Sewing Can Be Dangerous and Other Small Threads

by S. R. Mallery

  Silence. Her heart was pounding so hard she had trouble hearing anything else in the room. When was he going to attack? Was that the sound of some sort of weapon being taken out of a sheath? She couldn’t tell. She opened her mouth, but nothing came out.

  Suddenly, she pictured the noose around Bridget Bishop’s neck tightening, then drawn up and pulled, leaving the accused dangling helplessly in the air.

  It gave Deborah the strength to howl. “Whaaaah—” she began, just as two strong arms enveloped her, holding her gently, tenderly.

  The next day she threw out the quilt.

  LETTIE’S TALE

  Simply stated, John Beauregard was not a contented man. According to his wife, indeed, many of his neighbors, there was no reason on earth why he shouldn’t be happy, surrounded as he was by mint juleps, stylish day dresses, magnolias, hydrangeas, and white Georgian-Palladian columns on his extensive veranda. Yet for him, recently it was as if a chigger had lodged itself just below his skin, depositing its venom—itching first in one spot, then in another and another, leaving him in a constant state of discomfort. If people had bothered to ask, he might have told them how he had begun to feel caught in the middle of an antiquated world; gracious and refined to be sure, but in the end, contaminated by slavery. As he surveyed his inherited plantation, the White Birches, while others gawked at his front garden, with its planting beds edged by boxwood and its gravel pathway coated with seashells, all he could focus on were his many slaves out in the distant fields, hunched over in the hot sun, their bodies forming ‘n’s, as they quietly and steadily picked cotton for his profit.

  Dinners that included ham, boiled mutton, beef á la mode, boiled turkey stuffed with oysters, various vegetables, syllabub, plum and cheesecake pudding, and stewed apples with cream, once delightful to him, now had become intolerable, particularly when his wife Margaret would prattle on about something inconsequential one minute, then complain bitterly about the laziness of their darkies the next. He would scrutinize the faces of their house slaves then, searching for any reaction, but usually he saw none, simply impassive stares on tired, lined faces, worn by age and servitude.

  “Honestly, John, sometimes you can be so exasperating,” Margaret remarked one day, seconds after hearing a startling pronouncement from her husband. “Whatever gave you such an idea as that? Our darkies don’t need to learn to read and write. That would simply be too dangerous. Why would you ever want to do that, Sir?”

  “Because, my dear, ultimately, they are human beings, and as such, they, too, deserve to be educated, particularly our little family of house slaves. Why, Beulah has been Charles’ and Charlotte’s Mammy since they were born!” It was difficult masking the contempt he felt for his wife.

  “Being a mammy to our children is one thing, but educating her is quite another! I simply won’t have it!” Fear of slave insurrections kept Margaret narrow and strident, although her tone abruptly changed once her daughter Charlotte was carried in by her caretaker.

  “My little dahlin’! Did you have a nice nap?” Ignoring her slave, Margaret snatched the toddler away from Beulah’s strong, experienced arms, and with a firm “Hurrumpff!” aimed at John, retreated to her separate bedroom with Charlotte, leaving her husband alone with Mammy.

  After an awkward pause, he turned to her. “How’s your daughter, Lettie, Mammy? Is everything all right now?” he asked gently.

  She stared up at him, recognizing the stooped shoulders of a hollow marriage. Whereas her first instincts were to blanket her owner with comforting arms, instead she provided only a weak smile. “Yes’r. She doin’ gist fine.”

  How could she ever divulge the fact that her own toddler had had a high fever for several days now, and all her family’s frantic efforts to reduce it were unsuccessful? Certain subjects were just not discussed with white masters, even sympathetic ones, like Master John.

  There was no doubt she was fortunate. Just behind the main house, the house-slave quarters seemed a paradise compared to the field hands’ shacks. Built on wooden stilts several inches above ground, Beulah’s family could live without mud and earthworms in the fall and spring, not to mention yearlong lizards and field rodents scurrying across their planked floor. Narrow beds coddled their backs and there was even a larder, often filled with leftover tidbits, pilfered from an unsuspecting Margaret.

