His face furrowed. “Forgive me, I only thought you chose it because you’d given up on me.”
He thought my ambition was a consolation? Reflexively, I stood and took a few steps.
I thought of the knowing that had come to me about my mission on the night I wrote to Handful. It was pure as the voice that had brought me north. When I’d sewed the button on my dress, I knew it couldn’t be undone.
I turned back to him and saw he was on his feet, waiting. “I can’t be Rebecca, Israel. Her whole life was for you and the children, and I would love you no less than she did, but I’m not like her. There are things I must do. Please, Israel, don’t make me choose.”
He took my hands and kissed them, first one, then the other, and it came to me that I’d spoken of love, but he had not. He’d spoken of caring, of need—his, the children’s, Green Hill’s.
“Wouldn’t I, wouldn’t we be enough for you?” he said. “You would be a wonderful wife and the best of mothers. We would see to it that you never missed your ambition.”
It was his way of telling me. I could not have him and myself both.
Handful
I spread a pallet under the tree and set my sewing basket on it. Missus had decided she needed new curtains and covers for the drawing room, which was the last thing she needed, but it gave me a reason to come out here and sew with mauma.
She sat under the tree every day, working her story onto the quilt. Even if it drizzled, I couldn’t budge her—she was like God mending the world. When she came to bed at night, she brought the tree with her. The smell of bark and white mushrooms. Crumbs from the earth all over the mattress.
Winter had packed and gone. The leaves had wriggled out on the tree branches and the gold tassels were falling from the limbs like shedding fur. Settling on the pallet next to mauma, I wondered about Sarah up north, if her pale face ever saw the sun. She’d written me a while back, first letter I ever got. I carried it in my pocket most of the time.
Thomas’ wife had given missus a brass bird that fastened cloth in its beak, what they called a sew bird. I stuck one end of the curtain panel in its mouth while I measured and cut. Mauma was cutting out the appliqué of a man holding a branding iron in the fire.
“Who’s the man?” I said.
“That’s massa Wilcox,” she said. “He brand me the first time we run off. Sky was ’bout seven then—I had to wait on her to get old enough to travel.”
“Sky said yawl ran four times.”
“We run the next year when she’s eight, and then when she’s nine, and that time they whip her, too, so I stop trying.”
“How come you tried this last time then?”
“When I first get there, before Sky was born, massa Wilcox come down to see me. Everybody know what he want, too. When he put his hand on me, I take a scoop of red coals off the fire and toss ’em. Burn the man’s arm clean through his shirt. I got my first whipping, but it’s the last time he try that with me. When Sky turn thirteen last year, here he come back, sniffing round her. I tell her, we leaving, and this time we gon die trying.”
I couldn’t measure words against any of that. I said, “Well, you made it. You’re here now.”
Our needles started back. Over in the garden, Sky was singing. Ef oona ent kno weh oona da gwuine, oona should kno weh oona dum from.
Sky had never set foot past the Grimké walls since she got here. Missus didn’t have owner papers on her and Nina said it was dangerous business out there. Since Denmark, the codes had got stricter and the buckrahs had got meaner, but the next market day, I told Nina, “Write Sky a pass, just do it for me. I’ll watch after her.”