The Invention of Wings

PART TWO

February 1811-December 1812

Sarah

Sitting before the mirror in my room, I stared at my face while Handful and six-year-old Nina wove my ponytail into braids with the aim of looping them into a circlet at the nape of my neck. Earlier I’d rubbed my face with salt and lemon-vinegar, which was Mother’s formula for removing ink spots. It had lightened my freckles, but not erased them, and I reached for the powder muff to finish them off.
It was February, the height of Charleston’s social season, and all week, a stream of calling cards and invitations had collected on the waiting desk beside the front door. From them Mother had chosen the most elegant and opportune affairs. Tonight, a waltzing party.

I’d entered society two years ago, at sixteen, thrust into the lavish round of balls, teas, musical salons, horseraces, and picnics, which, according to Mother, meant the dazzling doors of Charleston had flung open and female life could begin in earnest. In other words, I could take up the business of procuring a husband. How highborn and moneyed this husband turned out to be would depend entirely on the allure of my face, the delicacy of my physique, the skill of my seamstress, and the charisma of my tête-à-tête. Notwithstanding my seamstress, I arrived at the glittery entrance like a lamb to slaughter.

“Look at this mess you’ve gone and made,” Handful said to Nina, who’d tangled the lock of hair assigned to her into what we commonly referred to as a rat’s nest. Handful raked the brush through it at no small expense to my scalp, then divided the strands into three even pieces, and pronounced two of them to be rabbits and one of them a log. Nina, who’d gone into a pout at having her braid confiscated, perked up at the prospect of a game.

“Watch now,” Handful told her. “This rabbit goes under the log, and this rabbit goes over the log. You make them hop like that all the way down. See, that’s how you make a plait—hop over, hop under.”

Nina took possession of the rabbits and the log and created a remarkably passable braid. Handful and I oohed and ahhed as if she’d carved a Florentine statue.

It was a winter evening like so many others that passed in quiet predictability: the room flushed with lamplight, a fire nesting on the grate, an early dark flattening against the windows, while my two companions fussed over me at the dresser.

My sister and godchild, Angelina—Nina for short—already bore the oval face and graceful features with which our older sister Mary had been blessed. Her eyes were brown and her hair and lashes dark as the little stone box in which I’d once kept my button. My precious Nina was strikingly beautiful. Better yet, she had a lively intellect and showed signs of being quite fearless. She believed she could do anything, a condition I took pains to foster despite the disaster that had come from my own fearless believing.

My aspiration to become a jurist had been laid to rest in the Graveyard of Failed Hopes, an allfemale establishment. The sorrow of it had faded, but regret remained, and I’d taken to wondering if the Fates might be kinder to a different girl. Throughout my childhood, a framed sketch of the Three Fates had hung prominently at the top of the stairs, where they went about their business of spinning, measuring, and cutting the thread of life, all the while keeping an eye on my comings and goings. I was convinced of their personal animosity toward me, but that didn’t mean they would treat my sister’s thread the same way.

I’d vowed to Mother that Nina would become the purpose of my life, and so she was. In her, I had a voice that didn’t stammer and a heart that was unscathed. It’s true I lived a portion of my life through hers, and yes, I blurred the lines of self for both of us, but there was no one who loved Nina

more than I did. She became my salvation, and I want to think I became hers.
She’d called me Mother from the time she could talk. It came naturally, and I didn’t discourage it, but I did have the good sense to keep her from doing it in front of Mother. From the days Nina was in her crib, I’d proselytized her about the evils of slavery. I’d taught her everything I knew and believed, and though Mother must have had some idea I was molding her in my own image, she had no idea to what extent.

With her braid complete, Nina climbed into my lap and began her usual pleading. “Don’t go! Stay with me.”

“Oh, I have to, you know that. Binah will tuck you in.” Nina’s lip fluted out, and I added, “If you don’t whine, I’ll let you pick out the dress I wear.”

She fairly leapt from my knees to the wardrobe, where she chose the most luxuriant costume I had, a maroon velvet gown with three satin chevrons down the front, each with an agraffe of chipped diamonds. It was Handful’s own magnificent creation. At seventeen, she was a prodigy with the needle, even more so than her mother. She now sewed most of my attire.

