The Invention of Wings: A Novel (17 page)

It would take ten years to come up with that much. “I don’t know,” I told her. “Some things can’t be done—that’s all.”

She got up and headed for the basement, talking with her back to me. “Don’t be telling me—
can’t be done.
That’s some god damney white talk, that’s what that is.”

I lugged myself up the stairs and went straight for the alcove. Next to the tree out back, this was my chosen spot, up here where I could see the water. With the house empty, I was the only one upstairs, and I stayed by the window till all the light bled from the sky and the water turned black.
Cross the water, cross the sea, let them fishes carry me.
The songs I used to sing back when I first belonged to Miss Sarah still came to me, but I didn’t feel like the water would take me much of anywhere.

I said under my breath,
Five hundred dollars.

Goods and chattel. The words from the leather book came into my head. We were like the gold leaf mirror and the horse saddle. Not full-fledge people. I didn’t believe this, never had believed it a day of my life, but if you listen to white folks long enough, some sad, beat-down part of you starts to wonder. All that pride about what we were worth left me then. For the first time, I felt the hurt and shame of just being who I was.

After a while, I went down to the cellar. When mauma saw my raw eyes, she said, “Ain’t nobody can write down in a book what you worth.”

O
ur caravan of two carriages, two wagons, and seventeen people returned to Charleston in May on the high crest of spring. Rains had left the city rinsed and clean, scented with newly flowering myrtle, privet, and Chinese tallow. The bougainvillea had advanced en masse over garden gates, and the sky was bright and creamed with thin, swirling clouds. I felt exultant to be back.

As we lumbered through the back gate into an empty work yard, Tomfry hurried from the kitchen house at an old man’s trot, calling, “Massa, you back early.” He had a napkin stuffed at his collar and looked anxious, as if we’d caught him in the dilatory act of eating.

“Only by a day,” Father said, climbing from the Barouche. “You should let the others know we’re here.”

I squirmed past everyone, leaving even Nina behind, and broke for the house where I pillaged the calling cards on the desk, and there it was—the borrowed paper.

3 May

Burke Williams requests Sarah Grimké’s company on a (chaperoned) horseback outing at Sullivan’s Island, upon her return to Charleston.

Yours, most truly.

I let out an exhale, behemoth in nature, and ascended the stairs.

I remember very clearly coming to a full halt on the second-floor landing and gazing curiously at the door to my room. It alone was shut, while the others stood open. I walked toward it uncertainly, with a vague sense of portent. I paused with my hand over the knob for a second and cocked my ear. Hearing nothing, I turned the knob. It was locked.

I gave the knob a second determined try, and then a third and fourth, and that’s when I heard the tentative voice inside.

“That you, mauma?”

Handful?
The thought of her inside my room with the door locked was so incongruent I could not immediately answer back.

She called out, “Coming.” Her voice sounded exasperated, reluctant, breathy. There was the sound of water splashing, a key thrust into the lock.
Click. Click.

She stood in the doorway dripping wet, naked but for a white linen towel clutched around her waist. Her breasts were two small, purple plums protruding from her chest. I couldn’t help gazing at her wet, black skin, the small compact power of her torso. She’d unloosed her braids, and her hair was a wild corona around her head, shimmering with beaded water.

She stepped backward and her mouth parted. Behind her, the wondrous copper tub sat in the middle of the room, filled with water. Vapor was lifting off the surface, turning the air rheumy. The audacity of what she’d done took my breath. If Mother discovered this, the consequences would be swift and dire.

I moved quickly inside and closed the door, my instinct even now to protect her. She made no attempt to cover herself. I glimpsed defiance in her eyes, in the way she wrested back her chin as if to say,
Yes, it’s me, bathing in your precious tub.

The silence was terrible. If she thought my reserve was due to anger, she was right. I wanted to shake her. Her boldness seemed like more than a frolic in the tub, it seemed like an act of rebellion, of usurpation. What had possessed her? She’d violated not only the privacy of my room and the intimacy of our tub, she’d breached my trust.

I didn’t recognize how my mother’s voice ranted inside me.

