The Invention of Wings: A Novel (40 page)

Missus stays mad at Nina most all the time. Nina started some troubles at the presbyterry church where she goes. Some man came last week to punish her on something she said. Mauma and Sky are the one bright hope.

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

Handful

“I hope it isn’t bad news,” Lucretia said, studying my face, which must’ve been a confusion of elation and heart-wrench.

I read the letter aloud to her. I hadn’t spoken much about the slaves my family held, but I had told her about Handful. She reached over and patted my hand.

We fell quiet as the ice turned back to rain, coming in a dark, drowning wash on the window. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine the reunion between Handful and her mother. The sister named Sky. Charlotte’s scars and white hair.

“… Why would God plant such deep yearnings in us … if they only come to nothing?” It was more of a sigh than a question. I was thinking of Charlotte and her longing to be free, but as the words left my mouth, I knew I was thinking of myself, too.

I hadn’t really expected Lucretia to respond, but after a moment, she spoke. “God fills us with all sorts of yearnings that go against the grain of the world—but the fact those yearnings often come to nothing, well, I doubt that’s God’s doing.” She cut her eyes at me and smiled. “I think we know that’s men’s doing.”

She leaned toward me. “Life is arranged against us, Sarah. And it’s brutally worse for Handful and her mother and sister. We’re all yearning for a wedge of sky, aren’t we? I suspect God plants these yearnings in us so we’ll at least try and change the course of things. We must try, that’s all.”

I felt her words tear a hole in the life I’d made. An irreparable hole.

I started to tell her that as a child I’d yearned for the entire firmament. For a profession completely untried among women. I didn’t want her to think I’d always been content to be a tutor when I had little passion for it, but I pushed the confession aside. Even Nina didn’t know about my aspiration to be a lawyer, how it’d ended in humiliation.

“… But you did more than try to become a minister … You accomplished it … I’ve often wondered whether one must feel a special call from God to undertake that.”

Quaker ministers were nothing like the Anglican or Presbyterian clergy I was used to. They didn’t stand behind a pulpit and preach sermons: they spoke during the Silence as inspired by God. Anyone could speak, of course, but the ministers were the most verbal, the ones who offered messages for worship, the ones whose voices seemed set apart.

She pushed at the messy bun coiled at her neck. “I can’t say the call I felt was special. I wanted to have a say in things, that’s what it came down to. I wanted to speak my conscience and to have it matter. Surely, God calls us all to that.”

“… Do you think … I could become a Quaker minister?” The words had been tucked inside of me for a long time, perhaps since the moment on the ship when I first met Israel and he told me female ministers actually existed.

“Sarah Grimké, you’re the most intelligent person I know. Of course you could.”

Propped in bed, wearing my warmest woolen gown, my hair loosed, I bent over the bed-desk and pewter inkstand I’d recently indulged in buying and tried to answer Handful’s letter.

19 January 1827

Dear Handful,

What joyous news! Charlotte is back! You have a sister!

I lowered the pen and stared at the procession of exclamations. I sounded like a chirping bird. It was my fifth attempt at a beginning.

Strewn about me on the bed were crumpled balls of paper.
How happy you must be now,
I’d written first, then worried she might think I was implying all her miseries were over now. Next:
I was euphoric to receive your news,
but what if she didn’t know the word
euphoric
? I couldn’t write a single line without fear of seeming insensitive or condescending, too removed or too familiar. I remembered us, as I always did, on the roof drinking tea, but that was gone and it was all balled-up paper now.

I picked up the sheet of stationery with the glib exclamations and crushed it in my hands. A smear of ink licked across my palm. Holding my hand aloft from Lucretia’s white eiderdown, I lifted the bed-desk from across my legs and went to the basin. When soap failed to remove the stain, I rummaged in the dresser drawer for the cream of tartar, and there, lying beside the bottle, was the black lava box containing my silver
fleur de lis
button. I opened it and gazed down at the button. It was darkly silvered, like something pearling up from beneath the water.

The button had been the most constant object in my life. I’d thrown it away that once, but it’d come back to me. I could thank Handful for that.

I returned to the warmth of the bed and placed the button on the bed-desk, watching the lamplight spill over it. I lay back on the pillow, remembering my eleventh birthday party at which Handful had been presented to me, how I’d woken the next day with the overpowering sense I was meant to do something in the world, something large, larger than myself. I brushed my finger across the button. It had always held this knowing for me.

In the room, everything magnified: cinders dropping on the hearth, a tiny scratching at the baseboard, the smell of ink, the etch of the
fleur de lis
on the button.

I took a clean sheet of stationery.

19 January 1827

Dear Handful,

My heart is full. I try to imagine you with Charlotte and a new sister, and I can’t dream what you must feel. I’m happy for you. At the same time, I’m sad to know of the scars your mother bears, all the horrors she must have lived through. But I won’t focus on that now, only on your togetherness.

Did you know once, when we were girls, Charlotte made me vow that one day I would do whatever I could to help you get free? We were out by the woodpile where the little orphaned barn owl lived. I remember it like yesterday. I confess now, that’s why I taught you to read. I told myself reading was a kind of freedom, the only one I could give. I’m sorry, Handful. I’m sorry I couldn’t keep the vow any better.

