The Invention of Wings: A Novel (3 page)

The slaves stare at Mother’s back, which is straight and without give. She turns and admonishes them. “You are lagging. Quickly now, let us be done with this.”

As she speaks, an older slave, Rosetta, is dragged from the cow house, dragged by a man, a yard slave. She fights, clawing at his face. Mother watches, impassive.

He ties Rosetta’s hands to the corner column of the kitchen house porch. She looks over her shoulder and begs.
Missus, please. Missus. Missus. Please.
She begs even as the man lashes her with his whip.

Her dress is cotton, a pale yellow color. I stare transfixed as the back of it sprouts blood, blooms of red that open like petals. I cannot reconcile the savagery of the blows with the mellifluous way she keens or the beauty of the roses coiling along the trellis of her spine. Someone counts the lashes—is it Mother?
Six, seven.

The scourging continues, but Rosetta stops wailing and sinks against the porch rail.
Nine, ten.
My eyes look away. They follow a black ant traveling the far reaches beneath the tree—the mountainous roots and forested mosses, the endless perils—and in my head I say the words I fashioned earlier.
Boy Run. Girl Jump. Sarah Go.

Thirteen. Fourteen …
I bolt from the shadows, past the man who now coils his whip, job well done, past Rosetta hanging by her hands in a heap. As I bound up the back steps into the house, Mother calls to me, and Binah reaches to scoop me up, but I escape them, thrashing along the main passage, out the front door, where I break blindly for the wharves.

I don’t remember the rest with clarity, only that I find myself wandering across the gangplank of a sailing vessel, sobbing, stumbling over a turban of rope. A kind man with a beard and a dark cap asks what I want. I plead with him,
Sarah Go.

Binah chases me, though I’m unaware of her until she pulls me into her arms and coos, “Poor Miss Sarah, poor Miss Sarah.” Like a decree, a proclamation, a prophecy.

When I arrive home, I am a muss of snot, tears, yard dirt, and harbor filth. Mother holds me against her, rears back and gives me an incensed shake, then clasps me again. “You must promise never to run away again.
Promise me
.”

I want to. I try to. The words are on my tongue—the rounded lumps of them, shining like the marbles beneath the tree.

“Sarah!” she demands.

Nothing comes. Not a sound.

I remained mute for a week. My words seemed sucked into the cleft between my collar bones. I rescued them by degrees, by praying, bullying and wooing. I came to speak again, but with an odd and mercurial form of stammer. I’d never been a fluid speaker, even my first spoken words had possessed a certain belligerent quality, but now there were ugly, halting gaps between my sentences, endless seconds when the words cowered against my lips and people averted their eyes. Eventually, these horrid pauses began to come and go according to their own mysterious whims. They might plague me for weeks and then remain away months, only to return again as abruptly as they left.

The day I moved from the nursery to commence a life of maturity in John’s staid old room, I wasn’t thinking of the cruelty that had taken place in the work yard when I was four or of the thin filaments that had kept me tethered to my voice ever since. Those concerns were the farthest thing from my mind. My speech impediment had been absent for some time now—four months and six days. I’d almost imagined myself cured.

So when Mother swept into the room all of a sudden—me, in a paroxysm of adjustment to my surroundings, and Binah, tucking my possessions here and there—and asked if my new quarters were to my liking, I was stunned by my inability to answer her. The door slammed in my throat, and the silence hung there. Mother looked at me and sighed.

When she left, I willed my eyes to remain dry and turned away from Binah. I couldn’t bear to hear one more
Poor Miss Sarah
.

A
unt-Sister took me to the warming kitchen where Binah and Cindie were fussing over silver trays, laying them full of ginger cake and apples with ground nuts. They had on their good long aprons with starch. Off in the drawing room, it sounded like bees buzzing.

Missus showed up and told Aunt-Sister to peel off my nasty coat and wash my face, then she said, “Hetty, this is Sarah’s eleventh birthday and we are having a party for her.”

She took a lavender ribbon from the top of the pie safe and circled it round my neck, tying a bow, while Aunt-Sister peeled the black off my cheeks with her rag. Missus wound more ribbon round my waist. When I tugged, she told me in a sharp way, “Stop that fidgeting, Hetty! Be still.”

Missus had done the ribbon too snug at my throat. It felt like I couldn’t swallow. I searched for Aunt-Sister’s eyes, but they were glued on the food trays. I wanted to tell her,
Get me free of this, help me, I need the privy
. I always had something smart to say, but my voice had run down my throat like a kitchen mouse.

I danced on one leg and the other. I thought what mauma had told me, “You be good coming up on Christmas cause that when they sell off the extra children or else send them to the fields.” I didn’t know one slave master Grimké had sold, but I knew plenty he’d sent to his plantation in the back country. That’s where mauma had come from, bearing me inside her and leaving my daddy behind.

I stopped all my fidget then. My whole self went down in the hole where my voice was. I tried to do what they said God wanted. Obey, be quiet, be still.

Missus studied me, how I looked in the purple ribbons. Taking me by the arm, she led me to the drawing room where the ladies sat with their dresses fussed out and their china teacups and lacy napkins. One lady played the tiny piano called a harpsichord, but she stopped when missus gave a clap with her hands.

Every eye fixed on me. Missus said, “This is our little Hetty. Sarah, dear, she is your present, your very own waiting maid.”

