Handful
The day mauma started sewing her story quilt, we were sitting out by the
spirit tree doing handwork. We always did the trouble-free work there—
hems, buttons, and trimmings, or the tiny stitches that strained your eyes in
a poor-lit room. The minute the weather turned fair, we’d spread a quilt on
the ground and go to town with our needles. Missus didn’t like it, said the
garments would get soiled. Mauma told her, “Well, I need the outdoor air to
keep going, but I’ll try and do without it.” Right after that, mauma’s quota
fell off. Nobody was getting much of anything new to wear, so Missus said,
“All right then, sew outside, but see to it my fabrics stay clean.”
It was early in the springtime, and the tree buds were popping open
while we sat there. Those days I did a lot of fretting and fraying. I was
watching Miss Sarah in society, how she wore her finery and going
whichever way she pleased. She was wanting to get a husband soon and
leave. The world was a Wilton carpet stretched out for her, and it seemed
like the doors had shut on me, and that’s not even right—the doors never
had opened in the first place. I was getting old enough to see they never
would.
Missus was still dragging us into the dining room for devotions,
preaching, “Be content with your lot, for this is of the Lord.” I wanted to
say, Take your lot and put it where the sun don’t shine.
The other thing was Little Nina. She was Miss Sarah’s own sister, more
like a daughter to her. I loved Nina, too, you couldn’t help it, but she took
over Miss Sarah’s heart. That was how it should be, but it left a hole in
mine.
That day by the tree, me and mauma had the whole kit and comboodle
of our sewing stuff lined up on the tree roots—threads, needle bags, pin
cushions, shears, and a small tin of beeswax we used to grease our needles.
A waxed needle would almost glide through the cloth by itself, and I got
where I hated to sew without the smell of it. I had the brass thimble on my
finger, finishing up a dressing table cover for missus’ bedchamber,
embroidering it with some scuppernong vines going round the edges.
Mauma said I’d outshined her with my sewing—I didn’t use a tracing wheel
like her, and my darts lay perfect every time.
Back two years, when I’d turned fifteen, missus said, “I’m making you
our apprentice seamstress, Hetty. You are to learn all you can and share in
the work.” I’d been learning from mauma since I could hold a needle, but I
guess this made me official, and it spread some of the burden off mauma
over to me.
Mauma had her wooden patch box beside her, plus a stack of red and
brown quilt squares, fresh-cut. She rooted through the box and came up
with a scrap of black cloth. I watched her cut three figures purely by eye.
No hesitation, that’s the trick. She pinned the shapes on a red square, and
started appliquéing. She sat with her back rounded, her legs straight out, her
hands moving like music against her chest.
When we’d made our spirit tree, I’d sewed a pouch for each of us out of
old bed ticking. I could see hers peeking out from her dress collar, plumped
with little pieces of the tree. I reached up and gave mine a pat. Beside the
tree charms, mine had Miss Sarah’s button inside it.
I said, “So what kind of quilt you making?”
“This a story quilt,” she said, and that was the first time I heard of one.
She said her mauma made one, and her mauma before her. All her kin in
Africa, the Fon people, kept their history on a quilt.
I left off my embroidery and studied the figures she was sewing—a
man, a woman, and a little girl between them. They were joined at the
hands. “Who’re they supposed to be?”
“When I get it all done, I tell you the story square by square.” She
grinned, showing the big space between her teeth.
After she stitched on the three people, she free-cut a tiny quilt top with
black triangles and sewed it at the girl’s feet. She cut out little shackles and
chains for their legs, then, a host of stars that she sewed all round them.
Some stars had tails of light, some lay on the ground. It was the story of the
night her mauma—my granny-mauma—got sold and the stars fell.
Mauma worked in a rush, needing to get the story told, but the more she
cut and stitched, the sadder her face turned. After a while her fingers slowed
down and she put the quilt square away. She said, “This gon take a while, I
guess.” Then she picked up a half-done quilt with a flower appliqué. It was
milk-white and rose-pink, something sure to sell. She worked on it
lackluster. The sun guttered in the leaves over our heads, and I watched the
shadows pass over her.
For the sake of some gossip, I told her, “Miss Sarah met a boy at one of
her parties, and he’s all she wants to talk about.”
“I got somebody like that,” she said.
