Handful
It was long about November when Goodis caught a chest cough and I
headed to the stable with some horehound and brown sugar for his throat,
thinking it’s another dull-luster day in the world. One more stitch in the
cloth.
Up in the house missus and Nina were bickering. One minute it’s the
way missus treats us slaves, next it’s Nina refusing to go back to society.
Without Sarah here to separate them, they kept a fight going all day. Phoebe
was in the kitchen house cooking a stew meat, getting more suggestions
from Aunt-Sister than she needed. Minta was hiding out someplace,
probably the laundry house, and Sabe, if I had to guess, was in the cellar,
smoking master Grimké’s pipe. Now that the liquor was gone, I smelled
pipe smoke all the time.
I slowed down by the vegetable garden to see if Goodis planted it for
the winter. It was nothing but dirt clods. The ornament garden was in a
shamble, too—the rose vines choking the oleander and the myrtle spurting
in twenty wrong directions. Missus said Goodis gave shiftless a bad name,
but the man wasn’t lazy, he was sick to the back teeth of forcing himself to
care about her squashes and flowers.
While I was studying the dirt and worrying about him, I got the feeling
somebody was watching me. I looked first at missus’ window, but it was
empty. The stable door was open, but Goodis had his back to me, rubbing
down the horse. Then, from the edge of my eye, I saw two figures at the
back gate. They didn’t move when I looked their way, just stood there in the
sharp light—an old slave woman and a slave girl. What’d they want? There
was always a slave ready to sell you something, but I’d never seen one
come peddling to the back gate. I hated to shoo them off. The old woman
was bent and frail-looking. The girl was holding her by the arm.
I walked back there, stepping with my cane, my fingers round the rabbit
head, feeling how it was smoothed to the grain from all the years of
holding. The woman and the girl didn’t take their eyes off me. Coming
closer, I noticed their head scarves were the same washed-out red. The
woman had yellow-brown skin. All of a sudden, her eyes flared wide and
her chin started to shake. She said, “Handful.”
I came to a stop, letting the sound flutter through the air and settle over
me. Then I dropped the cane and broke into a run, the closest I could get to
one. Seeing me come, the old woman sank to the ground. I didn’t have a
key for the gate, just flew over it, like crossing the sky. Kneeling down, I
scooped her in my arms.
I must’ve been shouting cause Goodis came running, then Minta,
Phoebe, Aunt-Sister, and Sabe. I remember them peering over the gate at us.
I remember the strange girl saying, “Is you Handful?” And me on the
ground, rocking the woman like a newborn.
“Sweet Lord Jesus,” Aunt-Sister said. “It’s Charlotte.”
Goodis carried mauma to the cellar room and laid her on the bed.
Everybody crowded in and stared at her like she was a specter. We were
deer in the woods, froze to stillness, afraid to move. I felt hot, the breath
gone from me. Mauma’s lids rolled back and I saw the white skins of her
eyes had started to yellow like the rest of her. She looked thin as thread. Her
face had turned to wrinkles and her hair had gone salt-white. She’d
disappeared fourteen years ago, but she’d aged thirty.
The girl hunkered next to her on the bed with her eyes darting face to
face, her skin dark as char. She was big-boned, big-handed, big-footed with
a forehead like the full moon. She looked just like her daddy. Denmark’s
girl.
I told Minta, get a wet rag. While I rubbed mauma’s face, she started to
groan and twist her neck. Sabe hauled off running to fetch missus and Nina,
and by the time they showed up, mauma’s eyes were starting to open to the
right place.
The smell of unwashed bodies hung round the bed, making missus draw
back and cover her nose. “Charlotte,” she said, standing back a ways. “Is
that you? I never thought we would see you again. Where on earth have you
been?”
Mauma opened her mouth, trying to speak, but her words scratched in
the air without much sense.
“We’re glad you’re back, Charlotte,” Nina said. Mauma blinked at her
like she didn’t have the first inkling who was saying it. Nina must’ve been
six or seven when mauma disappeared.
