I thought for a minute I’d slip out and go back to the spirit tree—take my chance going over the gate before dark, but Missus had caught me slipping over it last month and put a gash on my head that was just scabbing over. She’d told Sabe, “If Handful gets out again without permission, I’ll have you whipped along with her.” Now he had bug eyes in the back of his head.
I tried to set my mind on what the men were saying.
“What we need is a bullet mold,” Denmark said. “We got muskets, but we don’t have musket balls.”
They went down the list of weapons. I’d known there’d be blood, but I didn’t know it’d run down the streets. They had clubs, axes, and knives. They had stolen swords. They had kegs of gunpowder and slow fuses hid under the docks they meant to set off round the city and burn it to the ground.
They said a blacksmith slave named Tom was making five hundred pikes. I figured he had to be the same Tom the Blacksmith who made mauma’s fake slave badge back when she’d started hiring herself out. I remembered the day she’d showed it to me. That small copper square with a pinhole at the top, said Domestic Servant, Number 133, Year 1805. I could see all that, but I couldn’t get mauma’s face to come clear.
I had a tiny jay feather down in my pocket I’d picked up on the way over here, and I pulled it out and twirled it between my fingers, just something to do, and next thing I was thinking about was the time mauma saw a bird funeral. When she was a girl, she and my granny-mauma came on a dead crow lying under their spirit tree. They went to get a scoop to bury it, and when they came back, seven crows were on the ground circling round the dead bird, carrying on, not caw caw, but zeep zeep, a high-pitch cry like a mourning chant. My granny-mauma told her, “See, that’s what birds do, they stop flying and hunting food and swoop down to tend their dead. They march round it and cry. They do this so everything know: once this bird lived and now it’s gone.”
That story brought the bright red of mauma back to me. Her picture came perfect in my mind. I saw the yellow-parch of her skin, the calluses on her knuckles, the gold-lit eyes, and the gap in her teeth, the exact wideness of it.
“There’s a bullet mold at the City Arsenal on Meeting Street,” Gullah Jack said. “But getting in there—well, I don’t know.”
“How many guards they got?” Rolla asked.
Gullah Jack rubbed his whiskers. “Two, sometimes three. The place has the whole stockpile of weapons for the Guard, but they’re not letting one of us stroll in there.”
“Getting in would mean a fight,” Denmark said, “and that’s one thing we can’t afford. Like I said, the main thing now is not to rouse suspicion.”
“What about me?” I said.
They turned and looked at me like they’d forgotten I was in the room.
“What about you?” said Denmark.
“I could get in there. Nobody looks twice at a slave woman who’s lame in one leg.”
Sarah
As dusk hovered, I sat at the desk in my room and slit open a letter from Nina. I’d been at Green Hill almost a year, and I’d written her every month without fail, small dispatches about my life and inquiries about hers, but she’d never replied to any of them, not one, and now here was an envelope with her large calligraphy and I could only imagine the worst.
14 March 1822
Dear Sister,
I’ve been a poor correspondent and a poorer sister. I didn’t agree with your decision to go north, and I haven’t changed my mind about it, but I have behaved badly, and I hope you will forgive me.
I’m at my wit’s end about our mother. She grows more difficult and violent each day. She rants that we’ve been left without sufficient means to live and she blames Thomas, John, and Frederick for failing to take care of her. Needless to say, they come infrequently, and Mary never comes, only Eliza. Since your departure, Mother spends most of her day shut in her room, and when she emerges, it’s only to rage against the slaves. She swings her cane at them over the least thing. She recently hit Aunt-Sister for nothing more than burned loaves of bread. Last evening, she struck Handful when she spotted her climbing over the back gate. I should add that Handful was climbing into the work yard, not out of it, and when Mother asked for an explanation, Handful said she’d seen a wounded pup in the alley and gone over the gate to help the creature. She insisted she was returning from that momentary mission of mercy, but I don’t think Mother believed her. I certainly didn’t. Mother broke the skin over Handful’s brow, which I bandaged the best I could.