Handful
Some days I’d be coming down East Bay and catch sight of a woman with
cinnamon skin slipping round a corner, a snatch of red scarf on her head,
and I’d say, There you are again. I was twenty-five years old and still
talking to her.
Every October on the anniversary-day of mauma going missing, us
slaves sat in the kitchen house and reminisced on her. I hated to see that day
come dragging round.
On the six-year mark, Binah patted my leg and said, “Your mauma
gone, but we still here, the sky ain’t fall in yet.”
No, but every year one more slat got knocked out from under it.
That evening, they dredged up stories on mauma that went on past
supper. Stealing the bolt of green cloth. Hoodwinking missus with her limp.
Wrangling the cellar room. Getting herself hired out. That whole Jesus-act
she did. Tomfry told about the time missus had him search the premise and
mauma was nowhere on it, how we slipped her in the front door to the roof,
then trumped up that story about her falling asleep there. Same old tales.
Same laughing and slapping.
Now that she was gone, they loved her a lot better.
“You sure do have her eyes,” Goodis said, looking at me moon-face like
he always did.
I did have her eyes, but the rest of me had come from my daddy.
Mauma said he was an undersize man and blacker than the backside of the
moon.
On my sake, they left out the stories of her pain and sorrow. Nothing
about what might’ve happened to her. Every one of them, even Goodis,
believed she’d run and was living the high life of freedom somewhere. I
could more easy believe she’d been on the roof all this time, sleeping.
Outside the day was fading off. Tomfry said it was time to light the
lamps in the house, but nobody moved, and I felt the ache for them to know
the real woman mauma was, not just the cunning one, but the one smelted

from iron, the one who paced the nights and prayed to my granny-mauma.
Mauma had yearned more in a day than they felt in a year. She’d worked
herself to the bone and courted danger, searching for something better. I
wanted them to know that woman. That was the one who wouldn’t leave
me.
I said, “She didn’t run off. I can’t help what you think, but she didn’t
run.”
They just sat there and looked at me. You could see the little wheels
turning in their heads: The poor misled girl, the poor misled girl.
Tomfry spoke up, said, “Handful, think now. If she didn’t run off, she
got to be dead. Which-a-one you want us to believe?”
No one had put it to me that straight before. Mauma’s story quilt had
slaves flying through the sky and slaves laying dead on the ground, but in
my way of reckoning, mauma was lost somewhere between the two.
Between flyaway and dead-and-gone.
Which-a-one? The air was stiff as starch.
“Not neither one,” I told them and got up from there and left.
In my room, I laid down on the bed, on top of the story quilt, and stared
at the quilt frame still nailed to the ceiling. I never lowered it anymore, but I
slept under mauma’s stories every night except summers and the heat of
autumn, and I knew them front, back, and sideways. Mauma had sewed
where she came from, who she was, what she loved, the things she’d
suffered, and the things she hoped. She’d found a way to tell it.
After a while, I heard footsteps overhead—Tomfry, Cindie, Binah up
there lighting lamps. I didn’t have to worry with Sarah’s lamp anymore. I
just had sewing duties now. Some time ago, Sarah had given me back to
missus, official on paper. She said she didn’t want part in owning a human
person. She’d come special to my room to tell me, so nerve-racked she
couldn’t hardly get the words up. “. . . . . . I would’ve freed you if I
could . . . but there’s a law . . . It doesn’t allow owners to easily free slaves
anymore . . . Otherwise, I would have . . . you know that . . . don’t you?”
After that, it was plain as the freckles on her face—the only way I was
getting away from missus was drop dead, get sold, or find the hid-place
mauma had gone. Some days I mooned over the money mauma’d saved—it
never had turned up. If I could find that fortune, I could try and buy my
freedom from missus like we’d planned on. Least I’d have a chance—a
horse-piss of a chance, but it would be enough to keep me going.

Six years gone. I rolled over on the bed, my face to the window. I said,
“Mauma, what happened to you?”

When the new year came round, I was in the market getting what AuntSister needed when I overheard the slave who cleaned the butcher stall
talking about the African church. This slave’s name was Jesse, a good, kind
man. He used to take the leftover pig bladders and fill them with water for
the children to have a balloon. I didn’t usually pay him any mind—he was
always wagging his tongue, putting Praise the Lord at the end of every
sentence—but this day, I don’t know why it was, I went over there to hear
what he was saying.
Aunt-Sister had told me to hurry back, that it looked like sleet coming,
but I stood there with the raw smell hanging in the air while he talked about
the church. I found out the proper name was African Methodist Episcopal
Church, and it was just for coloreds, slaves and free blacks together, and it
was meeting in an empty hearse house near the black burial ground. Said
the place was packed to the rafters every night.
A slave man next to me, wearing some worn-out-looking livery, said,
“Since when is the city so fool-trusting to let slaves run their own church?”
Everybody laughed at that, like the joke was on Charleston.
Jesse said, “Well, ain’t that the truth, Praise the Lord. There’s a man at
the church who’s always talking ’bout Moses leading the slaves from
Egypt, Praise the Lord. He say, Charleston is Egypt all over again. Praise
the Lord.”
My scalp pricked. I said, “What’s the man’s name?”
Jesse said, “Denmark Vesey.”
For years, I’d refused to think of Mr. Vesey, how mauma had sewed him
on the last square on her story quilt. I didn’t like the man being on it, didn’t
like the man period. I’d never thought he knew anything about what
happened to her, why would he, but standing there, a bell rang in my head
and told me it was worth a try. Maybe then I could put mauma to rest.
That’s when I decided to get religion.
First chance I got, I told Sarah I was burdened down with the need for
deliverance, and God was calling me to the African church. I dabbed at my
eyes a little.

I was cut straight from my mauma’s cloth.
Next day, missus called me to her room. She was sitting by the window
with her Bible laid open. “It has come to my attention you wish to join the
new church that has been established in the city for your kind. Sarah
informs me you want to attend nightly meetings. I’ll allow you to go twice a
week in the evenings and on Sunday, as long as it doesn’t interfere with
your work or cause problems of any sort. Sarah will prepare your pass.”
She looked at me through her little glasses. She said, “See to it you
don’t squander the favor I’m granting you.”
“Yessum.” For measure, I added, “Praise the Lord.”