The Invention of Wings(52)

            Not Miss Sarah, but Sarah. I would never again hear her put Miss before my name.

            She had the look of someone who’d declared herself, and seeing it, my indignation collapsed and her mutinous bath turned into something else entirely. She’d immersed herself in forbidden privileges, yes, but mostly in the belief she was worthy of those privileges. What she’d done was not a revolt, it was a baptism.

            I saw then what I hadn’t seen before, that I was very good at despising slavery in the abstract, in the removed and anonymous masses, but in the concrete, intimate flesh of the girl beside me, I’d lost the ability to be repulsed by it. I’d grown comfortable with the particulars of evil. There’s a frightful muteness that dwells at the center of all unspeakable things, and I had found my way into it.

            As Handful began to shove the vessel back across the piazza, I tried to speak. “. . . . . . Wait. . . . . . I’ll. . . . . . help . . .”

            She turned and looked at me, and we both knew. My tongue would once again attempt its suicide.





Handful


            Missus sent me and mauma to the market for some good cotton to make a dress for Nina. She was growing out from everything. Missus said, get something pastel this time and see about some homespun for Tomfry and them to have new vests.

            The market was a row of stalls that ran all the way from East Bay to Meeting and had whatever under the sun you wanted. Missus said the place was a vulgar bazaar, that was her words. The turkey buzzards wandered round the meat stands like regular customers. They had to keep a man in there with a palm branch to shoo them. Course, they flew to the roofs and waited him out, then came on back. The smells in there would knock you down. Ox tails, bullock hearts, raw pork, live chickens, cracked oysters, blue crabs, fish, and more fish. The sweet peanut cakes didn’t stand a chance. I used to go round holding my nose till mauma got some eucalyptus leaves to rub over my top lip.

            The slave sellers, what they called higglers, were shouting their wares, trying to out-do each other. The men sang out, “Jimmie” (that’s what we called the male crabs), and the women sang back, “Sook” (those were the females). “Jimmieeee . . . Soooook . . . Jimmieeee . . . Soooook.” You needed something for your nose and your ears.

            It was September, and I still hadn’t laid eyes on the man mauma had told me about, the lucky free black who won the money to buy his freedom. He had a carpenter shop out back of his house, and I knew every time she was let out for hire or sent to the market without me, she was dallying with him. One, two times a week, she came back smelling like wood shavings, the back of her dress saw-dusted.

            That day, when we got to the piece good stalls, I started saying how he was made-up. “Awright then,” mauma said. She grabbed up the first pastel she saw and some drab brown wool and we headed outside with our baskets loaded. A block down, they were selling slaves right on the street, so we crossed the other way toward King. I patted the pass inside my dress pocket three times and checked to see did mauma still have her badge fastened on her dress. Out in the streets, I always had the bad feeling of something coming, some meanness gathering. On Coming Street, we spotted a guard, couldn’t have been old as me, stop an old man who got so nervous he dropped his travel pass. The guard stepped on it, having his fun.

            We walked in a hurry, outpacing the carriages. Mauma didn’t use her wooden cane anymore except special occasions. Those came along when she needed a letup from missus. She’d tell her, “Looks like the cure I prayed for my leg has worn off. I just need to rest up and pray for a few days.” Out came the cane.

            Mauma’s free black man lived at 20 Bull. It was a white frame single house, had black shudders with the paint flecking off and scruffy bushes round the porch. She shook the powder shell from the street off her hemline and said, “If I stand here, he see me and come right out.”

            “So we’re supposed to stand here till he looks out the window?”