Her eyes burned with anger all the time now. Sometimes she turned her blackened stare on me. Sometimes she turned it to cleverness. One day I found her at the foot of the stairs, explaining to missus she had a hard time climbing up to do her sewing, and for that matter, a hard time climbing the carriage house steps to her room. She said, “But I gon make out somehow, don’t worry.” Then while missus and me watched, she pulled on the bannister and dragged herself to the top, calling on Jesus the whole way.
Next we know, missus had Prince clear out a big room in the cellar, on the side of the house that backed up to the work yard wall. He moved mauma’s bed in there and all her stuff. Took the quilt frame down from her old ceiling and nailed it on the new one. Missus said mauma would do all the sewing in her room from here out and had Prince bring down the lacquer sewing table.
The cellar room was large as three slave rooms put together. It was bright whitewash and had its own tiny window near the ceiling, but looking through it, you didn’t see clouds in the sky, you saw bricks in the wall. Mauma made it a calico curtain anyway. She got hold of some pictures of sailing ships from a cast-off book and tacked them on the wall. A painted rocking chair turned up in there, along with a beat-up toilet table she covered with Ticklingburg cloth. On top, she set empty colored bottles, a box of candles, a cake of tallow, and a tin dish piled with coffee beans for her chewing pleasure. Where she got all this hoard, I don’t know. Along the wall shelf, she laid out our sewing stuff: the patch box, the pouch with needles and thread, the sack of quilt stuffing, pin cushion, shears, tracing wheel, charcoal, stamping papers, measuring ribbons. Sitting off by themselves was my brass thimble and the red thread I stole from Miss Sarah’s drawer.
Once mauma got the place fixed like a palace, she asked Aunt-Sister could they all come give a prayer for her “poor sorry room.” One evening here came the lot of them all too glad to see how poor and sorry it was. Mauma offered each of them a coffee bean. She let them look to their hearts’ content, then showed them how the door locked with an iron slide bolt, how she had her own privy pot under the bed, which it fell to me to empty, considering how cripple she was. She made a lot over the wooden cane missus had given her for getting round.
When Aunt-Sister left mauma’s party, she spit on the floor outside the door, and Cindie came behind her and did the same thing.
Best thing was, I could get to the new room without leaving the house. More nights than not, I crept down the two flights from Sarah’s room, sidestepping the creaks. Mauma loved that lock on her door. If she was in her room, you could be sure it was latched, and if she was sleeping, I had to pound my knuckles sore till she roused.
Mauma didn’t care anymore about me leaving my post. She’d snatch open her door, yank me in, and bolt it back. Under the covers, I’d ask her to tell me about the spirit tree, wanting more detail of it, every leaf, branch, and nest. When she thought I was sleeping, she got up and paced the room, humming a quiet sound through her lips. Those nights, something dark and heedless was loose in her.
By day, she sat in her new room and sewed. Miss Sarah let me go down every afternoon and stay till suppertime. A little air might fuss round mauma’s window, but it was like a smelter in there most of the time. Mauma would say, “Get yoself busy.” I learned baste, gather, pleat, shire, gore, and gusset. Every stitch there is. I learned to do a button hole and a shank. Cut a pattern from scratch without stamping powder.
That summer, I turned eleven years, and mauma said the pallet I slept on upstairs wasn’t fit for a dog. We were supposed to be working on the next ration of slave clothes. Every year the men got two brown shirts and two white, two pants, two vests. Women got three dresses, four aprons, and a head scarf. Mauma said all that could wait. She showed me how to cut black triangles each one big as the end of my thumb, then we appliquéd two hundred or more on red squares, a color mauma called oxblood. We sewed on tiny circles of yellow for sun splatter, then cranked down the quilt frame and pieced everything together. I hemmed on the homespun backing myself, and we filled the inside with all the batting and feathers we had. I cut a plug of my hair and plug of mauma’s and put them inside for charms. It took six afternoons.O