As Handful stretched on tiptoe to retrieve the dress, I noticed how undeveloped she was—her body lithe and skinny as a boy’s. She didn’t reach five feet and never would. But as small as she was, it was still her eyes that drew attention. I’d once heard a friend of Thomas’ refer to her as the pretty, yellow-eyed Negress.

We weren’t as close as we’d been as girls. Perhaps it was due to my absorption with Nina, or to Handful’s extra duties as the apprentice seamstress, or maybe we’d simply reached an age when our paths naturally began to diverge. But we were friends, I told myself.

As  she  passed  the  fireplace  with  the  dress  in  her  arms,  I  noticed  the  frown  that  seemed permanently etched in her features, as if by narrowing her enormous eyes she felt less of the world could reach her. It seemed she’d begun to feel the boundaries of her life more keenly, that she’d arrived at some moment of reckoning. The past week, Mother had denied her a pass to the market for some minor, forgettable reason, and she’d taken it hard. Her market excursions were the acme of her days, and trying to commiserate, I’d said, “I’m sorry, Handful, I know how you must feel.”
It seemed to me I did know what it felt to have one’s liberty curtailed, but she blazed up at me. “So we just the same, me and you? That’s why you the one to shit in the pot and I’m the one to empty it?”

Her words stunned me, and I turned toward the window to hide my hurt. I heard her breathing in fury before she fled the room, not to return the rest of the day. We hadn’t spoken of it again.
She helped me now step into the gown and slide it over my corset, which I’d laced as loosely as possible. I was of average build, and didn’t think it necessary to obstruct my breathing. After fastening me in, Handful pinned a black mantilla of poult-de-soie to the crown of my head and Nina handed me my black lace fan. Flicking it open, I swanned about the room for them.

Mother entered at the moment I pirouetted, trampling on my hemline and pitching forward—the picture of grace. “I hope you can refrain from this kind of clumsiness at Mrs. Alston’s,” she said.
She stood, buttressed by her cane. At forty-six, her shoulders were already rounding into an old lady’s stoop. She’d been warning me of the travail of spinsterhood for a year now, elaborating on the sad, maiden life of her aunt Amelia Jane. She likened her to a shriveled flower pressed between the pages of a forgotten book, as if this might scare some poise and beauty into me. I feared that Mother was about to embark again on her aunt’s desiccated existence, but she asked, “Didn’t you wear this gown only two nights ago?”

“I did, but—” I looked at my baby sister perched on the dresser stool, and gave her a smile. “Nina chose it.”

“It’s imprudent to wear it again so soon.” Mother seemed to be speaking solely to herself, and I


took the opportunity to ignore her.

Her gaze fell on Angelina, her last child. She made a summoning gesture, her hand scooping at the air for several seconds before she spoke. “Come along, I will see you to the nursery.”
Nina didn’t move. Her eyes turned to me, as if I were the higher authority and might override the command. It was not lost on Mother. “Angelina! I said come. Now!”

If I’d been a thorn in Mother’s side, Angelina would be the whole briar patch. She shook her head, as well as her shoulders. Her entire frame oscillated defiantly on the stool, and knowing very well what she was doing, she announced, “I want to stay here with Mother!”

I braced for Mother’s outburst, but it didn’t come. She pushed her fingers into her temples, moved them in a circle, and made a sound that was part groan, part sigh, part accusation. “I’ve been seized by a malicious headache,” she said. “Hetty, fetch Cindie to my chamber.”
With a roll of her eyes, Handful obeyed, and Mother departed after her, the dull tap of her cane receding along the corridor.

I knelt before Nina, sinking down into my skirt, which billowed out in such a way I must have appeared like a stamen in some monstrous red bloom. “How often have I told you? You mustn’t call me Mother unless we’re alone.”

Nina’s chin trembled visibly. “But you’re my mother.” I let her cry into the velvet of my dress. “You are, you are, you are.”

The upstairs drawing room in Mrs. Alston’s house on King Street was lit to an excessive brightness by a crystal chandelier that blazed like a small inferno from the ceiling. Beneath it, a sea of people danced the schottische, their laughter drowning out the violins.

