The Invention of Wings

Sarah

Our caravan of two carriages, two wagons, and seventeen people returned to Charleston in May on the high crest of spring. Rains had left the city rinsed and clean, scented with newly flowering myrtle, privet, and Chinese tallow. The bougainvillea had advanced en masse over garden gates, and the sky was bright and creamed with thin, swirling clouds. I felt exultant to be back.

As we lumbered through the back gate into an empty work yard, Tomfry hurried from the kitchen house at an old man’s trot, calling, “Massa, you back early.” He had a napkin stuffed at his collar and looked anxious, as if we’d caught him in the dilatory act of eating.

“Only by a day,” Father said, climbing from the Barouche. “You should let the others know we’re here.”

I squirmed past everyone, leaving even Nina behind, and broke for the house where I pillaged the calling cards on the desk, and there it was—the borrowed paper.

3 May

Burke Williams requests Sarah Grimké’s company on a (chaperoned) horseback outing at Sullivan’s Island, upon her return to Charleston.

Yours, most truly.

I let out an exhale, behemoth in nature, and ascended the stairs.

I remember very clearly coming to a full halt on the second-floor landing and gazing curiously at the door to my room. It alone was shut, while the others stood open. I walked toward it uncertainly, with a vague sense of portent. I paused with my hand over the knob for a second and cocked my ear. Hearing nothing, I turned the knob. It was locked.

I gave the knob a second determined try, and then a third and fourth, and that’s when I heard the tentative voice inside.

“That you, mauma?”

Handful? The thought of her inside my room with the door locked was so incongruent I could not immediately answer back.

She called out,  “Coming.” Her voice sounded exasperated, reluctant, breathy. There was the sound of water splashing, a key thrust into the lock. Click. Click.

She stood in the doorway dripping wet, naked but for a white linen towel clutched around her waist. Her breasts were two small, purple plums protruding from her chest. I couldn’t help gazing at her wet, black skin, the small compact power of her torso. She’d unloosed her braids, and her hair was a wild corona around her head, shimmering with beaded water.

She stepped backward and her mouth parted. Behind her, the wondrous copper tub sat in the middle of the room, filled with water. Vapor was lifting off the surface, turning the air rheumy. The audacity of what she’d done took my breath. If Mother discovered this, the consequences would be swift and dire.

I moved quickly inside and closed the door, my instinct even now to protect her. She made no attempt to cover herself. I glimpsed defiance in her eyes, in the way she wrested back her chin as if to say, Yes, it’s me, bathing in your precious tub.

The silence was terrible. If she thought my reserve was due to anger, she was right. I wanted to shake her. Her boldness seemed like more than a frolic in the tub, it seemed like an act of rebellion, of usurpation. What had possessed her? She’d violated not only the privacy of my room and the intimacy

of our tub, she’d breached my trust.

I didn’t recognize how my mother’s voice ranted inside me.

Handful started to speak, and I was terrified of what she would say, fearful it would be hateful and justifying, yet oddly, I feared an expression of shame and apology just as much. I stopped her. “Please. Don’t say anything. At least do that for me, say nothing.”

I turned my back while she dried herself and pulled on her dress. When I looked again, she was tying a kerchief around her hair. It was pale green, the same color as the tiny discolored patches on the copper. She bent to mop the puddles from the floor, and I saw the scarf darkening as it soaked the dampness.

She said, “You want me to empty the water out now or wait?” “Let’s do it now. We can’t have Mother wander in and find it.”

With effort, I helped her roll the sloshing tub through the jib door onto the piazza, close to the rail, hoping the family was inside now and wouldn’t hear the gush of water. Handful yanked open the vent and it spilled in a long, silver beak over the side. I seemed to taste it in my mouth, the tang of minerals.

“I know you’re angry, Sarah, but I didn’t see any harm with me being in the tub, same as you.” Not Miss Sarah, but Sarah. I would never again hear her put Miss before my name. She had the look of someone who’d declared herself, and seeing it, my indignation collapsed and
her mutinous bath turned into something else entirely. She’d immersed herself in forbidden privileges, yes, but mostly in the belief she was worthy of those privileges. What she’d done was not a revolt, it was a baptism.