  Indeed, Beulah had always given thanks to the Lord for her decent life on the plantation, but tonight, upon finding her mother, Minah, sobbing and wringing her hands, the sudden wrench of her stomach told her the good fortune was about to end.

  “There’s somethin’ wrong wid dis child. She not right,” Minah moaned, clutching her granddaughter and dabbing her creviced cheeks with a shredded handkerchief.

  Cradling Lettie in her arms, Beulah swayed, cooed, and, clucked, anything to stop the toddler’s screams. But the little girl only wailed louder, cupping her tiny ears with frail hands as spittle ran down her chin.

  Her mother’s eyes rolled up towards the ceiling, as if all the Powers That Be were present in the room. “Whaz wrong? Whaz wrong?” she whispered. Suddenly, Lettie went quiet.

  “She better now, she better now!” Minah kept repeating, hopping from one foot to another in joy.

  “Hey, little girl, hey, little girl. You’s all right now!” laughed Beulah as she threw back her head and let out such a piercing, ‘Hallelujah, Lord,’ she thought she’d split her dress. Then, smiling down at her little daughter, she waited for a response. Lettie stared back up at her, her dark eyes shining, her mouth still.

  The tiny hairs on the back of her neck were slowly rising as she peered into her child’s eyes. “Hey, little girl. Give me a smile. Hey…hey!” No response.

  Laying her little one carefully down on the bed, she clapped her hands together, gently at first, then harder and harder, until the little cabin echoed with each new smack. Still, no response. Gaping at one another, Minah and Beulah suddenly recognized the truth: Lettie’s world had been transformed forever.

  Once secure and grateful for being privileged house slaves, they now woke each morning in a heart-thumping panic. Would Lettie be auctioned off the plantation due to her hearing deformity? Deaf slaves were certainly not valued commodities. Sleepless nights brought dark circles under their eyes and tired movements as they worked hour after hour, guarding their secret.

  Finally, John inquired what was the matter. When they admitted their problem, he promptly put them at ease. “First of all, you needn’t worry about me selling Lettie. She has a home as long as you all do, and that will probably be for the rest of your lives. I would set you all free if I could do so, but it is not my decision—the laws forbid it. But I have decided to teach your family how to read and write. What say you to that?” He attempted a supportive smile.

  He was met with utter silence; hope had never rested well with slaves. But true to his word, several times a week John schooled Beulah, Park, and even little Lettie in reading in spite of Margaret tossing her nose in the air and spitting out, “We’ll see about this!” as he hovered over their slaves, sounding out words. She would disappear then, shaking her head and wondering why he had become insane enough to even keep a deaf child on the premises in the first place!

  Yet, throughout, there remained one area that secured a place for Beulah and her extended family—quilts. Quilts were an integral part of their world, quilts that won awards for Margaret in the neighboring towns, and homespun, bright-colored quilts that kept them all warm at night after the evening air had chilled or in the early fog-laden mornings when the dampness superseded everything. And in time, as Lettie grew, so did her ability to sew beautiful coverlets, just like her mother and grandmother before her.

  Margaret would sneer at the crudeness of the slave quilts in comparison to the exquisite appliquéd ones that the two slaves had finished for her. As for Lettie, helping to piece her family’s quilts in front of a slow-burning fire became as much of a cherished history lesson about their ancestors as it
did about learning how to make tiny, uniformed stitches. Her needle flying through the clothes she had cut up for their quilts, Beulah would recount endless stories to her daughter all about their relatives and forefathers from Africa. With the little girl in front of her, she would carefully mouth her words about how clever they had all been, using secret embroidered codes on many of the fabrics they had carried with them when they were being abducted from their village.

  Lettie’s favorite story by far was about her great-grandfather, Ksistu, a blacksmith from the Mende tribe. It was their belief that being a well-skilled blacksmith held special powers, and although the other tribesmen could communicate through their drums, he could spread his words even farther through his hammer and anvil. Even so, he was allotted no special privileges and as a young man, he, too, was kidnapped and sent to Goree, the infamous slave pen on the West African coast.

  There, in a windowless cell, jammed up against countless scores of other future slaves, he inwardly raged. Twenty-four hours of human sweat, urine, feces, and vomit accosted him from the moment he awoke until he finally fell asleep. Yet watching his cellmates slowly deteriorate from the heat and rancid air, he vowed to maintain his pride above all else.

