Another square was mauma sewing a wild purple dress covered with moons and stars, only she was doing it in a mouse-hole, the walls bent over her.
Going picture to picture, felt like I was turning pages in a book she’d left behind, one that held her last words. Somewhere along the way, I stopped feeling anything, like when you lay on your arm wrong and wake up and it’s pins and needles. I started looking at the appliqués that had taken mauma two years to sew like they didn’t have any belonging to me, cause that was the only way I could bear to see them. I let them float by like panes of light.
Here was mauma with her leg hitched up behind her with a strap, standing in the yard getting the one-legged punishment. Here was another spirit tree same like the other one, but it was ours, and it didn’t have vultures, only green leaves and a girl underneath with a book and a whip coming down to strike her.
Last square was a man, a bull of a man with a carpenter apron on—Mr. Denmark Vesey—and next to him she’d stitched four numbers big as he was: 1884. I didn’t have a notion what that meant.
I went straight to stitching. Hell with missus and her gowns. All that day and far in the night, I pieced mauma’s squares together with the tiny stitches you can’t barely see. I sewed on the lining and filled the quilt with the best padding we’d saved and the whole collection of our feathers. Then I took shears to my hair and cut every bit of it off my head, down to a scalp of fuzz. I loosed the cut hair all through the stuffing.
That’s when I remembered about the money. Eight years, saving. I went over and looked down in the trunk and it was empty as air. Four hundred dollars, gone same as mauma. And I’d run out of places to look. I couldn’t draw a breath.
Next day, after I’d slept a little, I sewed the layers of the quilt together with a tacking stitch. Then I wrapped the finish quilt round me like a glory cloak. I wore it out into the yard where Aunt-Sister was bundled up chopping cane sugar, and she said, “Girl, what you got on you? What’d you do to your head?”
I didn’t say nothing. I walked back to the tree with my breath trailing clouds, and I wrapped new thread round the trunk.
Then the noise came into the sky. The crows were flying over and smoke from the chimneys rising to meet them.
“There you go,” I said. “There you go.”
PART THREE
October 1818–November 1820
Handful
Some days I’d be coming down East Bay and catch sight of a woman with cinnamon skin slipping round a corner, a snatch of red scarf on her head, and I’d say, There you are again. I was twenty-five years old and still talking to her.
Every October on the anniversary-day of mauma going missing, us slaves sat in the kitchen house and reminisced on her. I hated to see that day come dragging round.
On the six-year mark, Binah patted my leg and said, “Your mauma gone, but we still here, the sky ain’t fall in yet.”
No, but every year one more slat got knocked out from under it.
That evening, they dredged up stories on mauma that went on past supper. Stealing the bolt of green cloth. Hoodwinking missus with her limp. Wrangling the cellar room. Getting herself hired out. That whole Jesus-act she did. Tomfry told about the time missus had him search the premise and mauma was nowhere on it, how we slipped her in the front door to the roof, then trumped up that story about her falling asleep there. Same old tales. Same laughing and slapping.
Now that she was gone, they loved her a lot better.
“You sure do have her eyes,” Goodis said, looking at me moon-face like he always did.
I did have her eyes, but the rest of me had come from my daddy. Mauma said he was an undersize man and blacker than the backside of the moon.