My dance program was bare except for Thomas, who’d written in his name for two sets of the quadrille. He’d been admitted to the bar the year before and opened a practice with Mr. Langdon Cheves, a man I couldn’t help but feel had taken my place, just as I’d taken Mother’s. Thomas had written to me from Yale, remorseful for ridiculing my ambition on the night of his farewell, but he wouldn’t budge from his position. We’d made peace, nevertheless, and in many ways he was still a demi-god to me. I looked about the room for him, knowing he would be attached to Sally Drayton, whom he was soon to marry. At their engagement party, Father had declared that a marriage between a Grimké and a Drayton would bring forth  “a new Charleston dynasty.” It had irked Mary, who’d entered into a suitable engagement, herself, but one without any regal connotations.
Madame Ruffin had suggested I use my fan to advantage, concealing my “strong jaw and ruddy cheeks,” and I did so obsessively out of self-consciousness. Positioning the fan over the lower half of my face, I peered over its scalloped edge. I knew many of the young women from Madame Ruffin’s classes, St. Philip’s, or the previous social season, but I couldn’t claim a friendship with any of them. They were polite enough to me, but I was never allowed into the warmth of their secrets and gossip. I think my stammer made them uneasy. That, and the awkwardness I seemed to feel in their presence. They were wearing a new style of head-turban the size of settee cushions made from heavy brocades and studded with pins, pearls, and little palettes on which the face of our new president, Mr. Madison, was painted, and their poor heads appeared to wobble on their necks. I thought they looked silly, but the beaux swarmed about them.

Night after night, I endured these grand affairs alone, revolted by what objets d’art we were and

contemptuous of how hollow society had turned out to be, and yet inexplicably, I was filled with a yearning to be one of them.

The slaves moved among us with trays of custard and Huguenot tortes, holding doors, taking coats, stoking fires, moving without being seen, and I thought how odd it was that no one ever spoke of them, how the word slavery was not suitable in polite company, but referred to as the peculiar institution.

Turning abruptly to leave the room, I plowed headlong into a male slave carrying a crystal pitcher of Dragoon punch. It created a magnificent explosion of tea, whiskey, rum, cherries, orange slices, lemon wedges, and shards of glass. They spilled across the rug, onto the slave’s frock coat, the front of my skirt, and the trousers of a tall young man who was passing by at the moment of the collision.

In those first seconds of shock, the young man held my gaze, and I reflexively lifted my hand to my chin as if to cover it with my fan, then realized I’d dropped my fan in the commotion. He smiled at me as sound rushed back into the room, gasps and thin cries of alarm. His composure calmed me, and I smiled back, noticing he had a tiny polyp of orange pulp on his cheek.

Mrs. Alston appeared in a swishing, silver-gray dress, her head bare except for a small jeweled headband across her curling bangs. With aplomb, she inquired if anyone had suffered injury. She dismissed the petrified slave with her hand and summoned another to clean the wreckage, all the while laughing softly to put everyone at ease.

Before I could make an apology, the young man spoke loudly, addressing the room. “I beg your forgiveness. I fear I am an awkward lout.”

“But it was not you—” I began.

He cut me off. “The fault is completely mine.”

“I insist you think no more of it,” Mrs. Alston said. “Come, both of you, and we’ll get you dried off.” She escorted us to her own chamber and left us in the care of her maid, who dabbed at my dress with a towel. The young man waited, and without thinking, I reached out and brushed the pulp from his cheek. It was overtly forward of me, but I wouldn’t consider that until later.
“We make a drowned pair,” he said. “May I introduce myself? I’m Burke Williams.” “Sarah Grimké.”

The only gentleman who’d ever shown interest in me was an unattractive fellow with a bulging forehead and raisin eyes. A member of the Jockey Club, he’d escorted me about the New Market Course at the culmination of Race Week last year, and afterward deposited me in the ladies’ stand to watch the horses on my own. I never saw him again.

Mr. Williams took the towel and blotted his pants, then asked if I would like some air. I nodded, dazed that he’d asked. His hair was blond, mottled with brown, something like the light sands on the beach at Sullivan’s Island, his eyes were greenish, his chin broad, and his cheeks faintly chiseled. I became aware of myself staring at him as we strolled toward the balcony off the drawing room, behaving like a fool of a girl, which, of course, I was. He was aware of it. I saw a smile pull about his mouth, and I silently berated myself for my transparency, for losing my precious fan, for slipping into the solitary darkness of the balcony with a stranger. What was I doing?

