Handful.
Mauma disappeared two days after we watched the stars fall.
We were standing in the work yard near the back gate. She had the red scarf on her head and wore her good dress, the one dyed indigo. Her ap.r.o.n was pressed to a crisp. She"d oiled her lips and borrowed Binah"s cowrie sh.e.l.l bracelets to dress up her wrists. In the sunlight her skin had a gold l.u.s.ter and her eyes shined like river rocks. That"s how I see her now in my dreams, with the look she had then. Almost happy.
She pinned on her slave badge, full of haste. She"d got permission to deliver her fresh-made bonnets, but I knew before the last one left the basket, she"d be obliging that man, Mr. Vesey.
I said, "Be sure your badge is on good."
Mauma hated my pestering. "It on there, Handful. It ain"t goin" nowhere."
"What about your pouch?" I couldn"t see the bulge of it under her dress like usual. I kept both of our pouches fresh with sc.r.a.ps from our tree, and I meant for her to wear it, what with me going to all that trouble and her needing all the protection she could get. She fished it up from her bosom. Her fingers had faded smudges on them from the charcoal powder she"d used to trace designs on her bonnets.
I wanted to say more to her. Why"re you wearing the good dress with all that mud out there? When are you planning on telling me about the baby? Now we got to buy freedom for the three of us? But I shoved all this to the side for later.
I lingered while Tomfry unlocked the back gate and let her out. After she stepped through to the alley, she turned round and looked at me, then walked on off.
After mauma left that day, I did everything usual. Cut sleeves and collars for the men slaves to have work shirts, got busy on missus" splashers, these squares of cloth you tack up behind the washstands cause Lord forbid you get a drop of water on the wall. Each and every one had to be embroidered to the hilt.
Middle of the afternoon, I went out to the privy. The sun had stayed put, and the sky was blue as cornflowers. Aunt-Sister was in the kitchen house baking whole apples with custard poured round them, what"s called a bird nest pudding, and that whole smell was in the air. I was on my way back inside, relishing the sweet air after being in the latrine, when the carriage came flying through the gate with Sarah and Nina, both of them looking scared to pieces. And look who was driving. Goodis. When it rolled to a stop, their feet hit the ground running. They pa.s.sed me without a word and struck for the house. The little gray traveling cape I"d sewed Nina flapped behind her like a dove wing.
Goodis gave me a long look of pity before he tugged the horse inside the stable.
When the long shadows started, I sat on the porch steps to the kitchen house and watched the gate for mauma. Cross the yard, Goodis held vigil with me in the stable door, whittling on a piece of wood. He knew something I didn"t.
The apple-eggs were still in the air when Aunt-Sister and Phoebe cleaned up and blew out the lamps. The dark came, and no moon.
Sarah found me hunched on the steps. She sat down close next to me. ". . . Handful," she said. ". . . I wanted to be the one to tell you."
"It"s mauma, ain"t it?"
"She got in a dispute with a white lady . . . The lady wanted her to give way on the street. She prodded your mother with an umbrella, and . . . you know your mother, she wouldn"t stand aside. She . . . she struck the lady." Sarah sighed into the dark, and took hold of my hand. "The City Guard was there. They took her away."
All this time I"d been waiting for her to say mauma was dead. Hope came back into me. "Where is she?"
Sarah looked away from me then. ". . . That"s what I"ve been trying to discover . . . We don"t know where she is . . . They were taking her to the Guard House, but when Thomas went to pay the fine, he was told Charlotte had managed to wrestle free . . . Apparently, she ran off . . . They said the Guard chased her, but lost her in the alleys. They"re out there looking for her now."
All I could hear was breathing-Sarah, Goodis cross the yard, the horses in the stable, the creatures in the brush, the white people on their feather beds, the slaves on their little pallets thin as wafers, everything breathing but me.
Sarah walked with me to the bas.e.m.e.nt. She said, "Would you like some warmed tea? I can put a little brandy in it."
I shook my head. She wanted to draw me to her for solace, I could tell, but she held back. Instead, she laid her hand gentle on my arm and said, "She"ll come back."
I said those words all night long.
I didn"t know how to be in the world without her.
Sarah.
Charlotte"s disappearance brought a severe and terrible mercy, for not once throughout the harrowing weeks that followed Burke"s betrayal was I uncertain which event was tragic and which was merely unfortunate.
