The Invention of Wings

Handful

4 August

Dear Sarah

Mauma passed on last month. She fell into a sleep under the oak tree and never roused. She stayed asleep six days before she died in her bed, me beside her and Sky too. Your mauma paid for her to have a pine box.

They put her in the slave burial ground on Pitt Street. Missus let Goodis carry me and Sky over there in the carriage to see her resting place and say goodbye. Sky has turned 22 now and stands tall as a man. When we stood by the grave, I didn’t come up to her shoulder. She sang the song the women on the plantation sing when they pound rice to leave on the graves. She said they put rice there to help the dead find their way back to Africa. Sky had a pocketful from the kitchen house and she spread it over mauma while she sang.
What came to me was the old song I made up when I was a girl. Cross the water, cross the sea, let them fishes carry me, carry me home. I sang that, then I took the brass thimble, the one I loved from the time I was little, and I left it on top of her grave so she’d have that part of me.

Well, I wanted you to know. I guess she’s at peace now.

I hope this letter makes it to you. If you write me, take care cause your sister Mary watches everything. The black driver from her plantation named Hector is the butler now and he does her spying.

Your friend

Handful

I wrote Sarah’s name and address on the front by the light of the candle, copying missus’ handwriting as close as I could manage. Missus’ penship had fallen off so bad I could’ve set down any kind of lettering and passed it off for hers. I closed the letter with a drop of wax and pressed it with missus’ seal-stamp. I’d stole the stamp from her room—let’s say, borrowed it. I planned to take it back before it was missed. The stationery, though, was just plain stolen.

Cross the room, Sky was sleeping, thrashing in the heat. I watched her arms search the spot on the mattress where mauma used to lay, then I blew out the flame and watched the smoke tail away in the dark. Tomorrow I’d slip the letter in the batch going to the post and hope nobody took a hard look.
Sky sang out in her sleep, sounded like Gullah, and I thought of the rice she’d sprinkled on mauma’s grave, trying to send her spirit to Africa.

Africa. Wherever me and Sky were, that’s the only place mauma would be.

Sarah

I woke each day to a sick, empty feeling. Catherine had given us until the first day of October to pack our things and leave, but we could find no one who’d take in two sisters expelled by the Quakers, and Lucretia’s house was packed with children now. The streets had been flooded with hand fliers—they were tacked on light posts and buildings and strewn on the ground—the headline screaming out in the salacious way these street rags did: OUTRAGE: An Abolitionist of the Most Revolting Character is Among  You. Below  that,  Nina’s  letter  to The  Liberator was  printed  in  full.  Even  the  lowliest boardinghouses wouldn’t open their doors to us.

I’d reached the borders of despair when a letter came with no return name or address on the envelope.

29 September 1835
Dear Misses Grimké,


If you are bold enough to sit with us on the Negro pew, perhaps you will find it in yourself to share our home until you find more suitable lodging. My mother and I have nothing to offer but a partially furnished attic, but it has a window and the chimney runs through the middle of it and keeps it warm. It is yours, if you would have it. We ask that you not speak of the arrangement to anyone, including your present landlord Catherine Morris. We await you at 5 Lancaster Row.

Yours in Fellowship, Sarah Mapps Douglass

We departed our old life the next day, leaving no forwarding address and no goodbye, arriving by coach at a tiny brick house in a poor, mostly white neighborhood. There was a crooked wooden fence around the front with a chain on the gate, which necessitated us dragging our trunks to the back door.
The attic was poorly lit and gauzy with cobwebs, and when a fire blazed below, the room filled with stultifying heat and smelled bitter with wood smoke, but we didn’t complain. We had a roof. We had each other. We had friends in Sarah Mapps and Grace.

Sarah Mapps was well educated, perhaps more than I, having attended the best Quaker academy for free blacks in the city. She would tell me that even as a child she’d known her only mission in life was to found a school for black children. “Few understand that kind of emphatic knowing,” she said. “Most people, including my mother, feel I’ve sacrificed too much by not marrying and having children, but the pupils, they are my children.” I understood far better than she realized. Like me, she loved books, keeping her precious volumes inside a chest in their small front sitting room. Each evening she read to her mother in her lovely singsong voice—Milton, Byron, Austen—continuing long after Grace had fallen asleep in her chair.

There were hats everywhere in various stages of construction, hanging on tree racks throughout the house, and if not actual hats, then sketches of hats scattered on tables and wedged into the frame of the mirror  by the door. Grace made big, wild-feathered creations which she sold to the shops, creations that, as a Quaker, she never could’ve worn herself. Nina said she was living vicariously, but I think she simply possessed the urgings of an artist.

Our first week in the attic, we cleaned. We swept out the dust and spiders and shined the window glass. We polished the two narrow bed frames, the table and chair, and the creaky rocker. Sarah Mapps brought up a hand-braided rug, bright quilts, an extra table, a lantern, and a small bookshelf where we



set our books and journals. We tucked evergreen boughs under the eaves to scent the air and hung our clothes on wall hooks. I placed my pewter inkstand on the extra table.

By the second week we were bored. Sarah Mapps had said we should be careful to conceal our comings and goings, that the neighbors would not tolerate racial mixing, but slipping out one day, we were spotted by a group of  ruffian boys, who pelted us  with pebbles  and slurs. Amalgamators. Amalgamators. The next day the front of the house was egged.

