Handful
In the workshop at Denmark’s house, the lieutenants were standing round
the work table. They were always by Denmark’s side. He told them he’d set
the date, two months from now, said there were six thousand names in the
Book.
I was back in the corner, listening, crouched on a footstool, my usual
spot. Nobody much noticed me there unless they needed something to
drink. Handful, bring the hooch water, Handful, bring the ginger beer.
It was April and half the heat from hell had already showed up in
Charleston. The men were dripping with it. “These last weeks, you need to
play the part of the good slave better than ever,” Denmark said. “Tell
everybody to grit their teeth and obey their owners. If somebody was to tell
the white folks a slave revolt is coming, we need them to laugh and say,
‘Not our slaves, they’re like family. They’re the happiest people on earth.’”
While they talked, mauma came to my mind, and the picture I had of
her was washed-out like the red on a quilt after it’s boiled too many times.
It’d got sometimes where I couldn’t remember how her face looked, where
the ridges had been on her fingers from working the needle, or what she
smelled like at the end of the day. Whenever this happened, I’d go out to the
spirit tree. That’s where I felt mauma the sharpest, in the leaves and bark
and dropping acorns.
Sitting there, I shut my eyes and tried to get her back, worried she was
leaving me for good. Aunt-Sister would’ve said, “Let her go, it’s past the
time,” but I wanted the pain of mauma’s face and hands more than the
peace of being without them.
I thought for a minute I’d slip out and go back to the spirit tree—take
my chance going over the gate before dark, but Missus had caught me
slipping over it last month and put a gash on my head that was just scabbing
over. She’d told Sabe, “If Handful gets out again without permission, I’ll
have you whipped along with her.” Now he had bug eyes in the back of his
head.
I tried to set my mind on what the men were saying.
“What we need is a bullet mold,” Denmark said. “We got muskets, but
we don’t have musket balls.”
They went down the list of weapons. I’d known there’d be blood, but I
didn’t know it’d run down the streets. They had clubs, axes, and knives.
They had stolen swords. They had kegs of gunpowder and slow fuses hid
under the docks they meant to set off round the city and burn it to the
ground.
They said a blacksmith slave named Tom was making five hundred
pikes. I figured he had to be the same Tom the Blacksmith who made
mauma’s fake slave badge back when she’d started hiring herself out. I
remembered the day she’d showed it to me. That small copper square with a
pinhole at the top, said Domestic Servant, Number 133, Year 1805. I could
see all that, but I couldn’t get mauma’s face to come clear.
I had a tiny jay feather down in my pocket I’d picked up on the way
over here, and I pulled it out and twirled it between my fingers, just
something to do, and next thing I was thinking about was the time mauma
saw a bird funeral. When she was a girl, she and my granny-mauma came
on a dead crow lying under their spirit tree. They went to get a scoop to
bury it, and when they came back, seven crows were on the ground circling
round the dead bird, carrying on, not caw caw, but zeep zeep, a high-pitch
cry like a mourning chant. My granny-mauma told her, “See, that’s what
birds do, they stop flying and hunting food and swoop down to tend their
dead. They march round it and cry. They do this so everything know: once
this bird lived and now it’s gone.”
That story brought the bright red of mauma back to me. Her picture
came perfect in my mind. I saw the yellow-parch of her skin, the calluses
on her knuckles, the gold-lit eyes, and the gap in her teeth, the exact
wideness of it.
“There’s a bullet mold at the City Arsenal on Meeting Street,” Gullah
Jack said. “But getting in there—well, I don’t know.”
“How many guards they got?” Rolla asked.
Gullah Jack rubbed his whiskers. “Two, sometimes three. The place has
the whole stockpile of weapons for the Guard, but they’re not letting one of
us stroll in there.”
“Getting in would mean a fight,” Denmark said, “and that’s one thing
we can’t afford. Like I said, the main thing now is not to rouse suspicion.”
“What about me?” I said.
They turned and looked at me like they’d forgotten I was in the room.
“What about you?” said Denmark.
“I could get in there. Nobody looks twice at a slave woman who’s lame
in one leg.”
