The Invention of Wings: A Novel (28 page)

I don’t know where he came from, but Gullah Jack was on top of me before I could turn my head. He grabbed me from behind and threw me into the room, my rabbit cane flying. I bounced off the wall and landed flat.

He stuck his foot on my chest, pressing me to the floor. “Who’re you?”

“Take your nasty foot off me!” I spit at him and the spew fell back on my face.

He raised a hand like he was ready to strike, and from the edge of my eye, I saw Denmark Vesey pick him up by the collar and fling him half cross the room. Then he pulled me up. “You all right?”

My arms were trembling so bad I couldn’t hold them still.

“Everything you heard in here, you keep to yourself,” he told me.

I nodded again, and he put his arm round me to stop the shaking.

Turning to Gullah Jack and the rest of them, he said, “This is the daughter of my wife and the sister of my child. She’s family, and that means you don’t lay a hand on her.”

He told the men to go on back to his workshop. We waited while they scraped the chairs back and eased from the room.

So, he counted mauma one of his wives.
I’m family.

He pulled a chair for me. “Here, sit down. What’re you doing here?”

“I came to find out the truth of what happened to mauma. I know you know.”

“Some things are better not to know,” he said.

“Well, that’s not what the Bible preaches. It says if you know the truth, it’ll set you free.”

He circled the table. “All right, then.” He closed the window so the truth would stay in the room and not float out for the world to hear.

“The day Charlotte got in trouble with the Guard, she came here. I was in the workshop and when I looked up, there she was. They’d chased her all the way to the rice mill pond, where she hid inside a sack in the millhouse. She had rice hulls all over her dress. I kept her here till dark, then I took her to the Neck, where the policing is light. I took her there to hide.”

The Neck was just north of the city and had lots of tenement houses for free blacks and slaves whose owners let them “live out.” Negro huts, they called them. I tried to picture one, picture mauma in it.

“I knew a free black there who had a room, and he took her in. She said when the Guard stopped searching for her, she’d go back to the Grimkés and throw herself on their mercy.” He’d been pacing, but now he sat down next to me and finished up the truth quick as he could. “One night she went out to the privy in Radcliff Alley and there was a white man there, a slave poacher named Robert Martin. He was waiting for her.”

A noise filled my head, a wailing sound so loud I couldn’t hear. “A poacher, what’s a poacher?”

“Somebody that steals slaves. They’re worse than scum. We all knew this man—he had a wagon-trade in these parts. First, regular goods, then he started buying slaves, then he started stealing slaves. He hunted for them in the Neck. He’d keep his ear to the ground and go after the runaways. More than one person saw him take Charlotte.”

“He took her? He sold her off somewhere?”

I was on my feet, screaming over the noise in my skull. “Why didn’t you look for her?”

He took me by the shoulders and gave me a shake. His eyes were sparking like flint. He said, “Gullah Jack and I looked for two days. We looked everywhere, but she was gone.”

I
made the laborious journey back to Philadelphia, where I found lodging at the same house on Society Hill where Father and I had boarded earlier, expecting to stay only until the ship sailed, but on the appointed morning—my trunk packed and the carriage waiting—something strange and unknown inside of me balked.

Mrs. Todd, who rented the room to me, tapped at my door. “Miss Grimké, the carriage—it’s waiting. May I send the driver to collect the trunk?”

I didn’t answer immediately, but stood at the window and stared out at the leafy vine on the picket fence, at the cobble street lined with sycamore trees, the light falling in quiet, mottled patterns, and beneath my breath I whispered, “No.”

I turned to her, untying my bonnet. It was black with a small ruffle suitable for mourning. I’d purchased it on High Street the day before, maneuvering alone in the shops with no one to please but myself, then come back to this simple room where there were no servants or slaves, no immoderate furniture or filigree or gold leaf, no one summoning me to tea with visitors I didn’t care for, no expectations of any kind, just this little room where I took care of everything myself, even spreading my own bed and seeing to my laundry. I turned to Mrs. Todd. “… I would like to keep the room a bit longer, if I may.”

She looked confused. “You’re not leaving as planned?”

“No, I would like to stay a while. Only a while.”

I told myself it was because I wanted to grieve in private. Really, was that so implausible?

Mrs. Todd was the wife of a struggling law clerk and she clasped my hand. “You’re welcome to stay as long as you wish.”

I wrote a solicitous letter to Mother, explaining the unexplainable: Father had died and I wasn’t coming home straight away.
I need to grieve alone.

Mother’s letter in response arrived in September. Her small, tight scrawl was thick with fury and ink. My behavior was shameful, selfish, cruel. “How could you abandon me in my darkest hour?” she wrote.

I burned her letter in the fireplace, but her words left contusions of guilt. There was truth in what she’d written. I was selfish. I’d abandoned my mother. Nina, as well. I anguished over it, but I didn’t pack my trunk.

I spent my days as a malingerer. I slept whenever I was tired, often in the middle of the day. Mrs. Todd gave up on my presence at appointed meals and reserved my food in the kitchen. I would take it to my room at odd hours, then wash my own dishes. There were few books to read, but I wrote in a little journal I’d bought, mostly about Father’s last days, and I practiced my scripture verses with a set of Bible flash cards. I walked up and down the streets beneath the sycamores as they turned blonde, then bronze, venturing further and further each day—to Washington Square, Philosophical Hall, Old St. Mary’s, and once, quite by accident, The Man Full of Trouble Tavern where I heard shouting and crockery breaking.