  But that task proved difficult, especially when herded down a long corridor, through ‘The Door of No Return’, then slung into the hold of a ship bound for the Americas. Shackled, lined up head-to-toe next to hundreds of other Africans, he could feel his body aching from the weight of the heavy iron chains and neck collar. If a person died, nothing was mentioned; the corpse would simply be hurled overboard to make room for someone else.

  After landing on the shores of South Carolina, Ksistu was given no time to rest. He was whisked away to a slave auction, where, beneath a blistering sun, he stood on a makeshift platform, crushed against a multitude of terrified Africans, waiting to be bought. As the slave traders greased their faces and torsos with wax to make them ‘shine’, Ksistu numbed. Surprisingly, he didn’t have long to wait. He was immediately sold to a gentleman farmer by the name of Montgomery Beauregard, who had specifically requested a slave with blacksmith capabilities. It seemed he had had a hankering for some intricate wrought-iron work on the gates leading up to his plantation, and was told by one of the traders about Ksistu.

  Lettie pointed to the beautiful gates outside the White Birches, glottal-stopping her sounds.

  “Yes, child,” Beulah enunciated carefully. “Dose gates was built by yo great-grandfather, and don’t ever forgit it!” She laughed proudly, promising to continue telling Lettie their family history, so that Lettie would be able to some day pass everything onto her own children. “Dis is how it’s done,” Beulah continued. “Dis is da African way, tellin’ stories so we don’ ever forgit.”

  Margaret’s family background provided money and breeding but little else. Although marrying such a man as John did not produce an ideal marriage, it did bring with it a certain continuity of the noblesse oblige to which she was accustomed. However, as John’s attitude changed, her increasing resentment towards their slaves needed an outlet, and Lettie became the perfect scapegoat. The next time Master John was away on business for a few days, Beulah was ordered to take her skinny, ten-year-old daughter down to the slave cabins to do some real work.

  The mammy did what she was told; she nodded outwardly with just the right amount of deference. On the inside, she prayed for a good, sharp hatchet.

  “Now, Lettie, don’t get upset,” she warned the little girl staring up at her with troubled eyes. “Dese po’ folks don’t live like we’s do. Dey can’t hep how dey look o’ smell. Dey’s good folk, tho’, and I gist don wan you t’ git scared.”

  Down by the row of field hands’ cabins, Lettie grasped her mother’s hand so tightly Beulah finally had to let go and fan out her own fingers to bring back some circulation. The smell of frying salt pork wafted out of holes where windows should have been, reminding Beulah of the harsh childhood she had spent many hours trying to forget. Chickens bobbed and clucked in the tiny front area, pecking at stray cornmeal, twisting their heads around in frenetic movements before reaching down again to peck at some more. Over a line of rope stretched between two trees, crude, shoddy material from England (Negra Cloth Beulah once heard Miz Margaret call it) was hung out to dry, in an effort to remove any leftover sizing, and/or lice.

  At the tin front door, Beulah rapped softly, knowing full well that if her knocks were too loud or insistent, her cousins inside might assume it was a white person and get frightened. Seconds later, the door opened and Lettie could see about eight people sitting around on wooden stools, the earthen floor, and an old barnyard crate, about to eat their meager supper. Behind them stood their chimbly, composed of sticks and red mud. Beulah shuddered, remembering how once when she was fifteen-years-old, one of these chimblies had caught on fire, filling her parent’s cabin with choking red smoke and burning twigs.

  One of them instantly cried out, “Cuzin Beulah! Cuzin Beulah! ‘Member me? I’s yo’ cuzin Mattie. Mattie from da ol’ days!”

  Beulah peered in at the crinkled, gray-haired woman and gasped. Her cousin had aged so much over the last twenty years she hardly recognized her. The last time they had seen each other, Mattie had been an active cotton picker in the fields, Beulah just graduated from water carrier to weed puller. Now, facing one another, grinning through their tears, any thoughts of where did all those years go were brushed aside.