I looked at her like her head had fallen off. I set down the embroidery
hoop, and the white dresser cover flopped in the dirt. “Well, who is he,
where’d you get him?”
“Next trip to the market, I take you to see him. All I gon say is: he a free
black, and he one of a kind.”
I didn’t like she’d been keeping things from me. I snapped at her. “And
you gonna marry Mr. One of a Kind Free Black?”
“No, I ain’t. He already married.”
Course he was.
Mauma waited through my pique, then said, “He come into some
money and bought his own freedom. He cost a fortune, but his massa have a
gamble debt, so he only pay five hundred dollars for hisself. And he still
have money after that to buy a house at 20 Bull Street. It sit three blocks
from where the governor live.”
“How’d he get all this money?”
“Won it in the East Bay Street lottery.”
I laughed out loud. “That’s what he told you? Well, I reckon this is the
luckiest slave that ever lived.”
“It happen ten years ago, everybody know ’bout it. He buy a ticket, and
his number come up. It happen.”
The lottery office was down the street from the market, near the docks.
I’d passed it myself when mauma took me out to learn the shopping. There
was always a mish-mash of people getting tickets: ship captains, City
Guard, white laborers, free blacks, slaves, mulattoes, and creoles. There’d
be two, three men in silk cravats with their carriages waiting.
I said, “How come you don’t buy a ticket?”
“And waste a coin on some fancy chance?”
For the last five years, every lick of strength mauma had left from
sewing for missus had gone toward her dollar bill collection. She’d been
hired out steady since I was eleven, but it wasn’t on the sly anymore, and
thank you kind Jesus for that. Her counterfeit badge and all that sneaking
out she’d done for the better part of a year had put white hair on my head. I
used to pull it out and show it to her. I’d say, “Look what you’re doing to
me.” She’d say, “Here I is, saving up to buy us freedom and you worrying
’bout hair.”
When I was thirteen, missus had finally given in and let mauma hire
out. I don’t know why. Maybe she got tired of saying the word no. Maybe it
was the money she wanted—mauma could put a hundred dollars a year in
missus’ pocket—but I know this much, it didn’t hurt when mauma made
missus a patchwork quilt for Christmas that year. It had a square for each of
her children made from some remnant of theirs. Mauma told her, “I know
this ain’t nothing much, but I sewed you a memory quilt of your family so
you can wrap up in it after they gone.” Missus touched each square: “Why,
this is from the dress Mary wore to her coming out . . . This is Charles’
baptism blanket . . . My goodness, this is Thomas’ first riding shirt.”
Mauma didn’t waste a breath. She asked missus right then to hire her
out. A month later she was hired legal to sew for a woman on Tradd Street.
Mauma kept twenty cents on the dollar. The rest went to missus, but I knew
mauma was selling underhand on the side—frilled bonnets, quilt tops,
candlewick bedcovers, all sorts of wears that didn’t call for a fitting.
She had me count the money regular. It came to a hundred ninety
dollars. I hated to tell her her money-pile could hit the roof, but that didn’t
mean missus would sell us, specially to ourselves.
Thinking about all this, I said, “We sew too good for missus to let us
go.”
“Well if she refuse us, then our sewing gon get real bad, real fast.”
“What makes you think she wouldn’t sell us to somebody else for
spite?”
Mauma stopped working and the fight seemed to almost leave her. She
looked tired. “It’s a chance we has to take, or else we gon end up like
Snow.”
Poor Snow, he’d died one night last summer. Fell over in the privy.
Aunt-Sister tied his jaw to keep his spirit from leaving, and he was laid out
on a cooling board in the kitchen house for two days before they put him in
a burial box. The man had spent his whole life carrying the Grimkés round
town. Sabe took his place as the coachman and they brought some new boy
from their plantation to be the footman. His name was Goodis, and he had
one lazy eye that looked sideways. He watched me so much with that eye
mauma’d said, “That boy got his heart fix on you.”
“I don’t want him fixing his heart on me.”
“That’s good,” she’d said. “I can’t buy nobody’s freedom but mine and
yours. You get a husband, and he on his own.”
I tied off a knot and moved the embroider hoop over, saying to myself, I
don’t want a husband and don’t plan on ending up like Snow on a cooling
board in the kitchen house either.
“How much will it take to buy the both of us?” I asked.
Mauma rammed the needle in the cloth. She said, “That’s what you gon
find out.”
