The Invention of Wings (14 page)

Night after night, I endured these grand affairs alone, revolted by what
objets d’art
we were and contemptuous of how hollow society had turned out to be, and yet inexplicably, I was filled with a yearning to be one of them.

The slaves moved among us with trays of custard and Huguenot tortes, holding doors, taking coats, stoking fires, moving without being seen, and I thought how odd it was that no one ever spoke of them, how the word
slavery
was not suitable in polite company, but referred to as
the peculiar institution.

Turning abruptly to leave the room, I plowed headlong into a male slave carrying a crystal pitcher of Dragoon punch. It created a magnificent explosion of tea, whiskey, rum, cherries, orange slices, lemon wedges, and shards of glass. They spilled across the rug, onto the slave’s frock coat, the front of my skirt, and the trousers of a tall young man who was passing by at the moment of the collision.

In those first seconds of shock, the young man held my gaze, and I reflexively lifted my hand to my chin as if to cover it with my fan, then realized I’d dropped my fan in the commotion. He smiled at me as sound rushed back into the room, gasps and thin cries of alarm. His composure calmed me, and I smiled back, noticing he had a tiny polyp of orange pulp on his cheek.

Mrs. Alston appeared in a swishing, silver-gray dress, her head bare except for a small jeweled headband across her curling bangs. With aplomb, she inquired if anyone had suffered injury. She dismissed the petrified slave with her hand and summoned another to clean the wreckage, all the while laughing softly to put everyone at ease.

Before I could make an apology, the young man spoke loudly, addressing the room. “I beg your forgiveness. I fear I am an awkward lout.”

“But it was not you—” I began.

He cut me off. “The fault is completely mine.”

“I insist you think no more of it,” Mrs. Alston said. “Come, both of you, and we’ll get you dried off.” She escorted us to her own chamber and left us in the care of her maid, who dabbed at my dress with a towel. The young man waited, and without thinking, I reached out and brushed the pulp from his cheek. It was overtly forward of me, but I wouldn’t consider that until later.

“We make a drowned pair,” he said. “May I introduce myself? I’m Burke Williams.”

“Sarah Grimké.”

The only gentleman who’d ever shown interest in me was an unattractive fellow with a bulging forehead and raisin eyes. A member of the Jockey Club, he’d escorted me about the New Market Course at the culmination of Race Week last year, and afterward deposited me in the ladies’ stand to watch the horses on my own. I never saw him again.

Mr. Williams took the towel and blotted his pants, then asked if I would like some air. I nodded, dazed that he’d asked. His hair was blond, mottled with brown, something like the light sands on the beach at Sullivan’s Island, his eyes were greenish, his chin broad, and his cheeks faintly chiseled. I became aware of myself staring at him as we strolled toward the balcony off the drawing room, behaving like a fool of a girl, which, of course, I was. He was aware of it. I saw a smile pull about his mouth, and I silently berated myself for my transparency, for losing my precious fan, for slipping into the solitary darkness of the balcony with a stranger.
What was I doing?

The night was cold. We stood by the railing, which had been festooned with pine wreaths, and stared at the figures moving past the windows inside the room. The music whirred behind the panes. I felt very far away from everything. The sea wind rose and I began to shiver. My stammer had been in hibernation for almost a year, but last winter it had showed up on the eve of my coming out and remained throughout my first season, turning it into a perdition. I shook now as much from fear of its return as from the frigid air.

“You’re chilled,” he said, removing his coat and draping it about me in gentlemanly fashion. “How is it we’ve not been introduced until now?”

Williams.
I didn’t recognize his family name. Charleston’s social pyramid was ruthlessly defended by the aristocratic planters at the top—the Middle-tons, Pinckneys, Heywards, Draytons, Smiths, Manigaults, Russells, Alstons, Grimkés, and so on. Below them dwelled the mercantile class, wherein a little social mobility was sometimes possible, and it occurred to me that Mr. Williams was from this secondary tier, having slipped into society through an opportune crevice, or perhaps he was a visitor to the city.

“Are you visiting here?” I asked.