I saw then what I hadn’t seen before, that I was very good at despising slavery in the abstract, in the removed and anonymous masses, but in the concrete, intimate flesh of the girl beside me, I’d lost the ability to be repulsed by it. I’d grown comfortable with the particulars of evil. There’s a frightful muteness that dwells at the center of all unspeakable things, and I had found my way into it.
As Handful began to shove the vessel back across the piazza, I tried to speak. “. . . . . . Wait. . . I’ll. . . . . . help . . .”

She turned and looked at me, and we both knew. My tongue would once again attempt its suicide.

Handful

Missus sent me and mauma to the market for some good cotton to make a dress for Nina. She was growing  out  from  everything.  Missus  said,  get  something  pastel  this  time  and  see  about  some homespun for Tomfry and them to have new vests.

The market was a row of stalls that ran all the way from East Bay to Meeting and had whatever under the sun you wanted. Missus said the place was a vulgar bazaar, that was her words. The turkey buzzards wandered round the meat stands like regular customers. They had to keep a man in there with a palm branch to shoo them. Course, they flew to the roofs and waited him out, then came on back. The smells in there would knock you down. Ox tails, bullock hearts, raw pork, live chickens, cracked oysters, blue crabs, fish, and more fish. The sweet peanut cakes didn’t stand a chance. I used to go round holding my nose till mauma got some eucalyptus leaves to rub over my top lip.
The slave sellers, what they called higglers, were shouting their wares, trying to out-do each other. The men sang out, “Jimmie” (that’s what we called the male crabs), and the women sang back, “Sook” (those were the females). “Jimmieeee . . . Soooook . . . Jimmieeee . . . Soooook.” You needed something for your nose and your ears.

It was September, and I still hadn’t laid eyes on the man mauma had told me about, the lucky free black who won the money to buy his freedom. He had a carpenter shop out back of his house, and I knew every time she was let out for hire or sent to the market without me, she was dallying with him. One, two times a week, she came back smelling like wood shavings, the back of her dress saw-dusted.
That day, when we got to the piece good stalls, I started saying how he was made-up. “Awright then,” mauma said. She grabbed up the first pastel she saw and some drab brown wool and we headed outside with our baskets loaded. A block down, they were selling slaves right on the street, so we crossed the other way toward King. I patted the pass inside my dress pocket three times and checked to see did mauma still have her badge fastened on her dress. Out in the streets, I always had the bad feeling of something coming, some meanness gathering. On Coming Street, we spotted a guard, couldn’t have been old as me, stop an old man who got so nervous he dropped his travel pass. The guard stepped on it, having his fun.

We walked in a hurry, outpacing the carriages. Mauma didn’t use her wooden cane anymore except special occasions. Those came along when she needed a letup from missus. She’d tell her, “Looks like the cure I prayed for my leg has worn off. I just need to rest up and pray for a few days.” Out came the cane.

Mauma’s free black man lived at 20 Bull. It was a white frame single house, had black shudders with the paint flecking off and scruffy bushes round the porch. She shook the powder shell from the street off her hemline and said, “If I stand here, he see me and come right out.”
“So we’re supposed to stand here till he looks out the window?”

“You want me to go up there and knock on the door? If his wife come, you want me to say, ‘Tell your husband his girlfriend out here?’”

“How come you’re fooling with somebody who has a wife anyway?” “They not married legal, she his free-wife. He got two more of ’em, too. All mulatto.” As she said the word, mulatto, he stepped from the house and stood on the porch looking at us. A
bull of a man. I wanted to say, Well he sure does live on the right street . He was thickset and solid with a big chest and large forehead.

When he came over, mauma said to him, “This my girl, Handful.” He nodded. I could see he was stern, and proud. He said, “I’m Denmark Vesey.”

Mauma sidled up to him and said for my benefit, “Denmark is a country next to France, and a real fine one, too.” She smiled at him in a way I had to look away from.

He slid his hand up the side of her arm, and I eased off down the street. If they wanted to carry on, all right, but I didn’t have to stand there and watch it.

In the coming year, we’d make this visit to 20 Bull more times than I care to tell. The two lovebirds would go in his workshop, and I’d sit outside and wait. After they were done, he’d come out and talk. And he could talk, Lord, could that man talk. Denmark the man never had been to Denmark the country, just the Danish Islands. To hear him tell it, though, he’d been everywhere else. He’d traveled the world with his owner Captain Vesey, who sailed a slave ship. He spoke French, Danish, Creole, Gullah, and the King’s English. I heard him speak every one of these tongues. He came from the Land of Barbados and liked to say Charleston didn’t trust slaves from there, cause they’d slit your throat. He said Charleston wanted saltwater blacks from Africa who knew rice planting.
The worst troubling thing he told me was how his neighbor down the street—a free black named Mr. Robert Smyth—owned three slaves. Now what you supposed to do with something like that? Mr. Vesey had to take me to the man’s house to meet the slaves before I allowed any truth to it. I didn’t know whether this Mr. Smyth was behaving like white people, or if it just showed something vile about all people.