The third week we became hermits.

November arrived, I began to pace the oval rug as I reread books and old letters, holding them as I walked, trying not to disappear into the melancholic place I’d visited since childhood. I felt as if I was fighting to hold my ground, that if I stepped off the rug, I would fall into my old abyss.
Before we’d left Catherine’s, a letter had arrived from Handful telling us of Charlotte’s death. Every time I read it—so many times Nina had threatened to hide it from me—I thought of the promise I’d made to help Handful get free. It had plagued me my whole life, and now that Charlotte was gone, instead of releasing me, her death had somehow made the obligation more binding. I told myself I’d tried—I had tried. How many times had I written Mother begging to purchase Handful in order to free her? She’d not even acknowledged my requests.

Then one morning while my sister used the last of our paints to capture the bare willow outside the window and I walked my trenchant path on the rug, I suddenly stopped and gazed at the pewter inkstand. I stared at it for whole minutes. Everything was in shambles, and there was the inkstand.
“. . . Nina! Do you remember how Mother would make us sit for hours and write apologies? Well, I’m going to write one . . . a true apology for the anti-slavery cause. You could write, too . . . We both could.”

She stared at me, while everything I felt and knew offered itself up at once. “. . . It’s the South that must be reached,” I said. “. . . We’re Southerners . . . we know the slaveholders, you and I . . . We can speak to them . . . not lecture them, but appeal to them.”

Turning toward the window, she seemed to study the willow, and when she looked back, I saw the glint in her eyes. “We could write a pamphlet!”

She rose, stepping into the quadrangle of light that lay on the floor from the window.  “Mr. Garrison printed my letter, perhaps he would print our pamphlet, too, and send it to all the cities in the South. But let’s not address it to the slaveholders. They’ll never listen to us.”
“. . . Who then?”

“We’ll write to the Southern clergy and to the women. We’ll set the preachers upon them, and their wives and mothers and daughters!”

I wrote in bed on my lap desk, wrapped in a woolen shawl, while Nina bent over the small table in her

old, fur-lined bonnet. The entire attic ached with cold and the scratch-scratch of our pens and the whippoorwills already calling to each other in the gathering dark.

All winter the chimney had steeped the attic with heat and Nina would throw open the window to let in the icy air. We wrote sweltering or we wrote shivering, but rarely in between. Our pamphlets were nearly finished—mine, An Epistle to the Clergy of the Southern States, and Nina’s, An Appeal to the Christian Women of the South. She’d taken the women, and I the clergy, which I found ironic considering I’d done so poorly with men and she so well. She insisted it would’ve been more ironic the other way around—her writing about God when she’d done so poorly with him.
We’d set down every argument the South made for slavery and refuted them all. I didn’t stutter on the page. It was an ecstasy to write without hesitation, to write everything hidden inside of me, to write with the sort of audacity I wouldn’t have found in person. I sometimes thought of Father as I wrote and the brutal confession he’d made at the end. Do you think I don’t abhor slavery? Do you think I don’t know it was greed that kept me from following my conscience? But it was mostly Charlotte who haunted my pages.

Below us in the kitchen, I heard Sarah Mapps and Grace feeding wood into the stove, an ornery old Rumford that coughed up clouds of smut. Soon we smelled vegetables boiling—onions, parsnips, beet tops—and we gathered our day’s work and descended the ladder.

Sarah Mapps turned from the stove as we entered, sheaves of smoke floating about her head. “Do you have new pages for us?” she asked, and her mother, who was pounding dough, stopped to hear our answer.

“Sarah has brought down the last of hers,” Nina said. “She wrote the final sentence today, and I expect to complete mine tomorrow!”

Sarah Mapps clapped her hands the way she might’ve done for the children in her class. Our habit was to gather in the sitting room after the meal, where Nina and I read our latest passages aloud to them. Grace sometimes grew so distressed at our eyewitness accounts of slavery she would interrupt us with all sorts of outbursts—Such an abomination! Can’t they see we are persons? There but for the grace of God. Finally, Sarah Mapps would fetch the millinery basket so her mother could distract herself by jabbing a needle into one of the hats she was making.

“A letter came for you today, Nina,” Grace said, wiping dough from her hands and digging it from her apron.

Few people knew of our whereabouts: Mother and Thomas in Charleston, and I’d sent the address to Handful as well, though I’d not heard back from her. Among the Quakers, we’d informed no one but Lucretia, afraid that Sarah Mapps and Grace would suffer for consorting with us. The handwriting on the letter, however, belonged to none of them.

I gazed over Nina’s shoulder as she tore open the paper.

“It’s from Mr. Garrison!” Nina cried. I’d forgotten—Nina had written him some weeks ago, describing our literary undertaking, and he’d responded with enthusiasm, asking us to submit our work when it was finished. I couldn’t imagine what he might want.

21 March 1836

Dear Miss Grimké,

I have enclosed a letter to you from Elizur Wright in New York. Not knowing how to reach you, he entrusted the letter to me to forward. I think you will find it of utmost importance.
I pray the monographs you and your sister are writing will reach me soon and that you will both rise to the moment that is now upon you.

