“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Well then, looks like you got company,” Kwako tells me. “Little vacation might be nice. We hardly never get one.”
“I’m very grateful.”
We finish our drinks in silence, then Kwako asks if I’d like to see some of Barbara’s quilts. I understand he’s suggesting I buy one in compensation for the favor they’re doing me. We squeeze into a back bedroom. It’s also jammed with lumber. Lovely quilts of all colors droop over clothes racks, chests of drawers, chairs, and the bed. Outside, a rose bush scrapes the window screen. The bed’s headboard ticks in the room’s awful swelter. The air burns my throat. I stumble against a framed poem on the wall. Barbara catches me and it. I apologize; she smiles. I study the words. “These were part of our wedding vows,” she tells me. “Goes all the way back to slavery days.” She straightens the frame on the walclass="underline"
Barbara’s eyes mist, but I can’t tell if it’s nostalgia of the heat. “Reminds me of the song my mama used to sing while she did her piecework,” I say, fingering a brown and yellow quilt on the bed. The fabric cools my palm. “Foller the drinking gou’d…”
Barbara grins. “When the sun come back / When the first quail call / Then the time is come / Foller the drinking goud…”
“So it’s a famous tune?”
“Oh my, yes. Old slave song, from the Underground Railroad. My grandma taught it to me.”
“What’s its significance? Do you know?”
“Sure. Grandma said there’s a feller name Peg Leg Joe, former sailor, an abolitionist, who’d travel from plantation to plantation, working, and while he’s there, he’d teach the slaves this song. Always, the following spring after he’d gone — when the first quail called — a few slaves would disappear, heading north, following the Big Dipper, on the trail he’d scoped out for them.” She steps past me and unfolds a huge blue quilt from a chair. “I made this one after patterns Old Granny taught me, designs going back to slavery.” She runs her fingers across appliqué and beadwork in the upper right-hand corner. “These represent stars, see, the spring constellations. Plantation women worked from can to can’t — sunup till after dark every day — so the stars was there in the morning when they started, just beginning to fade, and they’s there when they finished up at night. After supper, the women would all gather on a porch and commence talking and piecing.” She asks Kwako to help her spread the quilt on the bed. Vibrant colors — reds and greens across the blue. But I’m embarrassed for her when I see how crooked the lines are: just like Mama’s. As if hearing my thoughts, she tells me, “Old West African superstition, says Evil travels in a straight line, so the slave women, they’d sew their lines all cattywompers, block Evil’s path.”
“On purpose?”
“You bet. To throw off suspicion, too — see, these quilts was signs in the Underground Railroad. The patterns formed a map. When they got word it was safe to travel, the women would hang their quilts out over windowsills or on porch railings, signal folks the running time had come. The masters, they didn’t think twice about it. Figgered quilting was just a hobby for Mammy, kept her happy in the evenings, and the sloppier-looking the work, the less attention it drawn to itself. But all the slaves knew what these things meant.”
“Road guides.”
“That’s right. Hidden in plain sight.” She pats a square to the left of the stars. “Shoofly.”
“My mama used that one.”
“Well, Shoofly say it’s time to shoo!” She points to another square, just below the first.
The “drunkard’s path” is another raggedy-ass pattern Mama made. I run my hands across it. “So this is how it’s supposed to look?”
Barbara nods. “Your mama must have been real proud of her roots, hewing to the old piecing ways.”
“She — ” I lift the quilt, rub it against my cheek. My eyes sting. “I don’t know.”
“You like it?” Kwako asks. “Two hundred bucks, even. Real bargain.”
She scowls at him.
I clear my throat. “I do like it.”
“We’ll work something out when you pick us up on Thursday, how’s that?” Batbara says.
Kwako peers out the window, past the rose bush, picking his teeth with his little finger. “Yessir, business sure slow today.”
“No, that’s okay,” I say. “I’d like the quilt. I’d be honored to have it.” I pull the checkbook from my purse.
“Here at the Multicultural Museum, we only prepared to deal in cash,” Kwako says.
“Oh. Of course. Well then — ”
“Thursday will be fine,” Barbara assures me, touching my arm. “Take it. I hope it pleases your mama.”
“Actually,” I say, “my mama’s passed.”
Kwako steps over to help me fold the quilt. “Then I guess we’d better find your daddy, eh?”
On a dirt road between flooded rice paddies and Houston’s southern edge, I stop the car and pull Barbara’s quilt across my knees.
In Dale Licht’s house, in that white man’s house, she sang a slave song, stitched a freedom map into her African patterns. My mama, who ran from the niggers, who denied her own family. My mama, who refused me a black heritage (though she did name me Telisha, didn’t she — why?), weaving for herself a rich, down-low world.
Hidden in plain sight.
What did she value about her own darkness? What part of her wouldn’t let go? I bunch the beaded stars in my lap, lift the fabric to my lips, and kiss the flying geese.
The sky is smudged paper, soiled by refinery smoke. Heavy air force planes drone low over the land whose still water glistens among spreading weeds. A chain-link fence, tilted and slack, runs along the road near my Taurus. A rusty sign on it says, AMERICAN INDUSTRIAL SECURITY,INC. Through my rolled-down window I smell the lot’s years of neglect. Rotted leaves in the mud, a thousand insect eggs gone to ruin. Dust scuffles. The day’s bad breath. Wrecked cars sit in a field up ahead. On broken antennae they snag cottonwood fuzz from the air, strands of wind-ripped spider webs. Foam rubber spills from split seats. Torqued metal. Fine raw material for Kwako. Gather up rubber, plastic, leather, glass. Hammer, sand, plane, and saw. Make me a mama, sir, will you please, sir? A figure I can lift and carry. Pencil mouth. Shoe-heel ears. A bra stuffed with nothing (those cancerous breasts). Top her off with a plume — a shredded get well card, sent a day too late.
I’m staining the quilt with my tears. My hands hurt, gripping its edges so hard. If I could make it through the muck out there I’d comb through the death-cars, the nuts and bolts of abandonment, until I found a radio that would sing to me from far across the years, my mama’s voice, the voices of buried slaves, steady, fearful, hushed: Foller the drinking gou’d / Foller the Risen Lawd.