Maum Hannah lived in the house where she and her mother and her grandmother were born. As they approached it a miscellany of goats and chickens and pigs and dogs and half-clothed little children scampered away from the door-step. The door was ajar, but a chorus of voices called out:
“Maum Hannah ain’ home. E’s yonder down de street!”
“Come look inside de door at Maum Hannah’s nice house,” Big Sue pushed the door wider open with a stick, so Breeze could see. The huge chimney had big strong black andirons, where heavy logs of wood were slowly being charred in two by a sleepy fire. All kinds of pots sat around on the clean white sand of the hearth. One pot on a pot-hook that reached out from the chimney’s back had steam spurting from under its cover, filling the room with a savory smell. Big Sue sniffed. “Dat goat-meat stew is seasoned mighty high,” she said. “De floor was scoured wid mighty strong lye soap, too.”
The thing that took Breeze’s eye was the tiny black child that sat on the hearth warming its bare feet on the naked sooty pots. He knew it was Emma, but if he had not seen her before he could never have told if she were a girl or a boy, her small features were so sharp and her clothes so shapeless.
“Looka, Emma!” Big Sue called out with a laugh, and the child’s small head perched on one side, one round black eye narrowed and a broad grin showed her two rows of milk-white teeth.
“You’s Maum Hannah’s heart-string, enty, Emma?”
But Emma didn’t answer a word.
Big Sue said Emma’s mother was dead and she had no daddy, but she was worth a lot, for she had power to cure sickness and sorrow by the touch of her hand. That was because she had never looked on her daddy’s face. Somebody stepped over her when she was a baby; that was why she had never grown much. She’d never grow, although she sat there on the hearth roasting potatoes and eating them all day long.
All children loved to come here and sit inside Maum Hannah’s chimney on the end of a log. Big Sue used to sit there and watch Maum Hannah put ash-cake in the ashes to cook, and sweet potatoes to roast. The fire never went out in Maum Hannah’s fireplace. It’s bad luck for a fire to die in a house and this fire had never gone out altogether since it was first started by Maum Hannah’s great-grandpa, who was brought from across the sea to be a slave. The first houses ever built here were sheds to keep the fires from the rain and wind, for nobody had any matches in those days. The fires that burned in all the Quarter houses came from that same first fire that had burned for years and years. It was a lot older than anybody on the plantation. Big Sue’s fire was a piece of it. It burned hotter than match fire. Steadier too. It’s unlucky to start a new fire with a match. Breeze must learn how to bank the live coals with ashes every night, so the next morning they can be uncovered and started into a blaze. If the fire goes out, borrow a start from Maum Hannah, or one of the neighbors who have the old fire.
Maum Hannah’s cabin was very clean. Newspapers were pasted all over the walls, the dark naked rafters almost hidden by fringed papers that swung from the barrel hoops on which they were tied. A few split hickory chairs sat near the small pine table, a water-shelf beside the door held a wooden bucket and a long-handled gourd. The wide boards of the floor were scrubbed until they were almost white, and a string of eggshells by the chimney dangled in the draught. They’d been hung there to make the hens lay.