The Invention of Wings

Handful

I spread a pallet under the tree and set my sewing basket on it. Missus had decided she needed new curtains and covers for the drawing room, which was the last thing she needed, but it gave me a reason to come out here and sew with mauma.

She sat under the tree every day, working her story onto the quilt. Even if it drizzled, I couldn’t budge her—she was like God mending the world. When she came to bed at night, she brought the tree with her. The smell of bark and white mushrooms. Crumbs from the earth all over the mattress.
Winter had packed and gone. The leaves had wriggled out on the tree branches and the gold tassels were falling from the limbs like shedding fur. Settling on the pallet next to mauma, I wondered about Sarah up north, if her pale face ever saw the sun. She’d written me a while back, first letter I ever got. I carried it in my pocket most of the time.

Thomas’ wife had given missus a brass bird that fastened cloth in its beak, what they called a sew bird. I stuck one end of the curtain panel in its mouth while I measured and cut. Mauma was cutting out the appliqué of a man holding a branding iron in the fire.

“Who’s the man?” I said.

“That’s massa Wilcox,” she said. “He brand me the first time we run off. Sky was ’bout seven then—I had to wait on her to get old enough to travel.”

“Sky said yawl ran four times.”

“We run the next year when she’s eight, and then when she’s nine, and that time they whip her, too, so I stop trying.”

“How come you tried this last time then?”

“When I first get there, before Sky was born, massa Wilcox come down to see me. Everybody know what he want, too. When he put his hand on me, I take a scoop of red coals off the fire and toss ’em. Burn the man’s arm clean through his shirt. I got my first whipping, but it’s the last time he try that with me. When Sky turn thirteen last year, here he come back, sniffing round her. I tell her, we leaving, and this time we gon die trying.”

I couldn’t measure words against any of that. I said, “Well, you made it. You’re here now.” Our needles started back. Over in the garden, Sky was singing. Ef oona ent kno weh oona da
gwuine, oona should kno weh oona dum from.

Sky had never set foot past the Grimké walls since she got here. Missus didn’t have owner papers on her and Nina said it was dangerous business out there. Since Denmark, the codes had got stricter and the buckrahs had got meaner, but the next market day, I told Nina, “Write Sky a pass, just do it for me. I’ll watch after her.”

I tied a fresh scarf on Sky’s head and wrapped a pressed apron round her waist. I said, “Now, don’t be talking too much out there, all right?”

On the street, I showed her the alleys to duck in. I pointed out the guards, how to walk past and lower her eyes, how to step aside for the whites, how to survive in Charleston.
The market was busy—the men carrying wood slats piled with fish and the women walking round


with vegetable baskets on their heads the size of laundry tubs. The little slave girls were out, too, selling peanut patties from their straw hats. By the time we passed by the butcher tables with the bloody calf heads lined up, Sky’s eyes were big as horse hooves. “Where all this stuff come from?” she said.

“You’re in the city now,” I told her.

I showed her how to pick and choose what Aunt-Sister needed—coffee, tea, flour, corn meal, beef rump, lard. I taught her how to haggle, how to do the money change. The girl could do numbers in her head quicker than me.

When the shopping was done, I said, “Now we going somewhere, and I don’t want you telling mauma, or Goodis, or anybody about it.”

When we came to Denmark’s house, we stood on the street and looked at the battered whitewash. I’d come by here a few months after they lynched Denmark, and a free black woman I’d never seen answered the door. She said her husband had bought the house from the city, said she didn’t know what came of Susan Vesey.

I said to Sky, “You’re always singing how we should know where we come from.” I pointed to the house. “That’s where your daddy lived. His name was Denmark Vesey.”
She kept her eyes on the porch while I told her about him. I said he was a carpenter, a big, bravehearted man who had wits sharper than any white man. I said the slave people in Charleston called him Moses and he’d lived for getting us free. I told her about the blood he’d meant to spill. Blood I’d long since made peace with.

She said, “I know ’bout him. They hung him.”

I said, “He would’ve called you daughter if he’d had the chance.”

We hadn’t blown out the candle five minutes when mauma’s voice whispered cross the bed. “What happen to the money?”

My eyes popped open. “What?”

“The money I saved to buy our freedom. What happen to it?”

Sky was already sleeping deep with a wheeze in her breath. She rolled over at our voices, mumbling nonsense. I raised on my elbow and looked at mauma laying in the middle between us. “I thought you took it with you.”

“I was delivering bonnets that day. What would I be carrying all that money in my pocket for?” “I don’t know,” I whispered. “But it ain’t here. I looked high and low for it.” “Well, it’s right under your nose the whole time—if it was a snake, it’d bite you. Where’s that
first quilt you made—has red squares and black triangles?”

I should’ve known.

“I keep it on the quilt frame with the other quilts. Is that where you put it?” She whipped back the cover and climbed from bed, me fumbling behind her, lighting a candle.
Sky sat up in the hot, sputtering dark.

