The Invention of Wings

PART FIVE

November 1826-November 1829


Handful

It was long about November when Goodis caught a chest cough and I headed to the stable with some horehound and brown sugar for his throat, thinking it’s another dull-luster day in the world. One more stitch in the cloth.

Up in the house missus and Nina were bickering. One minute it’s the way missus treats us slaves, next it’s Nina refusing to go back to society. Without Sarah here to separate them, they kept a fight going all day. Phoebe was in the kitchen house cooking a stew meat, getting more suggestions from Aunt-Sister than she needed. Minta was hiding out someplace, probably the laundry house, and Sabe, if I had to guess, was in the cellar, smoking master Grimké’s pipe. Now that the liquor was gone, I smelled pipe smoke all the time.

I slowed down by the vegetable garden to see if Goodis planted it for the winter. It was nothing but dirt clods. The ornament garden was in a shamble, too—the rose vines choking the oleander and the myrtle spurting in twenty wrong directions. Missus said Goodis gave shiftless a bad name, but the man wasn’t lazy, he was sick to the back teeth of forcing himself to care about her squashes and flowers.

While I was studying the dirt and worrying about him, I got the feeling somebody was watching me. I looked first at missus’ window, but it was empty. The stable door was open, but Goodis had his back to me, rubbing down the horse. Then, from the edge of my eye, I saw two figures at the back gate. They didn’t move when I looked their way, just stood there in the sharp light—an old slave woman and a slave girl. What’d they want? There was always a slave ready to sell you something, but I’d never seen one come peddling to the back gate. I hated to shoo them off. The old woman was bent and frail-looking. The girl was holding her by the arm.

I walked back there, stepping with my cane, my fingers round the rabbit head, feeling how it was smoothed to the grain from all the years of holding. The woman and the girl didn’t take their eyes off me. Coming closer, I noticed their head scarves were the same washed-out red. The woman had yellow-brown skin. All of a sudden, her eyes flared wide and her chin started to shake. She said,

“Handful.”

I came to a stop, letting the sound flutter through the air and settle over me. Then I dropped the cane and broke into a run, the closest I could get to one. Seeing me come, the old woman sank to the ground. I didn’t have a key for the gate, just flew over it, like crossing the sky. Kneeling down, I scooped her in my arms.

I must’ve been shouting cause Goodis came running, then Minta, Phoebe, Aunt-Sister, and Sabe. I remember them peering over the gate at us. I remember the strange girl saying, “Is you Handful?” And me on the ground, rocking the woman like a newborn.

“Sweet Lord Jesus,” Aunt-Sister said. “It’s Charlotte.”

Goodis carried mauma to the cellar room and laid her on the bed. Everybody crowded in and stared at her like she was a specter. We were deer in the woods, froze to stillness, afraid to move. I felt hot, the breath gone from me. Mauma’s lids rolled back and I saw the white skins of her eyes had started to

yellow like the rest of her. She looked thin as thread. Her face had turned to wrinkles and her hair had gone salt-white. She’d disappeared fourteen years ago, but she’d aged thirty.

The girl hunkered next to her on the bed with her eyes darting face to face, her skin dark as char. She was big-boned, big-handed, big-footed with a forehead like the full moon. She looked just like her daddy. Denmark’s girl.

I told Minta, get a wet rag. While I rubbed mauma’s face, she started to groan and twist her neck. Sabe hauled off running to fetch missus and Nina, and by the time they showed up, mauma’s eyes were starting to open to the right place.

The smell of unwashed bodies hung round the bed, making missus draw back and cover her nose. “Charlotte,” she said, standing back a ways. “Is that you? I never thought we would see you again. Where on earth have you been?”

Mauma opened her mouth, trying to speak, but her words scratched in the air without much sense. “We’re glad you’re back, Charlotte,” Nina said. Mauma blinked at her like she didn’t have the
first inkling who was saying it. Nina must’ve been six or seven when mauma disappeared.
“Is she in her right mind?” missus asked.

Aunt-Sister set her hands on her hips. “She’s wore-out. What she need is food and a good long rest.” Then she sent Phoebe for the stew broth.

Missus studied the girl. “Who’s this?”

