I tied a fresh scarf on Sky’s head and wrapped a pressed apron round her waist. I said, “Now, don’t be talking too much out there, all right?”
On the street, I showed her the alleys to duck in. I pointed out the guards, how to walk past and lower her eyes, how to step aside for the whites, how to survive in Charleston.
The market was busy—the men carrying wood slats piled with fish and the women walking round with vegetable baskets on their heads the size of laundry tubs. The little slave girls were out, too, selling peanut patties from their straw hats. By the time we passed by the butcher tables with the bloody calf heads lined up, Sky’s eyes were big as horse hooves. “Where all this stuff come from?” she said.
“You’re in the city now,” I told her.
I showed her how to pick and choose what Aunt-Sister needed—coffee, tea, flour, corn meal, beef rump, lard. I taught her how to haggle, how to do the money change. The girl could do numbers in her head quicker than me.
When the shopping was done, I said, “Now we going somewhere, and I don’t want you telling mauma, or Goodis, or anybody about it.”
When we came to Denmark’s house, we stood on the street and looked at the battered whitewash. I’d come by here a few months after they lynched Denmark, and a free black woman I’d never seen answered the door. She said her husband had bought the house from the city, said she didn’t know what came of Susan Vesey.
I said to Sky, “You’re always singing how we should know where we come from.” I pointed to the house. “That’s where your daddy lived. His name was Denmark Vesey.”
She kept her eyes on the porch while I told her about him. I said he was a carpenter, a big, brave-hearted man who had wits sharper than any white man. I said the slave people in Charleston called him Moses and he’d lived for getting us free. I told her about the blood he’d meant to spill. Blood I’d long since made peace with.
She said, “I know ’bout him. They hung him.”
I said, “He would’ve called you daughter if he’d had the chance.”
We hadn’t blown out the candle five minutes when mauma’s voice whispered cross the bed. “What happen to the money?”
My eyes popped open. “What?”
“The money I saved to buy our freedom. What happen to it?”
Sky was already sleeping deep with a wheeze in her breath. She rolled over at our voices, mumbling nonsense. I raised on my elbow and looked at mauma laying in the middle between us. “I thought you took it with you.”
“I was delivering bonnets that day. What would I be carrying all that money in my pocket for?”
“I don’t know,” I whispered. “But it ain’t here. I looked high and low for it.”
“Well, it’s right under your nose the whole time—if it was a snake, it’d bite you. Where’s that first quilt you made—has red squares and black triangles?”
I should’ve known.
“I keep it on the quilt frame with the other quilts. Is that where you put it?”
She whipped back the cover and climbed from bed, me fumbling behind her, lighting a candle. Sky sat up in the hot, sputtering dark.
“Come on, get up,” mauma told her. “We fixing to roll the quilt frame down over the bed.”
Sky lumbered over to us, looking confused, while I grabbed the rope and brought it down, the pulley wheels begging for oil.