I didn’t see any sense in keeping the feud going. “I don’t have a bicker with you. I won’t be bothering you anymore.”
That took the nettle from her. Her shoulders dipped and her face turned soft. That’s when I noticed the scarf she was wearing. Red. Edges sewed with a perfect chain stitch. Little oil spots on the side. I said, “That’s my mauma’s head scarf.”
Her lips opened like the stopper had popped from the bottle. I waited, but she stood there, with her mouth empty.
“I know that scarf,” I said.
She set down her basket of cottons and took it off her head. “Go on, take it.”
I ran my finger along the stitched hem, cross the creases where her hair had been. I undid the scarf on my head and tied mauma’s on. Low on my forehead, the way she wore it.
“How’d you get it?” I said.
She shook her head. “I guess you ought to know. The night your mauma disappeared, she showed up at our door. Denmark said the Guard would be looking for a woman with a red scarf, so I took hers and gave her one of mine. A plain brown one that wouldn’t draw notice.”
“You helped her? You helped her get away?”
She didn’t give any kind of answer, she said, “I do what Denmark says do.” Then she sashayed off with her head stripped bare.
I sewed through that day and night and all the next day and night, and the whole time I wore mauma’s scarf. The whole time I thought about her showing up at Mr. Vesey’s that night, how he knew more than he was saying.
Every time I took the dress upstairs for fittings, the house would be in a tizzy getting ready for the mourners. Missus said half the city was coming. Aunt-Sister and Phoebe were baking funeral biscuits and seeing to the tea sets. Binah shrouded the paintings and mirrors with black swags and Eli was put to cleaning. Minta had the worst job, in there getting hankies and taking the brunt.
Tomfry set up master Grimké’s portrait in the drawing room and fixed a table with tokens. Had his beaver top hat and stick pins and the books of law he wrote. Thomas brought over a cloth banner that said, Gone, But Not Forgotten, and Tomfry put that on the table, too, with a clock stopped to the hour of his death. Missus didn’t know the time exact. Sarah had written he passed in the late afternoon, so missus said, just make it 4:30.
When she wasn’t crying, she was fuming that Sarah hadn’t had the sense to cut off a lock of master Grimké’s hair and put it in the letter. It left her without anything to go in her gold mourning brooch. Another thing she didn’t like was the notice that came out in the Mercury. It said he’d been laid to rest in the North without family or friends and this would surely be a travail to a great son of South Carolina.
I don’t know how I got the dress done in time. It was the finest dress I ever made. I strung hundreds of black glass beads, then sewed the strands into a collar that looked like a spider web. I fitted it round the neck and let it drape to the bust. When missus saw it, she said the one and only kind thing I can’t forget. She said, “Why, Hetty, your mother would be proud.”
I went through the window and over the wall on a Sunday after the callers had quit coming by to give their condolence. It was our day off and the servants were lolling round and missus was shut away in her room. I had a short walk past the front of the house before I could feel safe, and coming round the side of it, I saw Tomfry on the front steps, haggling with the slave boy who huckstered fish. They were bent over what looked like a fifty-pound basket of flounders. I put my head down and kept going.
“Handful! Is that you?”
When I looked up, Tomfry was staring at me from the top step. He was old now, with milk in his eyes, and it crossed my mind to say, No, I’m somebody else, but then, he could’ve seen the cane in my hand. You couldn’t misjudge that. I said, “Yeah, it’s me. I’m going to the market.”