Handful
I stood by the bed that morning, looking down on mauma still sleeping, the
way she had her hands balled under her chin like a child. I hated to wake
her, but I patted her foot, and her eyes rolled open. I said, “You feel like
getting up? Little missus sent me out here to get you.”
Little missus was what we called Mary, the oldest Grimké daughter.
She’d turned a widow the first of the summer, and before they got her
husband in the ground good, she’d handed off the tea plantation to her boys,
said the place had kept her cut off from the world too long. Next we know,
she showed up here with nine slaves and more clothes and furniture than we
could fit in the house. I heard missus tell her, “You didn’t need to bring the
entire plantation with you.” And Mary said, “Would you prefer I’d left my
money behind, too?”
Just when missus had got where she couldn’t swing the gold-tip cane
with the strength of a three-year-old, here came little missus, ready to pick
up the slack. She had lines round her eyes like dart seams and silver thread
in her hair, but she was the same. What we remembered most from when
Mary was a girl was the bad way she treated her waiting maid, Lucy—
Binah’s other girl. On the day Mary got here with her procession, Phoebe
bolted from the kitchen house, shouting, “Lucy. Lucy?” When nobody
answered, she rushed up to little missus and said, “You bring my sister Lucy
with you?”
Little missus looked stumped, then she said, “Oh, her. She died a long
time ago.” She didn’t see Phoebe’s broken face, just her kitchen apron. “I
don’t know what time you serve the midday meal,” she said, “but from now
on it will be at two.”
The slave quarters were busting seams. Every room taken, some
sleeping on the floor. Aunt-Sister and Phoebe yowled about the mouths to
feed, and little missus had me and mauma sewing new livery coats and
house dresses for everybody. Welcome to the Grimkés’. She hadn’t brought
a seamstress with her, but she’d brought everybody else and their second
cousin. We had a new butler, a laundress, little missus’ personal chamber
maid, a coachman, a footman, a groomsman, new help for the kitchen, the
house, and the yard. Sabe got demoted back to the gardens with Sky, and
Goodis, poor Goodis, he sat in the stable all day, whittling sticks. Me and
him even lost the little room where we still went sometimes to love each
other.
Now, here in the cellar room, mauma didn’t raise her head off the
pillow. She didn’t have a use for little missus. She said, “What she want
with me?”
“We got that big tea to put on today and she wants the ribbons sewed on
the napkins. She acts like you’re the only one can do it. She’s got me fixing
the tables.”
“Where’s Sky?”
“Sky’s washing the front steps.”
Mauma looked so tired. I knew the pains in her stomach had got worse
cause she’d picked at her food all week. She pushed herself up slow, so thin
her body looked like a stem growing up from the mattress.
“Mauma, you lay on back down. I’ll get those ribbons done.”
“You a good girl, Handful, you always was.”
The story quilt was folded on the foot of the bed where she liked to keep
it close. She spread it open cross her legs. It was July, a hot, sticky day, and
for one tick of the clock, I wondered if she was feeling that cold you get
toward the end. But then she turned the quilt till she found the first square.
“This is my granny-mauma when the stars fall and she gets sold away.”
I sat down next to her. She wasn’t cold, she just wanted to tell the story
on the quilt again. She loved to tell the story.
She’d forgot about the ribbons, and there could be trouble for me
lingering, but this was mauma, and this was the story. She went through the
whole quilt, every square, taking her time on the ones she’d sewed since she
was back. Her being taken away in the wagon by the Guard. Working the
rice fields with a baby on her back. A man branding her shoulder with the
left hand and hammering out her teeth with the right. Running away under
the moon. Finally, she came to the last square, the fifteenth one—it was me,
mauma, and Sky with our arms woven together like a loop stitch.
I got to my feet. “Go back to sleep now.”
“No, I’m coming. I be on up there in a while.”
Her eyes glowed like the paper lanterns we used to set out for the
garden parties.
I stood in the dining room, facing the window, stuffing big crystal horns
with fruit, everything in the larder that wasn’t rotten, when I spotted mauma
shuffling toward the spirit tree at the back of the yard. She had the story
quilt clutched round her shoulders.
My hands came still—the way she slid one foot, rested, then slid the
other one. When she reached the tree, she steadied her hand on the trunk
and lowered herself to the ground. My heart started to beat strange.
I didn’t look to see if little missus was near, I hurried out the back door.
Fast as I could, fast as the earth would pass beneath me.
“Mauma?”
She lifted her face. The light had gone from her eyes. There was only
the black wick now.
I eased down beside her. “Mauma?”
“It’s all right. I come to get my spirit to take with me.” Her voice
sounded far off inside her. “I’m tired, Handful.”
I tried not to be scared. “I’ll take care of you. Don’t worry, we’ll get you
some rest.”
She smiled the saddest smile, letting me know she’d get her rest, but not
the kind I hoped. I took hold of her hands. They were ice cold. Little bird
bones.
She said it again. “I’m tired.”
She wanted me to tell her it was all right, to get her spirit and go on, but
I couldn’t say it. I told her, “Course, you’re tired. You worked hard your
whole life. That’s all you did was work.”
“Don’t you remember me for that. Don’t you remember I’m a slave and
work hard. When you think of me, you say, she never did belong to those
people. She never belong to nobody but herself.”
She closed her eyes. “You remember that.”
“I will, mauma.”
I pulled the quilt round her shoulders. High in the limbs, the crows
cawed. The doves moaned. The wind bent down to lift her to the sky.
