in Africa, the Fon people, kept their history on a quilt.
I left off my embroidery and studied the figures she was sewing—a man, a woman, and a little girl between them. They were joined at the hands. “Who’re they supposed to be?”
“When I get it all done, I tell you the story square by square.” She grinned, showing the big space between her teeth.
After she stitched on the three people, she free-cut a tiny quilt top with black triangles and sewed it at the girl’s feet. She cut out little shackles and chains for their legs, then, a host of stars that she sewed all round them. Some stars had tails of light, some lay on the ground. It was the story of the night her mauma—my granny-mauma—got sold and the stars fell.
Mauma worked in a rush, needing to get the story told, but the more she cut and stitched, the sadder her face turned. After a while her fingers slowed down and she put the quilt square away. She said, “This gon take a while, I guess.” Then she picked up a half-done quilt with a flower appliqué. It was milk-white and rose-pink, something sure to sell. She worked on it lackluster. The sun guttered in the leaves over our heads, and I watched the shadows pass over her.
For the sake of some gossip, I told her, “Miss Sarah met a boy at one of her parties, and he’s all she wants to talk about.”
“I got somebody like that,” she said.
I looked at her like her head had fallen off. I set down the embroidery hoop, and the white dresser cover flopped in the dirt. “Well, who is he, where’d you get him?”
“Next trip to the market, I take you to see him. All I gon say is: he a free black, and he one of a kind.”
I didn’t like she’d been keeping things from me. I snapped at her. “And you gonna marry Mr. One of a Kind Free Black?”
“No, I ain’t. He already married.”
Course he was.
Mauma waited through my pique, then said, “He come into some money and bought his own freedom. He cost a fortune, but his massa have a gamble debt, so he only pay five hundred dollars for hisself. And he still have money after that to buy a house at 20 Bull Street. It sit three blocks from where the governor live.”
“How’d he get all this money?”
“Won it in the East Bay Street lottery.”
I laughed out loud. “That’s what he told you? Well, I reckon this is the luckiest slave that ever lived.”
“It happen ten years ago, everybody know ’bout it. He buy a ticket, and his number come up. It happen.”
The lottery office was down the street from the market, near the docks. I’d passed it myself when mauma took me out to learn the shopping. There was always a mish-mash of people getting tickets: ship captains, City Guard, white laborers, free blacks, slaves, mulattoes, and creoles. There’d be two, three men in silk cravats with their carriages waiting.
I said, “How come you don’t buy a ticket?”
“And waste a coin on some fancy chance?”
For the last five years, every lick of strength mauma had left from sewing for missus had gone toward her dollar bill collection. She’d been hired out steady since I was eleven, but it wasn’t on the sly anymore, and thank you kind Jesus for that. Her counterfeit badge and all that sneaking out she’d done for the better part of a year had put white hair on my head. I used to pull it out and show it to her. I’d say, “Look what you’re doing to me.” She’d say, “Here I is, saving up to buy us freedom and you worrying ’bout hair.”
When I was thirteen, missus had finally given in and let mauma hire out. I don’t know why. Maybe she got tired of saying the word no. Maybe it was the money she wanted—mauma could put a hundred dollars a year in missus’ pocket—but I know this much, it didn’t hurt when mauma made missus a patchwork quilt for Christmas that year. It had a square for each of her children made from some remnant of theirs. Mauma told her, “I know this ain’t nothing much, but I sewed you a memory quilt of your family so you can wrap up in it after they gone.” Missus touched each square: “Why, this is from the dress Mary wore to her coming out . . .