Someone-Mother, Father, perhaps Thomas-placed an ad in the Charleston Mercury.
Disappeared, Female Slave Mulatto. Wide s.p.a.ce between upper front teeth. Occasional limp. Answers to the name of Charlotte. Wearing red scarf and dark blue dress. A seamstress of skill and value. Belongs to Judge John Grimke. Large reward for her return.
The appeal brought no response.
Each day I watched from the back window in my room as Handful walked a repet.i.tive circuit in the work yard. Sometimes she walked the entirety of the morning. Never varying her path, she started at the back of the house, moved toward the kitchen house, past the laundry, cut over to the oak tree, where she touched the trunk as she pa.s.sed, then back to the house by way of the stable and carriage house. Upon reaching the porch steps, she would simply begin again. It was a circ.u.mambulation of such precise, ritualistic grief no one interfered. Even Mother left her to walk a rut of anguish into the yard.
I didn"t much mourn the loss of Burke or the demise of our wedding. I felt little heartbreak. Was that not strange? I did cry buckets, but mostly from the shame of it all.
I didn"t break my seclusion again. Instead, I took refuge in it.
Almost daily I received notes of concern in flowery scripts. I was being prayed for by everyone imaginable. It was hoped my reputation wouldn"t suffer too much. Did I know that Burke had vacated the city and was staying indefinitely with his uncle in Columbia? Wasn"t it a shame that his mother had taken ill with apoplexy? How was my own mother bearing up? I was missed at tea, but my absence was commended. I shouldn"t despair, for surely a young man would come forth who wouldn"t be put off by my disgrace.
I wrote rants and rebukes in my diary, then tore them out and burned them along with all the supercilious notes. Gradually, the lava in me subsided and there remained only a young woman whose life course had been demolished. Unlike Handful, I had no notion what path to walk.
One month after Charlotte"s disappearance, a frigid wind brought down most of the leaves on the oak. Handful still walked obsessively each morning, but only a quick loop or so now. The week before, Mother had put a stop to her unremitting march and sent her back to her duties. The high social season with its quota of gowns awaited-all the sewing now fell to Handful. Charlotte was gone. No one believed she was coming back.
I"d managed to stretch my three weeks of seclusion into four, but on this day, my reprieve ended. Mother had ordered me back to my duties, as well: procuring a husband. She"d informed me that a rowboat traversing the Atlantic might eventually be rescued by a pa.s.sing ship, but only if the rowboat bravely set out upon the water-this, her hapless metaphor of my marital prospects. My sister Mary arrived with similar encouragement. "Lift your chin, Sarah. Behave as if nothing has happened. Be gay and act a.s.sured. You"ll find a husband, G.o.d willing."
G.o.d willing. How strangely that strikes me now.
On the evening my solitude ended, I shoved myself out into the public domain by attending a lecture at the Second Presbyterian Church delivered by the Reverend Henry Kollack, a famed preacher. Those were not the waters Mother had in mind. The Episcopal Church might pa.s.s for society, but certainly not the Presbyterians with their revivalism and shouts for repentance-but she didn"t object. I was at least rowing, wasn"t I?
Sitting in a pew beside the devout friend who"d invited me, I scarcely listened at first. Words-sin, moral degradation, retribution-flitted in and out of my awareness, but at some point during that hour, I became morbidly engrossed.
The reverend"s eyes found me-I can"t explain it. Nor did he look away as he spoke. "Are you not sick of the frivolous being you have become? Are you not mortified at your own folly, weary of the ballroom and its gilded toys? Will you not give up the vanities and gaieties of this life for the sake of your soul?"
I felt utterly spoken to, and in the most direct and supernatural way. How could he know what lay inside me? How did he know what I was only that moment able to see myself?
"G.o.d calls you," he bellowed. "G.o.d, your beloved, begs you to answer."
The words ravished me. They seemed to break down some great artifice. I sat on the pew quietly shaken while Reverend Kollack looked at me now without focus or interest, and perhaps it had been so all along, but it didn"t matter. He"d been G.o.d"s mouthpiece. He"d delivered me to the precipice where one"s only choice was between paralysis or abandon.
With the reverend praying a long, earnest prayer for our souls, I took my leap. I vowed I would not return to society. I would not marry, I would never marry. Let them say what they would, I would give myself to G.o.d.
