Hetty Handful Grimké
There was a time in Africa the people could fly. Mauma told me this one
night when I was ten years old. She said, “Handful, your granny-mauma
saw it for herself. She say they flew over trees and clouds. She say they
flew like blackbirds. When we came here, we left that magic behind.”
My mauma was shrewd. She didn’t get any reading and writing like me.
Everything she knew came from living on the scarce side of mercy. She
looked at my face, how it flowed with sorrow and doubt, and she said, “You
don’t believe me? Where you think these shoulder blades of yours come
from, girl?”
Those skinny bones stuck out from my back like nubs. She patted them
and said, “This all what left of your wings. They nothing but these flat
bones now, but one day you gon get ’em back.”
I was shrewd like mauma. Even at ten I knew this story about people
flying was pure malarkey. We weren’t some special people who lost our
magic. We were slave people, and we weren’t going anywhere. It was later I
saw what she meant. We could fly all right, but it wasn’t any magic to it.

The day life turned into nothing this world could fix, I was in the work yard
boiling slave bedding, stoking fire under the wash pot, my eyes burning
from specks of lye soap catching on the wind. The morning was a cold one
—the sun looked like a little white button stitched tight to the sky. For
summers we wore homespun cotton dresses over our drawers, but when the
Charleston winter showed up like some lazy girl in November or January,
we got into our sacks—these thickset coats made of heavy yarns. Just an
old sack with sleeves. Mine was a cast-off and trailed to my ankles. I
couldn’t say how many unwashed bodies had worn it before me, but they
had all kindly left their scents on it.

Already that morning missus had taken her cane stick to me once cross
my backside for falling asleep during her devotions. Every day, all us
slaves, everyone but Rosetta, who was old and demented, jammed in the
dining room before breakfast to fight off sleep while missus taught us short
Bible verses like “Jesus wept” and prayed out loud about God’s favorite
subject, obedience. If you nodded off, you got whacked right in the middle
of God said this and God said that.
I was full of sass to Aunt-Sister about the whole miserable business. I’d
say, “Let this cup pass from me,” spouting one of missus’ verses. I’d say,
“Jesus wept cause he’s trapped in there with missus, like us.”
Aunt-Sister was the cook—she’d been with missus since missus was a
girl—and next to Tomfry, the butler, she ran the whole show. She was the
only one who could tell missus what to do without getting smacked by the
cane. Mauma said watch your tongue, but I never did. Aunt-Sister popped
me backward three times a day.
I was a handful. That’s not how I got my name, though. Handful was
my basket name. The master and missus, they did all the proper naming, but
a mauma would look on her baby laid in its basket and a name would come
to her, something about what her baby looked like, what day of the week it
was, what the weather was doing, or just how the world seemed on that day.
My mauma’s basket name was Summer, but her proper name was Charlotte.
She had a brother whose basket name was Hardtime. People think I make
that up, but it’s true as it can be.
If you got a basket name, you at least had something from your mauma.
Master Grimké named me Hetty, but mauma looked on me the day I came
into the world, how I was born too soon, and she called me Handful.
That day while I helped out Aunt-Sister in the yard, mauma was in the
house, working on a gold sateen dress for missus with a bustle on the back,
what’s called a Watteau gown. She was the best seamstress in Charleston
and worked her fingers stiff with the needle. You never saw such finery as
my mauma could whip up, and she didn’t use a stamping pattern. She hated
a book pattern. She picked out the silks and velvets her own self at the
market and made everything the Grimkés had—window curtains, quilted
petticoats, looped panniers, buckskin pants, and these done-up jockey
outfits for Race Week.
I can tell you this much—white people lived for Race Week. They had
one picnic, promenade, and fancy going-on after another. Mrs. King’s party