God Grant You Courage,

William Lloyd Garrison

Nina looked up, her eyes searching mine, and they were filled with a kind of wonder. With a deep breath, she read the accompanying letter aloud.

2 March 1836

Dear Miss Grimké,

I write on behalf of the American Anti-Slavery Society, which is soon to commission and send forth forty abolition agents to speak at gatherings across the free states, winning converts  to  our  cause  and  rousing  support.  After  reading  your  eloquent  letter  to The Liberator and observing the outcry and awe it has elicited, the Executive Committee is unanimous in its belief that your insight into the evils of slavery in the South and your impassioned voice will be an invaluable asset.

We invite you to join us in this great moral endeavor, and your sister, Sarah, as well, as we have learned of her sacrifice and staunch abolitionist views. We believe you may be more amenable to the mission if she accompanies you. If the two of you would consent to be our only female agents, we would have you speak to women in private parlors in New York.
We would expect you the sixteenth of next September for two months of rigorous agent training under the direction of Theodore Weld, the great abolitionist orator. Your circuit of lectures will commence in December.

We ask for your prayerful deliberation and your reply.
Yours Most Sincerely,

Elizur Wright

Secretary, AASS

The four of us stared at one another for a moment with blank, astonished expressions, and then Nina threw her arms around me. “Sarah, it’s all we could’ve hoped and more.”
I could only stand there immobile while she clasped me. Sarah Mapps scooped a handful of flour from the bowl and tossed it over us like petals at a wedding, and their laughter rose into the steamy air.

“Think  of  it,  we’re  to  be  trained  by  Theodore  Weld,”  Nina  said.  He  was  the  man  who’d “abolitionized” Ohio. He was said to be demanding, fiercely principled, and uncompromising.
I muddled through the meal and the reading, and when we slipped into bed, I was glad for the dark. I lay still and hoped Nina would think me asleep, but her voice came from her bed, two armlengths away. “I won’t go to New York without you.”

“. . . I-I didn’t say I wouldn’t go. Of course, I’ll go.” “You’ve been so quiet, I don’t know what to think.”

“. . . I’m overjoyed. I am, Nina . . . It’s just . . . I’ll have to speak. To speak in the most public way . . . among strangers . . . I’ll have to use the voice in my throat, not the one on the page.”
All evening, I’d pictured how it would be, the moment when the words clotted on my tongue and the women in New York shifted in their chairs and stared at their laps.

“You stood in Meetings and spoke,” Nina said. “You didn’t let your stutter stop you from trying to become a minister.”

I stared at the black plank of rafter over my head and felt the truth and logic of that, and it came to me that what I feared most was not speaking. That fear was old and tired. What I feared was the immensity of it all—a female abolition agent traveling the country with a national mandate. I wanted to say, Who am I to do this, a woman? But that voice was not mine. It was Father’s voice. It was Thomas’. It belonged to Israel, to Catherine, and to Mother. It belonged to the church in Charleston and the Quakers in Philadelphia. It would not, if I could help it, belong to me.

Handful

I was down near Adgers Wharf on an errand when the steamboat left the harbor and it was something in this world, the paddle thundering, the smokestack blowing, and people lined up on the top deck waving handkerchiefs. I watched it till the spume settled on the water and the boat dropped over the last blue edge.

Little missus had sent me to get two bottles of import scotch, and I hurried now not to be late. I was the one who did most of her bidding these days. When she sent her plantation slaves to fetch something, they’d come back with the basket empty or still holding the note they were supposed to deliver. They didn’t know the Battery from Wragg Square, and she’d make them go without supper if they were lucky, and if they weren’t, it was five lashes from Hector.

Last week Sky made up a rhyme and sang it in the garden. Little missus Mary, mean as a snake. Little missus Mary, hit her with the rake. I told her, don’t sing that cause Hector has ears to hear, but Sky couldn’t get the song off her tongue. She’d ended up with the iron muzzle latched on her mouth. It was used for when a slave stole food, but it worked just as good for a slave mouthing off. It took four men to hold Sky down, work the prongs inside her mouth, and clamp the contraption at the back of her head. She screamed so loud I bit the side of my cheek till blood seeped and the copper taste filled my mouth. Sky couldn’t eat or talk for two days. She slept sitting up so the iron wouldn’t cut her face, and when she woke groaning, I worked a wet rag under the edge of the gag so she could suck the water.
Coming out from the scotch store, I was thinking about the torn places on the sides of her mouth, how she hadn’t sung a tune since all that happened. Then I heard shouts and smelled the smoke.
A black billow was rising over the Old Exchange. The first thing that sprang in my head was Denmark, how the city was finally on fire like he wanted. I hitched up my skirt and jabbed the rabbit cane into the cobblestone, trying to make my leg go faster. The scotch bottles clanked in the basket. Pain jarred to my hip.

At the corner of Broad Street, I stopped in my tracks. What I thought was the city burning was a bonfire in front of the Exchange. A mob circled round it and the man from the post office was up on the steps throwing bundles of paper on the flames. Every time a packet landed, the cinders flew and the crowd roared.

I didn’t know what they were so stirred up about, and the last thing you want is to wade out in the middle of somebody else’s trouble, but I knew little missus doled out whippings for being late the same as she did for getting lost.