Two weeks later, on my twentieth birthday, I entered the drawing room, where the family had gathered to offer me well wishes, accompanied by Nina, who clung to my hand. Seeing that I"d chosen to wear one of my simpler dresses and no jewelry, Mary smiled at me sadly as if I wore the costume of a nun. I gathered Mother had confided my religious conversion to my sisters, perhaps to my father and brothers, as well.
Aunt-Sister had baked my favored dessert, a two-tiered election cake, filled with currants and sugar. Such cakes were molded on a board with yeast and left to rise, if they so elected, and this one had done so with majesty. Nina pranced about it impatiently until Mother signaled Aunt-Sister to cut the slices.
Father was seated with my brothers, who were engaged in a debate of some sort. Edging to the fringes, I determined that Thomas had evoked their wrath by promoting a program known as colonization. From what I could gather, the term had little to do with the British occupation of the last century and everything to do with the slaves.
". . . What"s this concept?" I asked, and they turned to me as if a housefly had pried through a slat in the shutters and was buzzing wantonly about.
"It"s a new and advanced idea," Thomas answered. "Despite what any of you believe, it will soon expand into a national movement. Mark my words."
"But what is it?" I said.
"It proposes we free the slaves and send them back to Africa."
Nothing had prepared me for so radical a scheme. ". . . Why, that"s preposterous!"
My reaction took them by surprise. Even Henry and Charles, now thirteen and twelve, gaped at me. "Christ preserve us," said John. "Sarah is against it!"
He a.s.sumed I"d outgrown my rebellions and become like the rest of them-a guardian of slavery. I couldn"t fault him for it. When was the last time any of them had heard me speak out against the peculiar inst.i.tution? I"d been wandering about in the enchantments of romance, afflicted with the worst female curse on earth, the need to mold myself to expectations.
John was laughing. A fire raged on the grate and Father"s face was bright and sweating. He wiped at it and joined the mirth.
"Yes, I am against colonization," I began. There was no falter now in my throat. I forced myself to keep on. "I"m against it, but not for the reason you think. We should free the slaves, but they should remain here. As equals."
An odd intermezzo ensued during which no one spoke. There"d been mounting talk from certain clergy and pious women about treating slaves with Christian sympathy, and now and then some rare soul would speak of freeing the slaves altogether. But equality, ludicrous!
By law, a slave was three-fifths of a person. It came to me that what I"d just suggested would seem paramount to proclaiming vegetables equal to animals, animals equal to humans, women equal to men, men equal to angels. I was upending the order of creation. Strangest of all, it was the first time thoughts of equality had entered my head, and I could only attribute it to G.o.d, with whom I"d lately taken up and who was proving to be more insurrectionary than law-abiding.
"My goodness, did you learn this from the Presbyterians?" Father asked. "Are they saying slaves should live among us as equals?" The question was sarcastic, meant for my brothers and for the moment itself, yet I answered him.
"No, Father, I"m saying it."
As I spoke, a rush of pictures spilled through my mind, all of them Handful. She was tiny, wearing the lavender bow on her neck. She was filling the house with smoke. She was learning to read. She was sipping tea on the roof. I saw her taking her lash. Wrapping the oak with stolen thread. Bathing in the copper tub. Sewing works of pure art. Walking bereaved circles. I saw everything as it was.
Handful.
Mauma was gone sure as I"m sitting here and I couldn"t do a thing but walk the yard trying to siphon my sorrow. The sorry truth is you can walk your feet to blisters, walk till kingdom-come, and you never will outpace your grief. Come December, I stopped all that. I halted in my track by the woodpile where we used to feed the little owl way back then, and I said out loud, "d.a.m.n you for saving yourself. How come you left me with nothing but to love you and hate you, and that"s gonna kill me, and you know it is."
Then I turned round, went back to the cellar room, and picked up the sewing.
Don"t think she wasn"t in every st.i.tch I worked. She was in the wind and the rain and the creaking from the rocker. She sat on the wall with the birds and stared at me. When darkness fell, she fell with it.
One day, before they started the Days of Christmas in the house, I looked at the wood trunk on the floor, shoved behind mauma"s gunny sack.
I said, "Now, where"d you go and put the key?"
I had got where I talked to her all the time. Like I would say, I didn"t hear her talk back, so I hadn"t lost my sanities. I turned the room upside down and the key was nowhere. It could"ve been in her pocket when she went missing. We had an axe in the yard shed, but I hated to chop the trunk apart. I said, "If I was you, where would I hide the key that locked up the only precious things I had?"
