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?
“God calls you,” he bellowed. “God, 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 God’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 God.
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 assumed 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 institution? 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 God, 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, “Damn 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 stitch 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 God 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 appliquéing 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 bloody. 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 appliqués 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 apron on—Mr. Denmark Vesey—and next to him she’d stitched four numbers big as he was: 1884. I didn’t have a notion what that meant.
I went straight to stitching. Hell with missus and her gowns. All that day and far in the night, I pieced mauma’s squares together with the tiny stitches 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 stitch. 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 1818–November 1820
Handful
Some days I’d be coming down East Bay and catch sight of a woman with cinnamon skin slipping round a corner, a snatch of red scarf on her head, and I’d say, There you are again. I was twenty-five years old and still talking to her.
Every October on the anniversary-day of mauma going missing, us slaves sat in the kitchen house and reminisced on her. I hated to see that day come dragging round.
On the six-year mark, Binah patted my leg and said, “Your mauma gone, but we still here, the sky ain’t fall in yet.”
No, but every year one more slat got knocked out from under it.
That evening, they dredged up stories on mauma that went on past supper. Stealing the bolt of green cloth. Hoodwinking missus with her limp. Wrangling the cellar room. Getting herself hired out. That whole Jesus-act she did. Tomfry told about the time missus had him search the premise and mauma was nowhere on it, how we slipped her in the front door to the roof, then trumped up that story about her falling asleep there. Same old tales. Same laughing and slapping.
Now that she was gone, they loved her a lot better.
“You sure do have her eyes,” Goodis said, looking at me moon-face like he always did.
I did have her eyes, but the rest of me had come from my daddy. Mauma said he was an undersize man and blacker than the backside of the moon.
On my sake, they left out the stories of her pain and sorrow. Nothing about what might’ve happened to her. Every one of them, even Goodis, believed she’d run and was living the high life of freedom somewhere. I could more easy believe she’d been on the roof all this time, sleeping.
Outside the day was fading off. Tomfry said it was time to light the lamps in the house, but nobody moved, and I felt the ache for them to know the real woman mauma was, not just the cunning one, but the one smelted from iron, the one who paced the nights and prayed to my granny-mauma. Mauma had yearned more in a day than they felt in a year. She’d worked herself to the bone and courted danger, searching for something better. I wanted them to know that woman. That was the one who wouldn’t leave me.
I said, “She didn’t run off. I can’t help what you think, but she didn’t run.”
They just sat there and looked at me. You could see the little wheels turning in their heads: The poor misled girl, the poor misled girl.
Tomfry spoke up, said, “Handful, think now. If she didn’t run off, she got to be dead. Which-a-one you want us to believe?”
No one had put it to me that straight before. Mauma’s story quilt had slaves flying through the sky and slaves laying dead on the ground, but in my way of reckoning, mauma was lost somewhere between the two. Between flyaway and dead-and-gone.
Which-a-one? The air was stiff as starch.
“Not neither one,” I told them and got up from there and left.
In my room, I laid down on the bed, on top of the story quilt, and stared at the quilt frame still nailed to the ceiling. I never lowered it anymore, but I slept under mauma’s stories every night except summers and the heat of autumn, and I knew them front, back, and sideways. Mauma had sewed where she came from, who she was, what she loved, the things she’d suffered, and the things she hoped. She’d found a way to tell it.
After a while, I heard footsteps overhead—Tomfry, Cindie, Binah up there lighting lamps. I didn’t have to worry with Sarah’s lamp anymore. I just had sewing duties now. Some time ago, Sarah had given me back to missus, official on paper. She said she didn’t want part in owning a human person. She’d come special to my room to tell me, so nerve-racked she couldn’t hardly get the words up. “. . . . . . I would’ve freed you if I could . . . but there’s a law . . . It doesn’t allow owners to easily free slaves anymore . . . Otherwise, I would have . . . you know that . . . don’t you?”
After that, it was plain as the freckles on her face—the only way I was getting away from missus was drop dead, get sold, or find the hid-place mauma had gone. Some days I mooned over the money mauma’d saved—it never had turned up. If I could find that fortune, I could try and buy my freedom from missus like we’d planned on. Least I’d have a chance—a horse-piss of a chance, but it would be enough to keep me going.
Six years gone. I rolled over on the bed, my face to the window. I said, “Mauma, what happened to you?”
When the new year came round, I was in the market getting what Aunt-Sister needed when I overheard the slave who cleaned the butcher stall talking about the African church. This slave’s name was Jesse, a good, kind man. He used to take the leftover pig bladders an
d fill them with water for the children to have a balloon. I didn’t usually pay him any mind—he was always wagging his tongue, putting Praise the Lord at the end of every sentence—but this day, I don’t know why it was, I went over there to hear what he was saying.
Aunt-Sister had told me to hurry back, that it looked like sleet coming, but I stood there with the raw smell hanging in the air while he talked about the church. I found out the proper name was African Methodist Episcopal Church, and it was just for coloreds, slaves and free blacks together, and it was meeting in an empty hearse house near the black burial ground. Said the place was packed to the rafters every night.
A slave man next to me, wearing some worn-out-looking livery, said, “Since when is the city so fool-trusting to let slaves run their own church?”
Everybody laughed at that, like the joke was on Charleston.
Jesse said, “Well, ain’t that the truth, Praise the Lord. There’s a man at the church who’s always talking ’bout Moses leading the slaves from Egypt, Praise the Lord. He say, Charleston is Egypt all over again. Praise the Lord.”
My scalp pricked. I said, “What’s the man’s name?”
Jesse said, “Denmark Vesey.”
For years, I’d refused to think of Mr. Vesey, how mauma had sewed him on the last square on her story quilt. I didn’t like the man being on it, didn’t like the man period. I’d never thought he knew anything about what happened to her, why would he, but standing there, a bell rang in my head and told me it was worth a try. Maybe then I could put mauma to rest.