Handful
Missus’ eyes were swollen shut from crying. It was the middle of the
morning and she was in bed with her sleeping clothes on. The mosquito net
was drawn round her and the curtains were pulled on the windows, but I
could see her lids puffed out. Minta, the new girl, was over in the corner
trying to disappear.
When missus tried to speak to me, she broke down crying. I felt for her.
I knew what it was to lose a person. What I didn’t know was why she’d
called me to her room. All I could do was stand there and wait for her to get
hold of herself.
After a few minutes, she yelled at Minta, “Are you or are you not going
to bring me a hankie?”
Minta went scrambling through a drawer in the linen press, and missus
turned to me. “You should start on my dress immediately. I want black
velvet. With beading of some kind. Mrs. Russell had jet beads on hers. I
will need a spoon bonnet with a long crepe veil down the back. And black
gloves, but make them fingerless mitts because of the heat. Are you
remembering this?”
“Yessum.”
“It must be ready in two days. And it must be flawless, Hetty, do you
understand? Flawless. Work through the night if you have to.”
Seemed like she’d gotten hold of herself real tight.
She wrote me a pass for the market and sent me in the carriage with
Tomfry, who was going out to purchase the mourning cards. Said it would
take too much time for me to hobble all that way and back. That’s how I got
the first carriage ride of my life. Along the way, Tomfry said, “Wipe the
grin off your face, we supposed to be grieving.”
In the market, I was at the high-class stalls looking for the beads missus
had to have when I came upon Mr. Vesey’s wife, Susan. I hadn’t seen her
since the first of the summer when I’d gone to 20 Bull.

“Look what the field cat dragged up,” she said. I guess she still had her
dander up.
I wondered what all she knew. Maybe she’d listened in that day I’d
talked to Mr. Vesey. She could know about mauma, the baby, everything.
I didn’t see any sense in keeping the feud going. “I don’t have a bicker
with you. I won’t be bothering you anymore.”
That took the nettle from her. Her shoulders dipped and her face turned
soft. That’s when I noticed the scarf she was wearing. Red. Edges sewed
with a perfect chain stitch. Little oil spots on the side. I said, “That’s my
mauma’s head scarf.”
Her lips opened like the stopper had popped from the bottle. I waited,
but she stood there, with her mouth empty.
“I know that scarf,” I said.
She set down her basket of cottons and took it off her head. “Go on,
take it.”
I ran my finger along the stitched hem, cross the creases where her hair
had been. I undid the scarf on my head and tied mauma’s on. Low on my
forehead, the way she wore it.
“How’d you get it?” I said.
She shook her head. “I guess you ought to know. The night your mauma
disappeared, she showed up at our door. Denmark said the Guard would be
looking for a woman with a red scarf, so I took hers and gave her one of
mine. A plain brown one that wouldn’t draw notice.”
“You helped her? You helped her get away?”
She didn’t give any kind of answer, she said, “I do what Denmark says
do.” Then she sashayed off with her head stripped bare.

I sewed through that day and night and all the next day and night, and the
whole time I wore mauma’s scarf. The whole time I thought about her
showing up at Mr. Vesey’s that night, how he knew more than he was
saying.
Every time I took the dress upstairs for fittings, the house would be in a
tizzy getting ready for the mourners. Missus said half the city was coming.
Aunt-Sister and Phoebe were baking funeral biscuits and seeing to the tea
sets. Binah shrouded the paintings and mirrors with black swags and Eli

was put to cleaning. Minta had the worst job, in there getting hankies and
taking the brunt.
Tomfry set up master Grimké’s portrait in the drawing room and fixed a
table with tokens. Had his beaver top hat and stick pins and the books of
law he wrote. Thomas brought over a cloth banner that said, Gone, But Not
Forgotten, and Tomfry put that on the table, too, with a clock stopped to the
hour of his death. Missus didn’t know the time exact. Sarah had written he
passed in the late afternoon, so missus said, just make it 4:30.
When she wasn’t crying, she was fuming that Sarah hadn’t had the
sense to cut off a lock of master Grimké’s hair and put it in the letter. It left
her without anything to go in her gold mourning brooch. Another thing she
didn’t like was the notice that came out in the Mercury. It said he’d been
laid to rest in the North without family or friends and this would surely be a
travail to a great son of South Carolina.
I don’t know how I got the dress done in time. It was the finest dress I
ever made. I strung hundreds of black glass beads, then sewed the strands
into a collar that looked like a spider web. I fitted it round the neck and let it
drape to the bust. When missus saw it, she said the one and only kind thing
I can’t forget. She said, “Why, Hetty, your mother would be proud.”

I went through the window and over the wall on a Sunday after the callers
had quit coming by to give their condolence. It was our day off and the
servants were lolling round and missus was shut away in her room. I had a
short walk past the front of the house before I could feel safe, and coming
round the side of it, I saw Tomfry on the front steps, haggling with the slave
boy who huckstered fish. They were bent over what looked like a fiftypound basket of flounders. I put my head down and kept going.
“Handful! Is that you?”
When I looked up, Tomfry was staring at me from the top step. He was
old now, with milk in his eyes, and it crossed my mind to say, No, I’m
somebody else, but then, he could’ve seen the cane in my hand. You
couldn’t misjudge that. I said, “Yeah, it’s me. I’m going to the market.”
“Who said you could go?”
I had Sarah’s pass in my pocket, but seemed like he’d question that—
she was still up north, waiting to sail home. I stood on the sidewalk stuck to