“Is she in her right mind?” missus asked.
Aunt-Sister set her hands on her hips. “She’s wore-out. What she need is
food and a good long rest.” Then she sent Phoebe for the stew broth.
Missus studied the girl. “Who’s this?”
Course, that’s what everybody wanted to know. The girl drew up
straight and gave missus a look that could cut paper.
“She’s my sister,” I said.
The room went silent.
“Your sister?” said missus. “As I live and breathe. What am I supposed
to do with her? I can barely keep the rest of you fed.”
Nina tugged her mother toward the door. “Charlotte needs rest. Let them
see to her.”
When the door closed behind them, mauma looked up at me with her
old smile. She had a big ugly hole where her two front teeth used to be. She
said, “Handful, look at you. Just look at you. My girl, all grown.”
“I’m thirty-three now, mauma.”
“All that time—” Her eyes watered up, the first tears I’d ever seen her
shed in my life. I eased down on the bed beside her and put my face to hers.
She said low against my ear, “What happen to your leg?”
“I took a bad fall,” I whispered.
Sabe sent everybody to their chores while I fed mauma spoonfuls of
broth and the girl gulped hers straight from the bowl. They slept side by
side through the afternoon. Time to time, Aunt-Sister stuck her head in the
door and said, “Yawl all right?” She brought short bread, castor oil boiled in
milk, and blankets for a floor pallet that I reckoned would be my bed for the
night. She helped me ease off their shoes without waking them, and when
she saw their feet festered over with sores, she left soap and a bucket of
water by the door.
The girl roused once and asked for the chamber pot. I led her out to the
privy and waited, watching the leaves on the oak tree drop, the soft way
they floated down. Mauma’s here. The wonder of it hadn’t broken through
to me yet, the need to go down on my knees. I couldn’t stop feeling the
shock of what she looked like, and I was worried what missus might do.
She’d looked at them like two bloodsuckers she wanted to thump off her
skin.
When the girl came out of the privy barefoot, I said, “We need to wash
your feet.”
She looked down at them with her mouth parted and the pink tip of her
tongue poking out. She couldn’t be but thirteen. My sister.
I sat her down on the three-legged stool in the yard in the last warm spot
from the sun. I brought the bucket and soap outside and stuck her feet in the
water to soak. I said, “How many days did you and mauma walk to get
here?”
She had barely spoken since this morning at the gate, and now the
backwash of words rushed from her lips and wouldn’t stop. “I ain’t sure.
Three weeks. Could be more. We come all the way from Beaufort. Massa
Wilcox place. We travel by night. Use the foot paths the traders take and
stay to the creeks. In the daytime, we hide in the fields and ditches. This the
fifth time we run, so we learn which-a-way to go. Mauma, she rub pepper
and onion peel on our shoes and legs to muddle the dogs. She say this time
we ain’t going back, we gon die trying.”
“Wait now. You and mauma ran off four times before this and got caught
every time?”
She nodded and looked off at the clouds. She said, “One time we get to
the Combahee River. Another time to the Edisto.”
I lifted her feet from the bucket one at a time and rubbed them with soap
while she talked, and that was something she liked to do—talk.
“We carry parched corn and dried yams with us. But that run out, so we
eat poke leaves and berries. Whatever we find. When mauma’d get where
she can’t go no more, I’d put her on my back and carry her. I’d go a ways,
then rest and carry her some more. She say, if something happen to me,
keep on till you find Handful.”
The things she told me. How they drank from puddles and licked drops
off sassafras leaves, how they climbed trees in the swamp and tied
themselves to the limbs and slept, how they wandered lost under the moon
and stars. She said one time a buckruh came by in a wagon and didn’t see
them laying right beside him in a ditch. Came to find out, she spoke Gullah,
the language the slaves used on the islands. She’d picked it up natural from
the plantation women. If she saw a bird, she’d say, there’s a bidi. A turtle
was a cooter. A white man, a buckruh.
