The Invention of Wings (27 page)

I didn’t see any sense in keeping the feud going. “I don’t have a bicker with you. I won’t be bothering you anymore.”

That took the nettle from her. Her shoulders dipped and her face turned soft. That’s when I noticed the scarf she was wearing. Red. Edges sewed with a perfect chain stitch. Little oil spots on the side. I said, “That’s my mauma’s head scarf.”

Her lips opened like the stopper had popped from the bottle. I waited, but she stood there, with her mouth empty.

“I know that scarf,” I said.

She set down her basket of cottons and took it off her head. “Go on, take it.”

I ran my finger along the stitched hem, cross the creases where her hair had been. I undid the scarf on my head and tied mauma’s on. Low on my forehead, the way she wore it.

“How’d you get it?” I said.

She shook her head. “I guess you ought to know. The night your mauma disappeared, she showed up at our door. Denmark said the Guard would be looking for a woman with a red scarf, so I took hers and gave her one of mine. A plain brown one that wouldn’t draw notice.”

“You helped her? You helped her get away?”

She didn’t give any kind of answer, she said, “I do what Denmark says do.” Then she sashayed off with her head stripped bare.

I sewed through that day and night and all the next day and night, and the whole time I wore mauma’s scarf. The whole time I thought about her showing up at Mr. Vesey’s that night, how he knew more than he was saying.

Every time I took the dress upstairs for fittings, the house would be in a tizzy getting ready for the mourners. Missus said half the city was coming. Aunt-Sister and Phoebe were baking funeral biscuits and seeing to the tea sets. Binah shrouded the paintings and mirrors with black swags and Eli was put to cleaning. Minta had the worst job, in there getting hankies and taking the brunt.

Tomfry set up master Grimké’s portrait in the drawing room and fixed a table with tokens. Had his beaver top hat and stick pins and the books of law he wrote. Thomas brought over a cloth banner that said,
Gone, But Not Forgotten,
and Tomfry put that on the table, too, with a clock stopped to the hour of his death. Missus didn’t know the time exact. Sarah had written he passed in the late afternoon, so missus said, just make it 4:30.

When she wasn’t crying, she was fuming that Sarah hadn’t had the sense to cut off a lock of master Grimké’s hair and put it in the letter. It left her without anything to go in her gold mourning brooch. Another thing she didn’t like was the notice that came out in the
Mercury.
It said he’d been laid to rest in the North without family or friends and this would surely be a travail to a great son of South Carolina.

I don’t know how I got the dress done in time. It was the finest dress I ever made. I strung hundreds of black glass beads, then sewed the strands into a collar that looked like a spider web. I fitted it round the neck and let it drape to the bust. When missus saw it, she said the one and only kind thing I can’t forget. She said, “Why, Hetty, your mother would be proud.”

I went through the window and over the wall on a Sunday after the callers had quit coming by to give their condolence. It was our day off and the servants were lolling round and missus was shut away in her room. I had a short walk past the front of the house before I could feel safe, and coming round the side of it, I saw Tomfry on the front steps, haggling with the slave boy who huckstered fish. They were bent over what looked like a fifty-pound basket of flounders. I put my head down and kept going.

“Handful! Is that you?”

When I looked up, Tomfry was staring at me from the top step. He was old now, with milk in his eyes, and it crossed my mind to say,
No, I’m somebody else,
but then, he could’ve seen the cane in my hand. You couldn’t misjudge that. I said, “Yeah, it’s me. I’m going to the market.”

“Who said you could go?”

I had Sarah’s pass in my pocket, but seemed like he’d question that—she was still up north, waiting to sail home. I stood on the sidewalk stuck to the spot.

He said, “What you doing out here? Answer me.”

Off in my head, I could hear the treadmill grind.

A shape moved at the front window.
Nina.
Then the front door opened, and she said, “What is it, Tomfry?”

“Handful out here. I’m trying to see what she’s doing.”

“Oh. She’s doing an errand for me, that’s all. Please say nothing to Mother, I don’t want her bothered.” Then she called down to me, “Carry on.”

Tomfry went back to the fish huckster. I couldn’t get my legs to move fast enough. At George Street, I stopped and looked back. Nina was still out there, watching me go. She lifted her hand and gave me a wave.

Close to 20 Bull, there was a little jug band going—three boys blowing on big jars and Gullah Jack, Mr. Vesey’s man, slapping his drum. A crowd of colored folks was gathered, and two of the women started doing what we called stepping. I stopped to watch cause they were Strutting Miss Lucy. Mostly, I kept my eye on Gullah Jack. He had fat side whiskers and was bouncing on his short legs. When he finished the tune, he tucked the drum under his arm and headed down the street to Mr. Vesey’s. Me, following behind.

I could see smoke from the kitchen house, and went back there and knocked. Susan let me in, saying, “Well, I’m surprised it took you this long.” She said I could give her some help, the men were in the front room, meeting.

“Meeting about what?”

She shrugged. “Don’t know, don’t wanna know.”

I helped her chop cabbages and carrots for their supper, and when she carried a bottle of Madeira to them, I trailed her. I waited outside the door, while she poured their glasses, but I could see them at the table: Mr. Vesey, Gullah Jack, Peter Poyas, Monday Gell, plus two who belonged to the governor, Rolla Bennett and Ned Bennett. I knew every one of them from church. They were all slaves, except Mr. Vesey. Later on, he’d start calling them his lieutenants.

