The Invention of Wings (34 page)

I stared at the unvarnished wood floor and the hem of her dress, unable almost to draw a breath.

I recall only a portion of what the members said in the aftermath of her insidious speech. I remember being hailed for my scruples and my sacrifice. I remember words like
honorable, selfless, praiseworthy, imperative.

When the whir of voices finally faded, an elderly man said, “Are we in unity on the matter? If you stand in opposition, please acknowledge yourself.”

I stand in opposition. I, Sarah Grimké.
The words strained against my ribs and became lost. I wanted to refute what Catherine had said, but I didn’t know where to begin. She’d ingeniously transformed me into an exemplar of goodness and self-denial. Any rebuttal I made would seem to contradict that and perhaps end my chances of being accepted into the Quaker fold. The thought of that pained me. Despite their austerity, their hair splitting, they’d put forth the first anti-slavery document in history. They’d showed me a God of love and light and a faith centered on individual conscience. I didn’t want to lose them, nor did I want to lose Israel, which I would surely do, if my probation failed.

I couldn’t move, not the tiniest muscle in my tongue.

Israel slid up on the pew as if he might stand and speak on my behalf, but he lingered there, balling his fist and pressing it into the palm of his hand. Catherine had put him in the same untenable position as me—he wanted to give no one a reason to question what went on in his house, especially the good people of Arch Street who were at the center of his life, who’d known and cherished Rebecca. I could understand this. Yet watching him hesitate now on the edge of his seat, I had the feeling his reluctance to speak out publicly for me stemmed from something even deeper, from some submerged, almost sovereign need to protect his love for his wife. I knew suddenly it was the same reason he hadn’t declared his feelings for me privately. He cast a tortuous look at me and eased back on the bench.

At the front of the room, the female minister sat on the “Facing bench” along with the other ministers, scrutinizing me, noticing the glimmers of distress I couldn’t hide. Gazing back at her, I imagined she saw down to the things in my heart, things I was just coming to know myself.
He might never claim me.

She nodded at me suddenly and stood. “I’m in opposition. I see no reason for Miss Grimké to move out. It would be a great disruption for her and a hardship for all involved. Her conduct is not in question. We should not be so concerned with outward appearances.”

Taking her seat, she smiled at me, and I thought I might cry at the sight of it.

She was the only one to offer a dissent to Catherine. The Quakers decided I would depart Green Hill within the month and duly recorded it in the Minute Book.

After the meeting, Israel left quickly to bring the carriage around, but I went on sitting on the pew, trying to gather myself. I couldn’t think where I would go. Would I still teach the children? As Catherine steered them toward the door, Becky looked back at me, twisting against Catherine’s hands, which were fastened like a harness on her small back.

“Sarah? May I call you Sarah?” It was my defender.

I nodded. “… Thank you for speaking as you did … I’m grateful.”

She thrust a folded piece of paper at me. “Here’s my address. You are welcome to stay with me and my husband.” She started to go, then turned back. “I’m sorry, I didn’t introduce myself, did I? My name is Lucretia Mott.”

I
n the workshop at Denmark’s house, the lieutenants were standing round the work table. They were always by Denmark’s side. He told them he’d set the date, two months from now, said there were six thousand names in the Book.

I was back in the corner, listening, crouched on a footstool, my usual spot. Nobody much noticed me there unless they needed something to drink.
Handful, bring the hooch water, Handful, bring the ginger beer.

It was April and half the heat from hell had already showed up in Charleston. The men were dripping with it. “These last weeks, you need to play the part of the good slave better than ever,” Denmark said. “Tell everybody to grit their teeth and obey their owners. If somebody was to tell the white folks a slave revolt is coming, we need them to laugh and say, ‘Not our slaves, they’re like family. They’re the happiest people on earth.’”

While they talked, mauma came to my mind, and the picture I had of her was washed-out like the red on a quilt after it’s boiled too many times. It’d got sometimes where I couldn’t remember how her face looked, where the ridges had been on her fingers from working the needle, or what she smelled like at the end of the day. Whenever this happened, I’d go out to the spirit tree. That’s where I felt mauma the sharpest, in the leaves and bark and dropping acorns.