“Come on, get up,” mauma told her. “We fixing to roll the quilt frame down over the bed.” Sky lumbered over to us, looking confused, while I grabbed the rope and brought it down, the
pulley wheels begging for oil.

Mauma dug through the pile on the frame and found the quilt near the bottom. When she shook it

out, the old quilt smell filled the room. She slit the backing and sent her hand rooting inside. Grinning, she pulled out a thin bundle, then five more, all wrapped in muslin and tied with string so rotted it came apart in her hands. “Well, look here,” she said.

“What you find?” Sky asked.

After we’d told her about the hiring-out mauma used to do, and we’d danced round and pored over the riches, we laid the money on the frame, and I winched it back to the ceiling.
Sky went on back to sleep, but me and mauma lay wide-eyed.

She said, “Tomorrow, first thing, you tie the money up fresh and sew it back inside the quilt.” “It’s not enough to buy all three of us.”

“I know that, we just gon hold on to it for now.”

The night drew on, and I started to drift, floating to the edge. Just before I went over, I heard mauma say, “I don’t spec to get free. The only way I’m getting free is for you to get free.”


Sarah

13 April 1828
Dearest Nina,


Last month, Israel proposed marriage, declaring himself at long last. You’ll be surprised to learn I turned him down. He didn’t want me to go on with my plans for the ministry, at least not as his wife. How could I choose someone who would force me to give up my own small reach for meaning? I chose myself, and without consolation.

You should have seen him. He couldn’t accept that a faded-looking woman in middle age would choose aloneness over him. Respectable, handsome Israel. When I delivered my answer, he asked if I felt ill, if I was myself. He explained the gravity of my mistake. He said I should reconsider. He insisted I speak with the elders. As if those men could ever know my heart.

People at Arch Street can’t conceive of my refusal any more than Israel. They think I’m selfish and misguided. Am I, Nina? Am I a fool? As the weeks pass without his visits, and I feel inconsolable, I fear I’ve made the worst mistake of my life.

I want to tell you I’m strong and resolute, but in truth, I feel afraid and alone and uncertain. I feel as if he has died, and I suppose in some way it’s true. I’m left with nothing but this strange beating in my heart that tells me I’m meant to do something in this world. I cannot apologize for it, or for loving this small beating as much as him.
I think of you and your Reverend McDowell with hope and blessings. Pray for your loving sister,

Sarah

I laid down the pen and sealed the letter. It was late, the Mott house asleep, the candle a nub, the night impervious on the window. For weeks, I’d resisted writing to Nina, but now it was done, and it seemed a turning point, an abdication of what I’d always been to her: mother, rescuer, exemplar. I didn’t want to be those things anymore. I wanted to be what I was, her fallible sister.

When Lucretia handed me Nina’s letter, I was in the kitchen making biscuits the way Aunt-Sister made them, with wheat flour, butter, cold water, and a spoonful of sugar. I wasn’t inclined toward baking, but I did try to be of help now and then. I opened the letter, standing over the bowl of flour.

1 June 1828

Dearest Sister,

Take Heart. Marriage is overvalued.

My own news, though not as dire as yours, is similar. Some weeks ago, I went before a meeting at church and requested the elders give up their slaves and publicly denounce slavery. It was not well-received. Everyone, including Mother, our brother Thomas, and even Reverend McDowell, behaved as if I’d committed a crime. I asked them to give up a sin, not



Christ and the Bible!

Reverend McDowell agrees with me in spirit, but when I pressed him to preach publicly what he says to me in private, he refused. “Pray and wait,” he told me. “Pray and act,” I snapped. “Pray and speak!”

How could I marry someone who displays such cowardice?

I have no choice now but to leave his church. I’ve decided to follow in your steps and become a Quaker. I shudder to think of the gruesome dresses and the barren meetinghouse, but my course is set.

Fine riddance to Israel! Be consoled in knowing the world depends upon the small beating in your heart.

Yours,

Nina

When I finished reading, I pulled a chair from the pine table and sat. Motes of flour-dust were drifting in the air. It seemed an odd convergence that Nina and I would both taste this pain only weeks apart. Fine riddance to Israel, she’d written, but it wasn’t fine. I feared I would love him the rest of my life, that I would always wonder what it would’ve been like to spend my life with him at Green Hill. I longed for it in that excruciating way one has of romanticizing the life she didn’t choose. But sitting here now, I knew if I’d accepted Israel’s proposal, I would’ve regretted that, too. I’d chosen the regret I could live with best, that’s all. I’d chosen the life I belonged to.

I’d struggled for nearly two years to be acknowledged as a minister, without success, and I bore down now on my efforts, performing charitable work at the children’s asylum in order to win over the Quaker women and spending so many evenings reading texts on Quaker thought and worship I smelled perpetually  of  paraffin.  The  crucial  factor,  though,  was  my  utterances  in  Meeting,  which  were completely  dismal.  My  nervousness  about  speaking  always  made  my  stammer  worse,  and  Mr. Bettleman complained loudly about my “incoherent mumblings.” It was said that rhetorical polish wasn’t  required  for  the  ministry,  but  the  fact  was  all  the  ministers  on  the  Facing  bench  were appallingly eloquent.

