The Invention of Wings: A Novel (52 page)

Next morning, we acted same as always. Sky went to the vegetable garden with the picking basket and plucked the ripe tomatoes and lettuce tops. Missus had me rubbing her ivory fans with sandpaper to scrub off the yellow tint. I worked in the alcove with the scrape of the paper, eyeing the steamship. The water on the harbor was ruffling like dress flounces.

Sarah was down the hallway in the withdrawing room with missus having her last goodbye. She wouldn’t see her mauma again. She knew that, and missus knew that. The air in the house sounded like a long note on the harpsichord. Downstairs, Sarah’s trunk was locked and ready by the front door, everything inside—mauma’s story, the flock of blackbirds.

The chiming clock sang out, and I counted the notes, nine of them, and Sarah came out of the withdrawing room with her eyes stinging bright. I set down the ivory fans and followed her to her room, leaving the rabbit cane behind, leaning against the window.

Sarah was wearing a pale gray dress with a big silver button at the collar, that same button from when she was a girl, pinning all her hopes on it. Stepping out through the jib door to the piazza, she peered over the rail at Sky in the ornament garden and gave her a wave. That meant,
Leave your plants and flowers and come inside. Pass by the house slaves. If little missus stops you, say, Sarah summoned me.

When Sky tapped on the door, I was already in my dress, my face patted with white flour gum. She smiled. She said, “You look like a haint.”

“Was anyone about?” Sarah asked.

“Nobody but Hector. He say to tell you Goodis gon bring the carriage now.”

I did up the back of Sky’s dress and helped her paint her face, and nobody spoke a word. Sarah’s brow was furrowed tight. She walked to and fro cross the room, a drawstring purse swinging on her arm.

We tugged on our gloves. We fixed on our hats. We drew the veils down to our waists. The tiny bottles of oleander juice, we tucked inside our sleeves—Sarah didn’t need to know about that.

From behind the veil, the room looked faint like the haze before daybreak.

I heard the horse clop along the side of the house, coming from the work yard, and my stomach tipped. I’d tried not to set my heart too high, tried not to think about the free black women up north wanting to take us in, the attic in their house with the chimney running through it, but I couldn’t hold back anymore. We could help them with their school and with making their hats. I could sew quilts to sell. Sky could make a garden.

Sarah handed me her mauma’s gold-tip cane. Then she looked us over and said, “I wouldn’t know you on the street.”

We went swift down the staircase. If little missus happened by, then she happened by. Keep going was all. Don’t stop for nobody. Reaching the bottom rung, I saw the empty place where the steamer trunk sat earlier, and then Hector by the door, boring two holes in us with his eyes.

Sarah spoke to him. “Mother asked me to provide her visitors with a ride to their home. You may go. Goodis will assist us from here.”

Hector eased off down the passageway.
That way he looked at us—did he know?
Little missus was nowhere to be seen.

We stepped through the front door and the world rushed up. I looked back at Sky and saw a trace of whiteness float behind her veil.

When Goodis drew the carriage up to the Steamboat Company sign, the heat had gathered thick under our veils. Sweat rivered down our necks. Sky lifted the gullies of her skirt for some air and the smell of lavender and body stench drifted out.

Helping me from the carriage, Goodis whispered, “Lord, Handful, what you doing?”

We hadn’t fooled him, and for what I knew, Hector might’ve figured it out, too. I peered back to see if he was charging down East Bay in the Sulky with little missus.

I said, “Goodis, I’m sorry, but we’re leaving. Don’t give us away.”

He pressed his lips together and I felt the places on me they’d touched. He was the best man I knew. Without meaning for it, my heart had got tangled with his.

He squeezed my hand, his face dim through the dark curtain. He said, “You take care yourself, girl.”

We waited for the tickets, waited to board the ship, waited for somebody to say,
Who’re you?

When we walked cross the gangplank, the breeze lifted and the boat rocked. I thought about missus and her devotions. We’d been through the Bible and back with that woman. Now we were Jesus walking on water.

