Handful
Tomfry said he tried not to put much force in it, but the strike flayed open
my skin. Miss Sarah made a poultice with Balm of Gilead buds soaked in
master Grimké’s rum, and mauma handed the whole flask to me and said,
“Here, go on, drink it, too.” I don’t hardly remember the pain.
The gash healed fast, but Miss Sarah’s hurt got worse and worse. Her
voice had gone back to stalling and she pined for her books. That was one
wretched girl.
It’d been Lucy who ran tattling to Miss Mary about my lettering under
the tree, and Miss Mary had run tattling to missus. I’d judged Lucy to be
stupid, but she was only weak-willed and wanting to get in good with Miss
Mary. I never did forgive her, and I don’t know if Miss Sarah forgave her
sister, cause what came from all that snitching turned the tide on Miss
Sarah’s life. Her studying was over and done.
My reading lessons were over, too. I had my hundred words, and I
figured out a good many more just using my wits. Now and then, I said my
ABCs for mauma and read words to her off the picture pages she’d tacked
on her wall.
One day I went to the cellar and mauma was making a baby gown from
muslin with lilac bands. She saw my face and said, “That’s right, another
Grimké coming. Sometime this winter. Missus ain’t happy ’bout it. I heard
her tell massa, that’s it, this the last one.”
When mauma finished hemming the little gown, she dug in the gunny
sack and pulled out a short stack of clean paper, a half full inkwell, and a
quill pen, and I knew she’d stole every one of these things. I said, “Why
you keep doing this?”
“I need you to write something. Write, ‘Charlotte Grimké has
permission for traveling.’ Under that, put the month, leave off the day, and
sign Mary Grimké with some curlicue.”
“First off, I don’t know how to write Charlotte. I don’t know the word
permission either.”
“Then, write, ‘This slave is allowed for travel.’”
“What you gonna do with it?”
She smiled, showing me the gap in her front teeth. “This slave gon
travel. But don’t worry, she always coming back.”
“What you gonna do when a white man stops you and asks to see your
pass and it looks like some eleven-year-old wrote it?”
“Then you best write it like you ain’t some eleven-year-old.”
“How you plan on getting past the wall?”
She looked up at the window near the ceiling. It wasn’t big as a hat box.
I didn’t see how she could wriggle through it, but she would grease herself
with goose fat if that’s what it took. I wrote her pass cause she was bent on
hell to have it.
After that, least one or two afternoons a week, she took off. Stayed gone
from middle of the afternoon till past dark. Wouldn’t say where she went.
Wouldn’t say how she got in and out of the yard. I worked out her escape
path in my head, though. Outside her window, it wasn’t but a couple of feet
between the house and the wall, and I figured once she squeezed through
the window, she would press her back against the house and her feet against
the wall and shimmy up and over, dropping to the ground on the other side.
Course, she had to find another way back in. My guess was the back
gate where the carriage came and went. She never came back till it was
good and dark, so she could climb it and nobody see. She always made it
before the drums beat for curfew. I didn’t wanna think of her out there
hiding from the City Guard.
One afternoon, while me and mauma were finishing up the slave clothes
for the year, I laid out my reasoning, how she went out the window in
daylight and came back over the gate at dark. She said, “Well, ain’t you
smart.”
In the far back of my head, I could see her with the strap tied on her
ankle and round her neck, and I filled up and started begging. “Don’t do it
no more. Please. All right? You gonna get yourself caught.”
“I tell you what, you can help me—if somebody here find me missing,
you sit the pail next to the cistern where I can see it from the back gate. You
do that for me.”
This scared me worse. “And if you see it, what you gonna do—run off?
Just leave me?” Then I broke down.
She rubbed my shoulders the way she always liked to do. “Handful,
child. I would soon die ’fore I leave you. You know that. If that pail sit by
the cistern, that just help me know what’s coming, that’s all.”
When their social season was starting off again, and me and mauma
couldn’t keep up with all the gowns and frocks, she up and hired herself out
without permission. I learned it one day after the supper meal, while we
were standing in the middle of the work yard. Miss Sarah had been in one
of her despairs all day, and I thought the worst things I had to fret over was
how low she got and mauma slipping out the window. But mauma, she
pulled a slave badge out from her pocket. If some owner hired his slave out,
he had to buy a badge from the city, and I knew master Grimké hadn’t
bought any such. Having a fake badge was worse than having missus’ green
silk.
I took the badge and studied it. It was a small square of copper with a
hole poked through the top so you could pin it to your dress. It was carved
with words. I sounded them out till it finally came clear what I was saying.
“Dome-stic . . . Do-mes-tic. Ser-vant. Domestic Servant!” I cried. “Number
133. Year 1805. Where’d you get this?”
“Well, I ain’t been out there grogging and lazing round this whole time
—I been finding work for myself.”
“But you got more work here than we can see to.”
“And I don’t make nothin’ from it, do I?” She took the badge from me
and dropped it back in her pocket.