I sought out the doctor who’d provided my spectacles, in hope, finally, of a cure, but he terrified me with talk of operations in which the root of one’s tongue was sliced and the excess tissue removed. I left, vowing I would never return. That night, unable to sleep, I sat in the kitchen with warm milk and nutmeg, repeating Wicked Willy Wiggle over and over, the little tongue exercise Nina had once insisted I do when she was a child.

8 October 1828


My Dear Sarah,

I am to be publicly expelled from Third Presbyterian Church. It seems they do not take well to my attending Quaker meetings these past few months. Mother is appalled. She insists my downfall began when I refused confirmation into St. Philip’s. According to her, I was a twelve-year-old marionette whose strings you pulled, and now I’m a grown marionette of twenty-four whose strings you’re manipulating all the way from Philadelphia. How skilled you are! Mother also felt compelled to add that I’m an unmarried marionette, thanks to my pride and my opinionated tongue.

Yesterday, Reverend McDowell visited, informing me I must return to “the fold of God’s elect” or be summoned before the church session to stand trial for broken vows and neglect of worship. Have you ever? I spoke as calmly as I could: “Deliver your document citing me to appear in your court, and I’ll come and defend myself.” Then I offered him tea. As Mother says, I’m proud, proud even of my pride. But when he departed, I fled to my room and gave way to tears. I am on trial!

Mother says I must give up my Quaker foolishness and return to the Presbyterians or bring public scandal upon the Grimkés. Well, we’ve endured them before, haven’t we? Father’s impeachment, that despicable Burke Williams, and your aweing “desertion” to the North. It’s my turn now.

I remain firm. Your Sister, Nina

Over the next year, my letters to Nina were the nearest thing to a diary I’d written since Father’s death. I told her how I practiced saying Wicked Willy Wiggle, of the fear my voice would keep me from realizing my largest hopes. I wrote of the anguish of seeing Israel each week at Meetings, the way he avoided me while his sister, Catherine, warmed to me considerably, a volte-face I couldn’t have imagined when I first returned here.

I sent Nina sketches I drew of the studio and recounted the talks Lucretia and I had there. I kept her abreast of the livelier petitions that circulated in Philadelphia: to keep free blacks from being turned out of white neighborhoods, to ban the “colored bench” in meetinghouses.
“It has come as a great revelation to me,” I wrote her, “that abolition is different from the desire for racial equality. Color prejudice is at the bottom of everything. If it’s not fixed, the plight of the Negro will continue long after abolition.”

In response, Nina wrote, “I wish I might nail your letter onto a public post on Meeting Street!” The thought of that was not at all unpleasant to me.

She wrote of her battles with Mother, the dryness of sitting in the Quaker meetinghouse, and the rampant ostracism she faced in Charleston for doing so. “How long must I remain in this land of slavery?” she wrote.

Then, on a languid summer day, Lucretia placed a letter in my hands.

12 August 1829

Dear Sarah,

Several days ago, in route to visit one of the sick in our Meeting, I was standing on the


corner of Magazine and Archdale when I encountered two boys—they were mere boys!— escorting a terrified slave to the Work House. She was pleading with them to change their minds, and seeing me, she begged more tearfully, “Please missus, help me.” I could do nothing.

I see now that I can do nothing here. I’m coming to you, Sister. I will quit Charleston and sail to Philadelphia in late October after the storms. We shall be together, and together nothing shall deter us.

With Abiding Love, Nina

I’d been expecting Nina for over a week, keeping vigil at the window of my new room in Catherine’s house. The November weather had been spiteful, delaying her ship, but yesterday the clouds had broken.

Today. Surely, today.

On my lap was a slender compendium on Quaker worship, but I couldn’t concentrate. Closing it, I paced back and forth in the narrow room, an unadorned little cell similar to the one that awaited Nina across the hall. I wondered what she’d think of it.

It had been hard to leave Lucretia’s, but there was no guest room there for Nina. Israel’s daughter-in-law had taken over Green Hill, allowing Catherine to move back to her small house in the city, and when she’d offered to board the both of us, I’d accepted with relief.

I went again to the window and peered at the outcroppings of blue overhead and then at the river of elm leaves in the street, brimming yellow, and I felt surprised suddenly at my life. How odd it had turned out, how different than I’d imagined. The daughter of Judge John Grimké—a Southern patriot, a slaveholder, an aristocrat—living in this austere house in the North, unmarried, a Quaker, an abolitionist.

A coach turned at the end of the street. I froze for a moment, arrested by the clomp clomp of the chestnut horses, the way their high stride made eddies in the leaves, and then I broke into a run.
When Nina opened the door of the coach and saw me rushing toward her without a shawl, my hair falling in red skeins from its pins, she began to laugh. She wore a black, full-length cloak with a hood, and tossing it back, she looked dark and radiant.

“Sister!” she cried and stepped off the carriage rung into my arms.