Handful
That winter mauma sat idle by the fire in the kitchen house. She got a little
weight back on her, but sometimes she had spells when she couldn’t keep
down her food and we’d be back where we started. Mauma said every time
she saw me, I was coming at her with a piece of biscuit.
We had plenty of vacant slave quarters, but the three of us stayed on
together in the cellar room. Goodis brought in a little bed from the nursery,
and we wedged it beside the big bed and slept three peas in a pod
underneath the quilt frame. Sky asked one time what was all that wood
nailed on the ceiling, and I said, “You never saw a quilt frame?” and mauma
said, “Well, you ain’t never seen a rice field, so yawl even.”
Mauma still wouldn’t talk about what’d happened to her. She’d say,
“What’s done’s done.” Most nights, though, she’d wake up and pace the
room, and it didn’t seem done at all. I realized the best curing thing for her
was a needle, a thread, and a piece of cloth. One day, I told her I needed
some help and handed her the mending basket. When I came back, the
needle was a hummingbird in her fingers.
The hardest part was finding work for Sky. She couldn’t do the laundry
to save her life. I got Sabe to try her in the house cleaning and serving tea
with me and Minta, but missus said she didn’t look the part, and put off the
guests. After that, she went to work in the kitchen house, but she drove
Aunt-Sister crazy with her chatter, stories about rabbits out-tricking foxes
and bears. She usually ended up on the porch, singing in Gullah. Ef oona
ent kno weh oona da gwuine, oona should kno weh oona dum from. That
same song, over and over. If you don’t know where you’re going, you should
know where you came from.
One morning on the tail end of winter, the knocker clacked on the front
door and in came Mr. Huger, the solicitor, stomping the cold off his feet. He
handed me his hat while Sabe went to get missus.
I found Nina in her room, readying for the class she taught at church. I
said, “Quick, you need to come see what your mauma’s up to. Mr. Huger’s
down there—”
She flew from the room before I could finish off the sentence.
I dawdled outside the closed drawing room doors, but I couldn’t make
out much they were saying—just passing words. Pension . . . Bank . . .
Cotton crash . . . Sacrifice. The clock bonged ten times. The sound filled
the house, turning it heavy, and when it stopped, I heard missus say the
word sky. Maybe she was talking about the blue roof that hung over the
world but I knew it was my sister.
I flattened my ear to the door. Let Sabe find me and chase me off, I
couldn’t care.
“She’s thirteen years old, without any perceivable domestic skills, but
she’s strong.” That was missus talking.
Mr. Huger mumbled about going rates, selling in the spring when the
planting started on the plantations.
“You can’t separate Sky from her mother,” Nina cried. “It’s inhuman!”
“I don’t care for it either,” missus said. “But we must face reality.”
My breath clutched at my ribs like grabbing hands. I closed my eyes,
tired of the sorry world.
When I found mauma in the kitchen house, she was alone with the
mending basket. I sank beside her. “Missus plans to sell Sky in the spring.
We got to find a way for her to earn her keep.”
“Sell?” She looked at me with stun, then pinched her eyes. “We ain’t
come this far so she can sell my girl. That’s for damn sure.”
“There must be something in the world Sky’s good at doing.” The way I
said it, like my sister was slow in the head, caused mauma to flare at me.
“Don’t you talk like that! Your sister has the smart of Denmark in her.”
She shook her head. “He’s her daddy, but I guess you figure that.”
“Yeah, I figured.” It seemed like the time to finally tell her. “Denmark,
he—”
“There ain’t a slave living who don’t know what happen to him. We
heard it all the way to Beaufort.”
I didn’t tell her I’d watched him dangle on the tree, but I told her
everything else. I started with the church where we’d sung Jericho. I told
her about the Work House, falling off the treadmill and crippling my foot. I
told her the way Denmark took me in and called me daughter. “I stole a
bullet mold for that man,” I said.
She pushed her fingers hard against her eyelids, trying to keep them
from spilling over. When she opened them, there was a map in her eyes of
broken red lines.
“Sky ask me one time who her daddy is,” she said. “I told her he was a
free black in Charleston, but he’s dead. That’s all she know.”
“How come you don’t tell her?”
“Sky’s got a child’s way of talking out of turn. The minute you tell her
’bout Denmark, she’ll tell half the world. That ain’t gon help her.”
“She needs to know about him.”
“What she need is to keep from getting sold. The thing she know best is
the rice fields. Put her to work in the yard.”
Sky took the ornament garden and brought it back to its glory. It came
natural to her—how deep to bury the jonquil bulbs, when to cut back the
roses, how to trim the hedges to match the drawings in a book Nina showed
her. When Sky planted the vegetables, she shoveled horse shit from the
stable and mixed it in the dirt. She dug straight furrows for the seeds and
covered them with her bare foot like she’d done with the rice. She sang
Gullah songs to the plants when she hoed. When the beetles came, she
picked them off with her fingers.
Wouldn’t you know, the crookneck squash came up the size of drinking
gourds. The heads on the peonies were big pink soup bowls. Even missus
came out special to see them. As soon as the jonquils came up and turned
the air choking sweet, she threw a garden tea for her friends that left them
suffering with envy.
Summer came, and Sky was still with us.
“Where you keep the scrap cloth?” mauma said. She was rummaging
through the lacquer sewing table in the corner of the cellar room. There was
a basket on the floor beside her feet heaped with spindles of thread, needle
bags, pins, shears, and a measure tape.
“Scrap cloth? The same place it always was. In the patch bag.”
She reached for it. “You got some red and brown cotton in here?”
“Always got red and brown cotton.”
I followed her to the spirit tree, where the crows hid up in the branches.
She sat on Aunt-Sister’s old fish-scaling stool with her back against the
trunk and went to work. She cut a red square, then took the shears to the
brown cloth and clipped the shape of a wagon.
I said, “Is that the wagon the Guard hauled you off in the day you
disappeared?”
She smiled.
She was picking up with the rest of her story. She wouldn’t say what
happened to her with words. She would tell it in the cloth.
