Handful
Mauma disappeared two days after we watched the stars fall.
We were standing in the work yard near the back gate. She had the red
scarf on her head and wore her good dress, the one dyed indigo. Her apron
was pressed to a crisp. She’d oiled her lips and borrowed Binah’s cowrie
shell bracelets to dress up her wrists. In the sunlight her skin had a gold
luster and her eyes shined like river rocks. That’s how I see her now in my
dreams, with the look she had then. Almost happy.
She pinned on her slave badge, full of haste. She’d got permission to
deliver her fresh-made bonnets, but I knew before the last one left the
basket, she’d be obliging that man, Mr. Vesey.
I said, “Be sure your badge is on good.”
Mauma hated my pestering. “It on there, Handful. It ain’t goin’
nowhere.”
“What about your pouch?” I couldn’t see the bulge of it under her dress
like usual. I kept both of our pouches fresh with scraps from our tree, and I
meant for her to wear it, what with me going to all that trouble and her
needing all the protection she could get. She fished it up from her bosom.
Her fingers had faded smudges on them from the charcoal powder she’d
used to trace designs on her bonnets.
I wanted to say more to her. Why’re you wearing the good dress with all
that mud out there? When are you planning on telling me about the baby?
Now we got to buy freedom for the three of us? But I shoved all this to the
side for later.
I lingered while Tomfry unlocked the back gate and let her out. After
she stepped through to the alley, she turned round and looked at me, then
walked on off.

After mauma left that day, I did everything usual. Cut sleeves and collars
for the men slaves to have work shirts, got busy on missus’ splashers, these
squares of cloth you tack up behind the washstands cause Lord forbid you
get a drop of water on the wall. Each and every one had to be embroidered
to the hilt.
Middle of the afternoon, I went out to the privy. The sun had stayed put,
and the sky was blue as cornflowers. Aunt-Sister was in the kitchen house
baking whole apples with custard poured round them, what’s called a bird
nest pudding, and that whole smell was in the air. I was on my way back
inside, relishing the sweet air after being in the latrine, when the carriage
came flying through the gate with Sarah and Nina, both of them looking
scared to pieces. And look who was driving. Goodis. When it rolled to a
stop, their feet hit the ground running. They passed me without a word and
struck for the house. The little gray traveling cape I’d sewed Nina flapped
behind her like a dove wing.
Goodis gave me a long look of pity before he tugged the horse inside
the stable.
When the long shadows started, I sat on the porch steps to the kitchen
house and watched the gate for mauma. Cross the yard, Goodis held vigil
with me in the stable door, whittling on a piece of wood. He knew
something I didn’t.
The apple-eggs were still in the air when Aunt-Sister and Phoebe
cleaned up and blew out the lamps. The dark came, and no moon.
Sarah found me hunched on the steps. She sat down close next to me.
“. . . Handful,” she said. “. . . I wanted to be the one to tell you.”
“It’s mauma, ain’t it?”
“She got in a dispute with a white lady . . . The lady wanted her to give
way on the street. She prodded your mother with an umbrella, and . . . you
know your mother, she wouldn’t stand aside. She . . . she struck the lady.”
Sarah sighed into the dark, and took hold of my hand. “The City Guard was
there. They took her away.”
All this time I’d been waiting for her to say mauma was dead. Hope
came back into me. “Where is she?”
Sarah looked away from me then. “. . . That’s what I’ve been trying to
discover . . . We don’t know where she is . . . They were taking her to the
Guard House, but when Thomas went to pay the fine, he was told Charlotte
had managed to wrestle free . . . Apparently, she ran off . . . They said the

Guard chased her, but lost her in the alleys. They’re out there looking for
her now.”
All I could hear was breathing—Sarah, Goodis cross the yard, the
horses in the stable, the creatures in the brush, the white people on their
feather beds, the slaves on their little pallets thin as wafers, everything
breathing but me.
Sarah walked with me to the basement. She said, “Would you like some
warmed tea? I can put a little brandy in it.”
I shook my head. She wanted to draw me to her for solace, I could tell,
but she held back. Instead, she laid her hand gentle on my arm and said,
“She’ll come back.”
I said those words all night long.
I didn’t know how to be in the world without her.