The Invention of Wings (44 page)

“You don’t have cold feet, do you?” Nina was saying. “Tell me you don’t.”

I heard Israel’s voice cut through the crowd, calling for Becky, and glancing up, I caught sight of his back disappearing into the meetinghouse. I stood a moment smelling the heat on the horse saddles, the stink of urine on the cobblestone.

“… I always have cold feet … but come on, they won’t stop me.”

She slid her arm through mine, and I could barely keep up with her as she towed me to the door, her chin raised in that defiant way she’d had since childhood, and for a second, I saw her at fourteen, sitting on the yellow settee before Reverend Gadsden with her chin yanked up just like this, refusing to be confirmed into St. Philip’s.

Soon after Nina had arrived in Philadelphia, the Quakers had made her a teacher in the Infant School, a job she despised. Our requests for another assignment had been ignored—I believe they thought there was some pride to be knocked out of her by diapering babies. The eligible men, including Jane Bettleman’s son, Edward, trampled over one another to assist her from the carriage, then loitered close by in case she dropped something they might retrieve, but she found them all tedious. When she turned thirty last winter, I began to quietly worry, not that she was becoming another Aunt Amelia Jane like me—indeed I told her if she got Mrs. Bettleman for a mother-in-law we would both have to drown ourselves in the river. No, my worry was that she would find herself forty-three like me, and still burping Quaker babies.

The Negro pew was in the low-slung spot beneath the stairs that led to the balcony. As usual, it was guarded by one of the men to ensure no white person sat on it by accident and no colored person passed beyond it. Noticing Edward Bettleman was the guard today, I sighed. We were doomed, it seemed, to make fresh enemies of his family over and over.

Sarah Mapps Douglass and her mother, Grace, sat on the bench in their Quaker dresses and bonnets. Typically the only Negroes among us, Sarah Mapps, close in age to Nina, was a teacher in the school for black children she’d founded, and her mother was a milliner. They were both known for their abolitionist leanings, but as we stepped toward them, I wondered for the first time if they would mind what Nina and I were about to do, if it would implicate them in any way.

As the thought crossed my mind, I hesitated, and seeing me pause, no doubt worrying again about the temperature of my feet, Nina strode quickly to the bench and plopped down beside the older woman.

I remember a blur of things happening at once—the exhale of surprise that left Mrs. Douglass’ lips, Sarah Mapps turning to look at me, comprehending, Edward Bettleman lunging toward Nina, saying too loudly, “Not here, you can’t sit here.”

Ignoring him, Nina stared bravely ahead, while I slipped beside Sarah Mapps. Edward turned to me. “Miss Grimké, this is the Negro pew, you’ll have to move.”

“… We’re comfortable here,” I said, noticing that entire rows of people nearby were twisting about to see the trouble.

Edward departed, and in the quiet that followed, I heard the women take up their fans and the men clear their throats, and I hoped the disturbance would die down now, but across the room on the Elders’ bench, there was a spate of whispering, and then I saw Edward returning with his father.

The four of us instinctively slid together on the bench.

“I ask you to respect the sanctity and tradition of the meeting and remove yourselves from the pew,” Mr. Bettleman said.

Mrs. Douglass began to breathe fast, and I was stabbed with fear that we’d put them in jeopardy. Belatedly, I recalled a free black woman who’d sat on a white pew at a wedding and had been forced to sweep the city streets. I gestured toward the two women. “… They’re not part of—” I’d almost said,
part of our dissidence
, but stopped myself. “… They’re not part of this.”

“That’s not so,” Sarah Mapps said, glancing at her mother, then up at Mr. Bettleman. “We are fully part of it. We sit here together, do we not?”

She slipped her hands into the folds of her skirt to hide the way they trembled, and I was filled with love and grief at the sight.

He waited, and we didn’t move. “I’ll ask one final time,” he said. He looked incredulous, incensed, certain of his righteousness, but he could hardly remove us forcibly. Could he?

