Handful
I smelled the corn fritters half a block from Denmark Vesey’s house, the
fry-oil in the air, the sweet corn fuss coming down the street. For two years,
I’d been sneaking off to 20 Bull every time I found a hole in the week to
squeeze through. Sabe was a shiftless lackey of a butler and didn’t watch us
the way Tomfry had—we could thank missus for that much.
I’d tell Sabe we were out of thread, beeswax, buttons, or rat droppings,
and he’d send me willy-nilly to the market. The rest of the time he didn’t
care where I was. The only thought in his head was for slurping down
master Grimké’s brandies and whiskeys in the cellar and messing round
with Minta. They were always in the empty room over the carriage house
doing just what you think they’re doing. Me, Aunt-Sister, Phoebe, and
Goodis would hear them all the way from the kitchen house porch and
Goodis would cock his eyebrow at me. Everybody knew he’d been sweet
on me since the day he got here. He’d made the rabbit cane special for me,
and he would give me the last yam off his plate. Once when Sabe yelled at
me for going missing, Goodis stuck a fist in his face and Sabe backed right
down. I never had a man touch me, never had wanted one, but sometimes
when I was listening to Sabe and Minta up in the carriage house, Goodis
didn’t seem so bad.
With Sarah gone, the whole place had gone to hell’s dredges. With the
last of the boys in college, there wasn’t anybody left in the house but missus
and Nina and us six slaves to keep it going. Missus stewed all the time
about money. She had the lump sum master Grimké left, but she said it was
a trifle of what she needed. Paint was flecking off the house and she’d sold
the extra horse. She didn’t eat bird nest pudding anymore, and in the slave
dining room, we lived on rice and more rice.
The day I smelled the fritters, it was two days before Christmas—I
remember there was a cold pinch in the air and palm wreaths tacked on the
doors of the piazzas, woven fancy like hair braids. This time Sabe had sent
me to carry a note from missus to the solicitor’s office. Don’t think I didn’t
read it before I handed it over.
Dear Mr. Huger,
I find that my allowance is inadequate to meet the
demands of living well. I request that you alert my sons as to
my needs. As you know, they are in possession of properties
that could be sold in order to augment my care. Such a
proposal would suit better coming from a man of your
influence, who was a loyal friend to their father.
Yours Truly,
Mary Grimké
I had a jar of sorghum in my pocket that I’d swiped from the larder. I
liked to bring Denmark a little something, and this would hit the spot with
the fritters. He had a habit of telling whoever was hanging round his place
that I was his daughter. He didn’t say I was like a daughter, but claimed out
and out I was his. Susan grumbled about it, but she was good to me, too.
I found her in her kitchen house, shoveling the corn cakes from the
skillet to the plate. She said, “Where you been? We haven’t seen you in
over a week.”
“You can’t do with me and you can’t do without me.”
She laughed. “I can do with you all right. The one I can’t do with and do
without is in his workshop.”
“Denmark? What’s he done now?”
She snorted. “You mean beside keep women all over the city?”
It struck me best to sidestep this since mauma had been one of them.
“Yeah, beside that.”
A smile dipped cross her lips. She handed me the plate. “Here, take this
to him. He’s in a mood, is all. It’s about that Monday Gell. He lost
something that set Denmark off. Some sort of list. I thought Denmark was
gonna kill the man.”
I headed back toward the workshop knowing Monday had lost the roll
of draftees he’d been collecting for Denmark out on the Bulkley farm.
For a long time now, Denmark and his lieutenants had been recruiting
slaves, writing down their names in what he called the Book. Last I heard,
there were more than two thousand pledged to take up arms when the time
came. Denmark had let me sit there and listen while he talked about raising
an army and getting us free, and the men got used to me being in there.
They knew I’d keep it quiet.
Denmark didn’t like the wind to blow unless he told it which way to go.
He’d come up with the exact words he wanted Gullah Jack and them to say
when they wooed the recruits. One day, he had me pretend like I was the
slave he was courting.
“Have you heard the news?” he said to me.