I still have the silver button you rescued after I tossed it out. As I write you now, it sits beside the inkwell, reminding me of the destiny I always believed was inside of me, waiting. How can I explain such a thing? I simply know it the way I know there’s an oak tree inside an acorn. I’ve been filled with a hunger to grow this seed my whole life. I used to think I was supposed to become a lawyer, perhaps because that’s what Father and Thomas did, but it was never that. These days, I feel inspired to become a Quaker minister. Doing so will at least provide me a way to do what I tried to do on my eleventh birthday, that day you were cruelly given to me to own. It will allow me to tell whoever might listen that I can’t accept this, that we can’t accept slavery, it must end. That’s what I was born for—not the ministry, not the law, but abolition. I’ve come to know it only this night, but it has always been the tree in the acorn.

Tell your mother I’m glad she has found you again. Greet your sister for me. I’ve failed in many things, even in my love for you, but I think of you as my friend.

Sarah

T
hat winter mauma sat idle by the fire in the kitchen house. She got a little weight back on her, but sometimes she had spells when she couldn’t keep down her food and we’d be back where we started. Mauma said every time she saw me, I was coming at her with a piece of biscuit.

We had plenty of vacant slave quarters, but the three of us stayed on together in the cellar room. Goodis brought in a little bed from the nursery, and we wedged it beside the big bed and slept three peas in a pod underneath the quilt frame. Sky asked one time what was all that wood nailed on the ceiling, and I said, “You never saw a quilt frame?” and mauma said, “Well, you ain’t never seen a rice field, so yawl even.”

Mauma still wouldn’t talk about what’d happened to her. She’d say, “What’s done’s done.” Most nights, though, she’d wake up and pace the room, and it didn’t seem done at all. I realized the best curing thing for her was a needle, a thread, and a piece of cloth. One day, I told her I needed some help and handed her the mending basket. When I came back, the needle was a hummingbird in her fingers.

The hardest part was finding work for Sky. She couldn’t do the laundry to save her life. I got Sabe to try her in the house cleaning and serving tea with me and Minta, but missus said she didn’t look the part, and put off the guests. After that, she went to work in the kitchen house, but she drove Aunt-Sister crazy with her chatter, stories about rabbits out-tricking foxes and bears. She usually ended up on the porch, singing in Gullah.
Ef oona ent kno weh oona da gwuine, oona should kno weh oona dum from.
That same song, over and over.
If you don’t know where you’re going, you should know where you came from.

One morning on the tail end of winter, the knocker clacked on the front door and in came Mr. Huger, the solicitor, stomping the cold off his feet. He handed me his hat while Sabe went to get missus.

I found Nina in her room, readying for the class she taught at church. I said, “Quick, you need to come see what your mauma’s up to. Mr. Huger’s down there—”

She flew from the room before I could finish off the sentence.

I dawdled outside the closed drawing room doors, but I couldn’t make out much they were saying—just passing words.
Pension … Bank … Cotton crash … Sacrifice.
The clock bonged ten times. The sound filled the house, turning it heavy, and when it stopped, I heard missus say the word
sky.
Maybe she was talking about the blue roof that hung over the world but I knew it was my sister.

I flattened my ear to the door. Let Sabe find me and chase me off, I couldn’t care.

“She’s thirteen years old, without any perceivable domestic skills, but she’s strong.” That was missus talking.

Mr. Huger mumbled about going rates, selling in the spring when the planting started on the plantations.

“You can’t separate Sky from her mother,” Nina cried. “It’s inhuman!”

“I don’t care for it either,” missus said. “But we must face reality.”

My breath clutched at my ribs like grabbing hands. I closed my eyes, tired of the sorry world.

When I found mauma in the kitchen house, she was alone with the mending basket. I sank beside her. “Missus plans to sell Sky in the spring. We got to find a way for her to earn her keep.”

“Sell?” She looked at me with stun, then pinched her eyes. “We ain’t come this far so she can sell my girl. That’s for damn sure.”

“There must be
something
in the world Sky’s good at doing.” The way I said it, like my sister was slow in the head, caused mauma to flare at me.

“Don’t you talk like that! Your sister has the smart of Denmark in her.” She shook her head. “He’s her daddy, but I guess you figure that.”

“Yeah, I figured.” It seemed like the time to finally tell her. “Denmark, he—”

“There ain’t a slave living who don’t know what happen to him. We heard it all the way to Beaufort.”

I didn’t tell her I’d watched him dangle on the tree, but I told her everything else. I started with the church where we’d sung
Jericho.
I told her about the Work House, falling off the treadmill and crippling my foot. I told her the way Denmark took me in and called me daughter. “I stole a bullet mold for that man,” I said.

She pushed her fingers hard against her eyelids, trying to keep them from spilling over. When she opened them, there was a map in her eyes of broken red lines.

“Sky ask me one time who her daddy is,” she said. “I told her he was a free black in Charleston, but he’s dead. That’s all she know.”

“How come you don’t tell her?”

“Sky’s got a child’s way of talking out of turn. The minute you tell her ’bout Denmark, she’ll tell half the world. That ain’t gon help her.”

“She needs to know about him.”