I stood there a while. Then, I lifted my eyes to the ceiling. To the quilt frame. The wheels on the pulley were fresh with oil. They didn"t make a peep when I brought the frame down. Sure enough. The key was laying in a groove along one of the boards.
Inside the trunk was a fat bundle wrapped in muslin. I peeled back the folds and you could smell mauma, that salty smell. I had to take a minute to cry. I held her quilt squares against me, thinking how she said they were the meat on her bones.
There were ten good-size squares. I spread them out cross the frame. The colors she"d used outdid G.o.d and the rainbow. Reds, purples, oranges, pinks, yellows, blacks, and browns. They hit my ears more than my eyes. They sounded like she was laughing and crying in the same breath. It was the finest work ever to come from mauma"s hands.
The first square showed her mauma standing small, holding her mauma and daddy"s hands and the stars falling round them-that was the night my granny-mauma got sold away, the night the story started.
The rest was a hotchpotch, some squares I could figure, some I couldn"t. There was a woman hoeing in the fields-I guessed her to be my granny-mauma, too-wearing a red head scarf, and a baby, my mauma, was laying in the growing plants. Slave people were flying in the air over their heads, disappearing behind the sun.
Next one was a little girl sitting on a three-leg stool appliqueing a quilt, red with black triangles, some of the triangles spilling on the floor. I said, "I guess that"s you, but it could be me."
Fourth one had a spirit tree on it with red thread on the trunk, and the branches were filled with vultures. Mauma had sewed a woman and baby boy on the ground-you could tell it was a boy from his privates. I figured they were my granny-mauma when she died and her boy that didn"t make it. Both were dead and picked b.l.o.o.d.y. I had to walk out in the cold air after that one. You come from your mauma, you sleep in the bed with her till you"re near twenty years grown, and you still don"t know what haunches in the dark corners of her.
I came back inside and studied the next one-it had a man in the field. He had a brown hat on, and the sky was full of eyes sitting in the clouds, big yellow eyes and red rain falling from the lids. That man is my daddy, Shanney, I said to myself.
One after that was mauma and a baby girl stretched on the quilt frame. I knew that girl was me, and our bodies were cut in pieces, bright patches that needed piecing back. It made my head sick and dizzy to look at it.
Another square was mauma sewing a wild purple dress covered with moons and stars, only she was doing it in a mouse-hole, the walls bent over her.
Going picture to picture, felt like I was turning pages in a book she"d left behind, one that held her last words. Somewhere along the way, I stopped feeling anything, like when you lay on your arm wrong and wake up and it"s pins and needles. I started looking at the appliques that had taken mauma two years to sew like they didn"t have any belonging to me, cause that was the only way I could bear to see them. I let them float by like panes of light.
Here was mauma with her leg hitched up behind her with a strap, standing in the yard getting the one-legged punishment. Here was another spirit tree same like the other one, but it was ours, and it didn"t have vultures, only green leaves and a girl underneath with a book and a whip coming down to strike her.
Last square was a man, a bull of a man with a carpenter ap.r.o.n on-Mr. Denmark Vesey-and next to him she"d st.i.tched four numbers big as he was: 1884. I didn"t have a notion what that meant.
I went straight to st.i.tching. h.e.l.l with missus and her gowns. All that day and far in the night, I pieced mauma"s squares together with the tiny st.i.tches you can"t barely see. I sewed on the lining and filled the quilt with the best padding we"d saved and the whole collection of our feathers. Then I took shears to my hair and cut every bit of it off my head, down to a scalp of fuzz. I loosed the cut hair all through the stuffing.
That"s when I remembered about the money. Eight years, saving. I went over and looked down in the trunk and it was empty as air. Four hundred dollars, gone same as mauma. And I"d run out of places to look. I couldn"t draw a breath.
Next day, after I"d slept a little, I sewed the layers of the quilt together with a tacking st.i.tch. Then I wrapped the finish quilt round me like a glory cloak. I wore it out into the yard where Aunt-Sister was bundled up chopping cane sugar, and she said, "Girl, what you got on you? What"d you do to your head?"
I didn"t say nothing. I walked back to the tree with my breath trailing clouds, and I wrapped new thread round the trunk.
Then the noise came into the sky. The crows were flying over and smoke from the chimneys rising to meet them.
"There you go," I said. "There you go."
PART THREE.
October 1818November 1820.