The night was cold. We stood by the railing, which had been festooned with pine wreaths, and stared at the figures moving past the windows inside the room. The music whirred behind the panes. I felt very far away from everything. The sea wind rose and I began to shiver. My stammer had been in hibernation for almost a year, but last winter it had showed up on the eve of my coming out and remained throughout my first season, turning it into a perdition. I shook now as much from fear of its return as from the frigid air.

“You’re chilled,” he said, removing his coat and draping it about me in gentlemanly fashion.

“How is it we’ve not been introduced until now?”

Williams. I  didn’t  recognize  his  family  name.  Charleston’s  social  pyramid  was  ruthlessly defended by the aristocratic planters at the top—the Middletons, Pinckneys, Heywards, Draytons, Smiths, Manigaults, Russells, Alstons, Grimkés, and so on. Below them dwelled the mercantile class, wherein a little social mobility was sometimes possible, and it occurred to me that Mr. Williams was from this secondary tier, having slipped into society through an opportune crevice, or perhaps he was a visitor to the city.

“Are you visiting here?” I asked.

“Not at all, my family’s home is on Vanderhorst. But I can read your thoughts. You’re trying to place my family. Williams, Williams, wherefore art thou Williams? ” He laughed. “If you’re like the others, you’re worried I’m an artisan or a laborer, or worse, an aspirer.”

I caught my breath. “Oh, I didn’t mean—I’m not concerned with that sort of thing.” “It’s all in jest—I can see you’re not like the others. Unless, of course, you’re off-put to learn my
family runs the silversmith shop on Queen Street. I’ll inherit it one day.”

“I’m not off-put, I’m not at all,” I said, then added, “I’ve been in your shop.” I didn’t say that shopping for silver irked me no end, as did most everything I was forced to do as
a wife-in-training. Oh, the days Mother had forced me to hand Nina over to Binah and sit with Mary, doing handwork samplers, hoop after hoop of white-on-white, cross stitch, and crewel, and if not handwork, then painting, and if not painting, then visitations, and if not visitations, then shopping in the somber shops of silversmiths, where my mother and sister swooned over a sterling nutmeg grater, or some such.

I’d fallen silent, uneasy with where our conversation had led, and I turned toward the garden, looking down into the faded black shadows. The pear trees were bare, their limbs spread open like the viscera of a parasol. Stretching into the darkness beyond, the single houses, double houses, and villas were lined up in cramped, neat rows which ran toward the tip of the peninsula.
“I see I’ve offended you,” he said. “I intended to be charming, but I’ve been mocking instead. It’s because my station is an awkward topic for me. I’m ill at ease with it.”

I turned back to him, astonished that he’d been so free with his thoughts. I hadn’t known a young man to display this kind of vulnerability. “I’m not offended. I’m—charmed like you said.”
“I thank you, then.”

“No, I should be the one to thank you. The clumsiness in the drawing room—that was mine. And you—”

“I could claim I was trying to be gallant, but in truth, I wanted to impress you. I’d been watching you. I was about to introduce myself when you whirled about and it rained punch.”
I laughed, more startled than amused. Young men did not watch me. “You created a brilliant spectacle,” he was saying. “Don’t you think?” Regrettably, we were veering into the hazards of flirting. I’d always been feeble at it. “Yes. I-I try.”

“And do you create these spectacles often?” he asked. “I try.”

“You’ve succeeded well. The ladies on the dance floor recoiled with such shock I thought a turban might sail off and injure someone.”

“Ah, but—the injury would’ve been laid at your feet, not mine. I mean, it was you who claimed responsibility for the whole thing.” Where had that come from?

He bowed, conceding.

“We should return to the party,” I told him, peeling his coat from my shoulders, wanting to end the banter on a high note, but worried, too, we might be missed.

“If you insist, but I would rather not share you. You’re the loveliest lady I’ve met this season.” His words seemed gratuitous, and for an instant, I didn’t quite trust them. But why couldn’t I be
lovely to him? Perhaps the Fates at the top of the stairs had changed their minds. Perhaps he’d looked past my plainness and glimpsed something deeper. Or, perhaps I was not as plain as I thought.
“May I call on you?” he asked.

“You want to call on me?”

He reached for my hand and pulled it to his lips. He kissed it, not removing his eyes from mine, pressing the heat and smoothness of his lips onto my skin. His face seemed strangely concentrated, and I felt the warmth from his mouth move up my arm into my chest.