This is Charles’ baptism blanket . . . My goodness, this is Thomas’ first riding shirt.”
Mauma didn’t waste a breath. She asked missus right then to hire her out. A month later she was hired legal to sew for a woman on Tradd Street. Mauma kept twenty cents on the dollar. The rest went to missus, but I knew mauma was selling underhand on the side—frilled bonnets, quilt tops, candlewick bedcovers, all sorts of wears that didn’t call for a fitting.
She had me count the money regular. It came to a hundred ninety dollars. I hated to tell her her money-pile could hit the roof, but that didn’t mean missus would sell us, specially to ourselves.
Thinking about all this, I said, “We sew too good for missus to let us go.”
“Well if she refuse us, then our sewing gon get real bad, real fast.”
“What makes you think she wouldn’t sell us to somebody else for spite?”
Mauma stopped working and the fight seemed to almost leave her. She looked tired. “It’s a chance we has to take, or else we gon end up like Snow.”
Poor Snow, he’d died one night last summer. Fell over in the privy. Aunt-Sister tied his jaw to keep his spirit from leaving, and he was laid out on a cooling board in the kitchen house for two days before they put him in a burial box. The man had spent his whole life carrying the Grimkés round town. Sabe took his place as the coachman and they brought some new boy from their plantation to be the footman. His name was Goodis, and he had one lazy eye that looked sideways. He watched me so much with that eye mauma’d said, “That boy got his heart fix on you.”
“I don’t want him fixing his heart on me.”
“That’s good,” she’d said. “I can’t buy nobody’s freedom but mine and yours. You get a husband, and he on his own.”
I tied off a knot and moved the embroider hoop over, saying to myself, I don’t want a husband and don’t plan on ending up like Snow on a cooling board in the kitchen house either.
“How much will it take to buy the both of us?” I asked.
Mauma rammed the needle in the cloth. She said, “That’s what you gon find out.”
Sarah
I’d never been inclined to keep a diary until I met Burke Williams. I thought by writing down my feelings, I would seize control over them, perhaps even curb what Reverend Hall called “the paroxysms of carnality.”
For what it’s worth, charting one’s passion in a small daybook kept hidden in a hatbox inside a wardrobe does not subdue passion in the least.
20 February 1811
I had imagined romantic love to be a condition of sweet utopia, not an affliction! To think, a few weeks ago, I thought my starved mind would be my worst hardship. Now my heart has its own ordeal. Mr. Williams, you torment me. It’s as if I’ve contracted a tropical fever. I cannot say whether I wish to be cured.
My diary overflowed with this sort of purple outburst.
3 March
Mr. Williams, why do you not call? It’s unfair that I must wait for you to act. Why must I, as a female, be at your disposal? Why can’t I send a calling note to you? Who made up these unjust rules? Men, that’s who. God devised women to be the minions. Well, I quite resent it!
9 March
A month has passed, and I see now what transpired between Mr. Williams and my naïve self on the balcony was a farce. He has toyed with me shamelessly. I knew it even then! He is a fickle-hearted cad, and I would no sooner speak to him now than I would speak to the devil.
When I was not engaged in aerating my feelings, or caring for little Nina, or fending off Mother’s attempts to draw me into my dutiful female tasks, I was foraging among the invitations and calling cards left on the desk by the front door. When Nina napped in the afternoon, I had Handful wheel the copper bathtub into my room and fill it with buckets of blistering water from the laundry.
This copper tub was a modern wonder imported from France by way of Virginia, and it was the talk of Charleston. It sat on noisy little wheels and traveled room to room like a portable dipping cart. You sat in it. You did not stand over a basin and pat water on yourself—no, you were