Some 50 years ago, my Virginia-bred mother, Cleoria Coleman Sparrow, did something straight out of West Africa.  The moment a certain visitor left the house, my mother swept from where he had last stood all the way out to the street.

“Why’d you do that?” I said.  “The floor’s clean.”

“To get rid of his presence so he won’t come back.”

That sweeping was a legacy from the Yoruba religion and sister traditions like Vodun(Voodoo), Akan, Palo and Santeria that crossed the Atlantic with the slave trade.

My mother was reared, in part, by my great-grandmother, Rose Wilson Ware, or Maw, born into slavery in Spotsylvania County, Virginia.  She lived from about 1851 to 1964, 113 years, and passed on some ways that echoed West Africa to my mother: the reliance on plant medicine, a gift of prescience and an ability to sense spirits.

It’s a short step back from Maw’s birth to 1830s Philadelphia, the setting for Blood Grip.  According to eyewitness Joseph Willson, author of Sketches of the Higher Classes of Colored Society (Philadelphia, 1841), the city teemed with all kinds of black folk at that time.  Many runaways sought to blend in with one of nation’s largest black population.  Blood Grip shows how one such woman, Ilsie Stone, might have used Yoruba rituals to help wrest a new life from a tough town.

                                                                                                               Constance Rose Sparrow

Cleora Coleman-Sparrow, Fredericksburg, Virginia

BLOOD GRIP - Bellaire Plantation, Virginia, 1836

“And before I’ll be a slave, I’ll be buried in my grave.”  A Negro spiritual.

“I seen what you did at the creek.”  Ben spat the words at Ilsie.

Fear sent a cramp ripping through her belly.  She knelt at the hearth, clenched her teeth and set a corn cake in the hot ashes alongside the others. The last time Ben got this mad, he broke a man’s jaw. Praise to God, their sons stood in the cabin, waiting on supper. 

Ben stormed up to the hearth, yanked off his leather apron and threw it down with such force that air swept the fire and stirred up flames that almost singed her face.

Ilsie twisted aside and stayed down.

“Ben, please!”

She fingered the eleke beads of the sacred necklaces encircling her neck that, as far back as she could remember, had comforted her.

“Help,” she murmured and held the beads, “help, help.” 

She closed her eyes for a moment and saw, as she often did, a face wrinkled and dark as a fig, tribal marks high on the cheeks. In that instant it came to her how to start this wrenching talk with Ben.

“Pa and me needs private words,” she said over her shoulder to her youngest son Jerusalem, just turned sixteen. If she faced Ben and the boys full on, they would see the flush of shame under her high brown color. “Y’all come back later.”

She half-turned and signed “Out!” to her eldest son, Jake, seventeen.

After the door closed, words rushed from Ben. “You was at the creek throwin water ‘tween your legs,” he said. “It’s Miller, ain’t it?”

The overseer had set his eye on her when he arrived at Bellaire Plantation months earlier. He had forced her to his cabin before, but she’d managed to hide it from Ben. She was still kneeling, turning the corn cakes to gain time to choose her words, when Ben plucked her off the earthen floor and set her down so that they stood face to face.

“If we stay here, I’ma kill him.”

“I got a feelin, Ben. Run, and we ain’t goin to make it, not all of us.” She leaned into him and felt his heart beat. His arms, as hard as the iron he worked at his forge, locked her in an embrace.

“I could pound him to shit froth, but he’d take it out on the boys, whip ‘em for nothin.  And what he done to you... He held her tighter.  “How long you want us sittin under his heel?”

“I wants us alive.”

He pushed back from her.

The talk of killing Miller conjured for Ilsie a picture of Ben swinging from a hang-rope, his head lolled sideways. Jake and Jerusalem could suffer the same fate if master tied them into Miller’s dying. Ilsie turned away and drew long breaths to take her thoughts from death.

“Look at me.” Ben grabbed her arms.

“You hurtin me.”

He let go and stood with his chest heaving.

The ash cakes smelled done, but intuition warned Ilsie to stay put and finish what she had to say.

“I’m pretty sure I’m breedin,” she said.

“What?”

“Three months.”

His eyes lit up, then went dead.

“Feel like a gal this time. Bound to be yours.”  But her gaze slid from his. “I’m goin to tell mistress I’m spottin. She’ll have master tell Miller to let me be.”

A bristling silence stretched between them. Ilsie heard cows lowing. Crickets sang, though softer now with autumn coming on. 

Ben cupped Ilsie’s chin and searched her eyes.  She knew he couldn’t stand it if she laid in too white a baby who would crawl around their cabin and eat at their table. His look held all that, and when he spoke his voice was low, rough.

“I’ma wait till you’re two months out of childbed, then I’m runnin with the boys and the baby, if she’s mine.  I love you, Ilsie, sorely hope you’ll come.  Ain’t no way I can keep watchin him hurt you.”

“Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen.  Nobody knows but Jesus.”  A Negro spiritual.

Philadelphia, July 4, 1836 - 4 a.m.

The rush of anger at Ben would have made Ilsie puke if she’d had anything in her stomach.  They wouldn’t be in this piss-ruin Philadelphia boardinghouse but for Ben wanting freedom. Free to live through five weeks of night-running. Free to blunder on without him.

