The Invention of Wings (33 page)

When the new year came, Nina scrounged up five girls and started the Female Prayer Society. They met in the drawing room Wednesday mornings. I served the tea and biscuits, tended the fire, and watched the door, and from what I could tell, the last thing going on was praying. Nina was in there doing her best to introduce them to the evils of slavery.

That girl.
She was like Sarah. Had the same notions, the same craving to be useful, but the two of them were different, too. Seventeen now, Nina turned every head that looked her way and she could talk the salt from the sea. Her beaux didn’t last long, though. Missus said she chased them off with her opinionating.

I don’t know why she didn’t chase the girls off either.

During the meetings, she made hot-blooded speeches that went on till one of the girls lost the point of it and turned the talk to something else—who danced with who or who wore what at the last social. Nina would give up then, but she seemed glad to speak her mind, and missus was happy, too, thinking Nina had finally found some religion.

It was during a meeting in March that the Smith girl took umbrage. Nina was taking special care to let her know how bad her neighborhood was.

“Would you come over here, Handful?” Nina called. She turned to the girls. “See her leg? See how she drags it behind her? That’s from the treadmill at the Work House. It’s an abomination, and it’s right under your nose, Henrietta!”

The Smith girl bristled. “Well, what was she doing at the Work House in the first place? There must be some discipline, mustn’t there? What did she do?”

“What did she
do
? Haven’t you heard anything I’ve been saying? God help us, how can you be so blind? If you want to know how Handful came to be at the Work House, she’s standing right here. She’s a person, ask
her.
”

“I’d rather not,” the girl said and tucked her skirts in round her legs.

Nina rose from her chair and came to stand beside me. “Why don’t you take your shoe off and show her the kind of brutality that takes place on the same street where she lives?”

I should’ve minded doing it, but I always remembered that day Tomfry caught me in front of the house sneaking off to Denmark’s, how Nina came to my rescue. She’d never asked where I’d gone, and the fact was, I wanted the girls to see what the Work House had done to me. I tugged off my shoe and bared the misshaped bone and the pinky-flesh scars wriggling cross my skin like earthworms. The girls pressed their fingers under their noses and blanched white as flour, but Henrietta Smith did one better. She fainted sideways in her chair.

I got the smelling salts and brought her round, but not before missus heard the uproar.

Later on that night in my cellar room, I heard a tap and opened the door to find Nina with her eyes puffed out.

“Did Mother punish you?” she asked. “I have to know.”

Since master Grimké died, missus hit Minta with the gold-tip cane so much you never saw her without black bruises on her brown arms. It was no wonder she went to the carriage house with Sabe to get salved. She struck me and Phoebe with the cane, too, and had even taken to swiping Aunt-Sister, which I never thought I’d live to see. Aunt-Sister didn’t take it laying down. I heard her tell missus, “Binah and the ones you sold, they the lucky ones.”

Nina was saying, “I tried to tell her that I
asked
you to take off your shoe, that you didn’t just volunteer—”

I stuck out my arm and showed her the welt.

“The cane?” Nina asked.

“One strike, but a good one. What’d she do to you?”

“Mostly, a lot of scolding. The girls won’t be coming back for any more meetings.”

“No, I didn’t think so,” I said. She looked so dismal I added, “Well, you tried.”

Her eyes watered up and I handed her my clean head scarf. Taking it, she sank down in the rocker and buried her face in it. I didn’t know how much more her eyes could take, whether she was crying over her failure with the Female Prayer Society, or Sarah leaving, or the shortfalls of people.

When she was all cried out, she went back to her room, and I lit a candle and sat in the wavy light, picturing the quilt on Denmark’s bed, and inside it, the hidden pocket, and inside that, the scroll of paper with all the names. People ready to lay their lives down to get free. The day I came up with the scheme of hiding the list, Susan didn’t have a single quilt in the house—she used plain wool blankets. I made a new quilt from scratch—red squares and black triangles, me and mauma’s favorite, the blackbirds flying away.

