The Invention of Wings: A Novel (33 page)

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

“Denmark? What’s he done now?”

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

It struck me best to sidestep this since mauma had been one of them. “Yeah, beside that.”

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

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

For a long time now, Denmark and his lieutenants had been recruiting slaves, writing down their names in what he called the Book. Last I heard, there were more than two thousand pledged to take up arms when the time came. Denmark had let me sit there and listen while he talked about raising an army and getting us free, and the men got used to me being in there. They knew I’d keep it quiet.

Denmark didn’t like the wind to blow unless he told it which way to go. He’d come up with the exact words he wanted Gullah Jack and them to say when they wooed the recruits. One day, he had me pretend like I was the slave he was courting.

“Have you heard the news?” he said to me.

“What news?” I answered. Like he told me to say.

“We’re gonna be free.”

“Free? Who says?”

“Come with me, and I’ll show you.”

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

I’d been at the house when one of those curious slaves had showed up, and it was something I’d take to my grave. Denmark had sailed up from his chair like Elijah in his chariot. “The Lord has spoken to me,” he cried out. “He said, set my people free. When your name is written in the Book, you’re one of us and you’re one of God’s, and we’ll take our freedom when God says. Let not your heart be troubled. Neither let it be afraid. You believe in God, believe also in me.”

When he spoke those words, a jolt traveled through me, the same one I used to get in the alcove when I was little and thought about the water taking me somewhere, or in church when we sang about the Jericho walls crumbling and the drumsticks in my legs beat the floor. My name wasn’t in the Book, just the men’s, but I would’ve put it in there if I could. I would’ve written it in blood.

Today, Denmark was pegging the legs on a Scot pine table. When I stepped into the room with the fritters, he set down the claw hammer and grinned, and when I pulled out the sorghum to boot, he said, “If you aren’t Charlotte all over.”

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

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

“What would happen if somebody finds it?”

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

That raised goose flesh on my arms. I said, “Where do you keep your names?”

He stopped chewing. “Why do you want to know?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You do, do you?”

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

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

“That’s easy, I’ll leave an opening in the seam big enough for your hand to slip in and out.”

He nodded. “See if Susan has a quilt somewhere. Get busy.”

When the new year came, Nina scrounged up five girls and started the Female Prayer Society. They met in the drawing room Wednesday mornings. I served the tea and biscuits, tended the fire, and watched the door, and from what I could tell, the last thing going on was praying. Nina was in there doing her best to introduce them to the evils of slavery.

That girl.
She was like Sarah. Had the same notions, the same craving to be useful, but the two of them were different, too. Seventeen now, Nina turned every head that looked her way and she could talk the salt from the sea. Her beaux didn’t last long, though. Missus said she chased them off with her opinionating.

I don’t know why she didn’t chase the girls off either.

During the meetings, she made hot-blooded speeches that went on till one of the girls lost the point of it and turned the talk to something else—who danced with who or who wore what at the last social. Nina would give up then, but she seemed glad to speak her mind, and missus was happy, too, thinking Nina had finally found some religion.

It was during a meeting in March that the Smith girl took umbrage. Nina was taking special care to let her know how bad her neighborhood was.

“Would you come over here, Handful?” Nina called. She turned to the girls. “See her leg? See how she drags it behind her? That’s from the treadmill at the Work House. It’s an abomination, and it’s right under your nose, Henrietta!”

The Smith girl bristled. “Well, what was she doing at the Work House in the first place? There must be some discipline, mustn’t there? What did she do?”

“What did she
do
? Haven’t you heard anything I’ve been saying? God help us, how can you be so blind? If you want to know how Handful came to be at the Work House, she’s standing right here. She’s a person, ask
her.
”

“I’d rather not,” the girl said and tucked her skirts in round her legs.

Nina rose from her chair and came to stand beside me. “Why don’t you take your shoe off and show her the kind of brutality that takes place on the same street where she lives?”

I should’ve minded doing it, but I always remembered that day Tomfry caught me in front of the house sneaking off to Denmark’s, how Nina came to my rescue. She’d never asked where I’d gone, and the fact was, I wanted the girls to see what the Work House had done to me. I tugged off my shoe and bared the misshaped bone and the pinky-flesh scars wriggling cross my skin like earthworms. The girls pressed their fingers under their noses and blanched white as flour, but Henrietta Smith did one better. She fainted sideways in her chair.

I got the smelling salts and brought her round, but not before missus heard the uproar.

Later on that night in my cellar room, I heard a tap and opened the door to find Nina with her eyes puffed out.

“Did Mother punish you?” she asked. “I have to know.”