“Not at all, my family’s home is on Vanderhorst. But I can read your thoughts. You’re trying to place my family.
Williams, Williams, wherefore art thou Williams?
” He laughed. “If you’re like the others, you’re worried I’m an artisan or a laborer, or worse, an
aspirer.
”

I caught my breath. “Oh, I didn’t mean—I’m not concerned with that sort of thing.”

“It’s all in jest—I can see you’re not like the others. Unless, of course, you’re off-put to learn my family runs the silversmith shop on Queen Street. I’ll inherit it one day.”

“I’m not off-put, I’m not at all,” I said, then added, “I’ve been in your shop.”

I didn’t say that shopping for silver irked me no end, as did most everything I was forced to do as a wife-in-training. Oh, the days Mother had forced me to hand Nina over to Binah and sit with Mary, doing handwork samplers, hoop after hoop of white-on-white, cross stitch, and crewel, and if not handwork, then painting, and if not painting, then visitations, and if not visitations, then shopping in the somber shops of silversmiths, where my mother and sister swooned over a sterling nutmeg grater, or some such.

I’d fallen silent, uneasy with where our conversation had led, and I turned toward the garden, looking down into the faded black shadows. The pear trees were bare, their limbs spread open like the viscera of a parasol. Stretching into the darkness beyond, the single houses, double houses, and villas were lined up in cramped, neat rows which ran toward the tip of the peninsula.

“I see I’ve offended you,” he said. “I intended to be charming, but I’ve been mocking instead. It’s because my station is an awkward topic for me. I’m ill at ease with it.”

I turned back to him, astonished that he’d been so free with his thoughts. I hadn’t known a young man to display this kind of vulnerability. “I’m not offended. I’m—charmed like you said.”

“I thank you, then.”

“No, I should be the one to thank you. The clumsiness in the drawing room—that was mine. And you—”

“I could claim I was trying to be gallant, but in truth, I wanted to impress you. I’d been watching you. I was about to introduce myself when you whirled about and it rained punch.”

I laughed, more startled than amused. Young men did not watch me.

“You created a brilliant spectacle,” he was saying. “Don’t you think?”

Regrettably, we were veering into the hazards of flirting. I’d always been feeble at it.

“Yes. I-I try.”

“And do you create these spectacles often?” he asked.

“I try.”

“You’ve succeeded well. The ladies on the dance floor recoiled with such shock I thought a turban might sail off and injure someone.”

“Ah, but—the injury would’ve been laid at
your
feet, not mine. I mean, it was you who claimed responsibility for the whole thing.”
Where had that come from?

He bowed, conceding.

“We should return to the party,” I told him, peeling his coat from my shoulders, wanting to end the banter on a high note, but worried, too, we might be missed.

“If you insist, but I would rather not share you. You’re the loveliest lady I’ve met this season.”

His words seemed gratuitous, and for an instant, I didn’t quite trust them. But why couldn’t I be lovely to him? Perhaps the Fates at the top of the stairs had changed their minds. Perhaps he’d looked past my plainness and glimpsed something deeper. Or, perhaps I was not as plain as I thought.

“May I call on you?” he asked.

“You want to call on me?”

He reached for my hand and pulled it to his lips. He kissed it, not removing his eyes from mine, pressing the heat and smoothness of his lips onto my skin. His face seemed strangely concentrated, and I felt the warmth from his mouth move up my arm into my chest.

T
he day mauma started sewing her story quilt, we were sitting out by the spirit tree doing handwork. We always did the trouble-free work there—hems, buttons, and trimmings, or the tiny stitches that strained your eyes in a poor-lit room. The minute the weather turned fair, we’d spread a quilt on the ground and go to town with our needles. Missus didn’t like it, said the garments would get soiled. Mauma told her, “Well, I need the outdoor air to keep going, but I’ll try and do without it.” Right after that, mauma’s quota fell off. Nobody was getting much of anything new to wear, so Missus said, “All right then, sew outside, but see to it my fabrics stay clean.”

It was early in the springtime, and the tree buds were popping open while we sat there. Those days I did a lot of fretting and fraying. I was watching Miss Sarah in society, how she wore her finery and going whichever way she pleased. She was wanting to get a husband soon and leave. The world was a Wilton carpet stretched out for her, and it seemed like the doors had shut on me, and that’s not even right—the doors never had opened in the first place. I was getting old enough to see they never would.