I was weaving my way, keeping my head down, when I saw one of the papers they were trying to burn laying on the street trampled underfoot, and I went over and picked it up.
It was singed along the bottom. An Epistle to the Clergy of the Southern States by Sarah M. Grimké.

I stood stock-still. Sarah. Sarah M. Grimké.

“Give that to me, nigger!” a man said. He was old and bald and smelled sour in the summer heat. “Hand it over!”

I looked at his red, watering eyes and poked the booklet inside my pocket. This was Sarah’s name and these were her words inside. They could burn the rest of the papers, but they weren’t burning this one.

Come later this night, Sky and Goodis would come to my bed and say, Handful, what was you thinking? You should’ve give that to him, but I did what I did.

I didn’t pay any heed to what he said. I turned my back and started walking off, getting away


from his stink and his grabbing hand.

He caught hold of the handle on my basket and gave it a jerk. I yanked back, and he held on, swaying on his feet, saying, “What you think? I’m gonna let you walk off with that?” Then he looked down, that half-drunk fool, and saw the bottles of scotch in the basket, the best scotch in Charleston, and his gray tongue came out and wiped his lips.

I said, “Here, you take the liquor and I’ll take the booklet,” and I slid the basket off my arm and left him holding it. I limped off, me and that sly rabbit on the cane, disappearing in the crowd.
I kept going past Market Street. The sun was dripping orange on the harbor, the green shadows falling off the garden walls. Up and down the street, the horses were hightailing home.
I didn’t hurry. I knew what was waiting on me.

Near the Grimké house, I saw the steamboat landing and the whitewash building with a sign over the door, Charleston Steamship Company. A man holding a pocket watch was locking the front door. When he left, I wandered down to the landing and sat hidden behind the wood crates, watching the pelicans dive straight as blades. When I took the booklet from my pocket, little charred flakes came off in my hand. I had to work hard at some of the words. If one tripped me up, I stared at the letters, waiting for the meaning to show itself, and it would come, too, like pictures taking shape in the clouds.

Respected Friends,

I address you as a repentant slaveholder of the South, one secure in the knowledge that the Negro is not chattel to be owned, but a person under God . . .

Little missus had me whipped by the light of the moon.

When I showed up late at the gate without her import scotch or the money she gave me to buy it, she told Hector to take care of me. It was dark out, the black sky full of sharp-edge, tin-cut stars and the moon so full Hector’s shadow lay perfect on the ground. He had the bullwhip wound up, hanging off his belt.

I’d always taken my hope from mauma and she was gone.

He lashed my hands to a post on the kitchen house. The last time I was whipped was for learning to read—one lash, a taste of sugar, they said—and Tomfry had tied me to this same post.
This time, ten lashes. The price to read Sarah’s words.

I waited with my back to Hector. I could see Goodis crouched in the shadows by the herb garden and Sky hidden up next to the warming kitchen, the flash of her eyes like a small night animal.
I let my eyelids fall shut on the world. What was it for anyway? What was any of this for? The first strike came straight from the fire, a burning poker under my skin. I heard the cotton on
my dress rip and felt the skin split. It knocked the legs from me.

I cried out cause I couldn’t help it, cause my body was small without padding. I cried out to wake God from his slumber.

The words in Sarah’s book came fresh to me. A person under God. In my head, I saw the steamboat. I saw the paddle turning.


Next day, I was measuring little missus for a dress, a walking costume made of silk taffeta, just what everybody needs, and her pretending nothing happened. Being obliging. Handful, what do you think about this gold color, is it too pale? . . . Nobody sews like you do, Handful.

When I stretched the measure tape from her waist to her ankle, the tore-up skin on my back pinched and pulled and a trickle ran between my shoulders. Phoebe and Sky had laid brown paper soaked in molasses on my back to keep the raw places clean, but it didn’t turn the pain sweet. Every step I took hurt. I slid my feet on the floor without picking them up.

Little missus stood on the fitting box and turned a circle. It made me think of the old globe in master Grimké’s study, the way it turned.

The clapper went off on the front door and we heard Hector’s shoes slap down the hallway to the drawing room where missus was taking tea. He called out, “Missus, the mayor’s here. He say for you to come to the door.”

Mary stepped off the fitting box and stuck her head out to see what she could see. Missus was old now, her hair paper-white, but she got round. I heard her cane fast-tapping and then her toady voice drifted into the room. “Mr. Hayne! This is an honor. Please, come, join me for tea.” Like she’d caught the big fly.

Little missus started scrambling to get her shoes on. She and missus were always bragging on the mayor. Mr. Robert Hayne walked on Charleston water. He was what they called a nullifier.
“I’m afraid this isn’t a social call, Mrs. Grimké. I’m here on official business regarding your daughters, Sarah and Angelina.”

Little missus went still. She edged back to the doorway, one shoe on, one shoe off, and I eased over there, too.

“I regret to inform you that Sarah and Angelina are no longer welcome in the city. You should inform them if they return for a visit, they’ll be arrested and imprisoned until another steamer can return them to the North. It’s for their own welfare as much as the city’s—Charleston is so enraged against them now they would undoubtedly meet with violence if they showed their faces.”
It fell silent. The old bones of the house creaked round us.

“Do you understand, madame?” the mayor said.