Course, that’s what everybody wanted to know. The girl drew up straight and gave missus a look that could cut paper.

“She’s my sister,” I said. The room went silent.

“Your sister?” said missus. “As I live and breathe. What am I supposed to do with her? I can barely keep the rest of you fed.”

Nina tugged her mother toward the door. “Charlotte needs rest. Let them see to her.” When the door closed behind them, mauma looked up at me with her old smile. She had a big
ugly hole where her two front teeth used to be. She said, “Handful, look at you. Just look at you. My girl, all grown.”

“I’m thirty-three now, mauma.”

“All that time—” Her eyes watered up, the first tears I’d ever seen her shed in my life. I eased down on the bed beside her and put my face to hers.

She said low against my ear, “What happen to your leg?” “I took a bad fall,” I whispered.

Sabe sent everybody to their chores while I fed mauma spoonfuls of broth and the girl gulped hers straight from the bowl. They slept side by side through the afternoon. Time to time, Aunt-Sister stuck her head in the door and said, “Yawl all right?” She brought short bread, castor oil boiled in milk, and blankets for a floor pallet that I reckoned would be my bed for the night. She helped me ease off their shoes without waking them, and when she saw their feet festered over with sores, she left soap and a bucket of water by the door.

The girl roused once and asked for the chamber pot. I led her out to the privy and waited, watching the leaves on the oak tree drop, the soft way they floated down. Mauma’s here. The wonder of it hadn’t broken through to me yet, the need to go down on my knees. I couldn’t stop feeling the shock of what she looked like, and I was worried what missus might do. She’d looked at them like two bloodsuckers she wanted to thump off her skin.

When the girl came out of the privy barefoot, I said, “We need to wash your feet.” She looked down at them with her mouth parted and the pink tip of her tongue poking out. She
couldn’t be but thirteen. My sister.


I sat her down on the three-legged stool in the yard in the last warm spot from the sun. I brought the bucket and soap outside and stuck her feet in the water to soak. I said, “How many days did you and mauma walk to get here?”

She had barely spoken since this morning at the gate, and now the backwash of words rushed from her lips and wouldn’t stop. “I ain’t sure. Three weeks. Could be more. We come all the way from Beaufort. Massa Wilcox place. We travel by night. Use the foot paths the traders take and stay to the creeks. In the daytime, we hide in the fields and ditches. This the fifth time we run, so we learn whicha-way to go. Mauma, she rub pepper and onion peel on our shoes and legs to muddle the dogs. She say this time we ain’t going back, we gon die trying.”

“Wait now. You and mauma ran off four times before this and got caught every time?” She nodded and looked off at the clouds. She said, “One time we get to the Combahee River.
Another time to the Edisto.”

I lifted her feet from the bucket one at a time and rubbed them with soap while she talked, and that was something she liked to do—talk.

“We carry parched corn and dried yams with us. But that run out, so we eat poke leaves and berries. Whatever we find. When mauma’d get where she can’t go no more, I’d put her on my back and carry her. I’d go a ways, then rest and carry her some more. She say, if something happen to me, keep on till you find Handful.”

The things she told me. How they drank from puddles and licked drops off sassafras leaves, how they climbed trees in the swamp and tied themselves to the limbs and slept, how they wandered lost under the moon and stars. She said one time a buckruh came by in a wagon and didn’t see them laying right beside him in a ditch. Came to find out, she spoke Gullah, the language the slaves used on the islands. She’d picked it up natural from the plantation women. If she saw a bird, she’d say, there’s a bidi. A turtle was a cooter. A white man, a buckruh.

I dried her feet good in my lap. “You didn’t tell me your name.”

“The man who work us in the rice field call me Jenny. Mauma say that ain’t no name. She say our people use to fly like blackbirds. The day I was born, she look at the sky and that’s what she call me. Sky.”

The girl didn’t look like her name. She was like the trunk of a tree, like a rock in a field you plow round, but I was glad mauma had given it to her. I heard Goodis coughing in the stable and the horse whinny. When I stood, she peered up at me and said, “When we was lost, she tell me the story ’bout the blackbirds, I don’t know how many times.”

I smiled at her. “She used to tell me that story, too.”

