Handful
I spread a pallet under the tree and set my sewing basket on it. Missus had
decided she needed new curtains and covers for the drawing room, which
was the last thing she needed, but it gave me a reason to come out here and
sew with mauma.
She sat under the tree every day, working her story onto the quilt. Even
if it drizzled, I couldn’t budge her—she was like God mending the world.
When she came to bed at night, she brought the tree with her. The smell of
bark and white mushrooms. Crumbs from the earth all over the mattress.
Winter had packed and gone. The leaves had wriggled out on the tree
branches and the gold tassels were falling from the limbs like shedding fur.
Settling on the pallet next to mauma, I wondered about Sarah up north, if
her pale face ever saw the sun. She’d written me a while back, first letter I
ever got. I carried it in my pocket most of the time.
Thomas’ wife had given missus a brass bird that fastened cloth in its
beak, what they called a sew bird. I stuck one end of the curtain panel in its
mouth while I measured and cut. Mauma was cutting out the appliqué of a
man holding a branding iron in the fire.
“Who’s the man?” I said.
“That’s massa Wilcox,” she said. “He brand me the first time we run off.
Sky was ’bout seven then—I had to wait on her to get old enough to travel.”
“Sky said yawl ran four times.”
“We run the next year when she’s eight, and then when she’s nine, and
that time they whip her, too, so I stop trying.”
“How come you tried this last time then?”
“When I first get there, before Sky was born, massa Wilcox come down
to see me. Everybody know what he want, too. When he put his hand on
me, I take a scoop of red coals off the fire and toss ’em. Burn the man’s arm
clean through his shirt. I got my first whipping, but it’s the last time he try
that with me. When Sky turn thirteen last year, here he come back, sniffing
round her. I tell her, we leaving, and this time we gon die trying.”
I couldn’t measure words against any of that. I said, “Well, you made it.
You’re here now.”
Our needles started back. Over in the garden, Sky was singing. Ef oona
ent kno weh oona da gwuine, oona should kno weh oona dum from.
Sky had never set foot past the Grimké walls since she got here. Missus
didn’t have owner papers on her and Nina said it was dangerous business
out there. Since Denmark, the codes had got stricter and the buckrahs had
got meaner, but the next market day, I told Nina, “Write Sky a pass, just do
it for me. I’ll watch after her.”
I tied a fresh scarf on Sky’s head and wrapped a pressed apron round
her waist. I said, “Now, don’t be talking too much out there, all right?”
On the street, I showed her the alleys to duck in. I pointed out the
guards, how to walk past and lower her eyes, how to step aside for the
whites, how to survive in Charleston.
The market was busy—the men carrying wood slats piled with fish and
the women walking round with vegetable baskets on their heads the size of
laundry tubs. The little slave girls were out, too, selling peanut patties from
their straw hats. By the time we passed by the butcher tables with the
bloody calf heads lined up, Sky’s eyes were big as horse hooves. “Where all
this stuff come from?” she said.
“You’re in the city now,” I told her.
I showed her how to pick and choose what Aunt-Sister needed—coffee,
tea, flour, corn meal, beef rump, lard. I taught her how to haggle, how to do
the money change. The girl could do numbers in her head quicker than me.
When the shopping was done, I said, “Now we going somewhere, and I
don’t want you telling mauma, or Goodis, or anybody about it.”
When we came to Denmark’s house, we stood on the street and looked
at the battered whitewash. I’d come by here a few months after they
lynched Denmark, and a free black woman I’d never seen answered the
door. She said her husband had bought the house from the city, said she
didn’t know what came of Susan Vesey.
I said to Sky, “You’re always singing how we should know where we
come from.” I pointed to the house. “That’s where your daddy lived. His
name was Denmark Vesey.”
She kept her eyes on the porch while I told her about him. I said he was
a carpenter, a big, brave-hearted man who had wits sharper than any white
man. I said the slave people in Charleston called him Moses and he’d lived
for getting us free. I told her about the blood he’d meant to spill. Blood I’d
long since made peace with.
She said, “I know ’bout him. They hung him.”
I said, “He would’ve called you daughter if he’d had the chance.”
We hadn’t blown out the candle five minutes when mauma’s voice
whispered cross the bed. “What happen to the money?”
My eyes popped open. “What?”
“The money I saved to buy our freedom. What happen to it?”
Sky was already sleeping deep with a wheeze in her breath. She rolled
over at our voices, mumbling nonsense. I raised on my elbow and looked at
mauma laying in the middle between us. “I thought you took it with you.”
“I was delivering bonnets that day. What would I be carrying all that
money in my pocket for?”
“I don’t know,” I whispered. “But it ain’t here. I looked high and low
for it.”
“Well, it’s right under your nose the whole time—if it was a snake, it’d
bite you. Where’s that first quilt you made—has red squares and black
triangles?”
I should’ve known.
“I keep it on the quilt frame with the other quilts. Is that where you put
it?”
She whipped back the cover and climbed from bed, me fumbling behind
her, lighting a candle. Sky sat up in the hot, sputtering dark.
“Come on, get up,” mauma told her. “We fixing to roll the quilt frame
down over the bed.”
Sky lumbered over to us, looking confused, while I grabbed the rope
and brought it down, the pulley wheels begging for oil.
Mauma dug through the pile on the frame and found the quilt near the
bottom. When she shook it out, the old quilt smell filled the room. She slit
the backing and sent her hand rooting inside. Grinning, she pulled out a thin
bundle, then five more, all wrapped in muslin and tied with string so rotted
it came apart in her hands. “Well, look here,” she said.
“What you find?” Sky asked.
After we’d told her about the hiring-out mauma used to do, and we’d
danced round and pored over the riches, we laid the money on the frame,
and I winched it back to the ceiling.
Sky went on back to sleep, but me and mauma lay wide-eyed.
She said, “Tomorrow, first thing, you tie the money up fresh and sew it
back inside the quilt.”
“It’s not enough to buy all three of us.”
“I know that, we just gon hold on to it for now.”
The night drew on, and I started to drift, floating to the edge. Just before
I went over, I heard mauma say, “I don’t spec to get free. The only way I’m
getting free is for you to get free.”