“I understand perfectly, now you should understand me. My daughters may hold unholy opinions, but they will not be treated with this sort of insult and indignity.”

The front door banged, the cane tapped, then missus was standing in the doorway with her lip trembling.

The measure tape slipped from my fingers. It curled on the floor by my foot. I wasn’t likely to see Sarah ever again.

Sarah

Seated on the platform, I watched the faces in the audience grow more rapt as Nina spoke, the air crackling about their heads as if something was effervescing in it. It was our inaugural lecture, and we weren’t tucked away in a parlor somewhere before twenty ladies with embroidery hoops on their laps like the Anti-Slavery Society had first envisioned. We were here in a majestic hall in New York with carved balconies and red velvet chairs filled to overflowing.

All week the newspapers had railed against the unwholesome novelty of two sisters holding forth like Fanny Wrights. The streets had been papered with handbills admonishing women to stay home, and even the Anti-Slavery Society had grown nervous about moving the lecture to a public hall. They’d come close to canceling the whole thing and sending us back to the parlor.
It was Theodore Weld who’d stood and castigated the Society for their cowardice. They called him the Lion of the Tribe of Abolition, and for good reason—he could be quite forceful when he needed to.  “I defend these ladies’ right to speak against slavery anywhere and everywhere. It’s supremely ridiculous for you to bully them from this great moment!”

He had saved us.

Nina swept back and forth across the stage, lifting her hands and sending her voice soaring into the balconies.  “We stand before you as Southern women, here to speak the terrible truth about slavery . . .” She’d splurged on a stylish, deep blue dress that set off her hair, and I couldn’t help wondering what Mr. Weld would think if he could see her.

Even though he’d led the training sessions for Nina and me and the thirty-eight other agents, schooling us in the skills of oration, he’d never seemed sure how to advise the two of us. Should we stand motionless and speak softly as people expected of a woman or gesture and project like a man? “I leave it to you,” he’d told us.

He’d taken what he called a brotherly interest in us, visiting us often at our lodgings. It was really Nina he’d taken an interest in, of course, and I doubted it was brotherly. She wouldn’t admit it, but she was drawn to him, too. Before arriving in New York, I’d pictured Mr. Weld as a stern old man, but as it turned out, he was a young man, and as kindly as he was stern. Thirty-three and unmarried, he was strikingly handsome, with thick brown curling hair and biting blue eyes, and he was color-blind to the point he wore all sorts of funny, mismatched shades. We thought it endearing. I was fairly sure, however, it wasn’t any of these qualities that attracted Nina. I suspected it was that saving speech of his. It was those five words, I leave it to you.

“The female slaves are our sisters,” Nina exclaimed and stretched her arms from her sides as if we were encompassed by a great host of them. “We must not abandon them.” It was the final line of her speech, and it was followed by a thunderclap in the hall, the women coming to their feet.
As the handclapping went on, heat washed up the sides of my neck. Now it was my turn. Having listened to me practice my speech, the Society men had decided Nina would go first and I would follow, fearing if the order was reversed, few would persevere through my talk to hear her. Getting to my feet, I wondered if the words I planned to say were already retreating

When I stepped to the lectern, my legs felt squishy as a sponge. For a moment, I held on to the sides of the podium, overwhelmed by the realization that I, of all people, was standing here. I was gazing at a sea of waiting faces, and it occurred to me that after my tall, dazzling sister, I must’ve been a sight. Perhaps I was even a shock. I was short, middle-aged, and plain, with a tiny pair of spectacles on the end of my nose, and I still wore my old Quaker clothes. I was comfortable in them now. I’m who I am. The thought made me smile, and everywhere I looked, the women smiled back,


and I imagined they understood what I was thinking.

I opened my mouth and the words fell out. I spoke for several minutes before I looked at Nina as if to say, I’m not stammering! She nodded, her eyes wide and brimming.

As a child, my stutter had come and gone mysteriously just like this, but it had been with me for so long now I’d thought it permanent. I talked on and on. I spoke quietly about the evils of slavery that I’d seen with my own eyes. I told them about Handful and her mother and her sister. I spared them nothing.

Finally, I peered over my glasses and took them in for a moment. “We won’t be silent anymore. We women will declare ourselves for the slave, and we won’t be silent until they’re free.”
I turned then and walked back to my chair while the women rose and filled the hall with their applause.

spoke before large gatherings in New York City for weeks before holding a campaign in New Jersey, and then traveling on to towns along the Hudson. The women came in throngs, proliferating like the loaves and fishes in the Bible. In a church in Poughkeepsie, the crowd was so great the balcony cracked and the church had to be evacuated, forcing us to deliver our speeches outside in the frost and gloom of February, and not one woman left. In every town we visited, we encouraged the women to form their own anti-slavery societies, and we set them collecting signatures on petitions. My stutter came and went, though it kindly stayed away for most of my speeches.
We became modestly famous and extravagantly infamous. Throughout that winter and spring, news of our exploits was carried by practically every newspaper in the country. The anti-slavery papers published our speeches, and tens of thousands of our pamphlets were in print. Even our former president, John Quincy Adams, agreed to meet with us, promising he would deliver the petitions the women were collecting to Congress. In a few cities in the South, we were hung in effigy right along with Mr. Garrison, and our mother had sent word we could no longer set foot in Charleston without fear of imprisonment.