Nothing Miller had done to her was worth Ben’s life, though she knew she wouldn’t have loved Ben if he’d stood by and watched her used hard.

Hannah whimpered.

“Sweet Hannah!  My Ben’s last gift.”  Ilsie sat up on the pallet she and Hannah shared and took the baby into her arms.  She put Hannah to her breast and waited for the soothing that flooded her when she nursed the baby.  But Hannah suckled only a moment, and her skin felt too warm.

Ilsie set Hannah down and wept in silence, grateful for the darkness.  No point waking Jake or Jerusalem and losing this moment of private grief.  She had known Ben with a depth that their boys hadn’t. 

She had felt Ben’s presence in the worst moments on the road. Downpours, hunger, pursuit. But they still needed him. He had started this trouble. He owed it to them.

Ilsie made herself stop sobbing. She recalled the deep voice of her mother, who had reared in ways brought from across the sea.

“Speak to spirits with a quiet mind, daughter, and they’ll hear you all the better,” her mother used to say.  “Ashe!” she would add.

Ilsie gathered in her thoughts from recollections that sought to claim them: seeing the wagon depart when her mother, father and both brothers were sold away in her twelfth year; leaving friends and kin at Bellaire weeks ago, and watching Ben die.

When the familiar wizened black face came into Ilsie’s mind, she knew she’d grown calm enough.  She pulled her pallet back from the cramped room’s wall, careful not to bump her sons’ bigger pallet that nearly touched hers.  She used the edge of her hand to clear grime from the space between her pallet and the wall, laid down a semi-circle of ash to mark the separation between life and death, then drew lines through the circle’s edge.  All might be well if her white candle stub threw enough light to summon a spirit.

She lit the stub.

Jake, who sensed light even in his sleep, moaned and moved his head from side to side, his eyes still closed. She cupped her hands around the flame until he settled. Jerusalem snored on.

Ilsie drew a deep breath and then whispered, “Ben!  Ben!” Ben!  Her lips brushed the floor.  She put a glass of water in the semi-circle’s center over the spot where she’d spoken his name. “You got to help us.”

When warmth and tingling bathed her forehead, she went on whispering.

“Talk about out the frypan and into the fire. We fallen in hindparts first. The boys can’t find work, and we almost out of money.”  She caught her voice rising, stopped herself, then went on quietly.  “Now Hannah taken sick.  What shall I do?”

She waited, hands clasped in prayer. The candle flickered, as if something had passed near it, then a thought entered her mind.

“Thank you, Ben.”  Her heart lifted. 

If the boys hadn’t been there, she would have burst out singing.  She snuffed the candle, wiped up the ashes and returned the glass to its place.  The room’s tin pan held enough water to wash herself and Hannah.  She checked her left sleeve to make sure that the coins tied in her brown handkerchief wouldn’t fall from her sleeve.  She had lied to Jerusalem, told him she’d given him all of her money.  A woman was a fool if she didn’t keep something for herself.  Clinking coins would awaken Jerusalem, who’d go off like a thunderclap because she’d held back on him.

Hadn’t she given him everything except this last bit earned from her garden plot at Bellaire?  Besides, the plan Ben put into her mind would feed them all.  She pocketed the knife from her knapsack, drew her shawl off the rickety chair, and made a sling to carry Hannah in front of her.

She had just donned a wide-brimmed hat to hide her face in case of bounty hunters when Hannah cried.  Ilsie stroked her cheek to shush her.  Jerusalem stirred.  Ilsie froze.  She wasn’t about to tell him her plan.

He opened his eyes, sat up.  She hurried to the door, opened it and stepped into the hall.  The whole place stank of slop jars full of nightwork.

“Where you goin, Ma?”

“Be back this evenin at the latest.”  She shut the door and rushed down the hall before he could say another word.

*  *  *

At the market the yardgoods beckoned like an old friend calling her name.  She had ironed and made clothes at Bellaire.  Spools of satin ribbon on a cord tied at either end of the stall hung like a captive rainbow.  A glory of buttons caught her eye: shiny brass ones, silver ones with a brickwork pattern, some that looked like flowers.

She wove among the farm wagons, buggies, hawkers, sailors and hack drivers.  At a poultry stand decorated with red, white and blue bunting for the Fourth of July, she overheard talk of a parade.  She moved on as the vendor wrung a hen’s neck for an impatient young housewife.

She reached into the sling and stroked Hannah’s cheek.  Despite the poultice of wild onions picked this morning, Hannah’s fever was creeping up.  Ilsie bit her lip, kept moving.

At a confectioner’s stand she bought hollow candy sticks, then hurried on.  Horse dung, rotten fruit and spoiled meat made a foul soup in the gutter.   

Soon Ilsie saw oranges.  A few more steps and she spied lemons.  She elbowed servant girls for the choicest ones.  Two dozen for a good display.  What if her plan didn’t work?  She tried to put that thought from her mind, yet her hand shook when she paid the fruitseller the last of her money.