was always on Tuesday. The Jockey Club dinner on Wednesday. The big
fuss came Saturday with the St. Cecilia ball when they strutted out in their
best dresses. Aunt-Sister said Charleston had a case of the grandeurs. Up till
I was eight or so, I thought the grandeurs was a shitting sickness.
Missus was a short, thick-waist woman with what looked like little balls
of dough under her eyes. She refused to hire out mauma to the other ladies.
They begged her, and mauma begged her too, cause she would’ve kept a
portion of those wages for herself—but missus said, I can’t have you make
anything for them better than you make for us. In the evenings, mauma tore
strips for her quilts, while I held the tallow candle with one hand and
stacked the strips in piles with the other, always by color, neat as a pin. She
liked her colors bright, putting shades together nobody would think—purple
and orange, pink and red. The shape she loved was a triangle. Always black.
Mauma put black triangles on about every quilt she sewed.
We had a wooden patch box for keeping our scraps, a pouch for our
needles and threads, and a true brass thimble. Mauma said the thimble
would be mine one day. When she wasn’t using it, I wore it on my fingertip
like a jewel. We filled our quilts up with raw cotton and wool thrums. The
best filling was feathers, still is, and mauma and I never passed one on the
ground without picking it up. Some days, mauma would come in with a
pocketful of goose feathers she’d plucked from mattress holes in the house.
When we got desperate to fill a quilt, we’d strip the long moss from the oak
in the work yard and sew it between the lining and the quilt top, chiggers
and all.
That was the thing mauma and I loved, our time with the quilts.
No matter what Aunt-Sister had me doing in the yard, I always watched
the upstairs window where mauma did her stitching. We had a signal. When
I turned the pail upside down by the kitchen house, that meant everything
was clear. Mauma would open the window and throw down a taffy she stole
from missus’ room. Sometimes here came a bundle of cloth scraps—real
nice calicos, gingham, muslin, some import linen. One time, that true brass
thimble. Her favorite thing to take was scarlet-red thread. She would wind it
up in her pocket and walk right out the house with it.
The yard was over busy that day, so I didn’t have hope for a taffy falling
from the clear blue. Mariah, the laundry slave, had burned her hand on
charcoal from the iron and was laid up. Aunt-Sister was on a tear about the
backed-up wash. Tomfry had the men fixing to butcher a hog that was

running and screeching at the top of its lungs. Everyone was out there, from
old Snow the carriage driver all the way down to the stable mucker, Prince.
Tomfry wanted to get the killing over quick cause missus hated yard noise.
Noise was on her list of slave sins, which we knew by heart. Number
one: stealing. Number two: disobedience. Number three: laziness. Number
four: noise. A slave was supposed to be like the Holy Ghost—don’t see it,
don’t hear it, but it’s always hovering round on ready.
Missus called out to Tomfry, said keep it down, a lady shouldn’t know
where her bacon comes from. When we heard that, I told Aunt-Sister,
missus didn’t know what end her bacon went in and what end it came out.
Aunt-Sister slapped me into yesterday.
I took the long pole we called a battling stick and fished up the
bedcovers from the wash pot and flopped them dripping on the rail where
Aunt-Sister dried her cooking herbs. The rail in the stable was forbidden
cause the horses had eyes too precious for lye. Slave eyes were another
thing. Working the stick, I beat those sheets and blankets to an inch of their
lives. We called it fetching the dirt.
After I got the wash finished, I was left idle and pleased to enjoy sin
number three. I followed a path I’d worn in the dirt from looping it ten,
twelve times a day. I started at the back of the main house, walked past the
kitchen house and the laundry out to the spreading tree. Some of the
branches on it were bigger round than my body, and every one of them
curled like ribbons in a box. Bad spirits travel in straight lines, and our tree
didn’t have one un-crooked place. Us slaves mustered under it when the
heat bore down. Mauma always told me, don’t pull the gray moss off cause
that keeps out the sun and everybody’s prying eyes.
I walked back past the stable and carriage house. The path took me
cross the whole map of the world I knew. I hadn’t yet seen the spinning
globe in the house that showed the rest of it. I poked along, wishing for the
day to get used up so me and mauma could go to our room. It sat over the
carriage house and didn’t have a window. The smell of manure from the
stable and the cow house rose up there so ripe it seemed like our bed was
stuffed with it instead of straw. The rest of the slaves had their rooms over
the kitchen house.
The wind whipped up and I listened for ship sails snapping in the harbor
cross the road, a place I’d smelled on the breeze, but never seen. The sails
would go off like whips cracking and all us would listen to see was it some

slave getting flogged in a neighbor-yard or was it ships making ready to
leave. You found out when the screams started up or not.
The sun had gone, leaving a puckered place in the clouds, like the
button had fallen off. I picked up the battling stick by the wash pot, and for
no good reason, jabbed it into a squash in the vegetable garden. I pitched
the butternut over the wall where it splatted in a loud mess.
Then the air turned still. Missus’ voice came from the back door, said,
“Aunt-Sister, bring Hetty in here to me right now.”
I went to the house, thinking she was in an uproar over her squash. I
told my backside to brace up.