“What news?” I answered. Like he told me to say.
“We’re gonna be free.”
“Free? Who says?”
“Come with me, and I’ll show you.”
That was the way he wanted it said. Then, if a slave in the city was
curious enough, the lieutenant was supposed to bring him to 20 Bull to meet
Denmark. If the slaves were on the plantations, Denmark would go to them
and hold a secret meeting.
I’d been at the house when one of those curious slaves had showed up,
and it was something I’d take to my grave. Denmark had sailed up from his
chair like Elijah in his chariot. “The Lord has spoken to me,” he cried out.
“He said, set my people free. When your name is written in the Book,
you’re one of us and you’re one of God’s, and we’ll take our freedom when
God says. Let not your heart be troubled. Neither let it be afraid. You
believe in God, believe also in me.”
When he spoke those words, a jolt traveled through me, the same one I
used to get in the alcove when I was little and thought about the water
taking me somewhere, or in church when we sang about the Jericho walls
crumbling and the drumsticks in my legs beat the floor. My name wasn’t in
the Book, just the men’s, but I would’ve put it in there if I could. I would’ve
written it in blood.
Today, Denmark was pegging the legs on a Scot pine table. When I
stepped into the room with the fritters, he set down the claw hammer and
grinned, and when I pulled out the sorghum to boot, he said, “If you aren’t
Charlotte all over.”
Leaning on the work table to take the heft off my leg, I watched him eat
for a while, then I said, “Susan said Monday lost his list.”
The door to the back alley was open to let the sawdust float out and he
went over, peered both ways, and closed it. “Monday is a damn fool idiot.
He kept his list inside an empty feed barrel in the harness shop on Bulkley
farm, and yesterday the barrel was gone and nobody knows where.”
“What would happen if somebody finds it?”
He sat back on the stool and picked up the fork. “It depends. If the list
rouses suspicion and gets turned over to the Guard, they’d go through the
names with a whip till they found out what it was about.”
That raised goose flesh on my arms. I said, “Where do you keep your
names?”
He stopped chewing. “Why do you want to know?”
I was treading on the thin side of his temper, but I didn’t care. “Well, are
they hidden good or not?”
His eyes strayed to the leather satchel on the work table.
“They’re in the satchel?” I said. “Right there for the taking?”
I said it like he was a damn fool idiot, too, but instead of lashing out, he
laughed. “That satchel doesn’t leave my sight.”
“But if the Guard gets hold of Monday’s names and comes looking for
you, they’ll find your list easy enough.”
He got quiet and brushed the sugar dust off his mouth. He knew I was
right, but didn’t want to say.
The sun was stepping through the window, laying down four bright quilt
squares on the floor. I stared at them while the silence hung, thinking how
he’d said I was Charlotte all over, and it popped in my mind the way she’d
put pieces of our hair and little charms down inside her quilts, and then I
remembered the time she got caught red-handed with missus’ green silk.
She’d told me then, “I should’ve sewed that silk inside a quilt and she never
would’ve found it.”
“I know what you need to do with the list,” I said.
“You do, do you?”
“You need to hide it inside a quilt. I can sew a secret pocket inside to
hold it. Then you just lay the quilt on the bed in plain sight and nobody
knows the difference.”
He paced cross the workshop three, four times. Finally, he said, “What
if I need to get to the list?”
“That’s easy, I’ll leave an opening in the seam big enough for your hand
to slip in and out.”
He nodded. “See if Susan has a quilt somewhere. Get busy.”
When the new year came, Nina scrounged up five girls and started the
Female Prayer Society. They met in the drawing room Wednesday
mornings. I served the tea and biscuits, tended the fire, and watched the
door, and from what I could tell, the last thing going on was praying. Nina
was in there doing her best to introduce them to the evils of slavery.
That girl. She was like Sarah. Had the same notions, the same craving
to be useful, but the two of them were different, too. Seventeen now, Nina
turned every head that looked her way and she could talk the salt from the
sea. Her beaux didn’t last long, though. Missus said she chased them off
with her opinionating.
