The Invention of Wings: A Novel (11 page)

Father crossed his arms over his white shirt and stared at me from beneath the unclipped hedge of his brows. His eyes were clear and brown and empty of compassion, and that’s when I first saw my father as he really was—a man who valued principle over love.

“You have quite literally committed a crime,” he said and resumed his pacing, making a wide, slow orbit around me. “I will not punish you accordingly, but you must learn, Sarah.”

“From now on, you are denied entrance to this room. You shall not cross this threshold at any time, day or night. You are denied all access to the books here, and to any other books wherever they might be, except for those Madame Ruffin has allotted for your studies.”

No books. God, please.
My legs gave way then, and I went onto my knees.

He kept circling. “You will study nothing but Madame’s approved subjects. No more Latin sessions with Thomas. You will not write it, speak it, or compose it in your head. Do you understand?”

I lifted my hands, palms up, as high as my head, molding myself into the shape of a supplicant. “… … … Father, I beg you … P-please, don’t take books from me … I can’t bear it.”

“You have no need of books, Sarah.”

“… … F-f-father!”

He strode back to his desk. “It causes me distress to see your misery, Sarah, but it’s
fait accompli
. Try not to take it so hard.”

From the window came the rumble of drays and carriages, the cries of slave vendors on the street—the old woman with the basket atop her head who squawked, “Red ROSE to-may-TOES.” The din of commerce went on without regard. Opening the library door, I saw Binah had waited. She took my hand and led me up the stairs to the doorway of my room. “I get you some breakfast and bring it up here on a tray,” she said.

After she left, I peered beneath the bed where I’d kept the slate board, spellers, and primer. They were gone. The books on my desk were gone, too. My room had been scoured.

It was not until Binah returned with the tray that I thought to ask, “… … Where’s Handful?”

“Oh, Miss Sarah, that just it. She ’bout to get her own punishing out back.”

I have no memory of my feet grazing the stairs.

“It just one lash,” Binah cried, racing behind me. “One lash, missus say. That be all.”

I flung open the back door. My eyes swept the yard. Handful’s skinny arms were tied to the porch rail of the kitchen house. Ten paces behind her, Tomfry held a strap and stared at the ground. Charlotte stood in the wheel ruts that cut from the carriage house to the back gate, while the rest of the slaves clustered beneath the oak.

Tomfry raised his arm. “No!” I screamed.
“Nooooo!”
He turned toward me, hesitating, and relief filled his face.

Then I heard Mother’s cane tap the glass on the upstairs window, and Tomfry lifted his tired eyes toward the sound. He nodded and brought the lash down across Handful’s back.

T
omfry said he tried not to put much force in it, but the strike flayed open my skin. Miss Sarah made a poultice with Balm of Gilead buds soaked in master Grimké’s rum, and mauma handed the whole flask to me and said, “Here, go on, drink it, too.” I don’t hardly remember the pain.

The gash healed fast, but Miss Sarah’s hurt got worse and worse. Her voice had gone back to stalling and she pined for her books. That was one wretched girl.

It’d been Lucy who ran tattling to Miss Mary about my lettering under the tree, and Miss Mary had run tattling to missus. I’d judged Lucy to be stupid, but she was only weak-willed and wanting to get in good with Miss Mary. I never did forgive her, and I don’t know if Miss Sarah forgave her sister, cause what came from all that snitching turned the tide on Miss Sarah’s life. Her studying was over and done.

My reading lessons were over, too. I had my hundred words, and I figured out a good many more just using my wits. Now and then, I said my ABCs for mauma and read words to her off the picture pages she’d tacked on her wall.

One day I went to the cellar and mauma was making a baby gown from muslin with lilac bands. She saw my face and said, “That’s right,
another
Grimké coming. Sometime this winter. Missus ain’t happy ’bout it. I heard her tell massa, that’s it, this the last one.”

When mauma finished hemming the little gown, she dug in the gunny sack and pulled out a short stack of clean paper, a half full inkwell, and a quill pen, and I knew she’d stole every one of these things. I said, “Why you keep doing this?”

“I need you to write something. Write, ‘Charlotte Grimké has permission for traveling.’ Under that, put the month, leave off the day, and sign Mary Grimké with some curlicue.”

“First off, I don’t know how to write
Charlotte
. I don’t know the word
permission
either.”

“Then, write, ‘This slave is allowed for travel.’”

“What you gonna do with it?”

She smiled, showing me the gap in her front teeth. “This slave gon travel. But don’t worry, she always coming back.”