Denmark believed nothing would change without blood spilled. Plopped in the rocker now, I thought about Nina, her lecturing to five spoilt white girls, and Sarah being so upset with the way her world was, she had to leave it, and while I felt the goodness in what they did, it seemed their lecturing and leaving didn’t come to much when you had this much cruelty to overcome.

The retribution was coming and we’d bring it ourselves. Blood was the way. It was the only way, wasn’t it? I was glad now Sarah was far away from danger, and I would have to keep Nina safe. I said to myself,
Let not your heart be troubled. Neither let it be afraid.

I
snapped open the crisp white table cloth, unfurling it upward, watching it turn into a small ovoid cloud before it sank onto the pine needles.

“This isn’t the cloth we use for picnics,” Catherine said, crossing her arms over her chest.

Her criticisms of me were similar to her prayers—sacred, daily, and unsmiling. I was careful now. I taught the children, but I tried not to appear mothering. I deferred to Catherine in all household matters—if she put salt in the cake, she put salt in the cake. And Israel—I didn’t so much as look at him when she was in the room.

“… I’m sorry,” I told her. “… I thought you said to get the white cloth.”

“It will have to be bleached and clear starched. Let’s pray there’s no pine sap on the ground.”

God, no pine sap. Please.

It was the first day of April, which also happened to be Becky’s seventh birthday and the first day all year one could actually call warm. After my first winter in the North, I had an entirely new appreciation for heat. I’d never seen snow before arriving here, and when it’d come, the Pennsylvania sky split open like a vast goose down comforter and the entire world turned to feathers. The first time it happened, I slipped outside and wandered about catching flakes in my hands and on my tongue, letting them settle into my hair, which I’d left long and flowing down my back. Returning to the house, I spotted Israel and several of the children watching me from the window, looking quite astonished. My enchantment turned to slush about the same time the snow did. We seemed stuck in a perpetual twilight. Color bled from the world, recasting the landscape into gradations of black and white, and no matter how ruthlessly the fireplaces roared, cold formed on my Charleston bones like hoarfrost.

The picnic had been my idea. Quakers didn’t celebrate holidays—all days were treated equally, meant to be lived with the same simplicity—but Israel was known to hedge a bit on the children’s birthdays. He was home working that day, shut in his study with invoices and ledgers and bills of exchange. Having enough sense not to go to Catherine with my whim, I’d interrupted him mid-morning.

“… Spring has come,” I’d said. “Let’s not squander it … A picnic will do us all good, and you should see Becky, she’s so excited to be seven … A little celebration wouldn’t hurt, would it?”

He set down the account book in his hand and gazed at me with a slow, defenseless smile. It’d been months since he’d touched me. Back in the fall he’d often held my hand or slid his arm about my waist as we walked back up the hill from the pond, but then winter came, and the walks ceased as he retreated, going off inside himself somewhere to hibernate. I didn’t know what had happened until one morning in January when Catherine announced it was the second anniversary of Rebecca’s death. She seemed to take morose joy in explaining how deeply her brother was mourning, even more so this winter than the one before.

“All right, have the picnic, but no birthday cake,” Israel said.

“… I wouldn’t dream of anything so decadent as cake,” I replied, beaming, mocking him a little, and he laughed outright.

“You should come, too,” I added.

His eyes veered to the locket, lying on his desk, the one with the daffodils and his wife’s name engraved on it.

“Perhaps,” he said. “I have a great deal of work to do here.”

“… Well, try and join us. The children would like that.” I left, wishing I weren’t so dismayed by him at times, at how mercurial he could be, embracing one day, stand-offish the next.

Now, as I gazed down at the white cloth spread on the lawn, it wasn’t even disappointment I felt, it was anger. He hadn’t come.