Mr. Weld was our lifeline. He wrote us joint letters, praising our efforts. He called us brave and stalwart and dogged. Now and then, he added a postscript for Nina alone. Angelina, it’s widely said you keep your audiences in thrall. As director of your training, I wish I could take credit, but it’s all you.

On a balmy afternoon in April, he appeared without prior notice at Gerrit Smith’s country house in Peterboro, New York, where Nina and I were spending several days during our latest round of lectures. He’d come, he said, to discuss Society finances with Mr. Smith, the organization’s largest benefactor, but one could hardly miss the coincidence. Each morning, he and Nina took a walk along the lane that led through the orchards. He’d invited me as well, but I’d taken one look at Nina’s face and declined. He accompanied us to our afternoon lectures, waiting outside the halls, and in the evenings, the three of us sat with Mr. and Mrs. Smith in the parlor, as we debated strategies for our cause and recounted our adventures. When Mrs. Smith suggested it was time for the women to say good night, Theodore and Nina would glance at one another reluctant to part, and he would say, “Well then. You must get your rest,” and Nina would leave the room with painful slowness.
The day he departed, I watched from the window as the two of them returned from their walk. It had started to rain while they were out, one of those sudden downbursts during which the sun goes



right on shining, and he was holding his coat over their heads, making a little tent for them. They walked without the least bit of hurry. I could see they were laughing.

As they came onto the porch, shaking off the wetness, he bent and kissed my sister’s cheek.

June we arrived in Amesbury, Massachusetts, for a two-week respite at the clapboard cottage of a Mrs. Whittier. We were soon to begin a crusade of lectures in New England that would last through the fall, but we were ragged with fatigue, in need of fresh, more seasonal clothes, and I had an airy little cough I couldn’t get rid of. Mrs. Whittier was cherry-cheeked and plump, and fed us rich soups, dosed us with cod liver oil, refused all visitors, and forced us to bed before the moon appeared.
It  was  several  days  before  we  discovered  she  was  the  mother  of  John Greenleaf  Whittier, Theodore’s close friend. We were sitting in the parlor, having tea, when she began to speak of her son and his long friendship with Theodore, and we understood now why she’d taken us in.
“You must know Theodore well then,” Nina said.

“Teddy? Oh, he’s like a son to me, and a brother to John.” She shook her head. “I suppose you’ve heard of that awful pledge they made.”

“Pledge?” said Nina. “Why, no, we’ve heard nothing of it.”

“Well, I don’t approve. I think it too extreme. A woman my age would like grandchildren, after all. But they’re men of principle, those two, there’s no reasoning with them.”
Nina sat up on the edge of her chair, and I could see the brightness leave her. “What did they pledge?”

“They vowed neither of them would marry until slavery was abolished. Honestly, it will hardly be in their lifetimes!”

That night I was awakened by a knock on my door long after the moon set. Nina stood there with her face like a seawall, grim and braced. “I can’t bear it,” she said and fell against my shoulder.

That summer of 1837, New Englanders came by the thousands to hear us speak, and for the first time men began to appear in the audiences. At first a handful, then fifty, then hundreds. That we spoke publicly to women was bad enough—that we spoke publicly to men turned the Puritan world on its head.

“They’ll be lighting the pyres,” I said to Nina when the men first showed, trying to slough it off. We laughed, but it became not funny at all.

I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence. Was there ever a more galling verse in the Bible? It was preached that summer from every pulpit in New England with the Grimké sisters in mind. The Congregational churches passed a resolution of censure against us, urging a boycott of our lectures, and in its wake, a number of churches and public halls were closed to us. In Pepperell we were forced to deliver our message in a barn with the horses and


cows. “As you see, there’s no room at the inn,” Nina told them. “But, still, the wise men have come.”
We tried to be brave and stalwart and dogged, as Theodore had described us in his letter, and we began using portions of our lectures to defend our right to speak. “What we claim for ourselves we claim for every woman!” That was our rally cry in Lowell and Worcester and Duxbury, indeed everywhere we went. You should have seen the women, how they flocked to our side, and some, like the brave ladies of Andover, wrote public letters in our defense. My old friend Lucretia got a message to us all the way from Philadelphia. It contained four words: Press on, my sisters.
Without intending to, we set the country in an uproar. The matter of women having certain rights was new and strange and pilloried, but it was suddenly debated all the way to Ohio. They renamed my sister Devilina. They christened us “female incendiaries.” Somehow we’d lit the fuse.
The last week of August we returned to Mrs. Whittier’s cottage as if from battle. I felt tired and beleaguered, uncertain if I could continue with the fall lectures. The last teaspoon of fight had been scraped out of me. Our final meeting of the summer had ended with dozens of angered men standing on wagons outside the hall, shouting “Devilina!” and hurling rocks as we left. One had hit my mouth, transforming my lower lip into a fat, red sausage. I looked a sight. I wasn’t sure what Mrs. Whittier would say to all this, if she would even give us shelter—we were pariahs now—but when we arrived, she pulled us into her arms and kissed our foreheads.

