Handful
I was down near Adgers Wharf on an errand when the steamboat left the harbor and it was something in this world, the paddle thundering, the smokestack blowing, and people lined up on the top deck waving handkerchiefs. I watched it till the spume settled on the water and the boat dropped over the last blue edge.
Little missus had sent me to get two bottles of import scotch, and I hurried now not to be late. I was the one who did most of her bidding these days. When she sent her plantation slaves to fetch something, they’d come back with the basket empty or still holding the note they were supposed to deliver. They didn’t know the Battery from Wragg Square, and she’d make them go without supper if they were lucky, and if they weren’t, it was five lashes from Hector.
Last week Sky made up a rhyme and sang it in the garden. Little missus Mary, mean as a snake. Little missus Mary, hit her with the rake. I told her, don’t sing that cause Hector has ears to hear, but Sky couldn’t get the song off her tongue. She’d ended up with the iron muzzle latched on her mouth. It was used for when a slave stole food, but it worked just as good for a slave mouthing off. It took four men to hold Sky down, work the prongs inside her mouth, and clamp the contraption at the back of her head. She screamed so loud I bit the side of my cheek till blood seeped and the copper taste filled my mouth. Sky couldn’t eat or talk for two days. She slept sitting up so the iron wouldn’t cut her face, and when she woke groaning, I worked a wet rag under the edge of the gag so she could suck the water.
Coming out from the scotch store, I was thinking about the torn places on the sides of her mouth, how she hadn’t sung a tune since all that happened. Then I heard shouts and smelled the smoke.
A black billow was rising over the Old Exchange. The first thing that sprang in my head was Denmark, how the city was finally on fire like he wanted. I hitched up my skirt and jabbed the rabbit cane into the cobblestone, trying to make my leg go faster. The scotch bottles clanked in the basket. Pain jarred to my hip.
At the corner of Broad Street, I stopped in my tracks. What I thought was the city burning was a bonfire in front of the Exchange. A mob circled round it and the man from the post office was up on the steps throwing bundles of paper on the flames. Every time a packet landed, the cinders flew and the crowd roared.
I didn’t know what they were so stirred up about, and the last thing you want is to wade out in the middle of somebody else’s trouble, but I knew little missus doled out whippings for being late the same as she did for getting lost.
I was weaving my way, keeping my head down, when I saw one of the papers they were trying to burn laying on the street trampled underfoot, and I went over and picked it up.
It was singed along the bottom. An Epistle to the Clergy of the Southern States by Sarah M. Grimké.
I stood stock-still. Sarah. Sarah M. Grimké.
“Give that to me, nigger!” a man said. He was old and bald and smelled sour in the summer heat. “Hand it over!”
I looked at his red, watering eyes and poked the booklet inside my pocket. This was Sarah’s name and these were her words inside. They could burn the rest of the papers, but they weren’t burning this one.
Come later this night, Sky and Goodis would come to my bed and say, Handful, what was you thinking? You should’ve give that to him, but I did what I did.
I didn’t pay any heed to what he said. I turned my back and started walking off, getting away from his stink and his grabbing hand.
He caught hold of the handle on my basket and gave it a jerk. I yanked back, and he held on, swaying on his feet, saying, “What you think? I’m gonna let you walk off with that?” Then he looked down, that half-drunk fool, and saw the bottles of scotch in the basket, the best scotch in Charleston, and his gray tongue came out and wiped his lips.
I said, “Here, you take the liquor and I’ll take the booklet,” and I slid the basket off my arm and left him holding it. I limped off, me and that sly rabbit on the cane, disappearing in the crowd.