Catherine and I laid out the contents of the basket, a dozen boiled eggs, carrots, two loaves of bread, apple butter, and a kind of soft cheese Catherine had made by boiling cream and drying it in a cloth. The children had found a thatch of mint at the woods’ edge and were crushing the leaves between their fingers. The air pulsed with the smell of it.

“Oh,” I heard Catherine say. She was gazing toward the house, at Israel striding toward us through the brown grass.

We ate sitting on the ground with our faces turned to the bright crater of sky. When we finished, Catherine pulled gingerbread from the basket and stacked the slices in a pyramid. “The top slice is for you, Becky,” she said.

It was evident how much Catherine loved the child and all the rest of them, and I felt a sudden remorse for all my ill thoughts of her. The children grabbed the gingerbread and scattered, the boys toward the trees and the two girls off to pluck the wild flowers beginning to poke through the sod, and it was at this moment, as Catherine busied herself clearing things away, that I made a terrible mistake.

I languished, leaning back on my elbows within an arm’s length of Israel, feeling that he’d returned from his long hibernation and wanting to bask in the thought of it. Catherine’s back was to us, and when I looked at Israel, he had that yearning expression again, the sad, burning smile, and he dared to slide his little finger across the cloth and hook it about mine. It was a small thing, our fingers wrapped like vines, but the intimacy of it flooded me, and I caught my breath.

The sound made Catherine turn her head and peer at us over her shoulder. Israel snatched his finger from mine. Or did I snatch mine from his?

She leveled her eyes on him. “So, it is as I suspected.”

“This is not your business,” he told her. Getting to his feet, he smiled regretfully at me and walked back up the hill.

She didn’t speak immediately, but when I tried to assist her in packing the basket, she said, “You must move out and find lodging elsewhere. It’s unseemly for you to be here. I will speak to Israel about your leaving, but it would be better if you left on your own without him having to intervene.”

“… He wouldn’t ask me to leave!”

“We must do what propriety calls for,” she said, and then surprised me by placing her hand on mine. “I’m sorry, but it’s best this way.”

The eleven of us sat on a single pew in the Arch Street Meetinghouse—the eight Morris children bookended by Israel on one side and by Catherine and me on the other. I thought it unnecessary that we should all be here for what was called “a meeting for worship with a concern for business.” It was a business meeting, for heaven’s sake, plain and simple. They occurred monthly, but I typically remained at home with the children, while Israel and Catherine attended. This time, she’d insisted we all attend.

Catherine had wasted little time in approaching Israel after the picnic, and he’d stood his ground—I would stay at Green Hill. If the locket incident had cooled the air between Catherine and me, my refusal to leave and Israel’s refusal to back her had turned it bitter. I only hoped in time she would come around.

Inside the meeting room, a woman stood to convene the meeting by reading a verse from the Bible. She was the only female minister among us. She looked no more than my own age of twenty-nine, young for such an achievement. The first time I’d heard her speak in Meeting, it had been with a kind of awe. I thought of it now with a pang of jealousy. I’d made the essence of the Quaker faith my own, but so far I’d refrained from making a single utterance in Meeting.

As business began, the members brought forth a series of mind-dulling matters. Two of Israel’s sons were quietly shoving at one another, and the youngest had fallen asleep.
How senseless of Catherine to drag us here,
I thought.

She rose, arranging her shawl about her small, brittle shoulders. “I’m compelled by the Spirit to bring forth a matter of concern.”

I jerked my head upward, gazing at the set edge of her chin, and then at Israel on the opposite end of the row, who appeared as surprised as I was.

“I ask that we come to unity on the necessity of finding a new home for our beloved probationer, Sarah Grimké,” Catherine said. “Miss Grimké is an outstanding teacher to Israel’s children and a help to me with housely duties, and she is, of course, a Christian of the highest order, and it’s important that no one inside or outside of our community be able to question the decorum of an unmarried woman living in the home of a widower. It pains us at Green Hill to see her leave, but it’s a sacrifice we’re willing to make for the greater good. We ask that you assist us in her relocation.”