On the third day of refuge, I returned from a stroll along the banks of the Merrimack to find Nina canting sharply against the window as if she’d fallen asleep, her head pressed to the glass, her eyes closed, her arms dropped by her sides. She looked like a spinning top that had come to rest.
Hearing my footsteps, she turned and pointed to the tea table where the Boston Morning Post lay open. Mrs. Whittier took care to hide the editorials, but Nina had found the paper in the bread box.

August 25

The Misses Grimké have made speeches, written pamphlets, and exhibited themselves in public in unwomanly ways for a while now, but they have not found husbands. Why are all the old hens abolitionists? Because not being able to obtain husbands, they think they may stand some chance for a Negro, if they can only make amalgamation fashionable . . .

I couldn’t finish it.

“If that’s not enough, Theodore will be arriving this afternoon along with Elizur Wright and Mrs. Whittier’s son, John. Their letter came while you were out. Mrs. Whittier is in there making mince pies.”

She hadn’t spoken of Theodore all summer, but she was sick with longing for him, it was plain on her face.

The men arrived at three o’clock. My lip was almost back to its normal size, and I could speak now without sounding as if my mouth was stuffed with food, but it was still sore and I remained quiet, waiting for them to come to their purpose, remembering the way Theodore defended us before—It is supremely ridiculous they should be bullied from this great moment.

Today he was wearing two shades of green that made one wince. He walked to the mantel and picked up a piece of scrimshaw and inspected it. His eyes went to Nina. He said, “There has not been a contribution to the anti-slavery movement  more  impressive  or  tireless  than that  of  the  Grimké

sisters.”

“Hear, hear,” said dear Mrs. Whittier, but I saw her son lower his eyes, and I knew then why they had come.

“We commend you for it,” Theodore went on.  “And yet by encouraging men to join your audiences, you’ve mired us in a controversy that has taken the attention away from abolition. We’ve come, hoping to convince you—”

Nina interrupted him.  “Hoping to convince us to behave like good lapdogs and wait content beneath the table for whatever crumbs you toss to us? Is that what you hope?” Her rebuke was so swift and scathing I wondered if it was in reaction to his marriage pledge as much as anything.
“Angelina, please, just hear us out,” he said. “We’re on your side, at heart we are. I of all people support your right to speak. It’s downright senseless to keep men away from your meetings.”
“. . . Then why do you quibble?” I asked.

“Because we sent you out there on behalf of abolition, not women.”

He glanced at John, whose heavy brows and lean face made me feel the two could’ve been actual brothers, not just figurative ones.

“He only means to say the slave is of greater urgency,” John added. “I support the cause of women, too, but surely you can’t lose sight of the slave because of a selfish crusade against some paltry grievance of your own?”

“Paltry?” Nina cried. “Is our right to speak paltry?” “In comparison to the cause of abolition? Yes, I say it is.”

Mrs. Whittier drew up in her chair. “Really, John! As a woman, I didn’t think I had a grievance until you began speaking!”

“Why must it be one or the other?” Nina asked. “Sarah and I haven’t ceased to work for abolition. We’re speaking for slaves and women both. Don’t you see, we could do a hundred times more for the slave,  if  we  weren’t  so  fettered?”  She  turned  to  Theodore,  casting  on  him  the  most  beautiful, imploring look. “Can’t you stand side by side with me? With us?”

He drew a long breath and his face gave him away—it was twisted with love and distress—but he’d come on a mission, and as Mrs. Whittier had said, he was a man of principle, right or wrong. “Angelina, I think of you as my friend, the dearest of friends, and it tortures me to go against you, but now is the time to stand with the slave. The time will come for us to take up the woman question, but not yet.”

“The time to assert one’s right is when it’s denied!” “I’m sorry,” he told her.

Outside, the wind swirled up, churning the leaves in the birch. The sound and smell of it loomed through the open window, and I had a sudden fleeting memory of playing beneath the oak in the work yard back home, forming words with my brother’s marbles, Sarah Go, and then the slave woman is dragged from the cow house and whipped. I don’t scream or make a sound. I say nothing at all.
The older Mr. Wright had begun his piece, coming to the crux of it. “It saddens me, but your agitation for women harms our cause. It threatens to split the abolition movement in two. I can’t believe you want that. We’re only asking you to confine your audiences to women and refrain from further talk about women’s reform.”

Hushing up the Grimké sisters—would it never stop? I looked at Mr. Wright, sitting there rubbing his arthritic fingers, and then at John and Theodore—these good men who wished to quash us, gently, of course, benignly, for the good of abolition, for our own good, for their good, for the greater good. It was all so familiar. Theirs was only a different kind of muzzle.

I’d spoken but once since they’d gotten here, and it seemed to me now I’d spent my entire life trying to coax back the voice that left me that long-ago day under the tree. Nina, clearly furious, had


stopped arguing. She looked at me, beseeching me to say something. I lifted my fingers to my mouth and touched the last bit of swollenness on my lip, feeling the uprush of indignation that had sustained me through the summer, and, I suppose, my whole life, but this time, it formed into hard round words. “How can you ask us to go back to our parlors?” I said, rising to my feet. “To turn our backs on ourselves and on our own sex? We don’t wish the movement to split, of course we don’t—it saddens me to think of it—but we can do little for the slave as long as we’re under the feet of men. Do what you have to do, censure us, withdraw your support, we’ll press on anyway. Now, sirs, kindly take your feet off our necks.”

