The Invention of Wings: A Novel (13 page)

As Handful appeared, regarding me with her large, soulful eyes, I took the lava box from my dresser, removed the silver button, and dropped it into the ash bin by the fire, where it disappeared beneath the gray and white soot.

The following day, the withdrawing room was cleared for mother’s lying-in. She’d birthed her last six children there, surrounded by Binah, Aunt-Sister, Dr. Geddings, a hired wet nurse, and two female cousins. It seemed unlikely she would grant me a visit, but a week before her labor began, she allowed me in to see her.

It was a frosty morning in February. The sky was bunched with winter clouds, and the fireplaces throughout the house crackled and hissed. In the withdrawing room, the fire provided the only light. Mother, who was a week from her fortieth birthday, was sprawled on her Récamier, looking perfectly miserable.

“I hope you have no trouble to speak of, for I have no strength to deal with it,” she said through swollen lips.

“… … I have a request.”

She raised herself slightly and reached for her cup on the tea table. “Well then, what is it? What is this request that cannot wait?”

I’d come prepared with a speech, feeling resolute, but now my head swam with anxiety. I closed my eyes and wondered how I could make her understand.

“… … I’m afraid you’ll refuse me without thought.”

“For heaven’s sake, why should I do that?”

“… … Because my wish is out of the ordinary … … I wish to be godmother to the new baby.”

“Well, you’re correct—it’s out of the ordinary. It’s also out of the question.”

I’d expected this. I knelt beside her. “… … Mother, if I have to beg, I will … I’ve lost everything precious to me. What I thought to be the purpose of my life, my hope for an education, books, Thomas … Even Father seems lost to me now … Don’t deny me this, please.”

“But Sarah, the baby’s godmother? Of all things. It’s not some frippery. The religious welfare of the child would be in your hands. You’re twelve. What would people say?”

“… I’ll make
the child
the purpose of my life … You said I must give up ambition … Surely the love and care of a child is something you can sanction … Please, if you love me—” Lowering my head to her lap, I cried the tears I’d not been able to cry the night of Thomas’ farewell or since.

Her hand cupped the back of my head, and when I finally composed myself, I saw that her eyes were moist. “All right then. You’ll be the baby’s godmother, but see to it you do not fail him.” I kissed her hand and slipped from the room, feeling, oddly, that I’d reclaimed a lost part of myself.

I
twined red thread round the trunk of the spreading tree till every last bit had come off the spool. Mauma watched. It was all me and my idea to make us a spirit tree like her mauma had made, and I could tell she was just humoring. She clutched her elbows and blew fog with her breath. She said, “You ’bout got it? It’s cold as the blue moon out here.”

It was cold as Charleston could get. Sleet on the windows, blankets on the horses, Sabe and Prince chopping firewood daylight to dark. I gave mauma a look and spread my red-and-black quilt on the ground. It made a bright spot laying under the bare limbs.

I said, “First, we got to kneel on this and give our spirits to the tree. I want us to do it the way you said granny-mauma did.”

She said, “Awright, let’s do it then.”

We dropped on our knees and stared at the tree trunk with our coat sleeves touching. The ground was hard-caked, covered with acorns, and the cold seeped through the squares and triangles. A quietness came down on us, and I closed my eyes. Inside my coat pocket, my fingertips stroked Miss Sarah’s silver button. It felt like a lump of ice. I’d plucked it from the ash can after she cast it off. I felt bad she had to give up her plan, but that didn’t mean you throw out a perfect good button.

Mauma shifted her knees on the quilt. She wanted to make the spirit tree quick, and I wanted to make the minutes last.

I said, “Tell it again how you and granny-mauma did it.”

“Awright. What we did was get down like this on the quilt and she say, ‘Now we putting our spirits in the tree so they safe from harm, so they live with the birds, learning to fly.’ Then we just give our spirits to it.”

“Did you feel it when it happened?”

She pulled her headscarf over her cold ears and tried to bottle up her smile. She said, “Let me see if I can remember. Yeah, I felt my spirit leave from right here.” She touched the bone between her breasts. “It leave like a little draft of wind, and I look up at a branch and I don’t see it, but I know my spirit’s up there watching me.”

She was making all this up. It didn’t matter cause I didn’t see why it couldn’t happen that way now.

I called out, “I give my spirit to the tree.”

Mauma called out the same way. Then she said, “After your granny-mauma make our spirit tree, she say, ‘If you leave this place, you go get your spirit and take it with you.’ Then she pick up acorns, twigs, and leaves and make pouches for ’em, and we wear ’em round our neck.”

So me and mauma picked up acorns and twigs and yellow crumbles of leaves. The whole time, I thought about the day missus gave me as a present to Miss Sarah, how mauma told me,
It gon be hard from here on, Handful.

Since that day a year past, I’d got myself a friend in Miss Sarah and found how to read and write, but it’d been a heartless road like mauma said, and I didn’t know what would come of us. We might stay here the rest of our lives with the sky slammed shut, but mauma had found the part of herself that refused to bow and scrape, and once you find that, you got trouble breathing on your neck.

S
itting before the mirror in my room, I stared at my face while Handful and six-year-old Nina wove my ponytail into braids with the aim of looping them into a circlet at the nape of my neck. Earlier I’d rubbed my face with salt and lemon-vinegar, which was Mother’s formula for removing ink spots. It had lightened my freckles, but not erased them, and I reached for the powder muff to finish them off.

It was February, the height of Charleston’s social season, and all week, a stream of calling cards and invitations had collected on the waiting desk beside the front door. From them Mother had chosen the most elegant and opportune affairs. Tonight, a waltzing party.