One Sunday when the air was crisp and razor-cut with light, I walked ankle-deep in fallen leaves all the way to Arch Street, where I came upon a Quaker meetinghouse of such size I paused to stare. In Charleston, we had one teeny Friends House, something of a dilapidation, to which, it was said, no one came but two cantankerous old men. As I stood there, people began to stream from the central door, the women and girls clad in dismal, excoriated dresses that made us Presbyterians seem almost flamboyant. Even the children wore drab coats and grave little faces. I observed them against the red bricks, the steeple-less roof, the plain shuttered windows, and I felt repelled. I’d heard they sat in silence, waiting for someone to utter his most inward intimacies with God out loud for everyone to hear. It sounded terrifying to me.

Notwithstanding the Quakers, those days were very much like the moments I’d floated in the ocean at Long Branch beneath the white flag. A vitality inhabited those weeks, almost like a second heart beating in my chest. I’d found I could manage quite well on my own. Had it not been for Father’s death, I might have been happy.

When November arrived, however, I knew I couldn’t remain any longer. Winter was coming. The sea would become treacherous. I packed my trunk.

The ship was a cutter, which gave me hope of reaching Charleston in ten days. I’d booked first-class passage, but my stateroom was dark and cramped with nothing but a wallmere closet and a two-foot berth. As often as possible, I hazarded above deck to feel the cold, bracing winds, huddling with the other passengers on the lee side.

On the third morning, I woke near dawn and dressed quickly, not bothering to braid my hair. The stale, suffocating room felt like a sepulcher, and I surfaced above deck with my carrot hair flying, expecting to be alone, yet there was another already at the rail. Pulling up the hood of my cloak, I sought a spot away from him.

A tiny, white ball of moon was still in the sky, clinging to the last bit of night. Below it a thin line of blue light ran the length of the horizon. I watched it grow.

“How are thee?” a man’s voice said, using the formal Quaker greeting I’d often heard in Philadelphia.

As I turned to him, strands of my hair slipped from the hood and whipped wildly about my face. “… I’m fine, sir.”

He had a dramatic cleft in his chin and piercing brown eyes over which his brows slanted upward like the slopes of a tiny hill. He wore simple breeches with silver knee buckles, a dark coat, and a three-cornered hat. A lock of hair, dark as coal, tossed on his forehead. I guessed him to be some years older than I, perhaps ten or more. I’d seen him on deck before, and on the first night, in the ship’s dining quarters with his wife and eight children, six boys, two girls. I’d thought then how tired she looked.

“My name is Israel Morris,” he said.

Later, I would wonder if the Fates had placed me there, if they’d been the ones who’d kept me lingering in Philadelphia for three months until this particular ship sailed, though of course, we Presbyterians believed it was God who arranged propitious encounters like these, not mythological women with spindles, threads, and shears.

The mainsails were snapping and wheezing, making a great racket. I told him my name, and then we stood for a moment, gazing at the rising brightness, at the seabirds suddenly making soaring arcs in the sky. He told me his wife, Rebecca, was quarantined in their cabin tending their youngest two, who’d become sick with dysentery. He was a broker, a commission merchant, and though he was modest, I could tell he’d been prosperous at it.

In turn, I told him about the sojourn I’d made with my father and his unexpected death. The words slid fluidly off my tongue, with only an occasional stammer. I could only attribute it to the sweep and flow of water around us.

“Please, accept my sympathies,” he said. “It must have been difficult, caring for your father alone. Could your husband not travel with you?”

“My husband? Oh, Mr. Morris, I’m not married.”

His face flushed.

Wanting to ease the moment, I said, “I assure you, it’s not a matter that concerns me much.”

He laughed and asked about my family, about our life in Charleston. When I told him about the house on East Bay and the plantation in the upcountry, his lively expression died away. “You own slaves then?”

“… My family does, yes. But I, myself, don’t condone it.”

“Yet you cast your lot with those who do?”

I bristled. “… They are my family, sir. What would you have me do?”

He gazed at me with kindness and pity. “To remain silent in the face of evil is itself a form of evil.”

I turned from him toward the glassy water. What kind of man would speak like this? A Southern gentleman would as soon swallow his tongue.

“Forgive my bluntness,” he said. “I’m a Quaker. We believe slavery to be an abomination. It’s an important part of our faith.”

“… I happen to be Presbyterian, and while we don’t have an anti-slavery doctrine like you, it’s an important part of my faith, as well.”

“Of course. My apologies. I’m afraid there’s a zealot in me I’m at a loss to control.” He pulled at the rim of his hat and smiled. “I must see about breakfast for my family. I hope we might speak again, Miss Grimké. Good day.”

I thought of nothing but him for the next two days. He disturbed nearly every waking minute, and even my sleep. I was drawn to him in a deeper way than I’d been to Burke, and that’s what frightened me. I was drawn to his brutal conscience, to his repulsive Quakerism, to the force of his ideas, the force of
him.
He was married, and for that I was grateful. For that, I was safe.

He approached me in the dining room on the sixth day of the voyage. The ship was scudding before a gale and we’d been banned from above deck. “May I join you?” he asked.

“… If you like.” Heat flared in my chest. I felt it travel to my cheeks, turning them to crabapples. “… Are your children recovered? And your wife? Has she stayed well?”

“The sickness is making its way through all of the children now, but they’re recovering thanks to Rebecca. We couldn’t manage a single day without her. She is—” He broke off, but when I went on gazing at him expectantly, he finished his sentence. “The perfect mother.”

Without his hat, he looked younger. Thatches and sprigs of black hair waved in random directions. He had tired smudges beneath his eyes, and I imagined they were from helping his wife nurse the children, but he pulled a worn leather book from his vest, saying he’d stayed up late in the night, reading. “It’s the journal of John Woolman. He’s a great defender of our faith.”

As the conversation turned once again to Quakerism, he opened the book and read fragments to me, attempting to educate me about their beliefs. “Everyone is of equal worth,” he said. “Our ministers are female as well as male.”

“Female?” I asked so many questions about this oddity, he became amused.