missing, you sit the pail next to the cistern where I can see it from the back gate. You do that for me.”
This scared me worse. “And if you see it, what you gonna do—run off? Just leave me?” Then I broke down.
She rubbed my shoulders the way she always liked to do. “Handful, child. I would soon die ’fore I leave you. You know that. If that pail sit by the cistern, that just help me know what’s coming, that’s all.”
When their social season was starting off again, and me and mauma couldn’t keep up with all the gowns and frocks, she up and hired herself out without permission. I learned it one day after the supper meal, while we were standing in the middle of the work yard. Miss Sarah had been in one of her despairs all day, and I thought the worst things I had to fret over was how low she got and mauma slipping out the window. But mauma, she pulled a slave badge out from her pocket. If some owner hired his slave out, he had to buy a badge from the city, and I knew master Grimké hadn’t bought any such. Having a fake badge was worse than having missus’ green silk.
I took the badge and studied it. It was a small square of copper with a hole poked through the top so you could pin it to your dress. It was carved with words. I sounded them out till it finally came clear what I was saying. “Dome-stic . . . Do-mes-tic. Ser-vant. Domestic Servant!” I cried. “Number 133. Year 1805. Where’d you get this?”
“Well, I ain’t been out there grogging and lazing round this whole time—I been finding work for myself.”
“But you got more work here than we can see to.”
“And I don’t make nothin’ from it, do I?” She took the badge from me and dropped it back in her pocket.
“One of the Russell slaves name Tom has his own blacksmith shop on East Bay. Missus Russell let him work for hire all day and she don’t take but three-quarter of what he make. He made this badge for me, copied it off a real one.”
I had the mind of an eleven-year-old, but I knew right off this blacksmith wasn’t just some nice man doing her a favor. Why was he putting himself in danger to make a fake badge for her?
She said, “I gon be making bonnets and dresses and quilts for a lady on Queen Street. Missus Allen. I told her my name was Pearl, and I belong to massa Dupré on the corner of George and East Bay. She say to me, ‘You mean that French tailor?’ I say, ‘Yessum, he can’t fill my time no more with work, so he letting me out for hire.’”
“What if she checks on your story?”
“She an old widow, she ain’t gon check. She just say, ‘Show me your badge.’
Mauma was proud of her badge and proud of herself.
“Missus Allen say she pay me by the garment, and her two daughters need clothes and coverings for they children.”
“How you gonna get all this extra work done?”
“I got you. I got all the hours of the night.”
Mauma burned so many candles working in the dark, she took to swiping them from whatever room she happened on. Her eyes grew down to squints and the skin round them wrinkled like drawing a straight stitch. She was tired and frayed but she seemed better off inside.
She brought home money and stuffed it inside the gunny sack, and I helped her sew day and night, anytime I didn’t have duties drawing Miss Sarah’s baths, cleaning her room, keeping up with her clothes and her privy pot. When we got the widow’s orders done, mauma would squirm out the window and carry the parcels to her door where she got more fabric for the next batch. Then she would wait till dark and sneak over the back gate. All this dangerous business got natural as the day was long.
One afternoon during a real warm spell in January, missus sent Cindie to the basement to fetch mauma, something about rosettes falling off her new empire waist dress, and course, mauma was gone over the wall. She didn’t lock the door while she was out cause she knew missus would have Prince saw the door off its hinges if she didn’t answer, and how was she gonna explain an empty room behind a locked door?
News of a