Denmark Vesey read the Bible up and down. Give him five minutes and he’d tell you the story of Moses leading slaves from Egypt. He’d have the sea parting, frogs falling from the sky, firstborn baby boys stabbed in their beds. He mouthed a Bible verse from Joshua so many times, it still comes to me in full. They utterly destroyed all that were in the city, both man and woman, both young and old . The man was head-smart and reckless. He scared the wits out of me.

The two of us had a clash the first day we met. Like I said, I’d eased off down the street to let them know I didn’t have a need to see their urges. The street was busy, everybody from free blacks to the mayor and the governor lived on it, and when a white woman came along, walking in my path, I did the common thing you do—I stepped to the side to let her pass. It was the law, you were supposed to give way on the street, but here came Denmark Vesey charging down to where I stood with fury blowing from his nostrils, and mauma looking panic right behind him. He yanked me by the arm, yelled, “Is this the sort of person you want to be? The kind that steps aside? The kind that grovels in the street?”

I wanted to say, Get your hand off me, you don’t know nothing about me, I bathe in a copper tub, and you’re standing here and stink to heaven . The air round my head turned thick and my throat tightened on it. I managed to say, “Let me go.”

Behind him, mauma said, a little too sweet for my taste, “Take your hand off her.” He dropped his grip. “Don’t let me see that from you again.” Then he smiled. And mauma, she
smiled, too.

We walked home without a word between us.

Inside the Grimké house, the door to the library was open. The room was empty, so I went in and spun the globe. It made a screech sound. Like a nail on a slate board. Binah said that sound was the devil’s toenail. I looked over all the countries on the globe, round the whole earth. Denmark wasn’t next to France, it was up by Prussia, but looking at it, I knew why mauma chose him. He’d been places, and he was going places, and he set her alight with the notion she’d go places, too.

Sarah

Nina came up with the idea that my speech infirmity might be cured by kneading my tongue, a process typically applied to dough. The child was nothing if not pioneering. She’d listened to my tortured sentences throughout the summer and into the fall and came to believe the ornery protuberance in my mouth could be molded in a way that caused words to plump and rise as effortless as yeast. She was six and a half.

Once Nina was seduced by a problem, she wouldn’t give up until she’d improvised a solution and acted on it, and these solutions of hers could be outlandish, but also wondrously imaginative. Not wishing to dampen this fascinating proclivity of hers, I stuck out my tongue and allowed her to grasp it with what I hoped to be a clean drying towel.

This experiment was being performed on the second-floor piazza—me, sitting on the swing, neck craned, mouth open, eyes bulging—the vision of a voracious baby bird awaiting her worm, though to any observer, I’m sure it appeared the worm was being extracted rather than deposited.
An autumn sun was climbing over the harbor, spilling like yolk onto the clouds. From the corner of my watering eye, I could see the sheen of it angling sharply toward Sullivan’s Island. Mr. Williams and I had cantered along that island’s shoreline on horseback in what had turned out to be a sullen affair. Fearing my freshly returned stammer would cause him to abandon the courtship, I’d barely opened  my  mouth.  Nevertheless,  he’d  continued  to  call—there’d  been  five  occasions  since  I’d returned from Belmont last June. I expected each one to be the last. The boundary of feeling between Nina and me was permeable to a fault, and I believe my fear had become Nina’s. She seemed uncommonly determined to cure me.

Grasping my tongue, she pressed and pulled. In return, it flailed like the tentacle of an octopus. She sighed. “Your tongue is being implacable.”

Implacable! Where did the little genius get these words? I was teaching her to read, as I’d once taught Handful, but I was sure I’d never introduced the word implacable.