Nina drew herself up, eyes blazing. “We shall not be moved, sir!”

His face reddened. Turning to me, he spoke in a tightly coiled whisper. “Heed me, Miss Grimké. Rein in your sister, and yourself as well.”

As he left, I peered at Sarah Mapps and her mother, the way they grabbed hands and squeezed in relief, and then at Nina, at the small exultation on her face. She was braver than I, she always had been. I cared too much for the opinion of others, she cared not a whit. I was cautious, she was brash. I was a thinker, she was a doer. I kindled fires, she spread them. And right then and ever after, I saw how cunning the Fates had been. Nina was one wing, I was the other.

Nina and I were summoned from our rooms by Catherine ringing the tea bell on what we thought was a restful September afternoon. She often rang the bell when a letter arrived for one of us, a meal was served, or she needed help with some household task. We plodded downstairs without a trace of wariness, and there they were, the elders sitting ramrod straight in the chairs in Catherine’s parlor, a few left to stand along the wall, Israel among them. Catherine, the only woman, was grandly installed on the frumpy velvet wingchair. We had stumbled into the Inquisition.

Neither of us had bothered to tuck up our hair. Mine hung in limp red tassels to my waist, while Nina’s floated about her shoulders, all curls and corkscrews. It was improper for mixed company, but Catherine didn’t send us back. She pursed her lips into something sour that passed for a smile and gestured us into the room.

Three weeks had passed since we’d first sat on the Negro bench and refused to get up, and except for Mr. Bettleman, no one had said an admonishing word to us. We’d returned to sit with Sarah Mapps and Grace the following week and then the next, and no effort had been made to stop us. I’d been lulled into thinking the elders had acquiesced to what we’d done. Apparently, I’d been wrong.

We stood side by side waiting for someone to speak. The windowpanes burned with sunlight, baking the room to a kiln, and I felt a streak of cold sweat dart between my breasts. I tried to meet Israel’s gaze, but he leaned back into the shadow from the cornice. Turning then to Catherine, I saw the newspaper lying on her lap.
The Liberator.

My stomach caught.

Holding one corner between her thumb and forefinger, she lifted the paper as if it were a dead mouse she’d found in a trap and held by the tip of its tail. “A letter on the front page of the most notorious anti-slavery paper in the country has come to our attention.” She adjusted her glasses—the lenses were thick as the bottom of a bottle. “Allow me to read aloud.
30 August, 1835, Respected Friend—
”

Nina gasped. “Oh Sarah, I didn’t know it would be published.”

I squinted at her frantic eyes, trying to comprehend what she was saying. As it dawned on me, I tried to speak, yet nothing came but a spew of air. I had to strip the words like wallpaper. “… … You … wrote to … Mr. Garrison?”

A chair scraped on the floor, and I saw Mr. Bettleman stride toward us. “You want us to believe that you, the daughter of a slaveholding family, penned a letter to an agitator like William Lloyd Garrison, thinking he wouldn’t publish it? It’s exactly the sort of inflammatory material he spreads.”

She was not remorseful, she was defiant. “Yes, perhaps I did think he would publish it!” she said. Then to me, “People are risking their lives for the cause of the slave, and we do nothing but sit on the Negro pew! I did what I had to do.”

It did feel, all of a sudden, that what she’d done was inevitable. Our lives would never go back to the way they’d been, she’d seen to it, and I both wanted to pull her into my arms and thank her, and to shake her.

Their faces were all the same, grim and accusing, frowning through the glaze of light, all but Israel’s. He stared at the floor as if he wished to be anywhere but here.

As Catherine resumed reading, Nina fixed her eyes on the far wall, on some high, removed place above their heads. The letter was long and eloquent, and yes, highly flammable.

“If persecution is the means by which we will accomplish emancipation, then I say, let it come, for it is my deep, solemn, deliberate conviction that this is a cause worth dying for. Angelina Grimké
.
”
Catherine folded the paper and laid it on the floor.