My sister wasn’t much to look at, and to hear her talk, you’d think she was too simple to learn, but I felt the toughness of mauma inside her from the start.

I came awake that night on the floor pallet and mauma was standing in the middle of the room with her back to me, not moving, gazing at the high-up window. The darkness was tucked round her, but her kerchief had slipped off and her hair was shining like fresh polish silver. Over on the mattress, Sky was snoring loud and peaceful. Hearing me stir, mauma turned round and spread open her arms to me. Without making a sound, I got up and went to her. I walked right into her arms. That’s when she came home to me.


The next time I woke, early light had settled and mauma was sitting up in bed, looking at her story quilt. She’d been sleeping under it all night and didn’t know it.

I went over and patted her arm. “I sewed it all together.”

The last time she’d seen the quilt, it was a jumble-pile of squares. Some of the color had died out from them, but her story was all there, put together in one piece.

“You got every square in the right place,” she said. “I don’t know how you did that.” “I went by the order of what happened to you is all.”

When  Phoebe  and Aunt-Sister  brought  breakfast,  mauma  was  still  hunched  over  the  quilt, studying every stitch. She touched the figure on the last square, the one I knew to be Denmark. It pained me to think I might have to tell her what happened to him.

The air in the room had turned frigid during the night, so I got bathwater from the laundry house where Phoebe kept it good and scalding. Sky went over in the corner and washed her thick body, while I undid mauma’s dress buttons. “We gonna burn this dress,” I said, and mauma laughed the best sound.

The pouch I’d made for her hung shriveled from her neck with a new strap cut from a piece of hide. She pulled it over her head and handed it to me. “Ain’t much left in it now.”
When I opened it, a moldering smell drifted out. Digging my finger inside, I felt old leaves ground to powder.

Mauma sat low on the stool while I pulled her arms out of the dress sleeves and let the top drop to her waist, showing the grooves between her ribs and her breasts shrunk like the neck pouch. I dipped the rag in the basin, and when I stepped round to wash her back, she stiffed up. She had whip scars gnarled like tree roots from the top of her back down to her waist. On her right shoulder, she’d been branded with the letter W. It took me a minute before I could touch all that aching sadness.
When I finally set her feet in the basin, I asked, “What happened to your teeth?” “They fell out one day,” she said.

Sky made a sound like hmmmf. She said, “More like they got knocked out.” “You don’t need to be talking, you tell too many tales,” mauma told her.

The truth was Sky would tell more tales than mauma ever knew. Before the week was out, she’d tell me how mauma set loose mischief on the plantation every chance she got. The more they whipped mauma, the more holes she’d cut in the rice sacks. She broke things, stole things, hid things. Buried the threshing sickles in the woods, chopped down fences, one time set fire to the overseer’s privy house.

Over in the corner, Sky wouldn’t let go of the story about mauma’s teeth. “It happen the second time we run. The overseer say, if she do it again, she be easy to spot with her teeth gone. He took a hammer—”

“Hush up!” mauma cried.

I squatted down and stared her in the eyes. “Don’t you spare me. I’ve seen my share. I know what the world is.”


Sarah

Israel came to call on me wearing a short, freshly grown Quaker beard. We were seated side by side on the divan in the Motts’ parlor, and he stroked the whiskers constantly as he talked about the cost of wholesale wool and the marvels of the weather. The beard was thick as velvet brush-fringe and peppered with gray. He looked handsomer, sager, like a new incarnation of himself.
When I’d returned to Philadelphia after my disastrous attempt to resume life in Charleston, I’d rented a room in the home of Lucretia Mott, determined to make some kind of life for myself, and I suppose I’d done that. Twice weekly, I traveled to Green Hill to tutor Becky, though my old foe, Catherine, had recently informed me that my little protégée would be going away to school next year and my tutoring would end at the first of the summer. If I was to stay useful, I would have to seek out another Quaker family in need of a teacher, but as yet, I hadn’t made the effort. Catherine was kinder to me now, though she still drew herself up tight as a bud when she saw Israel smile at me at Meeting, something he never failed to do. Nor did he fail in his visits to me, coming twice each month to call on me in the Motts’ parlor.

