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Mary. To impress upon her the need for caution when she’s handling other people’s things.” She patted my arm. “Don’t be cross. There’s tea waiting in the parlor. Come along before it gets cold.”

5 | S ELINA
    T he first day when Mauma sent me up to the missus, I was shaking so hard I thought she would hear my bones rattling. She took me into the room with Kitty and Liza and two white girls I never saw before. Turns out they was Miss Mary’s cousins, come to stay for a while and help with the sewing. The house had wide, open doors that went from one big room to another. They had rounded openings at the top, like doors on churches in one of Miss Mary’s books. There was a fire going, and the room smelled like paint.
    Outside was Thursday’s boy, Nathaniel, painting the window frames. He put his face up to the glass and stuck his tongue out at me. I didn’t pay him any mind. He thinks he’s funny, but I don’t. Nathaniel’s aunt Judah makes up bags filled with strange things supposed to ward off evil spells. She calls them jacks. You supposed to wear the jack around your neck. Judah sells the jacks to black folks, and some whites too, but Mauma says they are foolishness, so I never had one and do not know if they work.
    Missus set me down at a table. In the middle was a sewing basket the size of a wheelbarrow, and in it was everything you would ever need to make clothes. A purple needle case, scissors in the shape of a swan. Thimbles, pincushions, and some other things I hadn’t ever laid my eyes on before. Missus named them and told us what they was for: bodkin for drawing cord through a hem, seam ripper in case you make a mistake and have to start over, spool caddy for holding different colors of thread, a strip of cloth with numbers painted on it for measuring out the cloth. Missus gave us gloves to wear so we wouldn’t get any dirt on the cloth, and we unrolled the bolts of silk and satin and white linen and pressed out the wrinkles with a hot iron.
    The two white girls, Emily and Harriett, pinned a pattern to one of the pieces of linen, and Missus cut it up. Missus said it was gone be a pair of drawers, which made Kitty giggle until Missus frowned at her. Sure enough, that stopped her cold. Missus showed us how to thread a needle and made us practice stitching on an old piece of blue cloth she took from a bag of rags. I about poked my fingers full of holes until Missus showed me how to use a thimble, and how the needle would slide through the cloth easier if you pushed it through a cake of beeswax first. Why she didn’t say so in the first place is a big mystery.
    The first several days, Missus wouldn’t let me and Kitty do anything but practice. Then she started us on finishing the legs of the drawers and then Harriett sewed the legs onto a waistband. We made a dozen pairs.
    Next was petticoats. Missus tried to teach me how to make tucks in the cloth, but I never could make the rows come out even and she gave up. Instead, she showed me how to do embroidery. It was the same motion with the needle over and over, and after a while I was making little blue flowers all over the bottom of Miss Mary’s new petticoat, which seemed silly. Who’s gone see the flowers anyway, hid under Miss Mary’s skirts? But then again, white folks have lots of notions that don’t make hardly a lick of sense when you stop to think about it.
    Every day along about dinnertime Missus sent us out to the porch where there was a table set up, and we had bread and butter and milk. If the sun was out we could walk to the garden to see if anything was blooming yet, and then Missus would clap her hands and bring us back to our work.
    Afternoons, with a full belly and the sound of the cousins chattering back and forth, it was hard to stay awake. I practiced spelling words in my head. I thought about Thursday and Althea down in the kitchen, and I wondered if Lottie forgot about me already and if she would remember me when the sewing