Sitting there, I shut my eyes and tried to get her back, worried she was leaving me for good. Aunt-Sister would’ve said, “Let her go, it’s past the time,” but I wanted the pain of mauma’s face and hands more than the peace of being without them.

I thought for a minute I’d slip out and go back to the spirit tree—take my chance going over the gate before dark, but Missus had caught me slipping over it last month and put a gash on my head that was just scabbing over. She’d told Sabe, “If Handful gets out again without permission, I’ll have you whipped along with her.” Now he had bug eyes in the back of his head.

I tried to set my mind on what the men were saying.

“What we need is a bullet mold,” Denmark said. “We got muskets, but we don’t have musket balls.”

They went down the list of weapons. I’d known there’d be blood, but I didn’t know it’d run down the streets. They had clubs, axes, and knives. They had stolen swords. They had kegs of gunpowder and slow fuses hid under the docks they meant to set off round the city and burn it to the ground.

They said a blacksmith slave named Tom was making five hundred pikes. I figured he had to be the same Tom the Blacksmith who made mauma’s fake slave badge back when she’d started hiring herself out. I remembered the day she’d showed it to me. That small copper square with a pinhole at the top, said
Domestic Servant, Number 133, Year 1805
. I could see all that, but I couldn’t get mauma’s face to come clear.

I had a tiny jay feather down in my pocket I’d picked up on the way over here, and I pulled it out and twirled it between my fingers, just something to do, and next thing I was thinking about was the time mauma saw a bird funeral. When she was a girl, she and my granny-mauma came on a dead crow lying under their spirit tree. They went to get a scoop to bury it, and when they came back, seven crows were on the ground circling round the dead bird, carrying on, not
caw caw,
but
zeep zeep,
a high-pitch cry like a mourning chant. My granny-mauma told her, “See, that’s what birds do, they stop flying and hunting food and swoop down to tend their dead. They march round it and cry. They do this so everything know: once this bird lived and now it’s gone.”

That story brought the bright red of mauma back to me. Her picture came perfect in my mind. I saw the yellow-parch of her skin, the calluses on her knuckles, the gold-lit eyes, and the gap in her teeth, the exact wideness of it.

“There’s a bullet mold at the City Arsenal on Meeting Street,” Gullah Jack said. “But getting in there—well, I don’t know.”

“How many guards they got?” Rolla asked.

Gullah Jack rubbed his whiskers. “Two, sometimes three. The place has the whole stockpile of weapons for the Guard, but they’re not letting one of us stroll in there.”

“Getting in would mean a fight,” Denmark said, “and that’s one thing we can’t afford. Like I said, the main thing now is not to rouse suspicion.”

“What about me?” I said.

They turned and looked at me like they’d forgotten I was in the room.

“What about you?” said Denmark.

“I could get in there. Nobody looks twice at a slave woman who’s lame in one leg.”

A
s dusk hovered, I sat at the desk in my room and slit open a letter from Nina. I’d been at Green Hill almost a year, and I’d written her every month without fail, small dispatches about my life and inquiries about hers, but she’d never replied to any of them, not one, and now here was an envelope with her large calligraphy and I could only imagine the worst.

14 March 1822

Dear Sister,

I’ve been a poor correspondent and a poorer sister. I didn’t agree with your decision to go north, and I haven’t changed my mind about it, but I have behaved badly, and I hope you will forgive me.

I’m at my wit’s end about our mother. She grows more difficult and violent each day. She rants that we’ve been left without sufficient means to live and she blames Thomas, John, and Frederick for failing to take care of her. Needless to say, they come infrequently, and Mary never comes, only Eliza. Since your departure, Mother spends most of her day shut in her room, and when she emerges, it’s only to rage against the slaves. She swings her cane at them over the least thing. She recently hit Aunt-Sister for nothing more than burned loaves of bread. Last evening, she struck Handful when she spotted her climbing over the back gate. I should add that Handful was climbing into the work yard, not out of it, and when Mother asked for an explanation, Handful said she’d seen a wounded pup in the alley and gone over the gate to help the creature. She insisted she was returning from that momentary mission of mercy, but I don’t think Mother believed her. I certainly didn’t. Mother broke the skin over Handful’s brow, which I bandaged the best I could.

