“Is she in her right mind?” missus asked.
Aunt-Sister set her hands on her hips. “She’s wore-out. What she need is food and a good long rest.” Then she sent Phoebe for the stew broth.
Missus studied the girl. “Who’s this?”
Course, that’s what everybody wanted to know. The girl drew up straight and gave missus a look that could cut paper.
“She’s my sister,” I said.
The room went silent.
“Your sister?” said missus. “As I live and breathe. What am I supposed to do with her? I can barely keep the rest of you fed.”
Nina tugged her mother toward the door. “Charlotte needs rest. Let them see to her.”
When the door closed behind them, mauma looked up at me with her old smile. She had a big ugly hole where her two front teeth used to be. She said, “Handful, look at you. Just look at you. My girl, all grown.”
“I’m thirty-three now, mauma.”
“All that time—” Her eyes watered up, the first tears I’d ever seen her shed in my life. I eased down on the bed beside her and put my face to hers.
She said low against my ear, “What happen to your leg?”
“I took a bad fall,” I whispered.
Sabe sent everybody to their chores while I fed mauma spoonfuls of broth and the girl gulped hers straight from the bowl. They slept side by side through the afternoon. Time to time, Aunt-Sister stuck her head in the door and said, “Yawl all right?” She brought short bread, castor oil boiled in milk, and blankets for a floor pallet that I reckoned would be my bed for the night. She helped me ease off their shoes without waking them, and when she saw their feet festered over with sores, she left soap and a bucket of water by the door.
The girl roused once and asked for the chamber pot. I led her out to the privy and waited, watching the leaves on the oak tree drop, the soft way they floated down. Mauma’s here. The wonder of it hadn’t broken through to me yet, the need to go down on my knees. I couldn’t stop feeling the shock of what she looked like, and I was worried what missus might do. She’d looked at them like two bloodsuckers she wanted to thump off her skin.
When the girl came out of the privy barefoot, I said, “We need to wash your feet.”
She looked down at them with her mouth parted and the pink tip of her tongue poking out. She couldn’t be but thirteen. My sister.
I sat her down on the three-legged stool in the yard in the last warm spot from the sun. I brought the bucket and soap outside and stuck her feet in the water to soak. I said, “How many days did you and mauma walk to get here?”
She had barely spoken since this morning at the gate, and now the backwash of words rushed from her lips and wouldn’t stop. “I ain’t sure. Three weeks. Could be more. We come all the way from Beaufort. Massa Wilcox place. We travel by night. Use the foot paths the traders take and stay to the creeks. In the daytime, we hide in the fields and ditches. This the fifth time we run, so we learn which-a-way to go. Mauma, she rub pepper and onion peel on our shoes and legs to muddle the dogs. She say this time we ain’t going back, we gon die trying.”
“Wait now. You and mauma ran off four times before this and got caught every time?”
She nodded and looked off at the clouds. She said, “One time we get to the Combahee River. Another time to the Edisto.”
I lifted her feet from the bucket one at a time and rubbed them with soap while she talked, and that was something she liked to do—talk.
“We carry parched corn and dried yams with us. But that run out, so we eat poke leaves and berries. Whatever we find. When mauma’d get where she can’t go no more, I’d put her on my back and carry her. I’d go a ways, then rest and carry her some more. She say, if something happen to me, keep on till you find Handful.”
The things she told me. How they drank from puddles and licked drops off sassafras leaves, how they climbed trees in the swamp and tied themselves to the limbs and slept, how they wandered lost under the moon and stars. She said one time a buckruh came by in a wagon and didn’t see them laying right beside him in a ditch. Came to find out, she spoke Gullah, the language the slaves used on the islands. She’d picked it up natural from the plantation women. If she saw a bird, she’d say, there’s a bidi. A turtle was a cooter. A white man, a buckruh.
I dried her feet good in my lap. “You didn’t tell me your name.”
“The man who work us in the rice field call me Jenny. Mauma say that ain’t no name. She say our people use to fly like blackbirds. The day I was born, she look at the sky and that’s what she call me. Sky.”
The girl didn’t look like her name. She was like the trunk of a tree, like a rock in a field you plow round, but I was glad mauma had given it to her. I heard Goodis coughing in the stable and the horse whinny. When I stood, she peered up at me and said, “When we was lost, she tell me the story ’bout the blackbirds, I don’t know how many times.”
I smiled at her. “She used to tell me that story, too.”
My sister wasn’t much to look at, and to hear her talk, you’d think she was too simple to learn, but I felt the toughness of mauma inside her from the start.
I came awake that night on the floor pallet and mauma was standing in the middle of the room with her back to me, not moving, gazing at the high-up window. The darkness was tucked round her, but her kerchief had slipped off and her hair was shining like fresh polish silver. Over on the mattress, Sky was snoring loud and peaceful. Hearing me stir, mauma turned round and spread open her arms to me. Without making a sound, I got up and went to her. I walked right into her arms. That’s when she came home to me.
The next time I woke, early light had settled and mauma was sitting up in bed, looking at her story quilt. She’d been sleeping under it all night and didn’t know it.
I went over and patted her arm. “I sewed it all together.”
