The Invention of Wings (29 page)

Missus shot her a look of venom. “Your father wrote the words himself, and we’ll honor his wishes. We have no choice. Please allow Mr. Huger to continue.”

When he started back reading, Sarah looked at me with the same sorrowful blue eyes she’d had the day she turned eleven years old and I was standing before her with the lavender ribbon round my neck. The world was a bashed-in place and she couldn’t fix it.

In December, everybody was on their last nerve waiting for missus to say who’d go and who’d stay. If I was sold, how would mauma find me if she came back?

Every night I put a hot brick in my bed to keep my feet warm and lay there thinking how mauma was alive. Out there somewhere. I wondered if the man who bought her was kind. I wondered if he’d put her in the fields. Was she doing any sewing? Did she have my little brother or sister with her? Was she still wearing the pouch round her neck? I knew she’d get back here if she could. This was where her spirit was, in the tree. This was where I was.

Don’t let me be the one that has to go.

Missus didn’t have Christmas that year, but she said go ahead and have Jonkonnu if you want to. That was a custom that got started a few years back brought by the Jamaica slaves. Tomfry would dress up in a shirt and pants tattered with strips of bright cloth sewed on, and a stove pipe hat on his head—what we called the Ragman. We’d traipse behind him, singing and banging pots, winding to the back door. He’d knock and missus and everybody would come out and watch him dance. Then missus would hand out little gifts to us. Could be a coin or a new candle. Sometimes a scarf or a cob pipe. This was supposed to keep us happy.

We didn’t expect to feel in the mood this year, but on Jonkonnu day, here came Tomfry in the yard, wearing his shaggy outfit, and we made a lot of clatter and forgot our troubles for a minute.

Missus stepped out from the back door in the black dress with a basket of gifts, Sarah, Nina, Henry, and Charles behind her. They were trying to smile at us. Even Henry, who took after his mauma, looked like a grinning angel.

Tomfry did his jig. Twirled. Bounced. Wagged his arms. The ribbons whirled out, and when he was done, they clapped, and he took off the tall hat and rubbed the crust of gray on his scalp. Reaching in the basket, missus gave the women these nice fans made with painted paper. The men got two coins, not one.

The sky had been cast down all day, but now the sun broke free. Missus leaned on her gold-tip cane and squinted at us. She called out Tomfry’s name. Then Binah. Eli. Prince. Mariah. She said, “I have something extra for you,” and handed each one a jar of gargling oil.

“You’ve served me well,” she told them. “Tomfry, you will go to John’s household. Binah, you will go to Thomas. Eli, I’m sending you to Mary.” Then she turned to Prince and Mariah. “I’m sorry to say you must be sold. It’s not my wish, but it’s necessary.”

Nobody spoke. The quiet sat on us like a stone you couldn’t lift.

Mariah dropped down and walked on her knees to missus, crying for her to change her mind.

Missus wiped her eyes. Then she turned and went in the house followed by her sons, but Sarah and Nina stayed behind, their faces full of pity.

The axe didn’t fall on me.
Didn’t my Lord deliver Handful?
The axe didn’t fall on Goodis either, and I felt surprise over the relief this caused me. But there was no God in any of it. Nothing but the four of them standing there, and Mariah, still on her knees. I couldn’t bear to look at Tomfry with the hat squashed under his arm. Prince and Eli, studying the ground. Binah, holding her paper fan, staring at Phoebe. A daughter she’d never see again.

Missus doled out their jobs to the ones of us left. Sabe took over for Tomfry as the butler. Goodis had the work yard, the stable, and drove the carriage. Phoebe got the laundry, and Minta and I got Eli’s cleaning duties.

When the first of the year came, missus set me to work on the English chandelier in the drawing room. She said Eli hadn’t shined it proper in ten years. It had twenty-eight arms with crystal shades and teardrops of cut-glass hanging down. Using the ladder and wearing white cotton gloves, I took it apart and laid it out on the table and shined it with ammonia. Then, I couldn’t figure out how to put the thing back together.

I found Sarah in her room, reading a leather book. “We’ll figure it out,” she said. We hadn’t talked much since she got back—she seemed woebegone all the time, always stuck in that same book.

After we finally got the chandelier back on the ceiling in one piece, tears flared up in her eyes. I said, “You sad about your daddy?”

She answered me the strangest way, and I knew what she said was the real hurt she’d brought back with her. “… I’m twenty-seven years old, Handful, and this is my life now.” She looked round the room, up at the chandelier, and back at me. “…
This
is my life. Right here for the rest of my days.” Her voice broke and she covered her mouth with her hand.

She was trapped same as me, but she was trapped by her mind, by the minds of the people round her, not by the law. At the African church, Mr. Vesey used to say,
Be careful, you can get enslaved twice, once in your body and once in your mind
.

I tried to tell her that. I said, “My body might be a slave, but not my mind. For you, it’s the other way round.”

She blinked at me and the tears came again, shining like cut-glass.