Since master Grimké died, missus hit Minta with the gold-tip cane so much you never saw her without black bruises on her brown arms. It was no wonder she went to the carriage house with Sabe to get salved. She struck me and Phoebe with the cane, too, and had even taken to swiping Aunt-Sister, which I never thought I’d live to see. Aunt-Sister didn’t take it laying down. I heard her tell missus, “Binah and the ones you sold, they the lucky ones.”

Nina was saying, “I tried to tell her that I
asked
you to take off your shoe, that you didn’t just volunteer—”

I stuck out my arm and showed her the welt.

“The cane?” Nina asked.

“One strike, but a good one. What’d she do to you?”

“Mostly, a lot of scolding. The girls won’t be coming back for any more meetings.”

“No, I didn’t think so,” I said. She looked so dismal I added, “Well, you tried.”

Her eyes watered up and I handed her my clean head scarf. Taking it, she sank down in the rocker and buried her face in it. I didn’t know how much more her eyes could take, whether she was crying over her failure with the Female Prayer Society, or Sarah leaving, or the shortfalls of people.

When she was all cried out, she went back to her room, and I lit a candle and sat in the wavy light, picturing the quilt on Denmark’s bed, and inside it, the hidden pocket, and inside that, the scroll of paper with all the names. People ready to lay their lives down to get free. The day I came up with the scheme of hiding the list, Susan didn’t have a single quilt in the house—she used plain wool blankets. I made a new quilt from scratch—red squares and black triangles, me and mauma’s favorite, the blackbirds flying away.

Denmark believed nothing would change without blood spilled. Plopped in the rocker now, I thought about Nina, her lecturing to five spoilt white girls, and Sarah being so upset with the way her world was, she had to leave it, and while I felt the goodness in what they did, it seemed their lecturing and leaving didn’t come to much when you had this much cruelty to overcome.

The retribution was coming and we’d bring it ourselves. Blood was the way. It was the only way, wasn’t it? I was glad now Sarah was far away from danger, and I would have to keep Nina safe. I said to myself,
Let not your heart be troubled. Neither let it be afraid.

I
snapped open the crisp white table cloth, unfurling it upward, watching it turn into a small ovoid cloud before it sank onto the pine needles.

“This isn’t the cloth we use for picnics,” Catherine said, crossing her arms over her chest.

Her criticisms of me were similar to her prayers—sacred, daily, and unsmiling. I was careful now. I taught the children, but I tried not to appear mothering. I deferred to Catherine in all household matters—if she put salt in the cake, she put salt in the cake. And Israel—I didn’t so much as look at him when she was in the room.

“… I’m sorry,” I told her. “… I thought you said to get the white cloth.”

“It will have to be bleached and clear starched. Let’s pray there’s no pine sap on the ground.”

God, no pine sap. Please.

It was the first day of April, which also happened to be Becky’s seventh birthday and the first day all year one could actually call warm. After my first winter in the North, I had an entirely new appreciation for heat. I’d never seen snow before arriving here, and when it’d come, the Pennsylvania sky split open like a vast goose down comforter and the entire world turned to feathers. The first time it happened, I slipped outside and wandered about catching flakes in my hands and on my tongue, letting them settle into my hair, which I’d left long and flowing down my back. Returning to the house, I spotted Israel and several of the children watching me from the window, looking quite astonished. My enchantment turned to slush about the same time the snow did. We seemed stuck in a perpetual twilight. Color bled from the world, recasting the landscape into gradations of black and white, and no matter how ruthlessly the fireplaces roared, cold formed on my Charleston bones like hoarfrost.

The picnic had been my idea. Quakers didn’t celebrate holidays—all days were treated equally, meant to be lived with the same simplicity—but Israel was known to hedge a bit on the children’s birthdays. He was home working that day, shut in his study with invoices and ledgers and bills of exchange. Having enough sense not to go to Catherine with my whim, I’d interrupted him mid-morning.

“… Spring has come,” I’d said. “Let’s not squander it … A picnic will do us all good, and you should see Becky, she’s so excited to be seven … A little celebration wouldn’t hurt, would it?”

He set down the account book in his hand and gazed at me with a slow, defenseless smile. It’d been months since he’d touched me. Back in the fall he’d often held my hand or slid his arm about my waist as we walked back up the hill from the pond, but then winter came, and the walks ceased as he retreated, going off inside himself somewhere to hibernate. I didn’t know what had happened until one morning in January when Catherine announced it was the second anniversary of Rebecca’s death. She seemed to take morose joy in explaining how deeply her brother was mourning, even more so this winter than the one before.