Handful
It was springtime when all the heavy cleaning and airing-out was going on
in the house and every night me and Sky would come back to the cellar
room after being with the bristle-brush all day, and fall on the bed, and the
first thing I’d see was the quilt frame, the one true roof over my head. I’d
think about everything hidden up there—mauma’s story quilt, the money,
Sarah’s booklet, her letter telling me about the promise she’d made to get
me free—and I’d fall asleep glad they were safe over my head.
Then one Sunday morning, I rolled the frame down. Sky watched me
without a word while I ran my hand over the red quilt with the black
triangles, feeling the money sewed inside. I peeled the muslin cloth from
round Sarah’s booklet and gazed on it, then wrapped it back. Next, I spread
the story quilt cross the frame and we stood there, looking down at the
history of mauma. I laid my palm on the second square—the woman in the
field and the slaves flying in the air over her head. All that hope in the wind.
We didn’t hear little missus outside the door. The lock mauma used to
have on the door was long gone, and little missus, she didn’t knock. She
flounced on in. “I’m going to St. Philip’s, and I need my claret cape. You
were supposed to mend it for me.” Her eyes wandered past me to the quilt
frame. “What’s all this?”
I stepped to block her view. “That’s right, I forgot about your cape.” I
was trying to fan the moth from the flame, but she brushed past me to see
the pinks, reds, oranges, purples, and blacks on the quilt. Mauma and her
colors.
“I’ll be straight over to mend the cape,” I said and took the rope off the
hook to hike the frame up before she figured out what she was looking at.
She put up her hand. “Hold on. You’re in an awful big hurry to hide this
from me.”
I fastened the rope back, the high-flutter coming in my chest. Sky
started humming a thin nervous tune. I started to put my finger to my lip,
but ever since she had that muzzle in her mouth, I couldn’t bear to hush her.
We looked back and forth to each other while little missus squinted from
one square to the next like she was reading a book. Everything done to
mauma—there it was. The one-legged punishment, the whippings, the
branding, the hammering. Mauma’s body laid on the quilt frame in pieces.
The muslin cloth with Sarah’s booklet inside was in plain sight, and
beside it, the quilt with the money inside. You could see the shape of the
bundles laying in the batting. I wanted to tuck everything from view, but I
didn’t move.
When she turned to me, the morning glare fell over her face and the
black in her eyes pulled into knots. She said, “Who made this?”
“Mauma did. Charlotte.”
“Well, it’s gruesome!”
I never had wanted to scream as bad as I did right then. I said, “Those
gruesome things happened to her.”
A dark pink color poured into her cheeks. “For heaven’s sakes then, you
would think her whole life was nothing but violence and cruelty. I mean, it
doesn’t show what she did to warrant her punishments.”
She looked at the quilt again, her eyes darting over the appliqués. “We
treated her well here, no one can dispute that. I can’t speak for what
happened to her when she ran away, she was out of our care then.” Little
missus was rubbing her hands now like she was cleaning them at the wash
bowl.
The quilt had shamed her. She walked to the door and took one look
back at it, and I knew she’d never let it stay in the world. She’d send Hector
to get it the minute we were out of the room. He’d burn mauma’s story to
ash.
Standing there, waiting for little missus’ steps to fade, I looked down at
the quilt, at the slaves flying in the sky, and I hated being a slave worse than
being dead. The hate I felt for it glittered so full of beauty I sank down on
the floor before it.
Sky’s hair was a bushel basket without her scarf and when she bent over
to see about me, the ends of it poked my face and smelled like the bristlebrush. She said, “You all right?”
I looked up at her. “We’re leaving here.”
She heard me, but she couldn’t be sure. She said, “What you say?”
“We gonna leave here or die trying.”
Sky pulled me to my feet like plucking a flower, and I saw Denmark’s
face settle into hers, that day he rode to his death sitting on a coffin. I’d
always wanted freedom, but there never had been a place to go and no way
to get there. That didn’t matter anymore. I wanted freedom more than the
next breath. We’d leave, riding on our coffins if we had to. That was the
way mauma had lived her whole life. She used to say, you got to figure out
which end of the needle you’re gon be, the one that’s fastened to the thread
or the end that pierces the cloth.
I lifted the quilt from the frame and folded it up, thinking of the feathers
inside it, and inside the feathers, the memory of the sky.
“Here,” I said, laying the quilt in Sky’s arms. “I got to go mend that
woman’s cape. Put the quilt in the gunny sack and take it to Goodis and tell
him to hide it with the horse blankets and don’t let anybody near it.”
Mending her cape was not all I did. I took little missus’ seal-stamp right off
her desk while she was standing in the room and I dropped it in my pocket.
I waited till dark to write my letter.
23 April 1838
Dear Sarah
I hope this makes it to you. Me and Sky will be leaving
here or die trying. That’s how we put it. I don’t know how
we’re doing it, but we’ve got mauma’s money. All we need is
a place to come to. I have the address on this letter. I hope I
see you again one day.
Your friend
Handful