I looked at him now and wondered how we’d gotten ourselves stranded on this endless plateau of friendship.  One  heard  all  sorts  of  rumors  about  it.  That  Israel’s  two  eldest  sons  opposed  his remarriage, not on general principle, mind you, but specifically to me. That he’d promised Rebecca on her deathbed he would love no one but her. That some of the elders had counseled him against taking a wife for reasons that ranged from his unreadiness to my unprovenness. I was not, after all, a birthright Quaker. In Charleston, it was being born into the planter class that mattered, here it was the Quakers. Some things were the same everywhere. “You’re the most patient of women,” Israel had told me once. It didn’t strike me as much of a virtue.

Today, except for the newness of his beard, Israel’s visit gradually began to seem like all the rest. I twiddled with my napkin as he talked about merino sheep farms and wool dyes. There was the clink of teacups when the silence came, children’s voices overhead mingled with racing footsteps on creaking floors, and then, abruptly, without preface, he announced, “My son Israel is getting married.” The way he said it, quiet and apologetic, embarrassed me.

“. . . Israel? . . . Little Israel?”

“He’s not so little now. He’s twenty-two.” He sighed, as if something had passed him by, and I wondered absurdly if there was a Quaker law forbidding fathers to marry after their sons. I wondered if the beard was not so much a new incarnation as a concession.

When it was time to say goodbye, he took my hand and pressed it against the dark whorls of hair on his cheek. He closed his eyes, and when he opened them, I felt he was about to say something. I lifted my brows. But then, releasing my hand, he rose from the divan and whatever errant thought had wriggled from his heart returned to it, repentant and undeclared.

He walked uncertainly to the door and let himself out, while I remained seated, seeing things with terrible clarity: the passivity, the hesitation about the future. Not Israel’s—mine.

As Lucretia and I sat in the tiny room she called a studio, winter rain pricked the windowpane, turning

to ice. We’d pulled our chairs close to the hearth where the fire was snapping and popping, zinging like harp strings. Lucretia was opening a small packet of mail that had arrived in the afternoon. I was reading a Sir Walter Scott novel banned by the Quakers, which somehow made it all the more enjoyable, but now, drowsy with heat, I lowered the book and stared into the flames.
It was my favorite part of the day—after the children were put to bed and Lucretia’s husband, James, had retired to his study, and it was just the two of us gathered here in her odd little nook of a room. A studio. It was comprised of nothing more than two stuffed chairs, a large leafed table, a fireplace, wall shelves, and a wide window that looked out over a copse of red mulberries and black oaks behind the house. The room was not for cooking or sewing or childcare or entertaining. Scattered with papers and pamphlets, books and correspondence, art palettes and squares of velvet cloth on which she pinned the bright luna moths she found lifeless in the garden, this room was just for her.
I don’t know how many evenings we’d spent in here talking, or like tonight, sitting quietly like two solitudes. Lucretia and I had formed a bond that went beyond friends. And yet I felt the difference between us. I noticed it at Meetings when I saw her on the Facing bench, the only female minister among all those men, the way she rose and spoke with such fearless beauty, and every morning when I went downstairs and there were her children sticky with oat gruel. I would get a faintly vacuous feeling in the pit of my stomach, not from envy that she had a profession, or these little ones, or even James, who was not like other men, but of some unknown species, a husband who beamed over her profession and made the oat gruel himself. No, it wasn’t that. It was the belonging I envied. She’d found her belonging.

“Why, this letter is for you,” Lucretia said, thrusting it toward me. It was Nina’s stationery, but not Nina’s script. The handwriting on the front was childlike and crude. Miss Sarah Grimké.

Dear Sarah

Mauma’s back. Nina said I could write you myself with the news. She ran away from the plantation where she’d been kept all this time. You should see her. She has scars and a full head of white hair and looks old as Methusal, but she’s the same inside. I nurse her day and night. She brought my sister with her named Sky. I know that’s some name. It comes from mauma and her longings. She always said one day we’d fly like blackbirds.
Missus stays mad at Nina most all the time. Nina started some troubles at the presbyterry church where she goes. Some man came last week to punish her on something she said. Mauma and Sky are the one bright hope.

It has taken too long to write this. Forgive my mistakes. I don’t get to read any more and work on my words. One day I will.