her their gaiety wasn’t contentment, but survival.
On this evening, though, the kitchen house was wrapped in a pall. Heat and smoke from the oven glugged out the window, reddening my face and neck. I caught glimpses of Aunt-Sister, Binah, Cindie, Mariah, Phoebe, and Lucy in their calico dresses, but heard only the clunk of cast iron pots.
Finally, Binah’s voice carried to me. “You mean to say she ain’t eat all day?”
“Not one thing,” Aunt-Sister said.
“Well, I ain’t eating neither if they strap me up like they done her,” Phoebe said.
A cold swell began in my stomach. Strapped her up? Who? Not Hetty, surely.
“What she think would happen if she pilfer like that?” I believed that voice to be Cindie’s. “What’d she say for herself?”
Aunt-Sister spoke again. “She won’t talk. Handful up there in bed with her, talking for both of ’em.”
“Poor Charlotte,” said Binah.
Charlotte! They’d strapped her up. What did that mean? Rosetta’s melodic keening rose in my memory. I saw them bind her hands. I saw the cowhide split her back and the blood-flowers open and die on her skin.
I don’t remember returning to the house, only that I was suddenly in the warming kitchen, ransacking the locked cupboard where Mother kept her curatives. Having unlocked it often to retrieve a bromide for Father, I easily found the key and removed the blue bottle of liniment oil and a jar of sweet balm tea. Into the tea, I dropped two grains of laudanum.
As I stuffed them into a basket, Mother entered the corridor. “What, pray tell, are you doing?”
I threw the question back at her. “. . . . . . What did you do?”
“Young lady, hold your tongue!”
Hold my tongue? I’d held the poor, tortured thing the near whole of my life.
“. . . . . . What did you do?” I said again, almost shouting.
She drew her lips tight and yanked the basket from my arm.
An unknown ferocity took me over. I wrenched the basket back from her and strode toward the door.
“You will not set foot from this house!” she ordered. “I forbid it.”
I stepped through the back door into the soft gloom, into the terror and thrill of defiance. The sky had gone cobalt. Wind was coursing in hard from the harbor.
Mother followed me, shrieking, “I forbid it.” Her words flapped off on the breezes, past the oak branches, over the brick fence.
Behind us, shoes scraped on the kitchen house porch, and turning, we saw Aunt-Sister, Binah, Cindie, all of them shadowed in the billowy dark, looking at us.
Mother stood white-faced on the porch steps.
“I’m going to see about Charlotte.” I said. The words slid effortlessly over my lips like a cascade of water, and I knew instantly the nervous affliction in my voice had gone back into hibernation, for that was how it had happened in the past, the debility gradually weakening, until one day I opened my mouth and there was no trace of it.
Mother noticed, too. She said nothing more, and I trod toward the carriage house without looking back.
Handful
When dark fell, mauma started to shake. Her head lolled and her teeth clattered. It wasn’t like Rosetta and her fits, where all her limbs jerked, it was like mauma was cold inside her bones. I didn’t know what to do but pat her arms and legs. After a while, she grew still. Her breathing drew heavy, and before I knew it, I drifted off myself.
I started dreaming and in that dream I was sleeping. I slept under an arbor of thick green. It was bent perfect over me. Vines hung round my arms. Scuppernongs fell alongside my face. I was the girl sleeping, but at the same time I could see myself, like I was part of the clouds floating by, and then I looked down and saw the arbor wasn’t really an arbor, it was our quilt frame covered in vines and leaves. I went on sleeping, watching myself sleeping, and the clouds went on floating, and I saw inside the thick green again. This time, it was mauma herself inside there.
I don’t know what woke me. The room was quiet, the light gone.
Mauma said, “You wake?” Those were the first words she’d said since Tomfry strapped her.
“I’m awake.”
“Awright. I gon tell you a story. You listening, Handful?”
“I’m listening.”
My eyes had got used to the dark, and I saw the door still propped wide to the hallway, and mauma beside me, frowning. She said, “Your granny-mauma come from Africa when