We climbed past the trunks, barrels, bales, and crates, past the boiler to the second deck, and sat down on a bench in the salon to wait for the Guard to pass through. The room was painted white with tables alongside the windows, all of them nailed to the floor. People stood in twos and threes, in their best clothes, in clouds of pipe smoke, and now and then they glanced our way, curious about the black grief we wore. Sarah sat a short space apart from us and kept her head tucked low inside her bonnet.

When the two guards lumbered in, I heard Sky’s breath pick up. One guard patrolled the left side, one the right. They nodded at folks, making talk here and there. Looking down, I saw the toes of Sky’s slave shoes sticking out from under her fine dress. The scrabble brown shoes, the scraped-up sadness of them.

He stopped before us. He said, “Where’re you traveling to?” Talking to me.

My slave tongue would be like the tip of Sky’s shoes, giving us away. I lifted my head and looked at him. His guard cap was cocked sideways on his head. He had new blond whiskers and green eyes. Behind him, through the smudged window, I saw the water shimmer.

“Mam?” he said.

Sarah shifted on the bench. I worried she was winding up to say something, that Sky would start humming now, that the fright spring-coiled inside me would break loose. Then I remembered the widow dress I was wearing. I made a sound with my lips like I was trying to give him an answer, but choking on the words, seized by my grief, and I didn’t have to pretend that much. I felt sorrow for my life, for what I’d lived and seen and known, for what was lost to me, and the weeping turned real.

A soft wail came from inside me and he took a step back. He said, “I’m sorry for your loss, mam.”

As he moved on, a white drop fell from my chin, flour plopping on my skirt.

The engine caught and a shudder ran through the bench. Then came the smell of oil and spewing smoke. The passengers left the salon for the deck to wave their hankies farewell, and we went, too, out where the wharf slaves were tossing the heavy ropes. Far off, the church bells rang on St. Michael’s.

We stood at the bow, the three of us, holding the rail tight, waiting. The gulls wheeled by, and the steamer lurched, pitching forward. When the paddles started to roll, Sarah put her hand on my arm and left it there while the city heaved away. It was the last square on the quilt.

I thought of mauma then, how her bones would always be here. People say don’t look back, the past is past, but I would always look back.

I watched Charleston fall away in the morning light.

When we left the mouth of the harbor, the wind swelled and the veils round us flapped, and I heard the blackbird wings. We rode onto the shining water, onto the far distance.

In 2007, I traveled to New York to see Judy Chicago’s
The Dinner Party
at the Brooklyn Museum. At the time, I was in the midst of writing a memoir,
Traveling with Pomegranates
, with my daughter, Ann Kidd Taylor, and I wasn’t thinking about my next novel. I had no idea what it might be about, only a vague notion that I wanted to write about two sisters. Who those sisters were, when and where they lived, and what their story might be had not yet occurred to me.

The Dinner Party
is a monumental piece of art, celebrating women’s achievements in Western civilization. Chicago’s banquet table with its succulent place settings honoring 39 female guests of honor rests upon a porcelain tiled floor inscribed with the names of 999 other women who have made important contributions to history. It was while reading those 999 names on the Heritage Panels in the Biographic Gallery that I stumbled upon those of Sarah and Angelina Grimké, sisters from Charleston, South Carolina, the same city in which I then lived. How could I have not heard of them?

Leaving the museum that day, I wondered if I’d discovered the sisters I wanted to write about. Back home in Charleston, as I began to explore their lives, I became passionately certain.

As it turned out, I’d been driving by the Grimké sisters’ unmarked house for over a decade, unaware these two women were the first female abolition agents and among the earliest major American feminist thinkers. Sarah was the first woman in the United States to write a comprehensive feminist manifesto, and Angelina was the first woman to speak before a legislative body. In the late 1830s, they were arguably the most famous, as well as the most infamous, women in America, yet they seemed only marginally known, even in the city of their origins. My ignorance of them felt like both a personal failing and a confirmation of Chicago’s view that women’s achievements had been repeatedly erased through history.