News of her letter would reach Charleston, of course. Mother, Thomas, the entire family would read it with outrage and disgrace. She would never go home again—I wondered if she’d thought of that, how those words slammed shut whatever door was left there.

Just then Israel spoke from the back of the room, and I closed my eyes at the gentleness in his voice, the sudden kindness. “You are both our sisters. We love you as Christ loves you. We’ve come here only to bring you back into good standing with your Quaker brethren. You may still return to us in full repentance, as the prodigal son returned to his father—”

“You must recant the letter or be expelled,” Mr. Bettleman said, terse and plain.

Expelled.
The word hung like a small blade, almost visible in the brightness. This could not happen. I’d spent thirteen years with the Quakers, six pursuing the ministry, the only profession left to me. I’d given up everything for it, marriage, Israel, children.

I hastened to speak before Nina. I knew what she would say and then the blade would fall. “… Please, I know you’re a merciful people.”

“Try and understand, Sarah, we looked the other way while you sat on the Negro pew,” Catherine said. “But it’s gone too far now.” She laced her fingers beneath her chin and her knuckles shone white. “And you have to consider, too, where you’ll go if you don’t recant. I care for you both, but naturally you couldn’t stay here.”

Panic arched into my throat. “… Is it so wrong to write a letter? … Is it so wrong to put feet to our prayers?”

“Matters like this—they aren’t the work of a woman’s life,” Israel said, stepping from the shadowed place along the wall. “Surely you’re not blind to that.” His voice was mired in hurt and frustration, the same tone he’d had when I turned down his proposal, and I knew he was speaking about more than the letter. “We have no choice. What you’ve done by declaring yourself in this manner is outside the bounds of Quakerism.”

I reached for Nina’s hand. It felt clammy and hot. I looked at Israel, only Israel. “… We cannot recant the letter. I only wish I’d signed it, too.”

Nina’s hand tightened on mine, squeezing to the point of pain.

4 August

Dear Sarah

Mauma passed on last month. She fell into a sleep under the oak tree and never roused. She stayed asleep six days before she died in her bed, me beside her and Sky too. Your mauma paid for her to have a pine box.

They put her in the slave burial ground on Pitt Street. Missus let Goodis carry me and Sky over there in the carriage to see her resting place and say goodbye. Sky has turned 22 now and stands tall as a man. When we stood by the grave, I didn’t come up to her shoulder. She sang the song the women on the plantation sing when they pound rice to leave on the graves. She said they put rice there to help the dead find their way back to Africa. Sky had a pocketful from the kitchen house and she spread it over mauma while she sang.

What came to me was the old song I made up when I was a girl. Cross the water, cross the sea, let them fishes carry me, carry me home. I sang that, then I took the brass thimble, the one I loved from the time I was little, and I left it on top of her grave so she’d have that part of me.

Well, I wanted you to know. I guess she’s at peace now.

I hope this letter makes it to you. If you write me, take care cause your sister Mary watches everything. The black driver from her plantation named Hector is the butler now and he does her spying.

Your friend

Handful

I wrote Sarah’s name and address on the front by the light of the candle, copying missus’ handwriting as close as I could manage. Missus’ penship had fallen off so bad I could’ve set down any kind of lettering and passed it off for hers. I closed the letter with a drop of wax and pressed it with missus’ seal-stamp. I’d stole the stamp from her room—let’s say, borrowed it. I planned to take it back before it was missed. The stationery, though, was just plain stolen.

Cross the room, Sky was sleeping, thrashing in the heat. I watched her arms search the spot on the mattress where mauma used to lay, then I blew out the flame and watched the smoke tail away in the dark. Tomorrow I’d slip the letter in the batch going to the post and hope nobody took a hard look.

Sky sang out in her sleep, sounded like Gullah, and I thought of the rice she’d sprinkled on mauma’s grave, trying to send her spirit to Africa.