Handful
Aunt-Sister took me to the warming kitchen where Binah and Cindie were
fussing over silver trays, laying them full of ginger cake and apples with
ground nuts. They had on their good long aprons with starch. Off in the
drawing room, it sounded like bees buzzing.
Missus showed up and told Aunt-Sister to peel off my nasty coat and
wash my face, then she said, “Hetty, this is Sarah’s eleventh birthday and
we are having a party for her.”
She took a lavender ribbon from the top of the pie safe and circled it
round my neck, tying a bow, while Aunt-Sister peeled the black off my
cheeks with her rag. Missus wound more ribbon round my waist. When I
tugged, she told me in a sharp way, “Stop that fidgeting, Hetty! Be still.”
Missus had done the ribbon too snug at my throat. It felt like I couldn’t
swallow. I searched for Aunt-Sister’s eyes, but they were glued on the food
trays. I wanted to tell her, Get me free of this, help me, I need the privy. I
always had something smart to say, but my voice had run down my throat
like a kitchen mouse.
I danced on one leg and the other. I thought what mauma had told me,
“You be good coming up on Christmas cause that when they sell off the
extra children or else send them to the fields.” I didn’t know one slave
master Grimké had sold, but I knew plenty he’d sent to his plantation in the
back country. That’s where mauma had come from, bearing me inside her
and leaving my daddy behind.
I stopped all my fidget then. My whole self went down in the hole
where my voice was. I tried to do what they said God wanted. Obey, be
quiet, be still.
Missus studied me, how I looked in the purple ribbons. Taking me by
the arm, she led me to the drawing room where the ladies sat with their
dresses fussed out and their china teacups and lacy napkins. One lady
played the tiny piano called a harpsichord, but she stopped when missus
gave a clap with her hands.
Every eye fixed on me. Missus said, “This is our little Hetty. Sarah,
dear, she is your present, your very own waiting maid.”
I pressed my hands between my legs and missus knocked them away.
She turned me a full circle. The ladies started up like parrots—happy
birthday, happy birthday—their fancy heads pecking the air. Miss Sarah’s
older sister, Miss Mary, sat there full of sulk from not being the center of
the party. Next to missus, she was the worst bird in the room. We’d all seen
her going round with her waiting maid, Lucy, smacking the girl six ways
from Sunday. We all said if Miss Mary dropped her kerchief from the
second floor, she’d send Lucy jumping out the window for it. Least I didn’t
end up with that one.
Miss Sarah stood up. She was wearing a dark blue dress and had rosycolored hair that hung straight like corn silk and freckles the same red color
all over her face. She took a long breath and started working her lips. Back
then, Miss Sarah pulled words up from her throat like she was raising water
from a well.
When she finally got the bucket up, we could hardly hear what she was
saying. “. . . . . . . . . I’m sorry, Mother. . . . . . I can’t accept.”
Missus asked her to say it over. This time Miss Sarah bellowed it like a
shrimp peddler.
Missus’ eyes were frost blue like Miss Sarah’s, but they turned dark as
indigo. Her fingernails bore into me and carved out what looked like a flock
of birds on my arm. She said, “Sit down, Sarah dear.”
Miss Sarah said, “. . . I don’t need a waiting maid . . . I’m perfectly fine
without one.”
“That is quite enough,” missus said. How you could miss the warning in
that, I don’t know. Miss Sarah missed it by a mile.
“. . . Couldn’t you save her for Anna?”
“Enough!”
Miss Sarah plopped on her chair like somebody shoved her.
The water started in a trickle down my leg. I jerked every way I could to
get free of missus’ claws, but then it came in a gush on the rug.
Missus let out a shriek and everything went hush. You could hear
embers leap round in the fireplace.
I had a slap coming, or worse. I thought of Rosetta, how she threw a
shaking fit when it suited her. She’d let the spit run from her mouth and
send her eyes rolling back. She looked like a beetle-bug upside down trying
to right itself, but it got her free of punishment, and it crossed my mind to
fall down and pitch a fit myself the best I could.
But I stood there with my dress plastered wet on my thighs and shame
running hot down my face.
Aunt-Sister came and toted me off. When we passed the stairs in the
main hall, I saw mauma up on the landing, pressing her hands to her chest.
That night doves sat up in the tree limbs and moaned. I clung to mauma in
our rope bed, staring at the quilt frame, the way it hung over us from the
ceiling rafters, drawn tight on its pulleys. She said the quilt frame was our
guarding angel. She said, “Everything gon be all right.” But the shame
stayed with me. I tasted it like a bitter green on my tongue.
The bells tolled cross Charleston for the slave curfew, and mauma said
the Guard would be out there soon beating on their drums, but she said it
like this: “Bugs be in the wheat ’fore long.”
Then she rubbed the flat bones in my shoulders. That’s when she told
me the story from Africa her mauma told her. How the people could fly.
How they flew over trees and clouds. How they flew like blackbirds.
Next morning mauma handed me a quilt matched to my length and told
me I couldn’t sleep with her anymore. From here on out, I would sleep on
the floor in the hall outside Miss Sarah’s bed chamber. Mauma said, “Don’t
get off your quilt for nothin’ but Miss Sarah calling. Don’t wander ’bout.
Don’t light no candle. Don’t make noise. When Miss Sarah rings the bell,
you make haste.”
Mauma told me, “It gon be hard from here on, Handful.”
