She was born that way. She lived in a falling-down old clapboard house way out on the edge of town with the other black folks, with an idiot daughter nobody had seen since she was a baby so maybe she was there and maybe she wasn’t, and maybe she was an idiot and maybe not. Claudie lived in the last house before the fields started, and her house was so crestfallen that even the other black people wouldn’t have gone there if they didn’t need to, and some people said it was green and some people said it was gray, but there wasn’t anybody who didn’t know that Claudie had a gift that was astonishing. Claudie Wiley could sew.She was a short but majestic woman, pale-skinned and wild-haired and big featured “high yellow,” we called it in those days. She had a slender frame from the waist up, but from her hips down, she was big-limbed and thick. She had eyes that looked right into you, without hesitation or the shyness that most black people affected around white people. She never deferred, because she knew the genius that was in her long slender fingers, needle-threading fingers, and she was sure of herself in a way that didn’t need to say what it was she was sure of.