I’d entered society two years ago, at sixteen, thrust into the lavish round of balls, teas, musical salons, horseraces, and picnics, which, according to Mother, meant the dazzling doors of Charleston had flung open and female life could begin in earnest. In other words, I could take up the business of procuring a husband. How highborn and moneyed this husband turned out to be would depend entirely on the allure of my face, the delicacy of my physique, the skill of my seamstress, and the charisma of my tête-à-tête. Notwithstanding my seamstress, I arrived at the glittery entrance like a lamb to slaughter.

“Look at this mess you’ve gone and made,” Handful said to Nina, who’d tangled the lock of hair assigned to her into what we commonly referred to as a rat’s nest. Handful raked the brush through it at no small expense to my scalp, then divided the strands into three even pieces, and pronounced two of them to be rabbits and one of them a log. Nina, who’d gone into a pout at having her braid confiscated, perked up at the prospect of a game.

“Watch now,” Handful told her. “This rabbit goes under the log, and this rabbit goes over the log. You make them hop like that all the way down. See, that’s how you make a plait—hop over, hop under.”

Nina took possession of the rabbits and the log and created a remarkably passable braid. Handful and I oohed and ahhed as if she’d carved a Florentine statue.

It was a winter evening like so many others that passed in quiet predictability: the room flushed with lamplight, a fire nesting on the grate, an early dark flattening against the windows, while my two companions fussed over me at the dresser.

My sister and godchild, Angelina—Nina for short—already bore the oval face and graceful features with which our older sister Mary had been blessed. Her eyes were brown and her hair and lashes dark as the little stone box in which I’d once kept my button. My precious Nina was strikingly beautiful. Better yet, she had a lively intellect and showed signs of being quite fearless. She believed she could do anything, a condition I took pains to foster despite the disaster that had come from my
own
fearless believing.

My aspiration to become a jurist had been laid to rest in the Graveyard of Failed Hopes, an all-female establishment. The sorrow of it had faded, but regret remained, and I’d taken to wondering if the Fates might be kinder to a
different
girl. Throughout my childhood, a framed sketch of the Three Fates had hung prominently at the top of the stairs, where they went about their business of spinning, measuring, and cutting the thread of life, all the while keeping an eye on my comings and goings. I was convinced of their personal animosity toward me, but that didn’t mean they would treat my sister’s thread the same way.

I’d vowed to Mother that Nina would become the purpose of my life, and so she was. In her, I had a voice that didn’t stammer and a heart that was unscathed. It’s true I lived a portion of my life through hers, and yes, I blurred the lines of self for both of us, but there was no one who loved Nina more than I did. She became my salvation, and I want to think I became hers.

She’d called me Mother from the time she could talk. It came naturally, and I didn’t discourage it, but I did have the good sense to keep her from doing it in front of Mother. From the days Nina was in her crib, I’d proselytized her about the evils of slavery. I’d taught her everything I knew and believed, and though Mother must have had some idea I was molding her in my own image, she had no idea to what extent.

With her braid complete, Nina climbed into my lap and began her usual pleading. “Don’t go! Stay with me.”

“Oh, I have to, you know that. Binah will tuck you in.” Nina’s lip fluted out, and I added, “If you don’t whine, I’ll let you pick out the dress I wear.”

She fairly leapt from my knees to the wardrobe, where she chose the most luxuriant costume I had, a maroon velvet gown with three satin chevrons down the front, each with an agraffe of chipped diamonds. It was Handful’s own magnificent creation. At seventeen, she was a prodigy with the needle, even more so than her mother. She now sewed most of my attire.

As Handful stretched on tiptoe to retrieve the dress, I noticed how undeveloped she was—her body lithe and skinny as a boy’s. She didn’t reach five feet and never would. But as small as she was, it was still her eyes that drew attention. I’d once heard a friend of Thomas’ refer to her as the pretty, yellow-eyed Negress.

We weren’t as close as we’d been as girls. Perhaps it was due to my absorption with Nina, or to Handful’s extra duties as the apprentice seamstress, or maybe we’d simply reached an age when our paths naturally began to diverge. But we
were
friends, I told myself.

As she passed the fireplace with the dress in her arms, I noticed the frown that seemed permanently etched in her features, as if by narrowing her enormous eyes she felt less of the world could reach her. It seemed she’d begun to feel the boundaries of her life more keenly, that she’d arrived at some moment of reckoning. The past week, Mother had denied her a pass to the market for some minor, forgettable reason, and she’d taken it hard. Her market excursions were the acme of her days, and trying to commiserate, I’d said, “I’m sorry, Handful, I know how you must feel.”

It seemed to me I
did
know what it felt to have one’s liberty curtailed, but she blazed up at me. “So we just the same, me and you? That’s why you the one to shit in the pot and I’m the one to empty it?”

Her words stunned me, and I turned toward the window to hide my hurt. I heard her breathing in fury before she fled the room, not to return the rest of the day. We hadn’t spoken of it again.

She helped me now step into the gown and slide it over my corset, which I’d laced as loosely as possible. I was of average build, and didn’t think it necessary to obstruct my breathing. After fastening me in, Handful pinned a black mantilla of
poult-de-soie
to the crown of my head and Nina handed me my black lace fan. Flicking it open, I swanned about the room for them.

Mother entered at the moment I pirouetted, trampling on my hemline and pitching forward—the picture of grace. “I hope you can refrain from this kind of clumsiness at Mrs. Alston’s,” she said.

She stood, buttressed by her cane. At forty-six, her shoulders were already rounding into an old lady’s stoop. She’d been warning me of the travail of spinsterhood for a year now, elaborating on the sad, maiden life of her aunt Amelia Jane. She likened her to a shriveled flower pressed between the pages of a forgotten book, as if this might scare some poise and beauty into me. I feared that Mother was about to embark again on her aunt’s desiccated existence, but she asked, “Didn’t you wear this gown only two nights ago?”