The Invention of Wings

Handful

I smelled the corn fritters half a block from Denmark Vesey’s house, the fry-oil in the air, the sweet corn fuss coming down the street. For two years, I’d been sneaking off to 20 Bull every time I found a hole in the week to squeeze through. Sabe was a shiftless lackey of a butler and didn’t watch us the way Tomfry had—we could thank missus for that much.

I’d tell Sabe we were out of thread, beeswax, buttons, or rat droppings, and he’d send me willynilly to the market. The rest of the time he didn’t care where I was. The only thought in his head was for slurping down master Grimké’s brandies and whiskeys in the cellar and messing round with Minta. They were always in the empty room over the carriage house doing just what you think they’re doing. Me, Aunt-Sister, Phoebe, and Goodis would hear them all the way from the kitchen house porch and Goodis would cock his eyebrow at me. Everybody knew he’d been sweet on me since the day he got here. He’d made the rabbit cane special for me, and he would give me the last yam off his plate. Once when Sabe yelled at me for going missing, Goodis stuck a fist in his face and Sabe backed right down. I never had a man touch me, never had wanted one, but sometimes when I was listening to Sabe and Minta up in the carriage house, Goodis didn’t seem so bad.

With Sarah gone, the whole place had gone to hell’s dredges. With the last of the boys in college, there wasn’t anybody left in the house but missus and Nina and us six slaves to keep it going. Missus stewed all the time about money. She had the lump sum master Grimké left, but she said it was a trifle of what she needed. Paint was flecking off the house and she’d sold the extra horse. She didn’t eat bird nest pudding anymore, and in the slave dining room, we lived on rice and more rice.
The day I smelled the fritters, it was two days before Christmas—I remember there was a cold pinch in the air and palm wreaths tacked on the doors of the piazzas, woven fancy like hair braids. This time Sabe had sent me to carry a note from missus to the solicitor’s office. Don’t think I didn’t read it before I handed it over.

Dear Mr. Huger,

I find that my allowance is inadequate to meet the demands of living well. I request that you alert my sons as to my needs. As you know, they are in possession of properties that could be sold in order to augment my care. Such a proposal would suit better coming from a man of your influence, who was a loyal friend to their father.

Yours Truly,

Mary Grimké

I had a jar of sorghum in my pocket that I’d swiped from the larder. I liked to bring Denmark a little something, and this would hit the spot with the fritters. He had a habit of telling whoever was hanging round his place that I was his daughter. He didn’t say I was like a daughter, but claimed out and out I was his. Susan grumbled about it, but she was good to me, too.

I found her in her kitchen house, shoveling the corn cakes from the skillet to the plate. She said, “Where you been? We haven’t seen you in over a week.”

“You can’t do with me and you can’t do without me.”

She laughed. “I can do with you all right. The one I can’t do with and do without is in his workshop.”

“Denmark? What’s he done now?”

She snorted. “You mean beside keep women all over the city?”

It struck me best to sidestep this since mauma had been one of them. “Yeah, beside that.” A smile dipped cross her lips. She handed me the plate. “Here, take this to him. He’s in a mood,
is all. It’s about that Monday Gell. He lost something that set Denmark off. Some sort of list. I thought Denmark was gonna kill the man.”

I headed back toward the workshop knowing Monday had lost the roll of draftees he’d been collecting for Denmark out on the Bulkley farm.

For a long time now, Denmark and his lieutenants had been recruiting slaves, writing down their names in what he called the Book. Last I heard, there were more than two thousand pledged to take up arms when the time came. Denmark had let me sit there and listen while he talked about raising an army and getting us free, and the men got used to me being in there. They knew I’d keep it quiet.
Denmark didn’t like the wind to blow unless he told it which way to go. He’d come up with the exact words he wanted Gullah Jack and them to say when they wooed the recruits. One day, he had me pretend like I was the slave he was courting.

“Have you heard the news?” he said to me. “What news?” I answered. Like he told me to say. “We’re gonna be free.”

“Free? Who says?”

“Come with me, and I’ll show you.”

That was the way he wanted it said. Then, if a slave in the city was curious enough, the lieutenant was supposed to bring him to  20 Bull to meet Denmark. If the slaves were on the plantations, Denmark would go to them and hold a secret meeting.

I’d been at the house when one of those curious slaves had showed up, and it was something I’d take to my grave. Denmark had sailed up from his chair like Elijah in his chariot. “The Lord has spoken to me,” he cried out. “He said, set my people free. When your name is written in the Book, you’re one of us and you’re one of God’s, and we’ll take our freedom when God says. Let not your heart be troubled. Neither let it be afraid. You believe in God, believe also in me.”
When he spoke those words, a jolt traveled through me, the same one I used to get in the alcove when I was little and thought about the water taking me somewhere, or in church when we sang about the Jericho walls crumbling and the drumsticks in my legs beat the floor. My name wasn’t in the Book, just the men’s, but I would’ve put it in there if I could. I would’ve written it in blood.
Today, Denmark was pegging the legs on a Scot pine table. When I stepped into the room with the fritters, he set down the claw hammer and grinned, and when I pulled out the sorghum to boot, he said, “If you aren’t Charlotte all over.”