Handful started to speak, and I was terrified of what she would say, fearful it would be hateful and justifying, yet oddly, I feared an expression of shame and apology just as much. I stopped her. “Please. Don’t say anything. At least do that for me, say nothing.”

I turned my back while she dried herself and pulled on her dress. When I looked again, she was tying a kerchief around her hair. It was pale green, the same color as the tiny discolored patches on the copper. She bent to mop the puddles from the floor, and I saw the scarf darkening as it soaked the dampness.

She said, “You want me to empty the water out now or wait?”

“Let’s do it now. We can’t have Mother wander in and find it.”

With effort, I helped her roll the sloshing tub through the jib door onto the piazza, close to the rail, hoping the family was inside now and wouldn’t hear the gush of water. Handful yanked open the vent and it spilled in a long, silver beak over the side. I seemed to taste it in my mouth, the tang of minerals.

“I know you’re angry, Sarah, but I didn’t see any harm with me being in the tub, same as you.”

Not
Miss
Sarah, but Sarah. I would never again hear her put Miss before my name.

She had the look of someone who’d declared herself, and seeing it, my indignation collapsed and her mutinous bath turned into something else entirely. She’d immersed herself in forbidden privileges, yes, but mostly in the belief she was worthy of those privileges. What she’d done was not a revolt, it was a baptism.

I saw then what I hadn’t seen before, that I was very good at despising slavery in the abstract, in the removed and anonymous masses, but in the concrete, intimate flesh of the girl beside me, I’d lost the ability to be repulsed by it. I’d grown comfortable with the particulars of evil. There’s a frightful muteness that dwells at the center of all unspeakable things, and I had found my way into it.

As Handful began to shove the vessel back across the piazza, I tried to speak. “… … Wait … … I’ll … … help …”

She turned and looked at me, and we both knew. My tongue would once again attempt its suicide.

M
issus sent me and mauma to the market for some good cotton to make a dress for Nina. She was growing out from everything. Missus said, get something pastel this time and see about some homespun for Tomfry and them to have new vests.

The market was a row of stalls that ran all the way from East Bay to Meeting and had whatever under the sun you wanted. Missus said the place was a vulgar bazaar, that was her words. The turkey buzzards wandered round the meat stands like regular customers. They had to keep a man in there with a palm branch to shoo them. Course, they flew to the roofs and waited him out, then came on back. The smells in there would knock you down. Ox tails, bullock hearts, raw pork, live chickens, cracked oysters, blue crabs, fish, and more fish. The sweet peanut cakes didn’t stand a chance. I used to go round holding my nose till mauma got some eucalyptus leaves to rub over my top lip.

The slave sellers, what they called higglers, were shouting their wares, trying to out-do each other. The men sang out, “Jimmie” (that’s what we called the male crabs), and the women sang back, “Sook” (those were the females). “Jimmieeee … Soooook … Jimmieeee … Soooook.” You needed something for your nose
and
your ears.

It was September, and I still hadn’t laid eyes on the man mauma had told me about, the lucky free black who won the money to buy his freedom. He had a carpenter shop out back of his house, and I knew every time she was let out for hire or sent to the market without me, she was dallying with him. One, two times a week, she came back smelling like wood shavings, the back of her dress saw-dusted.

That day, when we got to the piece good stalls, I started saying how he was made-up. “Awright then,” mauma said. She grabbed up the first pastel she saw and some drab brown wool and we headed outside with our baskets loaded. A block down, they were selling slaves right on the street, so we crossed the other way toward King. I patted the pass inside my dress pocket three times and checked to see did mauma still have her badge fastened on her dress. Out in the streets, I always had the bad feeling of something coming, some meanness gathering. On Coming Street, we spotted a guard, couldn’t have been old as me, stop an old man who got so nervous he dropped his travel pass. The guard stepped on it, having his fun.

We walked in a hurry, outpacing the carriages. Mauma didn’t use her wooden cane anymore except special occasions. Those came along when she needed a letup from missus. She’d tell her, “Looks like the cure I prayed for my leg has worn off. I just need to rest up and pray for a few days.” Out came the cane.

