“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 eye
s,” 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 and 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.
That’s when I decided to get religion.
First chance I got, I told Sarah I was burdened down with the need for deliverance, and God was calling me to the African church. I dabbed at my eyes a little.
I was cut straight from my mauma’s cloth.
Next day, missus called me to her room. She was sitting by the window with her Bible laid open. “It has come to my attention you wish to join the new church that has been established in the city for your kind. Sarah informs me you want to attend nightly meetings. I’ll allow you to go twice a week in the evenings and on Sunday, as long as it doesn’t interfere with your work or cause problems of any sort. Sarah will prepare your pass.”
She looked at me through her little glasses. She said, “See to it you don’t squander the favor I’m granting you.”
“Yessum.” For measure, I added, “Praise the Lord.”
Sarah
I couldn’t imagine why Nina and I had been summoned to the first-floor drawing room—that was never a good thing. We entered to find the very corpulent Reverend Gadsden seated on the yellow silk settee, and beside him, Mother, squeezed way over to one side, gripping her cane as if she might bore it into the floor. Glancing at Nina, who, at fourteen, was taller than I was, I noticed her eyes flash beneath their thick, dark lashes. She gave her chin a tiny defiant yank upward, and for a moment, I felt a passing bit of pity for the reverend.
“Close the door behind you,” Mother said. Down the passageway, Father was in his room, too ill now to work. Dr. Geddings had ordered quiet, and for weeks, the slaves had padded about, speaking in whispers, careful not to rattle a tray for fear of their lives. When one’s physician prescribes quiet as a remedy, along with a syrup made from horseradish root, he has clearly given up.
I took my seat on the twin settee beside Nina, facing the pair of them. The accusation against me would be failing as Nina’s godmother. As usual.
This past Sunday, my sister had refused confirmation into St. Philip’s Church, and it wasn’t even that as much as the way she’d done it. She’d made a pageant of it. When the other youths left their chairs on the dais and went to the altar rail for the bishop to lay his hands on their sweet heads, Nina remained pointedly in her seat. Our entire family was there, except for Father, and I watched with a confused mix of embarrassment and pride as she sat with her arms crossed, her dark hair gleaming around her shoulders and a tiny circle of red blazing on each of her cheeks.
The bishop walked over and spoke to her, and she shook her head. Mother went stiff as a piece of wrought iron on the pew beside me, and I felt the air in the church clotting around our heads. There was more coaxing by the bishop, more obstinacy by Nina, until he gave up and continued the service.
I’d had no inkling what she planned, though perhaps I should have—this was Nina, after all. She was full of fiery opinions and mutinous acts. Last winter, she’d scandalized her classroom by taking off her shoes because the slave boy, who cleaned the slate boards, was barefooted. I’d lost count of the letters of apology Mother had ordered h
er to write. Rather than submit, she would sit before the blank paper for days until Mother relented. On her eleventh birthday, Nina had refused her human present with such vehemence, Mother had given up out of sheer weariness.
Even if I’d tried to prevent Nina’s display at church that day, she would’ve pointed out that I, too, had spurned the Anglicans. Well, I had, but I’d done so to embrace the Presbyterians, whereas Nina would’ve spurned the Presbyterians, too, given half a chance. She hated them for what she called their “gall and wormwood.”
If there was a wedge between my sister and me, it was religion.
Over the last several years, it seemed my entire life had been possessed of swings between asceticism and indulgence. I’d banished society in the aftermath of Burke Williams, yes, but I’d been a chronic backslider, succumbing every season to some party or ball, which had left me empty and sickened, which had then sent me crawling back to God. Nina had often found me on my knees, weeping as I prayed, begging forgiveness, engaged in one of my excruciating bouts of self-contempt. “Why must you be like this?” she would shout.
Why, indeed.
Mr. Williams had been shaken from the lap of Charleston like a soiled napkin. He was married now to his cousin, keeping shop in his uncle’s dry goods store in Columbia. I’d put him behind me long ago, but I hadn’t been able to make peace with living here in this house till the end of my days. I had Nina, but not for much longer. As charismatic and beautiful as she was, she would be wooed by a dozen men and leave me here with Mother. It was the ubiquitous truth at the center of everything, and it had driven me to my backsliding. But there could be no more of that—at twenty-six I would be too old for the coming season. It was truly over, and I felt lost and miserable, galled and wormwood-ed, and there was nothing to be done about it.
The Invention of Wings: With Notes Page 15