I found Nina in her room, readying for the class she taught at church. I said, “Quick, you need to come see what your mauma’s up to. Mr. Huger’s down there—”
She flew from the room before I could finish off the sentence.
I dawdled outside the closed drawing room doors, but I couldn’t make out much they were saying—just passing words. Pension . . . Bank . . . Cotton crash . . . Sacrifice. The clock bonged ten times. The sound filled the house, turning it heavy, and when it stopped, I heard missus say the word sky. Maybe she was talking about the blue roof that hung over the world but I knew it was my sister.
I flattened my ear to the door. Let Sabe find me and chase me off, I couldn’t care.
“She’s thirteen years old, without any perceivable domestic skills, but she’s strong.” That was missus talking.
Mr. Huger mumbled about going rates, selling in the spring when the planting started on the plantations.
“You can’t separate Sky from her mother,” Nina cried. “It’s inhuman!”
“I don’t care for it either,” missus said. “But we must face reality.”
My breath clutched at my ribs like grabbing hands. I closed my eyes, tired of the sorry world.
When I found mauma in the kitchen house, she was alone with the mending basket. I sank beside her. “Missus plans to sell Sky in the spring. We got to find a way for her to earn her keep.”
“Sell?” She looked at me with stun, then pinched her eyes. “We ain’t come this far so she can sell my girl. That’s for damn sure.”
“There must be something in the world Sky’s good at doing.” The way I said it, like my sister was slow in the head, caused mauma to flare at me.
“Don’t you talk like that! Your sister has the smart of Denmark in her.” She shook her head. “He’s her daddy, but I guess you figure that.”
“Yeah, I figured.” It seemed like the time to finally tell her. “Denmark, he—”
“There ain’t a slave living who don’t know what happen to him. We heard it all the way to Beaufort.”
I didn’t tell her I’d watched him dangle on the tree, but I told her everything else. I started with the church where we’d sung Jericho. I told her about the Work House, falling off the treadmill and crippling my foot. I told her the way Denmark took me in and called me daughter. “I stole a bullet mold for that man,” I said.
She pushed her fingers hard against her eyelids, trying to keep them from spilling over. When she opened them, there was a map in her eyes of broken red lines.
“Sky ask me one time who her daddy is,” she said. “I told her he was a free black in Charleston, but he’s dead. That’s all she know.”
“How come you don’t tell her?”
“Sky’s got a child’s way of talking out of turn. The minute you tell her ’bout Denmark, she’ll tell half the world. That ain’t gon help her.”
“She needs to know about him.”
“What she need is to keep from getting sold. The thing she know best is the rice fields. Put her to work in the yard.”
Sky took the ornament garden and brought it back to its glory. It came natural to her—how deep to bury the jonquil bulbs, when to cut back the roses, how to trim the hedges to match the drawings in a book Nina showed her. When Sky planted the vegetables, she shoveled horse shit from the stable and mixed it in the dirt. She dug straight furrows for the seeds and covered them with her bare foot like she’d done with the rice. She sang Gullah songs to the plants when she hoed. When the beetles came, she picked them off with her fingers.