Sarah and Angelina were born into the power and wealth of Charleston’s aristocracy, a social class that derived from English concepts of landed gentry. They were ladies of piety and gentility, who moved in the elite circles of society, and yet few nineteenth-century women ever “misbehaved” so thoroughly. They underwent a long, painful metamorphosis, breaking from their family, their religion, their homeland, and their traditions, becoming exiles and eventually pariahs in Charleston. Fifteen years before Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote
Uncle Tom’s Cabin,
which was wholly influenced by
American Slavery As It Is,
a pamphlet written by Sarah, Angelina, and Angelina’s husband, Theodore Weld, and published in 1839, the Grimké sisters were out crusading not only for the immediate emancipation of slaves, but for racial equality, an idea that was radical even among abolitionists. And ten years before the Seneca Falls Convention, initiated by Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the Grimkés were fighting a bruising battle for women’s rights, taking the first blows of backlash.

As I read about the sisters, I was drawn more and more to Sarah and what she’d overcome. Before stepping onto the public stage, she experienced intense longings for a vocation, crushed hopes, betrayal, unrequited love, loneliness, self-doubt, ostracism, and suffocating silence. It seemed to me she had invented her wings not so much in spite of these things, but because of them. What compelled me as much as her life as a reformer was her life as a woman. How did she become who she was?

My aim was not to write a thinly fictionalized account of Sarah Grimké’s history, but a thickly imagined story inspired by her life. During my research, delving into diaries, letters, speeches, newspaper accounts, and Sarah’s own writing, as well as a huge amount of biographical material, I formed my own understanding of her desires, struggles, and motivations. The voice and inner life I’ve given Sarah are my own interpretation.

I’ve attempted to remain true to the broad historical contours of Sarah’s life. I’ve included in these pages most of her significant events and formative experiences, along with an enormous amount of factual detail. Occasionally I’ve used Sarah’s own words from her writings. Her letters in the novel, however, are my own invention.

The most expansive and notable way that I’ve diverged from Sarah’s record is through her imaginary relationship with the fictional character of Hetty Handful. From the moment I decided to write about Sarah Grimké, I felt compelled to also create the story of an enslaved character, giving her a life and a voice that could be entwined with Sarah’s. I felt I couldn’t write the novel otherwise, that both of their worlds would have to be represented here. Then I came upon a tantalizing detail. As a girl, Sarah was given a young slave named Hetty to be her waiting maid. According to Sarah, they became close. Defying the laws of South Carolina and her own jurist father who had helped to write those laws, Sarah taught Hetty to read, for which they were both severely punished. There, however, ends the short narrative of Hetty. Nothing further is known of her except that she died of an unspecified disease a short while later. I knew right away that hers was the other half of the story. I would try to bring Hetty to life again. I would imagine what might have been.

In addition, I’ve created and extrapolated numerous other events in Sarah’s life, grafting fiction onto truth in order to serve the story. It’s well-recorded, for example, that Sarah was a poor public speaker and struggled to express herself verbally, but there’s no indication she ever had a speech impediment, as I’ve portrayed. Sarah did return to Charleston in the months before the Denmark Vesey plot, as I’ve written, most likely trying to escape her feelings for Israel Morris, and while there, she made her anti-slavery views public, inciting confrontations, but her volatile encounter on the street with an officer of the South Carolina militia is all my doing. And while Sarah knew Lucretia Mott, attending the same Arch Street Meetinghouse and finding inspiration in Mott’s life as a Quaker minister, she never boarded in Mott’s house. The same is true of Sarah Mapps Douglass, who also attended Arch Street Meetinghouse. The two Sarahs became lasting friends, but Sarah and Angelina did not take refuge in Sarah Mapps’ attic after Angelina’s incendiary letter was published in
The Liberator.
No longer comfortable or welcome in the home of Catherine Morris, they found a place with friends in Rhode Island and elsewhere. I fabricated the attic primarily to create a future sanctum for Handful and Sky. These are just a few of the ways I’ve blended fact and fiction.