I pressed my hands between my legs and missus knocked them away. She turned me a full circle. The ladies started up like parrots—
happy birthday, happy birthday
—their fancy heads pecking the air. Miss Sarah’s older sister, Miss Mary, sat there full of sulk from not being the center of the party. Next to missus, she was the worst bird in the room. We’d all seen her going round with
her
waiting maid, Lucy, smacking the girl six ways from Sunday. We all said if Miss Mary dropped her kerchief from the second floor, she’d send Lucy jumping out the window for it. Least I didn’t end up with that one.

Miss Sarah stood up. She was wearing a dark blue dress and had rosy-colored hair that hung straight like corn silk and freckles the same red color all over her face. She took a long breath and started working her lips. Back then, Miss Sarah pulled words up from her throat like she was raising water from a well.

When she finally got the bucket up, we could hardly hear what she was saying. “… … … I’m sorry, Mother … … I can’t accept.”

Missus asked her to say it over. This time Miss Sarah bellowed it like a shrimp peddler.

Missus’ eyes were frost blue like Miss Sarah’s, but they turned dark as indigo. Her fingernails bore into me and carved out what looked like a flock of birds on my arm. She said, “Sit down, Sarah dear.”

Miss Sarah said, “… I don’t need a waiting maid … I’m perfectly fine without one.”

“That is quite enough,” missus said. How you could miss the warning in that, I don’t know. Miss Sarah missed it by a mile.

“… Couldn’t you save her for Anna?”

“Enough!”

Miss Sarah plopped on her chair like somebody shoved her.

The water started in a trickle down my leg. I jerked every way I could to get free of missus’ claws, but then it came in a gush on the rug.

Missus let out a shriek and everything went hush. You could hear embers leap round in the fireplace.

I had a slap coming, or worse. I thought of Rosetta, how she threw a shaking fit when it suited her. She’d let the spit run from her mouth and send her eyes rolling back. She looked like a beetle-bug upside down trying to right itself, but it got her free of punishment, and it crossed my mind to fall down and pitch a fit myself the best I could.

But I stood there with my dress plastered wet on my thighs and shame running hot down my face.

Aunt-Sister came and toted me off. When we passed the stairs in the main hall, I saw mauma up on the landing, pressing her hands to her chest.

That night doves sat up in the tree limbs and moaned. I clung to mauma in our rope bed, staring at the quilt frame, the way it hung over us from the ceiling rafters, drawn tight on its pulleys. She said the quilt frame was our guarding angel. She said, “Everything gon be all right.” But the shame stayed with me. I tasted it like a bitter green on my tongue.

The bells tolled cross Charleston for the slave curfew, and mauma said the Guard would be out there soon beating on their drums, but she said it like this: “Bugs be in the wheat ’fore long.”

Then she rubbed the flat bones in my shoulders. That’s when she told me the story from Africa her mauma told her. How the people could fly. How they flew over trees and clouds. How they flew like blackbirds.

Next morning mauma handed me a quilt matched to my length and told me I couldn’t sleep with her anymore. From here on out, I would sleep on the floor in the hall outside Miss Sarah’s bed chamber. Mauma said, “Don’t get off your quilt for nothin’ but Miss Sarah calling. Don’t wander ’bout. Don’t light no candle. Don’t make noise. When Miss Sarah rings the bell, you make haste.”

Mauma told me, “It gon be hard from here on, Handful.”

I
was sent to solitary confinement in my new room and ordered to write a letter of apology to each guest. Mother settled me at the desk with paper, inkwell, and a letter she’d composed herself, which I was to copy.

“… … You didn’t punish Hetty, did you?” I asked.

“Do you think me inhuman, Sarah? The girl had an accident. What could I do?” She shrugged with exasperation. “If the rug cannot be cleaned, it will have to be thrown out.”

As she walked to the door, I struggled to pry the words from my mouth before she exited. “… … Mother, please, let me … … let me give Hetty back to you.”

Give Hetty back
. As if she was mine after all. As if owning people was as natural as breathing. For all my resistance about slavery, I breathed that foul air, too.

“Your guardianship is legal and binding. Hetty is yours, Sarah, there is nothing to be done about it.”

“… … But—”

I heard the commotion of her petticoats as she crossed the rug back to me. She was a woman the winds and tides obeyed, but in that moment, she was gentle with me. Placing a finger under my chin, she tilted my face to hers and smiled. “Why must you fight this? I don’t know where you get these alien ideas. This is our way of life, dear one, make your peace with it.” She kissed the top of my head. “I expect all eighteen letters by the morning.”

The room filled with an orange glow that lit the cypress panels, then melted into dusk and shadows. In my mind, I could see Hetty clearly—the confused, mortified look on her face, her hair braids cocked in every direction, the disgraceful lavender ribbons. She was puny in the extreme, a year younger than I, but she looked all of six years old. Her limbs were stick and bone. Her elbows, the curves of two fastening pins. The only thing of any size about her was her eyes, which were colored a strange shade of gold and floated above her black cheeks like shiny half-moons.

It seemed traitorous to ask forgiveness for something I didn’t feel sorry for in the least. What I regretted was how pathetic my protest had turned out. I wanted nothing more than to sit here unyielding through the night, for days and weeks if need be, but in the end I gave in and wrote the damnable letters. I knew myself to be an odd girl with my mutinous ideas, ravenous intellect, and funny looks, and half the time I sputtered like a horse straining at its bit, qualities in the female sex that were not endearing. I was on my way to being the family pariah, and I feared the ostracism. I feared it most of all.