She was making all this up. It didn’t matter cause I didn’t see why it couldn’t happen that way now.
I called out, “I give my spirit to the tree.”
Mauma called out the same way. Then she said, “After your granny-mauma make our spirit tree, she say, ‘If you leave this place, you go get your spirit and take it with you.’ Then she pick up acorns, twigs, and leaves and make pouches for ’em, and we wear ’em round our neck.”
So me and mauma picked up acorns and twigs and yellow crumbles of leaves. The whole time, I thought about the day missus gave me as a present to Miss Sarah, how mauma told me, It gon be hard from here on, Handful.
Since that day a year past, I’d got myself a friend in Miss Sarah and found how to read and write, but it’d been a heartless road like mauma said, and I didn’t know what would come of us. We might stay here the rest of our lives with the sky slammed shut, but mauma had found the part of herself that refused to bow and scrape, and once you find that, you got trouble breathing on your neck.O
PART TWO
February 1811–December 1812
Sarah
Sitting before the mirror in my room, I stared at my face while Handful and six-year-old Nina wove my ponytail into braids with the aim of looping them into a circlet at the nape of my neck. Earlier I’d rubbed my face with salt and lemon-vinegar, which was Mother’s formula for removing ink spots. It had lightened my freckles, but not erased them, and I reached for the powder muff to finish them off.
It was February, the height of Charleston’s social season, and all week, a stream of calling cards and invitations had collected on the waiting desk beside the front door. From them Mother had chosen the most elegant and opportune affairs. Tonight, a waltzing party.
I’d entered society two years ago, at sixteen, thrust into the lavish round of balls, teas, musical salons, horseraces, and picnics, which, according to Mother, meant the dazzling doors of Charleston had flung open and female life could begin in earnest. In other words, I could take up the business of procuring a husband. How highborn and moneyed this husband turned out to be would depend entirely on the allure of my face, the delicacy of my physique, the skill of my seamstress, and the charisma of my tête-à-tête. Notwithstanding my seamstress, I arrived at the glittery entrance like a lamb to slaughter.O
“Look at this mess you’ve gone and made,” Handful said to Nina, who’d tangled the lock of hair assigned to her into what we commonly referred to as a rat’s nest. Handful raked the brush through it at no small expense to my scalp, then divided the strands into three even pieces, and pronounced two of them to be rabbits and one of them a log. Nina, who’d gone into a pout at having her braid confiscated, perked up at the prospect of a game.
“Watch now,” Handful told her. “This rabbit goes under the log, and this rabbit goes over the log. You make them hop like that all the way down. See, that’s how you make a plait—hop over, hop under.”
Nina took possession of the rabbits and the log and created a remarkably passable braid. Handful and I oohed and ahhed as if she’d carved a Florentine statue.
It was a winter evening like so many others that passed in quiet predictability: the room flushed with lamplight, a fire nesting on the grate, an early dark flattening against the windows, while my two companions fussed over me at the dresser.
My sister and godchild, Angelina—Nina for short—already bore the oval face and graceful features with which our older sister Mary had been blessed. Her eyes were brown and her hair and lashes dark as the little stone box in which I’d once kept my button. My precious Nina was strikingly beautiful. Better yet, she had a lively intellect and showed signs of being quite fearless. She believed she could do anything, a condition I took pains to foster despite the disaster that had come from my own fearless believing.