I dried her feet good in my lap. “You didn’t tell me your name.”
“The man who work us in the rice field call me Jenny. Mauma say that
ain’t no name. She say our people use to fly like blackbirds. The day I was
born, she look at the sky and that’s what she call me. Sky.”
The girl didn’t look like her name. She was like the trunk of a tree, like
a rock in a field you plow round, but I was glad mauma had given it to her. I
heard Goodis coughing in the stable and the horse whinny. When I stood,
she peered up at me and said, “When we was lost, she tell me the story
’bout the blackbirds, I don’t know how many times.”
I smiled at her. “She used to tell me that story, too.”
My sister wasn’t much to look at, and to hear her talk, you’d think she
was too simple to learn, but I felt the toughness of mauma inside her from
the start.
I came awake that night on the floor pallet and mauma was standing in the
middle of the room with her back to me, not moving, gazing at the high-up
window. The darkness was tucked round her, but her kerchief had slipped
off and her hair was shining like fresh polish silver. Over on the mattress,
Sky was snoring loud and peaceful. Hearing me stir, mauma turned round
and spread open her arms to me. Without making a sound, I got up and went
to her. I walked right into her arms. That’s when she came home to me.
The next time I woke, early light had settled and mauma was sitting up in
bed, looking at her story quilt. She’d been sleeping under it all night and
didn’t know it.
I went over and patted her arm. “I sewed it all together.”
The last time she’d seen the quilt, it was a jumble-pile of squares. Some
of the color had died out from them, but her story was all there, put together
in one piece.
“You got every square in the right place,” she said. “I don’t know how
you did that.”
“I went by the order of what happened to you is all.”
When Phoebe and Aunt-Sister brought breakfast, mauma was still
hunched over the quilt, studying every stitch. She touched the figure on the
last square, the one I knew to be Denmark. It pained me to think I might
have to tell her what happened to him.
The air in the room had turned frigid during the night, so I got bathwater
from the laundry house where Phoebe kept it good and scalding. Sky went
over in the corner and washed her thick body, while I undid mauma’s dress
buttons. “We gonna burn this dress,” I said, and mauma laughed the best
sound.
The pouch I’d made for her hung shriveled from her neck with a new
strap cut from a piece of hide. She pulled it over her head and handed it to
me. “Ain’t much left in it now.”
When I opened it, a moldering smell drifted out. Digging my finger
inside, I felt old leaves ground to powder.
Mauma sat low on the stool while I pulled her arms out of the dress
sleeves and let the top drop to her waist, showing the grooves between her
ribs and her breasts shrunk like the neck pouch. I dipped the rag in the
basin, and when I stepped round to wash her back, she stiffed up. She had
whip scars gnarled like tree roots from the top of her back down to her
waist. On her right shoulder, she’d been branded with the letter W. It took
me a minute before I could touch all that aching sadness.
When I finally set her feet in the basin, I asked, “What happened to your
teeth?”
“They fell out one day,” she said.
Sky made a sound like hmmmf. She said, “More like they got knocked
out.”
“You don’t need to be talking, you tell too many tales,” mauma told her.
The truth was Sky would tell more tales than mauma ever knew. Before
the week was out, she’d tell me how mauma set loose mischief on the
plantation every chance she got. The more they whipped mauma, the more
holes she’d cut in the rice sacks. She broke things, stole things, hid things.
Buried the threshing sickles in the woods, chopped down fences, one time
set fire to the overseer’s privy house.
Over in the corner, Sky wouldn’t let go of the story about mauma’s
teeth. “It happen the second time we run. The overseer say, if she do it
again, she be easy to spot with her teeth gone. He took a hammer—”
“Hush up!” mauma cried.
I squatted down and stared her in the eyes. “Don’t you spare me. I’ve
seen my share. I know what the world is.”