“And you are holding your breath,” she added. “Let it out. Try to loosen yourself.” Very bossy she was, too. Already she possessed more authority and self-assurance than I. “. . . I’ll
try,” I said, though perhaps what really happened was an accidental not-trying. I closed my eyes and breathed, and in my mind, I saw the bright water in the harbor and then the image of Handful’s bathwater streaming over the side of the piazza like a falling ribbon, and I felt my tongue unknot and grow tranquil beneath Nina’s fingers.

I don’t know how long she persisted with her efforts. I quite lost myself in the flow of water. Finally she said, “Repeat after me: Wicked Willy Wiggle.”

“Wicked Willy Wiggle,” I said, without a trace of stutter.

This odd interlude on the piazza brought me not a cure, but the nearest thing to a cure I would ever find, and it had nothing to do with Nina’s fanciful tongue kneading. It had somehow to do with breathing and repose and the vision of water.

So it would be from now on—whenever my stints of stammering came, I would close my eyes and breathe and watch Handful’s bathwater. I would see it pouring down and down, and opening my eyes, I would often speak with ease, sometimes for hours.



In November my nineteenth birthday came and went without acknowledgement except Mother’s reminder at breakfast that I’d reached a prime marriageable age. There were weekly dress fittings in preparation for the winter season, providing practically the only contact I had with Handful. She spent her days sewing in Charlotte’s room in the cellar or beneath the oak when the weather was mild. Her forbidden bath all those months ago still hung leaden between us, though Handful didn’t seem the least bit shamed by my discovery of it. Rather the opposite, she was like someone who’d risen to her full measure. During the fittings, Handful sang as she pinned me into half-made dresses. Standing on the fitting box, turning slow rotations, I wondered if she sang to avoid conversation. Whatever motivated her, I was relieved.

Then, one day in January, I noticed my father and older brothers huddled in the library with the door agape. The first icing of the winter had come in the night and glazed the city, and Tomfry had set the fireplaces ablaze. From where I stood in the main passage, I could see Father rubbing his hands before the flames, while Thomas, John, and Frederick gestured and flitted like moths in the light around his shoulders. Frederick, who’d recently returned from Yale and followed Thomas to the bar, slammed his fist into the palm of his hand. “How dare they, how dare they!”

“We’ll mount a defense,” Thomas said. “You mustn’t worry, Father, we won’t be defeated, I promise you that.”

Someone had wronged Father? I drew as close to the door as I dared, but I could make little sense of the discussion. They spoke of an outrage, but didn’t name it. They vowed a defense, but against what? Through the gap in the door, I watched them move to the desk, where they closed ranks around a  document.  They  pointed  at  various  passages,  jabbing  it  with  their  fingers,  debating  in  low, purposeful tones. The sight of them roused my ravenous old hunger to take my place in the world, too, to have my part matter. How many years had elapsed since I threw away the silver button?
I moved from the door, suddenly flush with anger. I was sorry for Father. He’d been wronged in some way, but here they all were ready to move heaven and earth to right it, and their wives, their mother, their sisters had no rights, not even to their own children. We couldn’t vote or testify in a court, or make a will—of course we couldn’t, we owned nothing to leave behind! Why didn’t the Grimké men assemble in our defense?

My anger dissipated, but my ignorance went on for another week. During those interminable days, Mother stayed in her chamber with a headache and even Thomas refused my queries, saying it was Father’s matter to disclose, not his. As it turned out, I would learn the news at a parlor concert held at one of the plantations northwest of the city.

Mary and I arrived on the plantation as the afternoon turned gray with twilight, our carriage met by a bevy of peacocks that strolled about the grounds for no reason other than ornamentation. They created a beautiful blue shimmer in the fading light, but I found them a sad spectacle, the way they

made little rushes at the air, going nowhere.

The concert was already under way when I reached the parlor door. Burke slipped from his seat and greeted me with unusual warmth. He looked dashing in his long cerise vest and silk suit. “I was worried you weren’t coming,” he whispered and led me quickly to the empty chair beside his. As I slipped off the emerald jacket that Handful had so wondrously crafted, he placed a letter upon my lap. I raised my brows to him as if to ask whether I should break the seal and read it while Miss Parodi and the harpsichord vied for the room. “Later,” he mouthed.

It was unconventional to pass a note in this manner, and my mind fretted throughout the program at what it might contain. When Mrs. Drayton, Thomas’ mother-in-law, played the final piece on the harp, we adjourned to the dining room where the table was spread with a Charlotte Russe dessert and a selection of French wines, brandy, and Madeira, of which I couldn’t partake for all my apprehension. Burke gulped a brandy, then maneuvered me toward the front door.