I don’t know why she didn’t chase the girls off either.
During the meetings, she made hot-blooded speeches that went on till
one of the girls lost the point of it and turned the talk to something else—
who danced with who or who wore what at the last social. Nina would give
up then, but she seemed glad to speak her mind, and missus was happy, too,
thinking Nina had finally found some religion.
It was during a meeting in March that the Smith girl took umbrage.
Nina was taking special care to let her know how bad her neighborhood
was.
“Would you come over here, Handful?” Nina called. She turned to the
girls. “See her leg? See how she drags it behind her? That’s from the
treadmill at the Work House. It’s an abomination, and it’s right under your
nose, Henrietta!”
The Smith girl bristled. “Well, what was she doing at the Work House in
the first place? There must be some discipline, mustn’t there? What did she
do?”
“What did she do? Haven’t you heard anything I’ve been saying? God
help us, how can you be so blind? If you want to know how Handful came
to be at the Work House, she’s standing right here. She’s a person, ask her.”
“I’d rather not,” the girl said and tucked her skirts in round her legs.
Nina rose from her chair and came to stand beside me. “Why don’t you
take your shoe off and show her the kind of brutality that takes place on the
same street where she lives?”
I should’ve minded doing it, but I always remembered that day Tomfry
caught me in front of the house sneaking off to Denmark’s, how Nina came
to my rescue. She’d never asked where I’d gone, and the fact was, I wanted
the girls to see what the Work House had done to me. I tugged off my shoe
and bared the misshaped bone and the pinky-flesh scars wriggling cross my
skin like earthworms. The girls pressed their fingers under their noses and
blanched white as flour, but Henrietta Smith did one better. She fainted
sideways in her chair.
I got the smelling salts and brought her round, but not before missus
heard the uproar.
Later on that night in my cellar room, I heard a tap and opened the door
to find Nina with her eyes puffed out.
“Did Mother punish you?” she asked. “I have to know.”
Since master Grimké died, missus hit Minta with the gold-tip cane so
much you never saw her without black bruises on her brown arms. It was no
wonder she went to the carriage house with Sabe to get salved. She struck
me and Phoebe with the cane, too, and had even taken to swiping AuntSister, which I never thought I’d live to see. Aunt-Sister didn’t take it laying
down. I heard her tell missus, “Binah and the ones you sold, they the lucky
ones.”
Nina was saying, “I tried to tell her that I asked you to take off your
shoe, that you didn’t just volunteer—”
I stuck out my arm and showed her the welt.
“The cane?” Nina asked.
“One strike, but a good one. What’d she do to you?”
“Mostly, a lot of scolding. The girls won’t be coming back for any more
meetings.”
“No, I didn’t think so,” I said. She looked so dismal I added, “Well, you
tried.”
Her eyes watered up and I handed her my clean head scarf. Taking it,
she sank down in the rocker and buried her face in it. I didn’t know how
much more her eyes could take, whether she was crying over her failure
with the Female Prayer Society, or Sarah leaving, or the shortfalls of
people.
When she was all cried out, she went back to her room, and I lit a
candle and sat in the wavy light, picturing the quilt on Denmark’s bed, and
inside it, the hidden pocket, and inside that, the scroll of paper with all the
names. People ready to lay their lives down to get free. The day I came up
with the scheme of hiding the list, Susan didn’t have a single quilt in the
house—she used plain wool blankets. I made a new quilt from scratch—red
squares and black triangles, me and mauma’s favorite, the blackbirds flying
away.
Denmark believed nothing would change without blood spilled. Plopped
in the rocker now, I thought about Nina, her lecturing to five spoilt white
girls, and Sarah being so upset with the way her world was, she had to leave
it, and while I felt the goodness in what they did, it seemed their lecturing
and leaving didn’t come to much when you had this much cruelty to
overcome.
The retribution was coming and we’d bring it ourselves. Blood was the
way. It was the only way, wasn’t it? I was glad now Sarah was far away
from danger, and I would have to keep Nina safe. I said to myself, Let not
your heart be troubled. Neither let it be afraid.