“One of the Russell slaves name Tom has his own blacksmith shop on
East Bay. Missus Russell let him work for hire all day and she don’t take
but three-quarter of what he make. He made this badge for me, copied it off
a real one.”
I had the mind of an eleven-year-old, but I knew right off this
blacksmith wasn’t just some nice man doing her a favor. Why was he
putting himself in danger to make a fake badge for her?
She said, “I gon be making bonnets and dresses and quilts for a lady on
Queen Street. Missus Allen. I told her my name was Pearl, and I belong to
massa Dupré on the corner of George and East Bay. She say to me, ‘You
mean that French tailor?’ I say, ‘Yessum, he can’t fill my time no more with
work, so he letting me out for hire.’”
“What if she checks on your story?”
“She an old widow, she ain’t gon check. She just say, ‘Show me your
badge.’
Mauma was proud of her badge and proud of herself.
“Missus Allen say she pay me by the garment, and her two daughters
need clothes and coverings for they children.”
“How you gonna get all this extra work done?”
“I got you. I got all the hours of the night.”
Mauma burned so many candles working in the dark, she took to
swiping them from whatever room she happened on. Her eyes grew down
to squints and the skin round them wrinkled like drawing a straight stitch.
She was tired and frayed but she seemed better off inside.
She brought home money and stuffed it inside the gunny sack, and I
helped her sew day and night, anytime I didn’t have duties drawing Miss
Sarah’s baths, cleaning her room, keeping up with her clothes and her privy
pot. When we got the widow’s orders done, mauma would squirm out the
window and carry the parcels to her door where she got more fabric for the
next batch. Then she would wait till dark and sneak over the back gate. All
this dangerous business got natural as the day was long.
One afternoon during a real warm spell in January, missus sent Cindie to
the basement to fetch mauma, something about rosettes falling off her new
empire waist dress, and course, mauma was gone over the wall. She didn’t
lock the door while she was out cause she knew missus would have Prince
saw the door off its hinges if she didn’t answer, and how was she gonna
explain an empty room behind a locked door?
News of a missing slave flies like brush fire. When I heard the news, my
heart dropped to my knees. Missus used her bell and gathered everybody in
the yard, up near the back door. She laid her hands on top of her big
pregnant belly and said, “If you know Charlotte’s whereabouts, you are
duty bound to tell me.”
Not a peep from anybody. Missus cast her eyes on me. “Hetty? Where is
your mother?”
I shrugged and acted stumped. “I don’t know, missus. Wish I did know.”
Missus told Tomfry to search the kitchen house, laundry, carriage house,
stable, storage shed, privy, and slave rooms. She said comb every nook in
the yard, look down the chute where Prince sent hay from the loft to the
horses’ trough. If that didn’t turn up mauma, she said Tomfry would go
through the house, the piazza, and the ornament garden, top to bottom.
She rang her bell, which meant go back to work. I hurried to mauma’s
room to check the gunny sack. All her money was still at the bottom under
the stuffing. Then I crept back outside and set the pail next to the cistern.
The sun was coming down the sky, turning it the color of apricots.
While Tomfry did his searching high and low, I took up my spot in the
front alcove on the second floor to wait. At the first shade of dark, lo-tobehold, I looked down through the window and there was mauma turning
the corner. She marched straight to the front door and knocked.
I tore down the stairs and got to the door the same time as Tomfry.
When he opened it, mauma said, “I gon give you half of a dollar if you
get me back in there safe. You owe me, Tomfry.”
He stepped out onto the landing, me beside him, and closed the door. I
threw my arms round mauma. She said to him, “Quick now, what it gon
be?”
“They ain’t nowhere to put you,” he said. “Missus had me search every
corner.”
“Not the rooftop,” I said.
Tomfry made the coast clear, and I led mauma to the attic and showed
her the ladder and the hatch. I said, “When they come, you say it was so
warm you came out here to see the harbor and lay down and fell asleep.”
Meantime, Tomfry went and explained to missus how he forgot about
the rooftop when he was searching, how he knew for a fact Charlotte had
been up there one time before.
Missus waited at the foot of the attic steps with her cane, huffing from
climbing the stairs, big as she was. I lurked behind her. I was trembling with
nerves.
Mauma came down the ladder, shivering, telling this cockamamie story
I’d come up with. Missus said, “I did not think you were as naturally dumb
as the rest, Charlotte, but you have proved me wrong. To fall asleep on the
roof! You could have rolled off onto the street. The roof! You must know
such a place is completely off-limits.”
She raised her cane and brought it down cross the back of mauma’s
head. “See yourself to your room, and tomorrow morning after devotions,
you are to sew the rosettes back on my new dress. Your sloppiness with the
needle has only worsened.”
“Yessum,” mauma said, hurrying to the stairs, waving me in front of
her. If missus noticed how mauma didn’t have her cane or her limp, she
didn’t say so.
When we reached the cellar, mauma shut the door and threw the lock. I
was winded, but mauma’s breath was steady. She rubbed the back of her
head. She set her jaw. She said, “I is a ’markable woman, and you is a
’markable girl, and we ain’t never gon bow and scrape to that woman.”