The day Binah left, I heard Phoebe crying all the way from the kitchen house.

1 February 1820

Dear Israel,

How often I have thought of our conversations on board ship! I read the book you entrusted to me and my spirit was deeply kindled. There are so many things I wish to ask you! How I wish we were together again—

3 February 1820

Dear Mr. Morris,

After being away from the evils of slavery for six months, my mind burst with new horror at seeing it again on my return to Charleston. It was made all the worse upon reading the book you gave me. I have nowhere to turn but you—

10 February 1820

Dear Mr. Morris,

I trust you are well. How is your dear wife, Rebecca—

11 February 1820

Thank you, sir, for the book. I find a bewildering beauty in your Quaker beliefs—the notion there is a seed of light inside of us, a mysterious Inner Voice. Would you kindly advise me how this Voice—

I wrote to him over and over, letters I couldn’t finish. Invariably, I would stop mid-sentence. I would lay down the quill, fold the letter, and conceal it with the rest at the back of my desk drawer.

It was the middle of the afternoon, the winter gloom hovering as I pulled out the thick bundle, untied the black satin ribbon, and added the letter of February 11 to the heap. Mailing the letters would only bring anguish. I was too drawn to him. Every letter he answered would incite my feelings more. And it would do no good to have him encouraging me toward Quakerdom. The Quakers were a despised sect here, regarded as anomalous, plain-dressed, and strange, a tiny cluster of jarringly eccentric people who drew stares on the street. Surely, I didn’t need to invite that kind of ridicule and shun. And Mother—she would never allow it.

Hearing her cane on the pine floor outside, I snatched up the letters and yanked open the drawer, my hands fumbling with panic. The stationery cascaded into my lap and onto the rug. As I stooped to collect it, the door swung open without a knock and she stood framed in the opening, her eyes moving across my hidden cache.

I looked up at her with the black ribbon furling from my fingers.

“You’re needed in the library,” she said. I couldn’t detect the slightest curiosity in her about the contents I’d spilled. “Sabe is packing your father’s books—I need you to oversee that he does it properly.”

“Packing?”

“They will be divided between Thomas and John,” she said, and turning, left me.

I gathered up the letters, tied them with the ribbon, and slipped them back into the drawer. Why I kept them, I didn’t know—it was foolish.

When I arrived in the library, Sabe wasn’t there. He’d emptied most of the shelves, stacking the books in several large trunks, which sat open on the floor, the same floor where I’d knelt all those years ago when Father forbade me the books. I didn’t want to think of it, of that terrible time, of the room stripped now, the books lost to me, always lost.

I sank into Father’s chair. The clock in the main passage clicked, magnifying, and I felt the shadows gathering inside of me again, worse this time. Since returning, I’d slipped further into melancholy each day. It was the same trough of darkness I’d fallen into when I was twelve and the life had gone out of everything. Mother had summoned Dr. Geddings back then, and I feared she might do so again. Every day, I forced myself to come down for tea. I endured the visitations from her friends. I kept up my attendance at church, at Bible study, at alms meetings. I sat with Mother in the mornings, hoops of embroidery on our laps, willing the needle through the cloth. She’d given me the task of household records, and each week I sorted through the supplies, writing inventories and procurement lists. The house, the slaves, Charleston, Mother, the Presbyterians—they were the woof and warp of everything.

Nina had pulled away. She was angry at me for remaining in Philadelphia after Father died. “You don’t know what it was like alone here,” she’d cried. “Mother instructed me constantly in the error of my ways, everything from church to slavery to my rebellious nature. It was horrible!”

I’d been the buffer between her and Mother, and my remaining away for so long had left her exposed. “I’m sorry,” I told her.

“You only wrote to me once!” Her beautiful face was contorted with hurt and resentment.
“Once
.
”

It was true. I’d been so enamored with my freedom up there, I hadn’t bothered. “I’m sorry,” I said again.

I knew in time she would forgive the selfish months I’d abandoned her, but I sensed the estrangement came from more than that. At fifteen, she needed to break away, to come out from my shadow, to understand who she was separate from me. My retreat to Philadelphia was only the excuse she needed to declare her independence.

As she fled to her room the day of our confrontation, she shouted, “Mother was right, I have no mind of my own. Only yours!”

We passed now like strangers. I let her be, but it added to my despair.

I stared at the trunks of books on the library floor, remembering the pangs I’d once had for a profession, for some purpose. The world had been such a beckoning place once.

Sabe still had not returned. I got up from my chair and rummaged nostalgically among the books, coming upon
The Sacred Biography of Jeanne d’Arc of France.
I couldn’t say how many times I’d read that wondrous little volume of Saint Joan’s bravery before Father had banned me from his library. Opening it now, I gazed at a sketch of her coat of arms—two
fleurs de lis.
I’d forgotten it was there, and it made sudden sense to me why I’d latched onto the
fleur de lis
button when I was eleven. I slipped the book beneath my shawl.