Missus was still dragging us into the dining room for devotions, preaching, “Be content with your lot, for this is of the Lord.” I wanted to say,
Take your lot and put it where the sun don’t shine
.

The other thing was Little Nina. She was Miss Sarah’s own sister, more like a daughter to her. I loved Nina, too, you couldn’t help it, but she took over Miss Sarah’s heart. That was how it should be, but it left a hole in mine.

That day by the tree, me and mauma had the whole kit and comboodle of our sewing stuff lined up on the tree roots—threads, needle bags, pin cushions, shears, and a small tin of beeswax we used to grease our needles. A waxed needle would almost glide through the cloth by itself, and I got where I hated to sew without the smell of it. I had the brass thimble on my finger, finishing up a dressing table cover for missus’ bedchamber, embroidering it with some scuppernong vines going round the edges. Mauma said I’d outshined her with my sewing—I didn’t use a tracing wheel like her, and my darts lay perfect every time.

Back two years, when I’d turned fifteen, missus said, “I’m making you our apprentice seamstress, Hetty. You are to learn all you can and share in the work.” I’d been learning from mauma since I could hold a needle, but I guess this made me official, and it spread some of the burden off mauma over to me.

Mauma had her wooden patch box beside her, plus a stack of red and brown quilt squares, fresh-cut. She rooted through the box and came up with a scrap of black cloth. I watched her cut three figures purely by eye. No hesitation, that’s the trick. She pinned the shapes on a red square, and started appliquéing. She sat with her back rounded, her legs straight out, her hands moving like music against her chest.

When we’d made our spirit tree, I’d sewed a pouch for each of us out of old bed ticking. I could see hers peeking out from her dress collar, plumped with little pieces of the tree. I reached up and gave mine a pat. Beside the tree charms, mine had Miss Sarah’s button inside it.

I said, “So what kind of quilt you making?”

“This a story quilt,” she said, and that was the first time I heard of one. She said her mauma made one, and her mauma before her. All her kin in Africa, the Fon people, kept their history on a quilt.

I left off my embroidery and studied the figures she was sewing—a man, a woman, and a little girl between them. They were joined at the hands. “Who’re they supposed to be?”

“When I get it all done, I tell you the story square by square.” She grinned, showing the big space between her teeth.

After she stitched on the three people, she free-cut a tiny quilt top with black triangles and sewed it at the girl’s feet. She cut out little shackles and chains for their legs, then, a host of stars that she sewed all round them. Some stars had tails of light, some lay on the ground. It was the story of the night her mauma—my granny-mauma—got sold and the stars fell.

Mauma worked in a rush, needing to get the story told, but the more she cut and stitched, the sadder her face turned. After a while her fingers slowed down and she put the quilt square away. She said, “This gon take a while, I guess.” Then she picked up a half-done quilt with a flower appliqué. It was milk-white and rose-pink, something sure to sell. She worked on it lackluster. The sun guttered in the leaves over our heads, and I watched the shadows pass over her.

For the sake of some gossip, I told her, “Miss Sarah met a boy at one of her parties, and he’s all she wants to talk about.”

“I got somebody like that,” she said.

I looked at her like her head had fallen off. I set down the embroidery hoop, and the white dresser cover flopped in the dirt. “Well, who is he, where’d you get him?”

“Next trip to the market, I take you to see him. All I gon say is: he a free black, and he one of a kind.”

I didn’t like she’d been keeping things from me. I snapped at her. “And you gonna marry Mr. One of a Kind Free Black?”

“No, I ain’t. He already married.”

Course he was.

Mauma waited through my pique, then said, “He come into some money and bought his own freedom. He cost a fortune, but his massa have a gamble debt, so he only pay five hundred dollars for hisself. And he still have money after that to buy a house at 20 Bull Street. It sit three blocks from where the governor live.”

“How’d he get all this money?”

“Won it in the East Bay Street lottery.”

I laughed out loud. “
That’s
what he told you? Well, I reckon this is the luckiest slave that ever lived.”

“It happen ten years ago, everybody know ’bout it. He buy a ticket, and his number come up. It happen.”