“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.