Then one Sunday morning, I rolled the frame down. Sky watched me without a word while I ran my hand over the red quilt with the black triangles, feeling the money sewed inside. I peeled the muslin cloth from round Sarah’s booklet and gazed on it, then wrapped it back. Next, I spread the story quilt cross the frame and we stood there, looking down at the history of mauma. I laid my palm on the second square—the woman in the field and the slaves flying in the air over her head. All that hope in the wind.
We didn’t hear little missus outside the door. The lock mauma used to have on the door was long gone, and little missus, she didn’t knock. She flounced on in. “I’m going to St. Philip’s, and I need my claret cape. You were supposed to mend it for me.” Her eyes wandered past me to the quilt frame. “What’s all this?”
I stepped to block her view. “That’s right, I forgot about your cape.” I was trying to fan the moth from the flame, but she brushed past me to see the pinks, reds, oranges, purples, and blacks on the quilt. Mauma and her colors.
“I’ll be straight over to mend the cape,” I said and took the rope off the hook to hike the frame up before she figured out what she was looking at.
She put up her hand. “Hold on. You’re in an awful big hurry to hide this from me.”
I fastened the rope back, the high-flutter coming in my chest. Sky started humming a thin nervous tune. I started to put my finger to my lip, but ever since she had that muzzle in her mouth, I couldn’t bear to hush her. We looked back and forth to each other while little missus squinted from one square to the next like she was reading a book. Everything done to mauma—there it was. The one-legged punishment, the whippings, the branding, the hammering. Mauma’s body laid on the quilt frame in pieces.
The muslin cloth with Sarah’s booklet inside was in plain sight, and beside it, the quilt with the money inside. You could see the shape of the bundles laying in the batting. I wanted to tuck everything from view, but I didn’t move.
When she turned to me, the morning glare fell over her face and the black in her eyes pulled into knots. She said, “Who made this?”
“Mauma did. Charlotte.”
“Well, it’s gruesome!”
I never had wanted to scream as bad as I did right then. I said, “Those gruesome things happened to her.”
A dark pink color poured into her cheeks. “For heaven’s sakes then, you would think her whole life was nothing but violence and cruelty. I mean, it doesn’t show what she did to warrant her punishments.”
She looked at the quilt again, her eyes darting over the appliqués. “We treated her well here, no one can dispute that. I can’t speak for what happened to her when she ran away, she was out of our care then.” Little missus was rubbing her hands now like she was cleaning them at the wash bowl.
The quilt had shamed her. She walked to the door and took one look back at it, and I knew she’d never let it stay in the world. She’d send Hector to get it the minute we were out of the room. He’d burn mauma’s story to ash.
Standing there, waiting for little missus’ steps to fade, I looked down at the quilt, at the slaves flying in the sky, and I hated being a slave worse than being dead. The hate I felt for it glittered so full of beauty I sank down on the floor before it.
Sky’s hair was a bushel basket without her scarf and when she bent over to see about me, the ends of it poked my face and smelled like the bristle-brush. She said, “You all right?”
I looked up at her. “We’re leaving here.”
She heard me, but she couldn’t be sure. She said, “What you say?”
“We gonna leave here or die trying.”