In the evenings the boys sat under a quilting frame and listened to stories of escape. Though the mother, it seemed to them, had resigned herself to a life of slavery, she had high hopes that her sons would grow up to carry on the great tradition of plotting escapes established by their forebears from the first day they were shackled into slave castles on the old continent. She relentlessly brought them up on a daily diet of stories of great flights and heroic attempts — often repeated with variations and embellishments to make them sink deeper into the boys’ minds.
Soon word of her wonderful stories spread and children from neighboring cabins came to listen. Even white children from the big house came some evenings. They gathered around bonfires of fall leaves to hear of Ananse the wily spider who came with the ancestors from the old continent and whose bag was always full of tricks. She developed a performance where she played all the parts, and incorporated the shadows and the flames and the smoke as characters in the elaborate tales that she seemed to improvise on the spot. To the frenzied drumming of Abednego, who had developed into a keen and nimble drummer, she draped herself in layers of quilts and donned masks of feathers and leaves and woven grass and frayed feed sacks. She pranced around and walked on air; becoming a demonic monster in one story, the wily Ananse spinning a web of deceit in another, and a kindly spirit that guided the children from the world of the unborn through the maze of birth in yet another one.
She climbed the sycamore tree in front of the cabin, stood on the highest branch and flapped her wings like a hawk. Then she swooped down in a spinning flight and landed in the midst of the open-mouthed children. Her gleaming black face reflected the flames and became purple as a result. They danced on her smooth skin until they jutted out of her eyes like red-hot blades. She became the sun as she narrated the story of The Sun. The Sun was very lonely because she was the only living thing in the whole wide world. She sat there brooding and feeling sorry for herself. The sharper children noted that the sun was now female whereas it was usually the moon that gloried in that gender. Yes, she sat there brooding and feeling sorry for herself. A big tear rolled out of her eye and dropped on the ground. It rolled on and on down the hill, gathering dust until it hit a boulder and divided into many tears that became children as they continued to roll. They were Children of the Tear. They lived in peace in a dust bowl and did not have any need for food, clothing or labor. Then one day The Sun farted. Instead of the bad wind coming out, a giraffe and Divided came out. A giraffe is a long-necked animal from the old continent, whereas Divided was a creature with the head and torso of a man and the body of a lion. She paused. She stared into the eyes that were almost popping out with expectation.
The children screamed in unison: “And then what happened?”
She pretended she had forgotten what happened after the giraffe and Divided came onto the scene and challenged the children to complete the story themselves. They came with their various versions of how the giraffe and Divided conspired to spoil the peace of the Children of the Tear, and how later the giraffe and Divided fell out between themselves and then fell into a crevice that The Sun had opened on the earth to save the Children of the Tear.
But one of The Owner’s sons would not buy the very beginning of the story.
“You say there was nothing in the world…only The Sun?” he asked.
And when all the children shouted that it was indeed so, the world was empty except for The Sun, the boy asked: “What about Jesus? Where was Jesus when all this was happening?”
“It was before there was nobody,” the Abyssinian Queen explained. “Not even Jesus. Not even trees and rivers.”
“Not even chickpeas,” his little sister piped. He loved chickpeas and at lunchtime they had fought over some that she had spilled on the floor by mistake.
The next day the Abyssinian Queen was surprised to see the shadow of the lady of the house looming at the cabin door. She immediately put her sewing on a bench and rushed to welcome her. The lady of the house was, however, not in any mood for pleasantries. She told the Abyssinian Queen that she was greatly offended that she was teaching her children voodoo stories, telling them that there was a time when there was no Jesus. Jesus has always been there.
“It’s only a story, ma’am,” the Abyssinian Queen said. “Maybe you gotta stop them kids from coming. It will break their li’l hearts though.”
“I ain’t gonna stop them from nothing,” said the lady of the house with finality. “This is their plantation, you know, so they gonna go where they wanna go. All you gotta do is stop the voodoo stories and tell Bible stories instead.”
Of course the Abyssinian Queen continued unabated with her “voodoo” stories and the children, including The Owner’s, continued to gather in the evenings. They even learned to sing along and to join in the choruses and in call-and-response chants.
The Owner never suspected anything subversive about the storytelling sessions, even when the lady of the house complained that they accorded too much mixing of the children, who would normally be segregated and quartered according to their breed and pedigree. The Owner was indeed becoming too soft with age. For instance, the white children who came for the stories were not only the freeborn from the big house — the lady’s own kids, that is. There were also the white girls who had been sold to Fairfield Farms by their indigent parents, and those who were said to be illegitimate and were then given to African women to bring up. All these would be reduced to slavery when they grew up, and would be used for the breeding of the much valued mulatto slaves. In the meantime The Owner turned a blind eye as these children mixed and filled their lives with the magic of foxes and buzzards and rabbits and wolves and scallywags of all types that all tried to outdo one another in knavery.
But stories of how Nat Turner, a preacherman, led more than fifty fellow slaves to take the armory in Southampton County, Virginia, and was hanged after being captured, were told in whispers, when the white children had gone back to the big house and to their various quarters. The pain of this particular story was still very fresh in the community because it happened only three or four years before. Stories of how Denmark Vesey, a respected carpenter and minister of religion, himself a former house slave, led a rebellion against slave owners in Charleston — not their Charleston, but another Charleston in South Carolina — and was executed a decade or so before, waited for the time when only the two boys remained.
At first the boys took these stories passively, but as they grew older the stories acquired new meaning. So did the quilts that their mother gave them one Christmas. Abednego’s was the crazy quilt with the map. For Nicodemus she created a wonderful sampler with the well-known designs: the Drunkard’s Path, the Log Cabin, the North Star, the Monkey Wrench, Crossroads, and the Flying Geese. Those who saw the quilt admired its beauty — the way she had arranged each of those designs and the color combinations that made each pattern stand out and yet blend in with the rest.
This was not beauty for its own sake; the Abyssinian Queen stressed that to the boys. Each design carried a message. The idea of making quilts talk a secret language first came with the forebears from the old continent, she went on. In the old continent works of art, including garments that people wore and lids that covered pots, talked secret languages that could be understood only by those who had been initiated into the circle.
In the same way that she taught them how to read the map on Abednego’s crazy quilt, she taught them how to interpret the sampler. They enjoyed it most when she told them what the Drunkard’s Path meant, for she acted out with silly exaggerations the staggering walk of a drunkard. The pattern, she said, told them never to take a straight route when they escape. They should always take a zigzag path. That way the evil spirits would not catch them, for evil spirits always traveled in a straight line. Like the evil spirits, slave chasers would be confused and lose track of them. The boys were not only fascinated by the meaning of the pattern but by the actual sewing of the Drunkard’s Path…how their mother cut one-quarter circles and then rearranged them to form the zigzags. It looked so simple when she did it yet so complicated when one looked at the finished product.