“. . . Where are we going?” I asked, unsure of the propriety. “Let’s take a stroll.”

We stepped onto the porch beneath the palladium fanlight and gazed at the sky. It was purple, almost watery-looking. The moon was rising over the tree line. I couldn’t, however, think of anything but the letter. I pulled it from my purse and ripped the seal.

My Dearest Darling,

I beg the privilege of becoming your most attached and devoted fiancé. My heart is yours.
I await your answer.

Burke

I read it once, then again, mildly disoriented, as if the letter he’d slipped to me earlier had been swapped for this one that had nothing at all to do with me. He seemed entertained by my confusion. He said, “Your parents will want you to wait and give your answer after you’ve consulted with them.”
“I accept your proposal,” I said, smiling at him, overwhelmed with a queer mixture of jubilation and relief. I would be married! I would not end up like Aunt Amelia Jane.
He was right, though, Mother would be horrified I’d answered without her say-so, but I didn’t doubt my parents’ response. After swallowing their disapproval, they would seize upon the miracle of Burke Williams’ proposal like it was the cure for a dread disease.

We walked along the carriage way, my arm looped in his. A little tremor was running rib to rib to rib inside of me. Abruptly, he steered me off the path toward a camellia grove. We disappeared into the shadows that hung in swaths between the huge, flowering bushes, and without preamble, he kissed me full on the mouth. I reared back. “. . . Why . . . why, you surprise me.”

“My Love, we’re engaged now, such liberties are allowed.”

He drew me to him and kissed me again. His fingers moved along the edge of my décolletage, brushing my skin. I didn’t entirely surrender, but I allowed Burke Williams a great amount of freedom during that small peccadillo in the camellia grove. When I mustered myself finally, pulling from his embrace, he said he hoped I didn’t hold his ardor against him. I did not. I adjusted my dress. I tucked vagrant pieces of hair back into my upswept coif. Such liberties are allowed now.
As we walked back to the house, I fixed my eyes on the path, how it was riddled with peacock excrement and pebbles shining in the moon’s light. This marriage, it would be life-enough, wouldn’t it? Surely. Burke was speaking about the necessity of a long engagement. A year, he said.
As we drew near the porch, a horse whinnied, and then a man stepped from the front door and lit his pipe. It was Mr. Drayton, Thomas’ father-in-law.

“Sarah?” he said. “Is that you?” His eyes shifted to Burke and back to me. A lock of my hair


fluttered guiltily at my shoulder. “Where’ve you been?” I heard the reproof, the alarm. “Are you all right?”

“. . . I am . . . we are engaged.” My parents weren’t yet informed, and I’d heralded the news to Mr. Drayton, whom I barely knew, hoping it would excuse whatever his mind imagined we were doing out there.

“We took a quick turn in the night air,” Burke said, trying, it seemed, to bring some normalcy to the moment.

Mr. Drayton was no fool. He gazed at me, plain Sarah, returning from a “turn in the night” with a startlingly handsome man, looking flushed and slightly unkempt. “Well, then, congratulations. Your happiness must be a welcome respite for your family given this recent trouble of your father’s.”
Was Father’s trouble common knowledge, then?

“Has some misfortune fallen upon Judge Grimké?” Burke asked. “Sarah hasn’t told you?”

“. . . I suppose I’ve been too distressed to speak of it,” I said. “. . . But please, sir, inform him on my behalf. It would be a service to me.”

Mr. Drayton took a draught from his pipe and blew the spicy smoke into the night. “I regret to say  the  judge’s  enemies  seek  to  remove  him  from  the  court.  Impeachment  charges  have  been brought.”

I let my breath out. I couldn’t imagine a greater humiliation for our father. “On what grounds?” Burke asked, properly outraged.

“They say he has grown biased and overly righteous in his judgments.” He hesitated.  “They charge incompetence. Ah, but it is all politics.” He waved his hand dismissively, and I watched the bowl of his pipe flare in the small wind.

Any flicker of gladness I might’ve hoped for from my family about my engagement, any retribution I might’ve feared for  accepting the proposal  without permission, was swallowed by Father’s trial. Mother’s reaction to my announcement was simply, “Well done, Sarah,” as if reviewing one of my embroidery samplers. Father did not respond at all.