Mauma’s free black man lived at 20 Bull. It was a white frame single house, had black shudders with the paint flecking off and scruffy bushes round the porch. She shook the powder shell from the street off her hemline and said, “If I stand here, he see me and come right out.”

“So we’re supposed to stand here till he looks out the window?”

“You want me to go up there and knock on the door? If his wife come, you want me to say, ‘Tell your husband his girlfriend out here?’”

“How come you’re fooling with somebody who has a wife anyway?”

“They not married legal, she his free-wife. He got two more of ’em, too. All mulatto.”

As she said the word,
mulatto,
he stepped from the house and stood on the porch looking at us. A bull of a man. I wanted to say,
Well he sure does live on the right street
. He was thickset and solid with a big chest and large forehead.

When he came over, mauma said to him, “This my girl, Handful.”

He nodded. I could see he was stern, and proud. He said, “I’m Denmark Vesey.”

Mauma sidled up to him and said for my benefit, “Denmark is a country next to France, and a real fine one, too.” She smiled at him in a way I had to look away from.

He slid his hand up the side of her arm, and I eased off down the street. If they wanted to carry on, all right, but I didn’t have to stand there and watch it.

In the coming year, we’d make this visit to 20 Bull more times than I care to tell. The two lovebirds would go in his workshop, and I’d sit outside and wait. After they were done, he’d come out and talk. And he could talk, Lord, could that man talk. Denmark the man never had been to Denmark the country, just the Danish Islands. To hear him tell it, though, he’d been everywhere else. He’d traveled the world with his owner Captain Vesey, who sailed a slave ship. He spoke French, Danish, Creole, Gullah, and the King’s English. I heard him speak every one of these tongues. He came from the Land of Barbados and liked to say Charleston didn’t trust slaves from there, cause they’d slit your throat. He said Charleston wanted saltwater blacks from Africa who knew rice planting.

The worst troubling thing he told me was how his neighbor down the street—a free black named Mr. Robert Smyth—owned three slaves. Now what you supposed to do with something like that? Mr. Vesey had to take me to the man’s house to meet the slaves before I allowed any truth to it. I didn’t know whether this Mr. Smyth was behaving like white people, or if it just showed something vile about all people.

Denmark Vesey read the Bible up and down. Give him five minutes and he’d tell you the story of Moses leading slaves from Egypt. He’d have the sea parting, frogs falling from the sky, firstborn baby boys stabbed in their beds. He mouthed a Bible verse from Joshua so many times, it still comes to me in full.
They utterly destroyed all that were in the city, both man and woman, both young and old
. The man was head-smart and reckless. He scared the wits out of me.

The two of us had a clash the first day we met. Like I said, I’d eased off down the street to let them know I didn’t have a need to see their urges. The street was busy, everybody from free blacks to the mayor and the governor lived on it, and when a white woman came along, walking in my path, I did the common thing you do—I stepped to the side to let her pass. It was the law, you were supposed to give way on the street, but here came Denmark Vesey charging down to where I stood with fury blowing from his nostrils, and mauma looking panic right behind him. He yanked me by the arm, yelled, “Is this the sort of person you want to be? The kind that steps aside? The kind that grovels in the street?”

I wanted to say,
Get your hand off me, you don’t know nothing about me, I bathe in a copper tub, and you’re standing here and stink to heaven
. The air round my head turned thick and my throat tightened on it. I managed to say, “Let me go.”

Behind him, mauma said, a little too sweet for my taste, “Take your hand off her.”

He dropped his grip. “Don’t let me see that from you again.” Then he smiled. And mauma, she smiled, too.

We walked home without a word between us.

Inside the Grimké house, the door to the library was open. The room was empty, so I went in and spun the globe. It made a screech sound. Like a nail on a slate board. Binah said that sound was the devil’s toenail. I looked over all the countries on the globe, round the whole earth. Denmark wasn’t next to France, it was up by Prussia, but looking at it, I knew why mauma chose him. He’d been places, and he was going places, and he set her alight with the notion she’d go places, too.