I slunk back into the hallway and let Susan go back to the kitchen house without me. Then I eased to the door, close as I could without getting seen.

It sounded like Mr. Vesey was divvying up all the slaves in the state. “I’ll take the French Negroes on the Santee, and Jack, you take the slaves on the Sea Islands. The ones that’ll be hard to enlist are the country slaves out on the plantations. Peter, you and Monday know them best. Rolla, I’m giving you the city slaves, and Ned, the ones on the Neck.”

His voice dropped and I crept a little closer. “Keep a list of everybody you draft. And keep that list safe on pain of death. Tell everybody, be patient, the day is coming.”

I don’t know where he came from, but Gullah Jack was on top of me before I could turn my head. He grabbed me from behind and threw me into the room, my rabbit cane flying. I bounced off the wall and landed flat.

He stuck his foot on my chest, pressing me to the floor. “Who’re you?”

“Take your nasty foot off me!” I spit at him and the spew fell back on my face.

He raised a hand like he was ready to strike, and from the edge of my eye, I saw Denmark Vesey pick him up by the collar and fling him half cross the room. Then he pulled me up. “You all right?”

My arms were trembling so bad I couldn’t hold them still.

“Everything you heard in here, you keep to yourself,” he told me.

I nodded again, and he put his arm round me to stop the shaking.

Turning to Gullah Jack and the rest of them, he said, “This is the daughter of my wife and the sister of my child. She’s family, and that means you don’t lay a hand on her.”

He told the men to go on back to his workshop. We waited while they scraped the chairs back and eased from the room.

So, he counted mauma one of his wives.
I’m family.

He pulled a chair for me. “Here, sit down. What’re you doing here?”

“I came to find out the truth of what happened to mauma. I know you know.”

“Some things are better not to know,” he said.

“Well, that’s not what the Bible preaches. It says if you know the truth, it’ll set you free.”

He circled the table. “All right, then.” He closed the window so the truth would stay in the room and not float out for the world to hear.

“The day Charlotte got in trouble with the Guard, she came here. I was in the workshop and when I looked up, there she was. They’d chased her all the way to the rice mill pond, where she hid inside a sack in the millhouse. She had rice hulls all over her dress. I kept her here till dark, then I took her to the Neck, where the policing is light. I took her there to hide.”

The Neck was just north of the city and had lots of tenement houses for free blacks and slaves whose owners let them “live out.” Negro huts, they called them. I tried to picture one, picture mauma in it.

“I knew a free black there who had a room, and he took her in. She said when the Guard stopped searching for her, she’d go back to the Grimkés and throw herself on their mercy.” He’d been pacing, but now he sat down next to me and finished up the truth quick as he could. “One night she went out to the privy in Radcliff Alley and there was a white man there, a slave poacher named Robert Martin. He was waiting for her.”

A noise filled my head, a wailing sound so loud I couldn’t hear. “A poacher, what’s a poacher?”

“Somebody that steals slaves. They’re worse than scum. We all knew this man—he had a wagon-trade in these parts. First, regular goods, then he started buying slaves, then he started stealing slaves. He hunted for them in the Neck. He’d keep his ear to the ground and go after the runaways. More than one person saw him take Charlotte.”

“He took her? He sold her off somewhere?”

I was on my feet, screaming over the noise in my skull. “Why didn’t you look for her?”

He took me by the shoulders and gave me a shake. His eyes were sparking like flint. He said, “Gullah Jack and I looked for two days. We looked everywhere, but she was gone.”

I
made the laborious journey back to Philadelphia, where I found lodging at the same house on Society Hill where Father and I had boarded earlier, expecting to stay only until the ship sailed, but on the appointed morning—my trunk packed and the carriage waiting—something strange and unknown inside of me balked.

Mrs. Todd, who rented the room to me, tapped at my door. “Miss Grimké, the carriage—it’s waiting. May I send the driver to collect the trunk?”

I didn’t answer immediately, but stood at the window and stared out at the leafy vine on the picket fence, at the cobble street lined with sycamore trees, the light falling in quiet, mottled patterns, and beneath my breath I whispered, “No.”

I turned to her, untying my bonnet. It was black with a small ruffle suitable for mourning. I’d purchased it on High Street the day before, maneuvering alone in the shops with no one to please but myself, then come back to this simple room where there were no servants or slaves, no immoderate furniture or filigree or gold leaf, no one summoning me to tea with visitors I didn’t care for, no expectations of any kind, just this little room where I took care of everything myself, even spreading my own bed and seeing to my laundry. I turned to Mrs. Todd. “… I would like to keep the room a bit longer, if I may.”

She looked confused. “You’re not leaving as planned?”

“No, I would like to stay a while. Only a while.”

I told myself it was because I wanted to grieve in private. Really, was that so implausible?

Mrs. Todd was the wife of a struggling law clerk and she clasped my hand. “You’re welcome to stay as long as you wish.”

I wrote a solicitous letter to Mother, explaining the unexplainable: Father had died and I wasn’t coming home straight away.
I need to grieve alone.

Mother’s letter in response arrived in September. Her small, tight scrawl was thick with fury and ink. My behavior was shameful, selfish, cruel. “How could you abandon me in my darkest hour?” she wrote.

I burned her letter in the fireplace, but her words left contusions of guilt. There was truth in what she’d written. I was selfish. I’d abandoned my mother. Nina, as well. I anguished over it, but I didn’t pack my trunk.