Throughout the winter, he sequestered in the library day and night with Thomas, Frederick, and Mr. Daniel Huger, a lawyer friend of Father’s who was known for legally eviscerating his opponents. My hearing was almost preternatural, cultivated by years of unsanctioned listening, and I caught scraps of conversation while sitting at the card table in the main passage, pretending to read.

John, you’ve received no money, no favors. You are accused of nothing that rises to the level of high crimes.

Isn’t a charge of incompetence bad enough? They accuse me of being biased! The streets and the papers are full of it. I’m ruined, regardless.

Father, you have friends in the legislative chamber!

Don’t be a fool, Thomas, what I have are enemies. Scheming bastards from the upcountry, seeking the bench for themselves.

They cannot possibly get a two-thirds majority.

Make meat of them, Daniel, do you hear me? Feed them to the dogs.

When the trial was heard that spring in the House of Representatives in Columbia, Mr. Huger

assailed Father’s enemies with a vengeance, laying bare their political conniving with such force Father was acquitted in a single day, but the vote was ominously close, and he returned to Charleston, vindicated, but dirtied.

At fifty-nine, Father was suddenly a very old man. His face had turned haggard and his clothes baggy as if he’d wilted inside them. A tremor appeared in his right hand.

As the months passed, Burke paid courting calls to me weekly in the withdrawing room, where we were allowed unchaperoned visits. He filled these rendezvous with the same fever and excess we’d shared in the camellia grove, and I complied, drawing lines the best I could. I counted it God’s miracle we weren’t discovered, though I’m sure our invisibility was not due to God, but to the family’s distraction. Father continued to shuffle and shrivel and tuck his hand in his pocket to hide its shake. He turned into a recluse of a man. And I, I turned into a Jezebel of a woman.

Handful

Mauma couldn’t sleep. She was up fussing round the cellar room like usual. She didn’t know the meaning of the words quiet as a mouse.

I was laying in the straw bed we’d always slept in, wondering what was on her mind this time. I’d stopped sleeping on the floor outside Sarah’s room a long time back, just decided it on my own, and nobody said a word about it, not even missus. During those years, her meanness was hit and miss.
Mauma dragged the chair over to the high-up window so she could crane her neck and see a piece of sky beyond the wall. I watched how she sat there and studied it.

Most of her waking nights, she would light the lamp and sew her story quilt. She’d been working on those quilt squares bits at a time for more than two years. “If there a fire and I ain’t here, that’s what you get,” she’d say. “You save the squares cause they pieces of me same like the meat on my bones.”

I pestered her all the time wanting to see the squares she’d finished, but she held firm. Mauma loved a good surprise. She wanted to unveil her quilt like they did marble statues. She had put her history on a quilt like the Fon people, and she meant to show it all at once, not piecemeal.
The day before, she’d told me, “You wait. I’m  ’bout ready to roll down the frame and start quilting it all together.”

She kept the squares locked in a wood trunk she’d dragged from the storeroom in the basement. The trunk had a bad, musty smell to it. Inside we’d found mold, dead moth-eggs, and a little key. She cleaned the trunk with linseed oil, then locked the squares inside, wrapped in muslin. I guessed she locked our freedom money in there too, cause right after that the bills disappeared from the gunny sack.

Last time I’d counted, she’d saved up four hundred dollars even.

Laying in bed now, I did the numbering in my head—we needed six hundred fifty more dollars to buy the both of us.

I broke the quiet. “Is this how you gonna be all night—sit in the dark and stare up at a hole in the wall?”

“It’s something to do. Go on back to sleep.” Go back to sleep—that was a lot of useless. “Where do you keep the key to the chest?”

“Is that how you gon be? Lay there figurin’ how to peek at my quilt? The key hid on the back of nowhere.”

I let it be, and my mind drifted off to Sarah.

I didn’t care for this Mr. Williams. The only thing he’d ever said to me was, “Remove yourself hastily.” I’d been building a fire in the drawing room so the man could get himself warm, and that’s what he had to say, Remove yourself hastily.

I couldn’t see Sarah married to him any more than I could see myself married to Goodis. He still trailed after me, wanting you know what. Mauma said, tell him, go jump in the lake.
Yesterday, Sarah had asked, “When I marry, would you come with me to live?” “Leave mauma?”

Real quick, she’d said, “Oh, you don’t have to . . . I just thought . . . Well, I’ll miss you.” Even though we didn’t have that much to say to each other anymore, I hated to think about us
parting. “I reckon I’ll miss you, too,” I told her.

