The Invention of Wings(6)

            Every eye fixed on me. Missus said, “This is our little Hetty. Sarah, dear, she is your present, your very own waiting maid.”O

            I pressed my hands between my legs and missus knocked them away. She turned me a full circle. The ladies started up like parrots—happy birthday, happy birthday—their fancy heads pecking the air. Miss Sarah’s older sister, Miss Mary, sat there full of sulk from not being the center of the party. Next to missus, she was the worst bird in the room. We’d all seen her going round with her waiting maid, Lucy, smacking the girl six ways from Sunday. We all said if Miss Mary dropped her kerchief from the second floor, she’d send Lucy jumping out the window for it. Least I didn’t end up with that one.

            Miss Sarah stood up. She was wearing a dark blue dress and had rosy-colored hair that hung straight like corn silk and freckles the same red color all over her face. She took a long breath and started working her lips. Back then, Miss Sarah pulled words up from her throat like she was raising water from a well.

            When she finally got the bucket up, we could hardly hear what she was saying. “. . . . . . . . . I’m sorry, Mother. . . . . . I can’t accept.”

            Missus asked her to say it over. This time Miss Sarah bellowed it like a shrimp peddler.

            Missus’ eyes were frost blue like Miss Sarah’s, but they turned dark as indigo. Her fingernails bore into me and carved out what looked like a flock of birds on my arm. She said, “Sit down, Sarah dear.”

            Miss Sarah said, “. . . I don’t need a waiting maid . . . I’m perfectly fine without one.”

            “That is quite enough,” missus said. How you could miss the warning in that, I don’t know. Miss Sarah missed it by a mile.

            “. . . Couldn’t you save her for Anna?”

            “Enough!”

            Miss Sarah plopped on her chair like somebody shoved her.

            The water started in a trickle down my leg. I jerked every way I could to get free of missus’ claws, but then it came in a gush on the rug.

            Missus let out a shriek and everything went hush. You could hear embers leap round in the fireplace.

            I had a slap coming, or worse. I thought of Rosetta, how she threw a shaking fit when it suited her. She’d let the spit run from her mouth and send her eyes rolling back. She looked like a beetle-bug upside down trying to right itself, but it got her free of punishment, and it crossed my mind to fall down and pitch a fit myself the best I could.

            But I stood there with my dress plastered wet on my thighs and shame running hot down my face.

            Aunt-Sister came and toted me off. When we passed the stairs in the main hall, I saw mauma up on the landing, pressing her hands to her chest.



            That night doves sat up in the tree limbs and moaned. I clung to mauma in our rope bed, staring at the quilt frame, the way it hung over us from the ceiling rafters, drawn tight on its pulleys. She said the quilt frame was our guarding angel. She said, “Everything gon be all right.” But the shame stayed with me. I tasted it like a bitter green on my tongue.

            The bells tolled cross Charleston for the slave curfew, and mauma said the Guard would be out there soon beating on their drums, but she said it like this: “Bugs be in the wheat ’fore long.”

            Then she rubbed the flat bones in my shoulders. That’s when she told me the story from Africa her mauma told her. How the people could fly. How they flew over trees and clouds. How they flew like blackbirds.

            Next morning mauma handed me a quilt matched to my length and told me I couldn’t sleep with her anymore. From here on out, I would sleep on the floor in the hall outside Miss Sarah’s bed chamber. Mauma said, “Don’t get off your quilt for nothin’ but Miss Sarah calling. Don’t wander ’bout. Don’t light no candle. Don’t make noise. When Miss Sarah rings the bell, you make haste.”