The Invention of Wings: A Novel
Read The Invention of Wings: A Novel Online
Authors: Sue Monk Kidd
| The Invention of Wings: A Novel |
| Sue Monk Kidd |
| Viking Adult (2014) |
Hetty “Handful” Grimke, an urban slave in early nineteenth century Charleston, yearns for life beyond the suffocating walls that enclose her within the wealthy Grimke household. The Grimke’s daughter, Sarah, has known from an early age she is meant to do something large in the world, but she is hemmed in by the limits imposed on women.
Kidd’s sweeping novel is set in motion on Sarah’s eleventh birthday, when she is given ownership of ten year old Handful, who is to be her handmaid. We follow their remarkable journeys over the next thirty five years, as both strive for a life of their own, dramatically shaping each other’s destinies and forming a complex relationship marked by guilt, defiance, estrangement and the uneasy ways of love.
As the stories build to a riveting climax, Handful will endure loss and sorrow, finding courage and a sense of self in the process. Sarah will experience crushed hopes, betrayal, unrequited love, and ostracism before leaving Charleston to find her place alongside her fearless younger sister, Angelina, as one of the early pioneers in the abolition and women’s rights movements.
Inspired by the historical figure of Sarah Grimke, Kidd goes beyond the record to flesh out the rich interior lives of all of her characters, both real and invented, including Handful’s cunning mother, Charlotte, who courts danger in her search for something better.
This exquisitely written novel is a triumph of storytelling that looks with unswerving eyes at a devastating wound in American history, through women whose struggles for liberation, empowerment, and expression will leave no reader unmoved.
**
Copyright © 2014 Sue Monk Kidd Ltd.
The right of Sue Monk Kidd to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Published by arrangement with Viking, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC,
A Penguin Random House Company
Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.
First published in Great Britain as an Ebook by Headline Publishing Group in 2014
All characters – other than the obvious historical figures – in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library
eISBN: 978 1 4722 1276 4
Cover design: cabinlondon.co.uk
Cover images © Martin Barraud/Getty Images (child) and Michael Eudenbach/Getty Images (trees); Library of Congress (Charleston Houses); Big Joker/Alamy (needle and thread)
Author photograph © Roland Scarpa
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Table of Contents
Part One: November 1803–February 1805
Part Two: February 1811–December 1812
Part Three: October 1818–November 1820
Part Four: September 1821–July 1822
Part Five: November 1826–November 1829
From the celebrated author of the international bestseller
The Secret Life of Bees
comes an extraordinary novel about two exceptional women.
Sarah Grimké is the middle daughter. The one her mother calls difficult and her father calls remarkable. On Sarah’s eleventh birthday, Hetty ‘Handful’ Grimké is taken from the slave quarters she shares with her mother, wrapped in lavender ribbons, and presented to Sarah as a gift. Sarah knows what she does next will unleash a world of trouble. She also knows that she cannot accept. And so, indeed, the trouble begins …
A powerful, sweeping novel, inspired by real events, and set in the American Deep South in the nineteenth century, THE INVENTION OF WINGS evokes a world of shocking contrasts, of beauty and ugliness, of righteous people living daily with cruelty they fail to recognise; and celebrates the power of friendship and sisterhood against all the odds.
Sue Monk Kidd’s debut novel, THE SECRET LIFE OF BEES, spent more than 100 weeks on the
New York Times
bestseller list, has sold more than eight million copies worldwide, was long-listed for the Orange Prize and has been translated into thirty-six languages. It was also turned into an award-winning major motion picture starring Dakota Fanning, Jennifer Hudson and Alicia Keys.
Her second novel, THE MERMAID CHAIR, was a number one
New York Times
bestseller. She is also the author of several widely acclaimed non-fiction titles including THE DANCE OF THE DISSIDENT DAUGHTER, WHERE THE HEART WAITS and, with her daughter Ann Kidd Taylor, TRAVELLING WITH POMEGRANATES.
Sue Monk Kidd lives with her husband Sandy in Florida.
Novels
The Secret Life of Bees
The Mermaid Chair
The Invention of Wings
Non-fiction
When the Heart Waits
The Dance of the Dissident Daughter
Firstlight
Travelling with Pomegranates (with Ann Kidd Taylor)
‘Wonderful … by turns funny, sad, full of incident and shot through with grown-up magic reminiscent of Joanne Harris’
Daily Telegraph
‘Wonderfully written, powerful, poignant and humorous … Do read it’ Joanna Trollope
‘Intoxicating … The tale of one motherless daughter’s discovery of what family really means … and of the strange and wondrous places we find love’
Washington Post
‘A narrative as skilful and sweet as a honeycomb. Uplifting and warm-hearted … moving’
Literary Review
‘A truly original Southern voice’ Anita Shreve
‘Charming, funny, moving’ Elizabeth Buchan,
The Times
To Sandy Kidd
with all my love
November 1803–February 1805
Hetty Handful Grimké
T
here was a time in Africa the people could fly. Mauma told me this one night when I was ten years old. She said, “Handful, your granny-mauma saw it for herself. She say they flew over trees and clouds. She say they flew like blackbirds. When we came here, we left that magic behind.”
My mauma was shrewd. She didn’t get any reading and writing like me. Everything she knew came from living on the scarce side of mercy. She looked at my face, how it flowed with sorrow and doubt, and she said, “You don’t believe me? Where you think these shoulder blades of yours come from, girl?”
Those skinny bones stuck out from my back like nubs. She patted them and said, “This all what left of your wings. They nothing but these flat bones now, but one day you gon get ’em back.”
I was shrewd like mauma. Even at ten I knew this story about people flying was pure malarkey. We weren’t some special people who lost our magic. We were slave people, and we weren’t going anywhere. It was later I saw what she meant. We could fly all right, but it wasn’t any magic to it.
The day life turned into nothing this world could fix, I was in the work yard boiling slave bedding, stoking fire under the wash pot, my eyes burning from specks of lye soap catching on the wind. The morning was a cold one—the sun looked like a little white button stitched tight to the sky. For summers we wore homespun cotton dresses over our drawers, but when the Charleston winter showed up like some lazy girl in November or January, we got into our sacks—these thickset coats made of heavy yarns. Just an old sack with sleeves. Mine was a cast-off and trailed to my ankles. I couldn’t say how many unwashed bodies had worn it before me, but they had all kindly left their scents on it.