  “Don’ worry, Cuzin,” Mattie comforted her after a supper of salt pork and garden vegetables. “We ain’t gonna let her work too hard. She kin be water carrier only, so she ain’t gonna get no hard labor. An’ if dat mean ol’ Miz Margaret ever come down here to check wid things, we gist gonna put Lettie right out in da field for gist dat time. Miz Margaret don’ have t’ know how it really be. Don’ worry, Cuzin, we gonna ‘Put on the Massa’ and she never know’d da dif’rence!”

  They both laughed, recognizing the stupidity of slave owners and suddenly, Mammy felt considerably better. And if she could see her daughter two times a week that would be more than tolerable. Still, she let her cousin know straight off that Lettie’s reading was top priority.

  Cousin Mattie was as good as her word. She insisted that Lettie read to herself as well as teach the others, and as the children concentrated by the firelight each night, the young ones cocooned in gunny sacks, the older ones draped in their one outfit—a soiled cloth, drawn at the waist by a roped cord—they all learned the scriptures from an old, tattered Bible Miz Margaret had thrown away. Their backs warming, their eyes burning, they all mouthed the words slowly, deliberately, taking their cues from their educated cousin as she used her own unique form of sign language. Secrecy remained uppermost in their minds; none of them could ever be caught reading.

  In time, Mattie furthered Lettie’s knowledge of quilting, and from the beginning was astonished by the agility of the young girl. Small, even stitches that for many might take a lifetime to perfect, came naturally to the deaf child, who delighted everyone by presenting each family member with their own, well-crafted quilt.

  At first, the idea of slavery wasn’t even a conscious thought for Lettie. She had been well-treated up at the Big House and even here, in the lowlands, surrounded by her cousins with whom she romped through the tall-bladed grass each sunset just before snuggling up together, heads to wriggly toes on one large, straw mat. But as they all matured, she could see how arduous their tasks had become. How being a half-quarter hand was infinitely more grueling than being a quarter hand. With the other boys becoming full field hands, Lettie watched them return from long, backbreaking days, exhausted, bitter, transformed from the carefree boys she had gotten to know.

  Her narrow world was shifting and with it, an awareness of little things that now called out to her; secrets whispered between the adults behind doorways, conversations stopped mid-sentence as she approached. It also occurred to her that more and more, slaves were disappearing. Where did they go? she wondered. Was that the se
cret? For the first time in her life, a tight knot was growing inside her chest, keeping her on high alert.

  Increasingly, Margaret would forge down to the cabins, and each time, Mattie, having pushed Lettie out of the largest window hole to the fields, assured her mistress, the deaf slave was indeed laboring tirelessly. Barely containing her triumph, Margaret would snort in pleasure then sashay back towards the house, her petticoats taking free rein as they flounced under her hoop skirt and brocade day dress.

  By sixteen, Lettie truly understood the concept of slavery and how no amount of ‘special’ treatment could stand up to Miz Margaret’s determination. If only she could talk to Master John. He had always been so kind and gentle to her. But these days, he was nowhere to be seen and word had it he didn’t have long to live. So she never returned to the Big House with the huge columns and boxwood hedges, and her images of marble halls, wide staircases, mahogany beds covered with beautiful appliquéd quilts gradually faded into a hazy, childhood memory.

  Still, in spite of everything, she managed to cling to her one joy as if it were her lifeline: quilting. As she grew, so did her reputation as an accomplished seamstress. Finally permitted to sit around with the women, she stayed in her own world, rhythmically plaiting her needle in and out of the fabrics while they chatted and sewed.

  One night, they jolted her out of that world.

  “Mattie, it be time to tell her,” one of the women suggested, resting her patchwork down on her lap.

  “I gist don’ know. She sure smart ‘nuff, but what go on in dat head of hers, I gist…I gist don’ know,” Mattie cautioned.

  But the next week she did begin pushing Lettie towards specific quilt patterns. First, there was a Flying Geese design, where dark mini-triangles of fabric went in one direction, lighter triangles headed in another. Next, she coaxed Lettie into making a Monkey Wrench quilt, with blocks shaped like anvils. But the moment Lettie drifted off into one of her own designs, Mattie’s brows would pinch and her lips tighten.