Leaning on the work table to take the heft off my leg, I watched him eat for a while, then I said, “Susan said Monday lost his list.”

The door to the back alley was open to let the sawdust float out and he went over, peered both ways, and closed it. “Monday is a damn fool idiot. He kept his list inside an empty feed barrel in the harness shop on Bulkley farm, and yesterday the barrel was gone and nobody knows where.”
“What would happen if somebody finds it?”

He sat back on the stool and picked up the fork. “It depends. If the list rouses suspicion and gets turned over to the Guard, they’d go through the names with a whip till they found out what it was about.”

That raised goose flesh on my arms. I said, “Where do you keep your names?” He stopped chewing. “Why do you want to know?”

I was treading on the thin side of his temper, but I didn’t care. “Well, are they hidden good or not?”

His eyes strayed to the leather satchel on the work table.


“They’re in the satchel?” I said. “Right there for the taking?”

I said it like he was a damn fool idiot, too, but instead of lashing out, he laughed. “That satchel doesn’t leave my sight.”

“But if the Guard gets hold of Monday’s names and comes looking for you, they’ll find your list easy enough.”

He got quiet and brushed the sugar dust off his mouth. He knew I was right, but didn’t want to
say.


The sun was stepping through the window, laying down four bright quilt squares on the floor. I stared at them while the silence hung, thinking how he’d said I was Charlotte all over, and it popped in my mind the way she’d put pieces of our hair and little charms down inside her quilts, and then I remembered the time she got caught red-handed with missus’ green silk. She’d told me then,  “I should’ve sewed that silk inside a quilt and she never would’ve found it.”

“I know what you need to do with the list,” I said.

“You do, do you?”

“You need to hide it inside a quilt. I can sew a secret pocket inside to hold it. Then you just lay the quilt on the bed in plain sight and nobody knows the difference.”

He paced cross the workshop three, four times. Finally, he said, “What if I need to get to the list?”

“That’s easy, I’ll leave an opening in the seam big enough for your hand to slip in and out.” He nodded. “See if Susan has a quilt somewhere. Get busy.”

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.

Sarah

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 midmorning.

“. . . 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 twentynine, 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.”
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.”

Handful

In 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.”

Sarah

As 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.”

Handful

The 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.

The room was empty except for a straw mattress Sabe had laid on the floor for Minta and him, but the place still had the same old fragrance of horse shit. I looked down at the grungy mattress, while Goodis spread a clean blanket cross it, smoothing out every little wrinkle just-so, and seeing the care he took with it, I felt tenderness to him pour through me. He wasn’t old, but most of his hair was gone. The lid over his wandering eye drooped, while the other lid stayed up, so he always looked like he was half asleep, but he had a big, easy smile and he kept it on while he helped me out from my dress.

When I was stretched out on the blanket, he gazed at the pouch round my neck, stuffed fat with scraps of the spirit tree.

“I don’t take that off,” I said.

He gave it a pinch, feeling the hard lumps of bark and acorns. “These your jewels?” “Yeah. Those are my gemstones.”

Pushing the pouch to the side, he held my breasts in his hands and said, “These ain’t big as two hazelnuts, but that’s how I like ’em, small and brown like this.” He kissed my mouth and shoulders and rubbed his face against the hazelnuts. Then he kissed my bad foot, his lip following the snarled path of scars. I wasn’t one to cry, but tears leaked from the sides of my eyes and ran behind my ears.
I never spoke a word the whole time, even when he pushed inside me. I felt like a mortar at first and he was the pestle. It was like pounding rice, but gentle and kind, breaking open the tough hulls. Once he laughed, saying, “This what you thought it’d be?” and I couldn’t answer. I smiled with the tears seeping out.

The next morning, I was sore from loving. At breakfast, Goodis said, “It’s a fine day. What you think, Handful?”

“Yeah, it’s fine.”

“Tomorrow gon be fine, too.” “Might be,” I said.

After the meal, I found Nina and asked her could I have a pass for the market—Sabe wasn’t in a granting mood. I told her, “Aunt-Sister says molasses with a little whiskey would do your mauma a world of good, might calm her down, but we don’t have any.”

She wrote the pass and when she handed it to me, she said, “Any time you need . . . molasses or anything like that, you come to me. All right?”

That’s how I knew we had an understanding. Course, if she knew what I was about to do, she never would’ve signed her name on that paper.