The last time she’d seen the quilt, it was a jumble-pile of squares. Some of the color had died out from them, but her story was all there, put together in one piece.
“You got every square in the right place,” she said. “I don’t know how you did that.”
“I went by the order of what happened to you is all.”
When Phoebe and Aunt-Sister brought breakfast, mauma was still hunched over the quilt, studying every stitch. She touched the figure on the last square, the one I knew to be Denmark. It pained me to think I might have to tell her what happened to him.
The air in the room had turned frigid during the night, so I got bathwater from the laundry house where Phoebe kept it good and scalding. Sky went over in the corner and washed her thick body, while I undid mauma’s dress buttons. “We gonna burn this dress,” I said, and mauma laughed the best sound.
The pouch I’d made for her hung shriveled from her neck with a new strap cut from a piece of hide. She pulled it over her head and handed it to me. “Ain’t much left in it now.”
When I opened it, a moldering smell drifted out. Digging my finger inside, I felt old leaves ground to powder.
Mauma sat low on the stool while I pulled her arms out of the dress sleeves and let the top drop to her waist, showing the grooves between her ribs and her breasts shrunk like the neck pouch. I dipped the rag in the basin, and when I stepped round to wash her back, she stiffed up. She had whip scars gnarled like tree roots from the top of her back down to her waist. On her right shoulder, she’d been branded with the letter W. It took me a minute before I could touch all that aching sadness.
When I finally set her feet in the basin, I asked, “What happened to your teeth?”
“They fell out one day,” she said.
Sky made a sound like hmmmf. She said, “More like they got knocked out.”
“You don’t need to be talking, you tell too many tales,” mauma told her.
The truth was Sky would tell more tales than mauma ever
knew. Before the week was out, she’d tell me how mauma set loose mischief on the plantation every chance she got. The more they whipped mauma, the more holes she’d cut in the rice sacks. She broke things, stole things, hid things. Buried the threshing sickles in the woods, chopped down fences, one time set fire to the overseer’s privy house.
Over in the corner, Sky wouldn’t let go of the story about mauma’s teeth. “It happen the second time we run. The overseer say, if she do it again, she be easy to spot with her teeth gone. He took a hammer—”
“Hush up!” mauma cried.
I squatted down and stared her in the eyes. “Don’t you spare me. I’ve seen my share. I know what the world is.”
Sarah
Israel came to call on me wearing a short, freshly grown Quaker beard. We were seated side by side on the divan in the Motts’ parlor, and he stroked the whiskers constantly as he talked about the cost of wholesale wool and the marvels of the weather. The beard was thick as velvet brush-fringe and peppered with gray. He looked handsomer, sager, like a new incarnation of himself.
When I’d returned to Philadelphia after my disastrous attempt to resume life in Charleston, I’d rented a room in the home of Lucretia Mott, determined to make some kind of life for myself, and I suppose I’d done that. Twice weekly, I traveled to Green Hill to tutor Becky, though my old foe, Catherine, had recently informed me that my little protégée would be going away to school next year and my tutoring would end at the first of the summer. If I was to stay useful, I would have to seek out another Quaker family in need of a teacher, but as yet, I hadn’t made the effort. Catherine was kinder to me now, though she still drew herself up tight as a bud when she saw Israel smile at me at Meeting, something he never failed to do. Nor did he fail in his visits to me, coming twice each month to call on me in the Motts’ parlor.
I looked at him now and wondered how we’d gotten ourselves stranded on this endless plateau of friendship. One heard all sorts of rumors about it. That Israel’s two eldest sons opposed his remarriage, not on general principle, mind you, but specifically to me. That he’d promised Rebecca on her deathbed he would love no one but her. That some of the elders had counseled him against taking a wife for reasons that ranged from his unreadiness to my unprovenness. I was not, after all, a birthright Quaker. In Charleston, it was being born into the planter class that mattered, here it was the Quakers. Some things were the same everywhere. “You’re the most patient of women,” Israel had told me once. It didn’t strike me as much of a virtue.
Today, except for the newness of his beard, Israel’s visit gradually began to seem like all the rest. I twiddled with my napkin as he talked about merino sheep farms and wool dyes. There was the clink of teacups when the silence came, children’s voices overhead mingled with racing footsteps on creaking floors, and then, abruptly, without preface, he announced, “My son Israel is getting married.”
The way he said it, quiet and apologetic, embarrassed me.
“. . . Israel? . . . Little Israel?”
“He’s not so little now. He’s twenty-two.” He sighed, as if something had passed him by, and I wondered absurdly if there was a Quaker law forbidding fathers to marry after their sons. I wondered if the beard was not so much a new incarnation as a concession.
When it was time to say goodbye, he took my hand and pressed it against the dark whorls of hair on his cheek. He closed his eyes, and when he opened them, I felt he was about to say something. I lifted my brows. But then, releasing my hand, he rose from the divan and whatever errant thought had wriggled from his heart returned to it, repentant and undeclared.
He walked uncertainly to the door and let himself out, while I remained seated, seeing things with terrible clarity: the passivity, the hesitation about the future. Not Israel’s—mine.