Cross the room, mauma said, “How old you reckon I is?” She never did know her age for sure,

didn’t have a record. “Seems I had you when I’m ’bout the same old as you now, and you nineteen. What that make me?”

I counted it in my head. “You’re thirty-eight.” “That ain’t too old,” she said.

We stayed like that a while, mauma staring at the window, mulling over her age, and me laying in the bed wide awake now, when she cried out, “Look, Handful! Look a here!” She leapt to her feet, bouncing on her knees. “There go ’nother one!”

I bolted from the bed.

“The stars,” she said. “They falling just like they done for your granny-mauma. Come on. Hurry.” We yanked on our shoes and sack coats, snatched up an old quilt, and were out the door, mauma tearing cross the work yard, me two steps behind.

We spread the quilt on the ground out in the open behind the spirit tree and lay down on top of it. When I looked up, the night opened and the stars poured down.

Each time a star streaked by, mauma laughed low in her throat.

When the stars stopped falling and the sky went still, I saw her hands rub the little mound of her belly.

And I knew then what it was she wasn’t too old for.

Sarah

Sarah, you should sit down. Please.”

That  was  how Thomas  began.  He  gestured  toward  the  two  chairs  beside  the  window that overlooked the piazza, but it was I alone who sat.

It  was  half  past  noon,  and  here  was  my  brother,  the au  courant of  Charleston  barristers, interrupting his lawyering to speak with me in the privacy of my room. His face was pale with what I took to be dread.

Naturally, my mind went to Father. One could scarcely look at him these days without worrying about him, this thin, hollowed-out man with the uncertain gait and erratic hand. Despite that, there’d been some improvement lately, enough that he’d returned to his duties on the bench.
Just the week before, I’d come upon Father laboring along the main passage with his cane. It had conjured up an old Sunday School image from our catechism of Lazarus hobbling from the tomb with his shroud cleaving to his ankles. Father’s left hand was shaking as if waving to a passerby, and before he saw me, he grabbed it violently, trying to subdue it. Noticing me, he said, “Oh, Sarah. God is ruthless to the aged.” I walked with him to the back door, moving with a corresponding slowness that only called attention to his feebleness.

“So tell me, when will you marry?” It was the only question anyone ever asked me now, but coming from Father, it brought me to a standstill. I’d been promised to Burke since last February, and not once had Father even mentioned it. I hadn’t blamed him for missing the engagement party, which Thomas and Sally had graciously hosted—he’d been bedridden then—but there’d been so many months of silence since.

“I don’t know,” I answered. “Burke is waiting on his father to assign the business over to him. He wants to be in the proper position.”

“Does he?” His tone was sardonic, and I made no attempt to answer.

It was difficult now to remember those times when Father had let me plunder his books and basked in my speeches. There’d been a kind of invisible cord running between us then, and I tried to think exactly when it’d been broken. The day he forbade me books? Thomas’ farewell party, when he hurled his vicious words? You shame yourself. You shame us all. Where did you get the notion that you could study the law?

“I remind you, Sarah, there is no divorce law in our state,” he was saying. “Once you are married, the contract is indissoluble. You are aware of this?”

“Yes, Father, I know.”

He nodded with what seemed like bleak acceptance.

That was where my mind alighted in those final moments before Thomas delivered his news, upon Father and my last encounter with him, upon his frailty.

“You’ve always been my favorite sister,” Thomas said. “You know that. In truth, you’ve been the favorite of all my siblings.”

He paused, stalling, gazing through the window across the piazza into the garden. I watched a drop of perspiration slide to his temple and cling in the net of wrinkles that was already forming. A strange resignation settled on me. Whatever it is, it has already happened.

“. . . Please, I’m not as fragile as you might think. Tell me plainly.”

“You’re right. I will simply say it. I’m afraid Burke Williams has misrepresented himself to you. It has come to my attention that he has other female acquaintances.”

Without considering the hidden entendre, I said, “Surely, that’s not a crime.”

“Sarah, these acquaintances—they’re also his fiancées.”

I knew suddenly what he said was true. So many things made sense now. The delay in naming a marriage date. The incessant trips he made to visit family or conduct business. The curious fact that someone so full of looks and charm had settled on me.

