I lingered while Tomfry unlocked the back gate and let her out. After she stepped through to the alley, she turned round and looked at me, then walked on off.
After mauma left that day, I did everything usual. Cut sleeves and collars for the men slaves to have work shirts, got busy on missus’ splashers, these squares of cloth you tack up behind the washstands cause Lord forbid you get a drop of water on the wall. Each and every one had to be embroidered to the hilt.
Middle of the afternoon, I went out to the privy. The sun had stayed put, and the sky was blue as cornflowers. Aunt-Sister was in the kitchen house baking whole apples with custard poured round them, what’s called a bird nest pudding, and that whole smell was in the air. I was on my way back inside, relishing the sweet air after being in the latrine, when the carriage came flying through the gate with Sarah and Nina, both of them looking scared to pieces. And look who was driving. Goodis. When it rolled to a stop, their feet hit the ground running. They passed me without a word and struck for the house. The little gray traveling cape I’d sewed Nina flapped behind her like a dove wing.
Goodis gave me a long look of pity before he tugged the horse inside the stable.
When the long shadows started, I sat on the porch steps to the kitchen house and watched the gate for mauma. Cross the yard, Goodis held vigil with me in the stable door, whittling on a piece of wood. He knew something I didn’t.
The apple-eggs were still in the air when Aunt-Sister and Phoebe cleaned up and blew out the lamps. The dark came, and no moon.
Sarah found me hunched on the steps. She sat down close next to me. “. . . Handful,” she said. “. . . I wanted to be the one to tell you.”
“It’s mauma, ain’t it?”
“She got in a dispute with a white lady . . . The lady wanted her to give way on the street. She prodded your mother with an umbrella, and . . . you know your mother, she wouldn’t stand aside. She . . . she struck the lady.” Sarah sighed into the dark, and took hold of my hand. “The City Guard was there. They took her away.”
All this time I’d been waiting for her to say mauma was dead. Hope came back into me. “Where is she?”
Sarah looked away from me then. “. . . That’s what I’ve been trying to discover . . . We don’t know where she is . . . They were taking her to the Guard House, but when Thomas went to pay the fine, he was told Charlotte had managed to wrestle free . . . Apparently, she ran off . . . They said the Guard chased her, but lost her in the alleys. They’re out there looking for her now.”
All I could hear was breathing—Sarah, Goodis cross the yard, the horses in the stable, the creatures in the brush, the white people on their feather beds, the slaves on their little pallets thin as wafers, everything breathing but me.
Sarah walked with me to the basement. She said, “Would you like some warmed tea? I can put a little brandy in it.”
I shook my head. She wanted to draw me to her for solace, I could tell, but she held back. Instead, she laid her hand gentle on my arm and said, “She’ll come back.”
I said those words all night long.
I didn’t know how to be in the world without her.
Sarah
Charlotte’s disappearance brought a severe and terrible mercy, for not once throughout the harrowing weeks that followed Burke’s betrayal was I uncertain which event was tragic and which was merely unfortunate.
Someone—Mother, Father, perhaps Thomas—placed an ad in the Charleston Mercury.
Disappeared, Female Slave
Mulatto. Wide space between upper front teeth. Occasional limp. Answers to the name of Charlotte. Wearing red scarf and dark blue dress. A seamstress of skill and value. Belongs to Judge John Grimké. Large reward for her return.