She took two fruit crates from a heap, then headed for Chestnut Street.  She found a busy corner, sat on one crate and set the lemons in front of her on the other.  She sliced the top off the lemons, cored out some pulp, then put a candy stick into the hole where the pulp had been.

“Sweet-sours!” she sang.  “Get your sweet-sours!”

A small boy clutched his father’s sleeve and approached her.

“How much?” the man said.

“Two cent.  Ain’t none bigger than mines.”

The boy chose one.

Ilsie put an arm under her breasts to ease the pressure when she leaned forward to rearrange the lemons.

Within moments, she sold two more sweet-sours.  She could sell here every morning, earn enough to feed her family every night.  “Praise His name!”

“Praise it,” a voice said behind her, “and get goin.”

Ilsie turned and saw a butter-colored woman wide as a barrel, scowling at her.  Round-faced and double-chinned, she wore a pink dress and a dirty gray apron.  She hefted four buckets of strawberries, two to an arm, like four cat hairs.  “This is my corner.”

“Don’t see no sign sayin so.”

“You hear me tellin you.”  She set her buckets on the cobblestones.  “The other corners is taken too.  Parade’s comin right past here.”

Ilsie looked her up and down, then turned away.

The woman grabbed a sweet-sour, threw it to the street and stomped on it.

Heat raced to Ilsie’s head.  The sweet-sours meant money, hope.  The woman was as good as stealing supper from Jake, Jerusalem and Hannah, tearing to pieces everything Ben had died for.  Ilsie shot to her feet and sank a fist into the woman’s stomach.

The woman reeled back, howling and holding her middle. 

People stopped, looked on.

The strawberry woman regained her balance and bared her nails.  She ran at Ilsie, who hunched over to shield Hannah.  Ilsie side-stepped at the last second and tripped her.  The woman clutched at Ilsie’s shoulder but fell, cussing Ilsie for six kinds of bitches.  Ilsie grabbed one of the buckets by the handle and, before the woman struggled to her feet, whipped it down on her head.

The woman dropped like an anchor, blood streaming from her scalp.  Urchins and pigs squealed around her and fought over the scattered fruit.

The sight buoyed Ilsie’s spirits until she saw blue and white beads on the street.  In the scuffle the woman had broken a strand of her eleke beads.  An omen?  Ilsie’s heart shriveled.

A whistle screeched nearby.

“Over here!”  One of the bystanders shouted and pointed at Ilsie.

A dishevled brownskin woman with a head of woolly full mixed-gray hair shoved the gawkers aside.

“Police comin,” she said, “Better absquatulate.”  She grabbed the crate of sweet-sours and yanked on Ilsie’s arm.

The whistle shrieked again.

The woman tore along at a clip.  They flew up side streets, through courtyards, between houses.  When Ilsie thought she would pass out, they stopped.

“How come you saved me?” Ilsie said, when she caught her breath.

“Nasty piece of goods, old Sal, one of God’s mistakes, you ask me.  Plus she wasted a good lemon.  Ain’t got one to spare, have you?”

Ilsie handed over a lemon. 

The woman tossed away the candy stick and smacked her lips  on the lemon.  She finished it and then said, “That baby don’t look good.”

“She ain’t, plus gettin jarred over hell’s half-acre.”  Ilsie reached in the sling and patted Hannah. 

“You goin to be all right?” the woman said.    

“Reckon so.”  Ilsie had misgivings about staying on the street, but with most of her money gone, she had no choice.  She had begun the day walking high on hope, but Hannah’s fever, the chase and broken necklace had dashed it.

The woman offered her a sticky hand.

“I’m Crazy Nancy,” she said.  “Ain’t askin your name, just tellin you somethin.  The police won’t find you this far from the market.  They ain’t that fond of exercise.  I know ‘em.  You can sell there on Spruce Street.”  Crazy Nancy waved toward the corner.  “Take care, though.  These streets are rough after dark.”

“Ain’t no pillows on ‘em by day, neither.”  Crates in hand, Ilsie trudged toward the spot Crazy Nancy had pointed out and set things up to sell.  She reached into the sling.  Hannah seemed to drowse, her skin still warm.  “Go ‘head, sleep.  Rest’ll mend you.”  She would stand the pressure in her breasts a little longer.

In an hour she sold just one sweet-sour.  She felt like her tits would bust if Hannah didn’t nurse soon.  And Ilsie wanted a look at the baby, who wasn’t acting right.

Ilsie gathered her sweet-sours and plodded to an alley that ran behind grand three-story brick houses.  The music from the third house drew her in.  She peeked in the back door and saw a brownskin woman who looked not much older than her own 32 years throw a fistful of flour into a big pot.

“Please, sister,” Ilsie said from the doorway.  “I been settin outside most all day tryin to sell these things.  Could you spare me a sip of water and let me nurse my baby?”

The cook drew back, wrinkled her nose.

Ilsie knew she was dirty from the street.  The woman wanted no truck with her.  Ilsie turned to go, but Hannah gave a soft cry that thinned into silence.

The cook shot out a floury hand and caught Ilsie’s arm.  “Won’t take you but a minute.”  The cook stepped out of the doorway.  “What harm can it do?”