My eyes filled. Thomas dug for his handkerchief and waited while I dabbed them dry. “How did you learn of this?” I asked, composed, no doubt protected by the recoil of shock. “Sally’s cousin Franny in Beaufort wrote to say she’d attended a soirée there and seen Burke
openly courting a young woman. She didn’t approach him, of course, but she did discreetly question the young woman, who told her Burke had recently proposed.”

I looked down at my lap, trying to absorb what he’d said. “But why? Why would he do this? I don’t understand.”

Thomas sat and took my hands. “He’s one of those men who prey on young ladies. We hear of this kind of thing now. There’s a fast-set of young men acquiring fiancées in order to—” He paused. “To lure women into sexual liaisons. They assure the women that given the promise of wedlock, such compromises are acceptable.” He could barely look at me. “I trust he didn’t take advantage—”
“No,” I said. “He did not.”

Thomas exhaled with relief that embarrassed me in its extravagance. “. . . You said fiancées. Beside the acquaintance in Beaufort, there’s another?” “Yes, I believe she lives in Savannah.”

“And how did you learn of this one? Not another cousin, I hope.”

He gave me a weak smile. “No, this one I heard of from Burke himself. I confronted him last evening. He admitted to both young ladies.”

“You confronted him? But why didn’t you let me—”

“I wanted to spare you the pain and disgrace. Both of our parents agreed you should be left out of it. There’s no reason for you to see him again. I’ve broken the engagement on your behalf.”
How could you? He’d usurped any chance I had for personal retribution. In that moment, I felt more enraged by Thomas’ babyish protection than by Burke’s cruelty. I sprang to my feet and stood with my back to him, almost gagging on mouthfuls of jumbled, scathing words.
“I know how you must feel,” he said behind me. “But it’s better this way.” He knew nothing of how I felt. I wanted to shout at him for uttering so arrogant a claim, but when
I whirled about, I saw his eyes were filled with tears and I forced myself to speak with civility. “. . . I would like to be alone. Please.”

He stood. “There’s one more thing. You’ll need to withdraw from public for a brief time. Mother believes three weeks will be sufficient for the talk to die down. Then you can return to society.”
He left me by the window, engulfed with anger and mortification, and with nowhere to hurl it except at myself. How could I have fallen prey to such a lascivious person? Was I so besotted, so needy, so blind that I imagined he loved me? I could see myself in the glare of the window, the flushed, round face, Father’s long nose, the pale eyes, the mis-colored hair. I’d clipped a piece of that hair for him. He must have laughed at that.

I went to my desk and retrieved the letter with his proposal of marriage. I didn’t read it again, I tore it into as many pieces as I could manage. The tatters fell onto the desktop and the rug and the folds of my skirt.

It was the time of year when migrating crows wheeled across the sky, thunderous flocks that moved like a single veil, and I heard them, out there in the wild chirruping air. Turning to the window, I watched the birds fill the sky before disappearing, and when the air was still again, I watched the empty place where they had been.

Handful

Sarah was up in her room with her heart broke so bad, Binah said you could hear it jangle when she walked. Her brother, Thomas, hadn’t even got his hat on to leave before the whole house knew what happened. Mr. Williams had himself two more fiancées. Now who has to remove himself hastily?
Come teatime that day, missus said to Tomfry, “Sarah will not be receiving visitors for the next three weeks. Explain to any callers that she is indisposed. Indisposed, Tomfry. That’s the word I would like you to use.”

“Yessum.”

Missus saw me hovering. “Quit dawdling, Hetty, and take a tray to Sarah’s room.” I fixed it, but I knew she wouldn’t touch a bite. I got the hyssop tea she liked, thinking of us when
we were little, how we drank it on the roof, her telling me about the silver button and the big plan she had. I’d worn that button in my neck pouch almost every day since she’d tossed it away.
I slipped into the warming kitchen, slid off the pouch, and dug the button out. It was full of tarnish. Looked like a big shriveled grape. I studied it a minute, then I got out the polish and rubbed it till it gleamed.

Sarah was sitting at her desk, writing in a notebook. Her eyes were so raw from crying I didn’t know how she could see to write. I set the tray in front of her. I said, “Look what’s on the tea saucer.”
She hadn’t laid eyes on the button in all these years, but she knew right off what it was. “How did . . . Why, Handful, you saved it?”

She didn’t touch it. Only stared.

I said, “Awright then, there it is,” and went to the door.