As Lucretia and I sat in the tiny room she called a studio, winter rain pricked the windowpane, turning to ice. We’d pulled our chairs close to the hearth where the fire was snapping and popping, zinging like harp strings. Lucretia was opening a small packet of mail that had arrived in the afternoon. I was reading a Sir Walter Scott novel banned by the Quakers, which somehow made it all the more enjoyable, but now, drowsy with heat, I lowered the book and stared into the flames.
It was my favorite part of the day—after the children were put to bed and Lucretia’s husband, James, had retired to his study, and it was just the two of us gathered here in her odd little nook of a room. A studio. It was comprised of nothing more than two stuffed chairs, a large leafed table, a fireplace, wall shelves, and a wide window that looked out over a copse of red mulberries and black oaks behind the house. The room was not for cooking or sewing or childcare or entertaining. Scattered with papers and pamphlets, books and correspondence, art palettes and squares of velvet cloth on which she pinned the bright luna moths she found lifeless in the garden, this room was just for her.
I don’t know how many evenings we’d spent in here talking, or like tonight, sitting quietly like two solitudes. Lucretia and I had formed a bond that went beyond friends. And yet I felt the difference between us. I noticed it at Meetings when I saw her on the Facing bench, the only female minister among all those men, the way she rose and spoke with such fearless beauty, and every morning when I went downstairs and there were her children sticky with oat gruel. I would get a faintly vacuous feeling in the pit of my stomach, not from envy that she had a profession, or these little ones, or even James, who was not like other men, but of some unknown species, a husband who beamed over her profession and made the oat gruel himself. No, it wasn’t that. It was the belonging I envied. She’d found her belonging.
“Why, this letter is for you,” Lucretia said, thrusting it toward me. It was Nina’s stationery, but not Nina’s script. The handwriting on the front was childlike and crude. Miss Sarah Grimké.
Dear Sarah
Mauma’s back. Nina said I could write you myself with the news. She ran away from the plantation where she’d been kept all this time. You should see her. She has scars and a full head of white hair and looks old as Methusal, but she’s the same inside. I nurse her day and night. She brought my sister with her named Sky. I know that’s some name. It comes from mauma and her longings. She always said one day we’d fly like blackbirds.
Missus stays mad at Nina most all the time. Nina started some troubles at the presbyterry church where she goes. Some man came last week to punish her on something she said. Mauma and Sky are the one bright hope.
It has taken too long to write this. Forgive my mistakes. I don’t get to read any more and work on my words. One day I will.
Handful
“I hope it isn’t bad news,” Lucretia said, studying my face, which must’ve been a confusion of elation and heart-wrench.
I read the letter aloud to her. I hadn’t spoken much about the slaves my family held, but I had told her about Handful. She reached over and patted my hand.
We fell quiet as the ice turned back to rain, coming in a dark, drowning wash on the window. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine the reunion between Handful and her mother. The sister named Sky. Charlotte’s scars and white hair.
“. . . Why would God plant such deep yearnings in us . . . if they only come to nothing?” It was more of a sigh than a question. I was thinking of Charlotte and her longing to be free, but as the words left my mouth, I knew I was thinking of myself, too.
I hadn’t really expected Lucretia to respond, but after a moment, she spoke. “God fills us with all sorts of yearnings that go against the grain of the world—but the fact those yearnings often come to nothing, well, I doubt that’s God’s doing.” She cut her eyes at me and smiled. “I think we know that’s men’s doing.”
She leaned toward me. “Life is arranged against us, Sarah. And it’s brutally worse for Handful and her mother and sister. We’re all yearning for a wedge of sky, aren’t we? I suspect God plants these yearnings in us so
we’ll at least try and change the course of things. We must try, that’s all.”
I felt her words tear a hole in the life I’d made. An irreparable hole.
I started to tell her that as a child I’d yearned for the entire firmament. For a profession completely untried among women. I didn’t want her to think I’d always been content to be a tutor when I had little passion for it, but I pushed the confession aside. Even Nina didn’t know about my aspiration to be a lawyer, how it’d ended in humiliation.
“. . . But you did more than try to become a minister . . . You accomplished it . . . I’ve often wondered whether one must feel a special call from God to undertake that.”
Quaker ministers were nothing like the Anglican or Presbyterian clergy I was used to. They didn’t stand behind a pulpit and preach sermons: they spoke during the Silence as inspired by God. Anyone could speak, of course, but the ministers were the most verbal, the ones who offered messages for worship, the ones whose voices seemed set apart.
She pushed at the messy bun coiled at her neck. “I can’t say the call I felt was special. I wanted to have a say in things, that’s what it came down to. I wanted to speak my conscience and to have it matter. Surely, God calls us all to that.”
“. . . Do you think . . . I could become a Quaker minister?” The words had been tucked inside of me for a long time, perhaps since the moment on the ship when I first met Israel and he told me female ministers actually existed.
“Sarah Grimké, you’re the most intelligent person I know. Of course you could.”
Propped in bed, wearing my warmest woolen gown, my hair loosed, I bent over the bed-desk and pewter inkstand I’d recently indulged in buying and tried to answer Handful’s letter.
19 January 1827
Dear Handful,