the spot.
He said, “What you doing out here? Answer me.”
Off in my head, I could hear the treadmill grind.
A shape moved at the front window. Nina. Then the front door opened,
and she said, “What is it, Tomfry?”
“Handful out here. I’m trying to see what she’s doing.”
“Oh. She’s doing an errand for me, that’s all. Please say nothing to
Mother, I don’t want her bothered.” Then she called down to me, “Carry
on.”
Tomfry went back to the fish huckster. I couldn’t get my legs to move
fast enough. At George Street, I stopped and looked back. Nina was still out
there, watching me go. She lifted her hand and gave me a wave.
Close to 20 Bull, there was a little jug band going—three boys blowing
on big jars and Gullah Jack, Mr. Vesey’s man, slapping his drum. A crowd
of colored folks was gathered, and two of the women started doing what we
called stepping. I stopped to watch cause they were Strutting Miss Lucy.
Mostly, I kept my eye on Gullah Jack. He had fat side whiskers and was
bouncing on his short legs. When he finished the tune, he tucked the drum
under his arm and headed down the street to Mr. Vesey’s. Me, following
behind.
I could see smoke from the kitchen house, and went back there and
knocked. Susan let me in, saying, “Well, I’m surprised it took you this
long.” She said I could give her some help, the men were in the front room,
meeting.
“Meeting about what?”
She shrugged. “Don’t know, don’t wanna know.”
I helped her chop cabbages and carrots for their supper, and when she
carried a bottle of Madeira to them, I trailed her. I waited outside the door,
while she poured their glasses, but I could see them at the table: Mr. Vesey,
Gullah Jack, Peter Poyas, Monday Gell, plus two who belonged to the
governor, Rolla Bennett and Ned Bennett. I knew every one of them from
church. They were all slaves, except Mr. Vesey. Later on, he’d start calling
them his lieutenants.
I slunk back into the hallway and let Susan go back to the kitchen house
without me. Then I eased to the door, close as I could without getting seen.
It sounded like Mr. Vesey was divvying up all the slaves in the state.
“I’ll take the French Negroes on the Santee, and Jack, you take the slaves

on the Sea Islands. The ones that’ll be hard to enlist are the country slaves
out on the plantations. Peter, you and Monday know them best. Rolla, I’m
giving you the city slaves, and Ned, the ones on the Neck.”
His voice dropped and I crept a little closer. “Keep a list of everybody
you draft. And keep that list safe on pain of death. Tell everybody, be
patient, the day is coming.”
I don’t know where he came from, but Gullah Jack was on top of me
before I could turn my head. He grabbed me from behind and threw me into
the room, my rabbit cane flying. I bounced off the wall and landed flat.
He stuck his foot on my chest, pressing me to the floor. “Who’re you?”
“Take your nasty foot off me!” I spit at him and the spew fell back on
my face.
He raised a hand like he was ready to strike, and from the edge of my
eye, I saw Denmark Vesey pick him up by the collar and fling him half
cross the room. Then he pulled me up. “You all right?”
My arms were trembling so bad I couldn’t hold them still.
“Everything you heard in here, you keep to yourself,” he told me.
I nodded again, and he put his arm round me to stop the shaking.
Turning to Gullah Jack and the rest of them, he said, “This is the
daughter of my wife and the sister of my child. She’s family, and that means
you don’t lay a hand on her.”
He told the men to go on back to his workshop. We waited while they
scraped the chairs back and eased from the room.
So, he counted mauma one of his wives. I’m family.
He pulled a chair for me. “Here, sit down. What’re you doing here?”
“I came to find out the truth of what happened to mauma. I know you
know.”
“Some things are better not to know,” he said.
“Well, that’s not what the Bible preaches. It says if you know the truth,
it’ll set you free.”
He circled the table. “All right, then.” He closed the window so the truth
would stay in the room and not float out for the world to hear.
“The day Charlotte got in trouble with the Guard, she came here. I was
in the workshop and when I looked up, there she was. They’d chased her all
the way to the rice mill pond, where she hid inside a sack in the millhouse.
She had rice hulls all over her dress. I kept her here till dark, then I took her
to the Neck, where the policing is light. I took her there to hide.”

The Neck was just north of the city and had lots of tenement houses for
free blacks and slaves whose owners let them “live out.” Negro huts, they
called them. I tried to picture one, picture mauma in it.
“I knew a free black there who had a room, and he took her in. She said
when the Guard stopped searching for her, she’d go back to the Grimkés
and throw herself on their mercy.” He’d been pacing, but now he sat down
next to me and finished up the truth quick as he could. “One night she went
out to the privy in Radcliff Alley and there was a white man there, a slave
poacher named Robert Martin. He was waiting for her.”
A noise filled my head, a wailing sound so loud I couldn’t hear. “A
poacher, what’s a poacher?”
“Somebody that steals slaves. They’re worse than scum. We all knew
this man—he had a wagon-trade in these parts. First, regular goods, then he
started buying slaves, then he started stealing slaves. He hunted for them in
the Neck. He’d keep his ear to the ground and go after the runaways. More
than one person saw him take Charlotte.”
“He took her? He sold her off somewhere?”
I was on my feet, screaming over the noise in my skull. “Why didn’t
you look for her?”
He took me by the shoulders and gave me a shake. His eyes were
sparking like flint. He said, “Gullah Jack and I looked for two days. We
looked everywhere, but she was gone.”