I walked to the Arsenal with my rabbit cane, carrying a basket of rags, cleaning spirits, a feather duster, and a long broom over my shoulder. Gullah Jack had been watching the place for a good while now. He said on the first Monday of the month, they opened it up for inspection and maintenance, counting weapons, cleaning muskets, and what-not. A free black girl named Hilde came those days to sweep it out, dust, oil the gun racks, and clean the privy out back. Gullah Jack had given her a coin not to show up today.

Denmark had drawn me a picture of a bullet mold. It looked like a pair of nose pliers, except the nose came together to form a tiny bowl on the end where you poured the lead to make the musket ball. He said a bullet mold wasn’t much bigger than his hand, so get two if I could. The main thing, he said, was don’t get caught.

That was my main thing, too.

The Arsenal was a round building made out of tabby with walls two foot thick. It had three skinny windows high up with iron bars. Today, the shutters were thrown back to let the light in. The guard by the door wanted to know who I was and where was Hilde. I wound through the story about her getting sick and sending me for the stand-in. He said, “You don’t look like you could lift a broom.”
Well, how you think this broom got on my shoulder? All by itself? That’s what I wanted to say, but I looked at the ground. “Yessir, but I’m a hard worker, you’ll see.”

He unlocked the bolt on the door. “They’re cleaning muskets today. Stay out of their way. When you’re done, tap on the door and I’ll let you out.”

I stepped inside. The door slammed. The bolt clicked.

Standing there, trying to get my bearings through the gloom, I sniffed mold and linseed oil and the rancid smell of cooped-up air. Two guards were on the far side with their backs to me, taking a musket apart under one of the windows—all the pieces spread out on a table. One of them turned and said, “It’s Hilde.”

I didn’t clear up the mistake. I started sweeping.

The Arsenal was a single room filled with weapons. My eyes roved over everything. Kegs of gunpowder were stacked in the middle halfway to the ceiling. Arranged neat along the walls were wooden racks filled with muskets and pistols, heaps of cannon balls, and in the back, dozens of wooden chests.

I kept the broom going, working my way round the whole floor, hoping the swish-swish covered the loud, ragged way my breath was coming. The guards’ voices came and went in echoes.
This one could fire on the half-cock. See the mainspring on the hammer? It’s gone bad. Make sure the ramrod head is tight and there’s no rust on it.

When I was blocked from their view behind the powder kegs, my breath eased up. I got out the feather duster. One by one, I brushed the tops of the wooden chests, pausing each time to look over my shoulder before lifting the lid to peek inside. I found cow horns with leather straps. A tangle of iron hand cuffs. Bars of lead. Pieces of thin rope I guessed to be fuses. But no bullet molds.
Then I noticed an old snare drum propped up against the wall, and behind it was another chest. Picking my way over to it, my lame foot upset the drum, and whamblam, it hit the floor.
Here came the boots stomping. I grabbed the duster and the feathers twitched and shook in my hand like they’d come alive.


The guard yelled at me. “What was that racket?” “This drum right here fell over.”

He narrowed his eyes. “You’re not Hilde.” “No, she turned sick. I’m filling in.”

He had a long piece of metal in his hand from the musket. He pointed it at the drum. “We don’t need that sort of carelessness in here!”

“Yessir, I’ll take care.”

He went back to work, but my heart had been beat to butter.

I opened the chest where the drum had leaned and there must’ve been ten bullet molds inside. I pulled out two, slow so they wouldn’t clink, and stuck them in my basket under the rags.
Then I swept the air clean of cobwebs and wiped down the gun racks with oil. When I had the place good as Hilde would’ve done it, I gathered my stuff and tapped on the door.
“Don’t forget the latrine,” the guard at the door said, thumbing toward the rear of the Arsenal. I headed back there, but I walked right past it and kept going.

That night in my room, I found a little piece of cobweb in my hair. I took a towel and rubbed myself clean, then lay down on top of the story quilt, remembering the smile on Denmark’s face when I’d showed up and pulled a bullet mold from my basket. When I drew out the second one, he’d slapped his leg and said, “You might be the best lieutenant I got.”

I waited for sleep, but it didn’t come. After a while, I went and sat on the back porch steps. The yard was quiet. I eyed the room over the carriage house and wondered if Goodis had looked for me after supper. He would be asleep now. Denmark, too. I was the only one up, worrying about the bowl on the end of the bullet mold, the place they pour the lead. How many people would those musket balls kill? I might’ve passed one of them on the street today. I might pass one tomorrow. I might pass a hundred people who would die cause of me.

The moon was round and white, sitting small at the top of the sky. It seemed the right size to sit in the bowl on the bullet mold. That was what I wished. I wished for the moon instead of lead.