When I was thirteen, missus had finally given in and let mauma hire out. I don’t know why. Maybe she got tired of saying the word no. Maybe it was the money she wanted—mauma could put a hundred dollars a year in missus’ pocket—but I know this much, it didn’t hurt when mauma made missus a patchwork quilt for Christmas that year. It had a square for each of her children made from some remnant of theirs. Mauma told her, “I know this ain’t nothing much, but I sewed you a memory quilt of your family so you can wrap up in it after they gone.” Missus touched each square: “Why, this is from the dress Mary wore to her coming out . . . This is Charles’ baptism blanket . . . My goodness, this is Thomas’ first riding shirt.”
Mauma didn’t waste a breath. She asked missus right then to hire her out. A month later she was hired legal to sew for a woman on Tradd Street. Mauma kept twenty cents on the dollar. The rest went to missus, but I knew mauma was selling underhand on the side—frilled bonnets, quilt tops, candlewick bedcovers, all sorts of wears that didn’t call for a fitting.
She had me count the money regular. It came to a hundred ninety dollars. I hated to tell her her money-pile could hit the roof, but that didn’t mean missus would sell us, specially to ourselves.
Thinking about all this, I said, “We sew too good for missus to let us go.”
“Well if she refuse us, then our sewing gon get real bad, real fast.”
“What makes you think she wouldn’t sell us to somebody else for spite?”
Mauma stopped working and the fight seemed to almost leave her. She looked tired. “It’s a chance we has to take, or else we gon end up like Snow.”
Poor Snow, he’d died one night last summer. Fell over in the privy. Aunt-Sister tied his jaw to keep his spirit from leaving, and he was laid out on a cooling board in the kitchen house for two days before they put him in a burial box. The man had spent his whole life carrying the Grimkés round town. Sabe took his place as the coachman and they brought some new boy from their plantation to be the footman. His name was Goodis, and he had one lazy eye that looked sideways. He watched me so much with that eye mauma’d said, “That boy got his heart fix on you.”
“I don’t want him fixing his heart on me.”
“That’s good,” she’d said. “I can’t buy nobody’s freedom but mine and yours. You get a husband, and he on his own.”
I tied off a knot and moved the embroider hoop over, saying to myself, I don’t want a husband and don’t plan on ending up like Snow on a cooling board in the kitchen house either.
“How much will it take to buy the both of us?” I asked.
Mauma rammed the needle in the cloth. She said, “That’s what you gon find out.”
Sarah
I’d never been inclined to keep a diary until I met Burke Williams. I thought by writing down my feelings, I would seize control over them, perhaps even curb what Reverend Hall called “the paroxysms of carnality.”
For what it’s worth, charting one’s passion in a small daybook kept hidden in a hatbox inside a wardrobe does not subdue passion in the least.
20 February 1811
I had imagined romantic love to be a condition of sweet utopia, not an affliction! To think, a few weeks ago, I thought my starved mind would be my worst hardship. Now my heart has its own ordeal. Mr. Williams, you torment me. It’s as if I’ve contracted a tropical fever. I cannot say whether I wish to be cured.
My diary overflowed with this sort of purple outburst.
3 March
Mr. Williams, why do you not call? It’s unfair that I must wait for you to act. Why must I, as a female, be at your disposal? Why can’t I send a calling note to you? Who made up these unjust rules? Men, that’s who. God devised women to be the minions. Well, I quite resent it!