Free The Invention of Wings: With Notes by Sue Monk Kidd Page A

for fastening clothes, but this one is beautiful, just plain uncommon, so I decided to let it stand for my desire to be a lawyer.”
    “I know about the button. I didn’t touch it, I just opened the box and looked at it.”
    “I don’t mind if you hold it,” I told her.
    “I have a thimble and it stands for pushing a needle and keeping my fingertip from turning sore, but I could let that stand for something else.”
    When I asked her what, she said, “I don’t know, ’cept I wanna sew like mauma.”
    Hetty got into the spirit. She retold the entire story I’d overheard her mother tell that night about her grandmother coming from Africa, appliquéing quilts with the triangles. When Hetty talked about the spirit tree, her voice took on a reverential tone.
    Before we went back down the hatch, Hetty said, “I took a spool of thread from your room. It was laying in your drawer no use to anybody. I’m sorry, I can bring it back.”
    “Oh. Well, go ahead and keep it, but please Hetty, don’t steal anymore, even little things. You could land in terrible trouble.”
    As we descended the ladder, she said, “My real name is Handful.”

Handful
    M auma came down with a limp. When she was in her room or in the kitchen house for meals, she didn’t have any trouble, but the minute she stepped in the yard, she dragged her leg like it was a dead log. Aunt-Sister and them watched her go lame and shook their heads. They didn’t like that kind of trick and didn’t mind saying it. Mauma told them, “After you get
your
one-legged punishment, you can say all you want. Till then, you best shut up.”
    After that, they stayed clear of her. Stopped talking if she showed up, started back when she left. Mauma said it was a hateful shun.
    Her eyes burned with anger all the time now. Sometimes she turned her blackened stare on me. Sometimes she turned it to cleverness. One day I found her at the foot of the stairs, explaining to missus she had a hard time climbing up to do her sewing, and for that matter, a hard time climbing the carriage house steps to her room. She said, “But I gon make out somehow, don’t worry.” Then while missus and me watched, she pulled on the bannister and dragged herself to the top, calling on Jesus the whole way.
    Next we know, missus had Prince clear out a big room in the cellar, on the side of the house that backed up to the work yard wall. He moved mauma’s bed in there and all her stuff. Took the quilt frame down from her old ceiling and nailed it on the new one. Missus said mauma would do all the sewing in her room from here out and had Prince bring down the lacquer sewing table.
    The cellar room was large as three slave rooms put together. It was bright whitewash and had its own tiny window near the ceiling, but looking through it, you didn’t see clouds in the sky, you saw bricks in the wall. Mauma made it a calico curtain anyway. She got hold of some pictures of sailing ships from a cast-off book and tacked them on the wall. A painted rocking chair turned upin there, along with a beat-up toilet table she covered with Ticklingburg cloth. On top, she set empty colored bottles, a box of candles, a cake of tallow, and a tin dish piled with coffee beans for her chewing pleasure. Where she got all this hoard, I don’t know. Along the wall shelf, she laid out our sewing stuff: the patch box, the pouch with needles and thread, the sack of quilt stuffing, pin cushion, shears, tracing wheel, charcoal, stamping papers, measuring ribbons. Sitting off by themselves was my brass thimble and the red thread I stole from Miss Sarah’s drawer.
    Once mauma got the place fixed like a palace, she asked Aunt-Sister could they all come give a prayer for her “poor sorry room.” One evening here came the lot of them all too glad to see how poor and sorry it was. Mauma offered each of them a coffee bean. She let them look to their hearts’ content, then showed them how the door locked with an iron slide bolt, how