“What you gonna do when a white man stops you and asks to see your pass and it looks like some eleven-year-old wrote it?”

“Then you best write it like you ain’t some eleven-year-old.”

“How you plan on getting past the wall?”

She looked up at the window near the ceiling. It wasn’t big as a hat box. I didn’t see how she could wriggle through it, but she would grease herself with goose fat if that’s what it took. I wrote her pass cause she was bent on hell to have it.

After that, least one or two afternoons a week, she took off. Stayed gone from middle of the afternoon till past dark. Wouldn’t say where she went. Wouldn’t say how she got in and out of the yard. I worked out her escape path in my head, though. Outside her window, it wasn’t but a couple of feet between the house and the wall, and I figured once she squeezed through the window, she would press her back against the house and her feet against the wall and shimmy up and over, dropping to the ground on the other side.

Course, she had to find another way back in. My guess was the back gate where the carriage came and went. She never came back till it was good and dark, so she could climb it and nobody see. She always made it before the drums beat for curfew. I didn’t wanna think of her out there hiding from the City Guard.

One afternoon, while me and mauma were finishing up the slave clothes for the year, I laid out my reasoning, how she went out the window in daylight and came back over the gate at dark. She said, “Well, ain’t you smart.”

In the far back of my head, I could see her with the strap tied on her ankle and round her neck, and I filled up and started begging. “Don’t do it no more. Please. All right? You gonna get yourself caught.”

“I tell you what, you can help me—if somebody here find me missing, you sit the pail next to the cistern where I can see it from the back gate. You do that for me.”

This scared me worse. “And if you see it, what you gonna do—run off? Just leave me?” Then I broke down.

She rubbed my shoulders the way she always liked to do. “Handful, child. I would soon die ’fore I leave you. You know that. If that pail sit by the cistern, that just help me know what’s coming, that’s all.”

When their social season was starting off again, and me and mauma couldn’t keep up with all the gowns and frocks, she up and hired herself out without permission. I learned it one day after the supper meal, while we were standing in the middle of the work yard. Miss Sarah had been in one of her despairs all day, and I thought the worst things I had to fret over was how low she got and mauma slipping out the window. But mauma, she pulled a slave badge out from her pocket. If some owner hired his slave out, he had to buy a badge from the city, and I knew master Grimké hadn’t bought any such. Having a fake badge was worse than having missus’ green silk.

I took the badge and studied it. It was a small square of copper with a hole poked through the top so you could pin it to your dress. It was carved with words. I sounded them out till it finally came clear what I was saying. “Domestic … Do-mes-tic. Ser-vant.
Domestic Servant!
” I cried. “Number 133. Year 1805. Where’d you get this?”

“Well, I ain’t been out there grogging and lazing round this whole time—I been finding work for myself.”

“But you got more work here than we can see to.”

“And I don’t make nothin’ from it, do I?” She took the badge from me and dropped it back in her pocket.

“One of the Russell slaves name Tom has his own blacksmith shop on East Bay. Missus Russell let him work for hire all day and she don’t take but three-quarter of what he make. He made this badge for me, copied it off a real one.”

I had the mind of an eleven-year-old, but I knew right off this blacksmith wasn’t just some nice man doing her a favor. Why was he putting himself in danger to make a fake badge for her?

She said, “I gon be making bonnets and dresses and quilts for a lady on Queen Street. Missus Allen. I told her my name was Pearl, and I belong to massa Dupré on the corner of George and East Bay. She say to me, ‘You mean that French tailor?’ I say, ‘Yessum, he can’t fill my time no more with work, so he letting me out for hire.’”

“What if she checks on your story?”

“She an old widow, she ain’t gon check. She just say, ‘Show me your badge.’

Mauma was proud of her badge and proud of herself.

“Missus Allen say she pay me by the garment, and her two daughters need clothes and coverings for they children.”

“How you gonna get all this extra work done?”

“I got you. I got all the hours of the night.”

Mauma burned so many candles working in the dark, she took to swiping them from whatever room she happened on. Her eyes grew down to squints and the skin round them wrinkled like drawing a straight stitch. She was tired and frayed but she seemed better off inside.

She brought home money and stuffed it inside the gunny sack, and I helped her sew day and night, anytime I didn’t have duties drawing Miss Sarah’s baths, cleaning her room, keeping up with her clothes and her privy pot. When we got the widow’s orders done, mauma would squirm out the window and carry the parcels to her door where she got more fabric for the next batch. Then she would wait till dark and sneak over the back gate. All this dangerous business got natural as the day was long.