I’m alarmed at Mother’s escalating temper, but I also fear Handful is engaged in something dangerous that involves frequent trips over the gate. I saw her slip away from the house myself on another occasion. She refuses to speak to me about it. I doubt I can shield her if she’s caught again.

I feel alone and helpless here. Please come to my aid. I beg you, come home.

Yours in need and with sisterly love, Nina

I laid down the letter. Pushing back the chair, I went to the dormer window and stared at the darkening grove of cedars. A little swarm of fireflies was rising up from it like embers.
I feel alone and helpless here—
Nina’s words, but I felt them like my own.

Earlier, Catherine had sent my trunk up from the cellar, and I busied myself now pulling belongings from the wardrobe and the desk, strewing them across the bed and onto the braided rug—bonnets, shawls, dresses, sleeping gowns, gloves, journals, letters, the little biography of Joan of Arc I’d stolen from Father’s study, a single strand of pearls, ivory brushes, bottles of French glass filled with lotions and powders, and dearest of all, my lava box with the silver button.

“You didn’t come down for supper.” Israel stood in the doorway, peering inside, afraid, it seemed, to cross into my small, messy sanctum.

My possessions were puny by Grimké standards, but I was nevertheless embarrassed by the excess, and in particular by the woolen underwear I was holding. He fixed his eyes on the open trunk, then swung his gaze to the eaves as if the sight of my packing stung him.

“… I had no appetite,” I said.

He stepped, finally, into the disarray. “I came to say, I’m sorry. I should’ve spoken in the meeting. I was wrong not to. What Catherine did was unpardonable—I’ve told her as much. I’ll go before the elders this week and make it clear I don’t wish you to leave.” His eyes gleamed with what I took to be anguish.

“… It’s too late, Israel.”

“But it isn’t. I can make them understand—”

“No!” It came out more forcefully than I intended.

He sank onto the end of my narrow bed and plowed his hand through his rampant black hair. It filled me with a sharp, almost exquisite pain to see him on the bed, there among my gowns and pearls and lava box. I thought how much I would miss him.

He stood and took my hand. “You’ll still come and teach the girls, won’t you? A number of people have offered to board you.”

I pulled my hand away. “… I’m going home.”

His eyes darted again to the trunk, and I watched his shoulders curve forward, his ribs dropping one onto the other. “Is it because of me?”

I paused, not knowing how to answer. Nina’s letter had come just when the bottom had fallen from things, and it was true, I welcomed the excuse to leave. Was I running away from him? “… No,” I told him. I was sure I would’ve left regardless, why dissect the reason?

When I recounted the contents of the letter, he said, “It’s terrible about your mother, but there must be other siblings who can tend to the situation.”

“… Nina needs
me.
Not someone else.”

“But it’s very sudden. You should think about it. Pray about it. God brought you here, you can’t deny that.”

I couldn’t deny it. Something good and right had brought me north, and even to this very place—to Green Hill and Israel and the children. The mandate to leave Charleston was still as radiant as the day I’d first felt it, but there was Nina’s letter lying on the desk. And then there was the other matter, the matter of Rebecca.

“Sarah, we need you here. You’ve become indispensable to—to all of us.”

“… It’s decided, Israel. I’m sorry. I’m going home to Charleston.”

He sighed. “At least tell me you’ll come back to us after things are settled there.”

The window was sheened with the glare of the room, but I stepped close to it and bent my head to the pane. I could see the bright helix of fireflies still out there. “… I don’t know. I don’t know anymore.”

T
he night before I went to the City Arsenal to steal a bullet mold, me and Goodis crept up to the empty room over the carriage house—the same one where me and mauma used to sleep—and I let him do what he’d been wanting to do with me for years, and I guess what I’d been wanting to do with him. I was twenty-nine years old now, and I told myself, if I get caught tomorrow, the Guard will kill me, and if they don’t, the Work House will, so before I leave the earth, I might as well know what the fuss is about.