sat down on the floor.
One of the overseers fastened Mr. Vesey’s chain to an iron ring and told
us to watch the wheel careful so we’d know what to do. The mauma with
the baby on her back said to him, “Who gon watch my baby while I down
there?”
He said, “You think we got people to tend your baby?”
I had to turn from her, the way her head dropped, the baby looking
wide-eye over her shoulder.
The treadmill was a spinning drum, twice as tall as a man, with steps on
it. Twelve scrambling people were climbing it fast as they could go, making
the wheel turn. They clung to a handrail over the top of it, their wrists
lashed to it in case their grip slipped. The mill groaned and the corn cracked
underneath. Two black-skin overseers paced with cowhides—cat o’nine
tails, they called them—and when the wheel slowed, they hit the backs and
legs of those poor people till you saw pink flesh ripple.
Mr. Vesey’s good eye studied me. “Don’t I know you from
somewhere?”
“From the church.”
“No, somewhere else.”
I could’ve spit the truth out, but we were both in Daniel’s lion’s den,
and God had left us to it. I said, “Where’s all that delivering God’s
supposed to do?”
He snorted. “You’re right, the only deliverance is the one we get for
ourselves. The Lord doesn’t have any hands and feet but ours.”
“That doesn’t say much for the Lord.”
“It doesn’t say much for us, either.”
A bell rang down below and the jaws on the wheel stopped chewing.
The overseers loosed the people’s wrists and they climbed down a ladder to
the floor. Some of them were so used-up they had to be dragged off.
The overseer unlocked Mr. Vesey from the floor ring. “Get on your feet.
It’s your turn.”