That night I began writing my second pamphlet, Letters on the Equality of the Sexes, working into the hours before dawn. The first line had arranged itself in my head while I’d sat listening to the men try and dissuade us: Whatsoever it is morally right for a man to do, it is morally right for a woman to do. She is clothed by her Maker with the same rights, the same duties.

Handful

It was springtime when all the heavy cleaning and airing-out was going on in the house and every night me and Sky would come back to the cellar room after being with the bristle-brush all day, and fall on the bed, and the first thing I’d see was the quilt frame, the one true roof over my head. I’d think about everything hidden up there—mauma’s story quilt, the money, Sarah’s booklet, her letter telling me about the promise she’d made to get me free—and I’d fall asleep glad they were safe over my head.

Then one Sunday morning, I rolled the frame down. Sky watched me without a word while I ran my hand over the red quilt with the black triangles, feeling the money sewed inside. I peeled the muslin cloth from round Sarah’s booklet and gazed on it, then wrapped it back. Next, I spread the story quilt cross the frame and we stood there, looking down at the history of mauma. I laid my palm on the second square—the woman in the field and the slaves flying in the air over her head. All that hope in the wind.

We didn’t hear little missus outside the door. The lock mauma used to have on the door was long gone, and little missus, she didn’t knock. She flounced on in. “I’m going to St. Philip’s, and I need my claret cape. You were supposed to mend it for me.” Her eyes wandered past me to the quilt frame. “What’s all this?”

I stepped to block her view. “That’s right, I forgot about your cape.” I was trying to fan the moth from the flame, but she brushed past me to see the pinks, reds, oranges, purples, and blacks on the quilt. Mauma and her colors.

“I’ll be straight over to mend the cape,” I said and took the rope off the hook to hike the frame up before she figured out what she was looking at.

She put up her hand. “Hold on. You’re in an awful big hurry to hide this from me.” I fastened the rope back, the high-flutter coming in my chest. Sky started humming a thin
nervous tune. I started to put my finger to my lip, but ever since she had that muzzle in her mouth, I couldn’t bear to hush her. We looked back and forth to each other while little missus squinted from one square to the next like she was reading a book. Everything done to mauma—there it was. The onelegged punishment, the whippings, the branding, the hammering. Mauma’s body laid on the quilt frame in pieces.

The muslin cloth with Sarah’s booklet inside was in plain sight, and beside it, the quilt with the money inside. You could see the shape of  the bundles  laying in the batting. I  wanted to tuck everything from view, but I didn’t move.

When she turned to me, the morning glare fell over her face and the black in her eyes pulled into knots. She said, “Who made this?”

“Mauma did. Charlotte.”

“Well, it’s gruesome!”

I never had wanted to scream as bad as I did right then. I said, “Those gruesome things happened to her.”

A dark pink color poured into her cheeks. “For heaven’s sakes then, you would think her whole life was nothing but violence and cruelty. I mean, it doesn’t show what she did to warrant her punishments.”

She looked at the quilt again, her eyes darting over the appliqués. “We treated her well here, no one can dispute that. I can’t speak for what happened to her when she ran away, she was out of our care then.” Little missus was rubbing her hands now like she was cleaning them at the wash bowl.


The quilt had shamed her. She walked to the door and took one look back at it, and I knew she’d never let it stay in the world. She’d send Hector to get it the minute we were out of the room. He’d burn mauma’s story to ash.

Standing there, waiting for little missus’ steps to fade, I looked down at the quilt, at the slaves flying in the sky, and I hated being a slave worse than being dead. The hate I felt for it glittered so full of beauty I sank down on the floor before it.

Sky’s hair was a bushel basket without her scarf and when she bent over to see about me, the ends of it poked my face and smelled like the bristle-brush. She said, “You all right?”
I looked up at her. “We’re leaving here.”

She heard me, but she couldn’t be sure. She said, “What you say?” “We gonna leave here or die trying.”

Sky pulled me to my feet like plucking a flower, and I saw Denmark’s face settle into hers, that day he rode to his death sitting on a coffin. I’d always wanted freedom, but there never had been a place to go and no way to get there. That didn’t matter anymore. I wanted freedom more than the next breath. We’d leave, riding on our coffins if we had to. That was the way mauma had lived her whole life. She used to say, you got to figure out which end of the needle you’re gon be, the one that’s fastened to the thread or the end that pierces the cloth.

I lifted the quilt from the frame and folded it up, thinking of the feathers inside it, and inside the feathers, the memory of the sky.

“Here,” I said, laying the quilt in Sky’s arms. “I got to go mend that woman’s cape. Put the quilt in the gunny sack and take it to Goodis and tell him to hide it with the horse blankets and don’t let anybody near it.”

Mending her cape was not all I did. I took little missus’ seal-stamp right off her desk while she was standing in the room and I dropped it in my pocket.

I waited till dark to write my letter.

23 April 1838

Dear Sarah

I hope this makes it to you. Me and Sky will be leaving here or die trying. That’s how we put it. I don’t know how we’re doing it, but we’ve got mauma’s money. All we need is a place to come to. I have the address on this letter. I hope I see you again one day.
Your friend