The Invention of Wings: A Novel (35 page)

“What about me?” I said.

They turned and looked at me like they’d forgotten I was in the room.

“What about you?” said Denmark.

“I could get in there. Nobody looks twice at a slave woman who’s lame in one leg.”

A
s dusk hovered, I sat at the desk in my room and slit open a letter from Nina. I’d been at Green Hill almost a year, and I’d written her every month without fail, small dispatches about my life and inquiries about hers, but she’d never replied to any of them, not one, and now here was an envelope with her large calligraphy and I could only imagine the worst.

14 March 1822

Dear Sister,

I’ve been a poor correspondent and a poorer sister. I didn’t agree with your decision to go north, and I haven’t changed my mind about it, but I have behaved badly, and I hope you will forgive me.

I’m at my wit’s end about our mother. She grows more difficult and violent each day. She rants that we’ve been left without sufficient means to live and she blames Thomas, John, and Frederick for failing to take care of her. Needless to say, they come infrequently, and Mary never comes, only Eliza. Since your departure, Mother spends most of her day shut in her room, and when she emerges, it’s only to rage against the slaves. She swings her cane at them over the least thing. She recently hit Aunt-Sister for nothing more than burned loaves of bread. Last evening, she struck Handful when she spotted her climbing over the back gate. I should add that Handful was climbing into the work yard, not out of it, and when Mother asked for an explanation, Handful said she’d seen a wounded pup in the alley and gone over the gate to help the creature. She insisted she was returning from that momentary mission of mercy, but I don’t think Mother believed her. I certainly didn’t. Mother broke the skin over Handful’s brow, which I bandaged the best I could.

I’m alarmed at Mother’s escalating temper, but I also fear Handful is engaged in something dangerous that involves frequent trips over the gate. I saw her slip away from the house myself on another occasion. She refuses to speak to me about it. I doubt I can shield her if she’s caught again.

I feel alone and helpless here. Please come to my aid. I beg you, come home.

Yours in need and with sisterly love, Nina

I laid down the letter. Pushing back the chair, I went to the dormer window and stared at the darkening grove of cedars. A little swarm of fireflies was rising up from it like embers.
I feel alone and helpless here—
Nina’s words, but I felt them like my own.

Earlier, Catherine had sent my trunk up from the cellar, and I busied myself now pulling belongings from the wardrobe and the desk, strewing them across the bed and onto the braided rug—bonnets, shawls, dresses, sleeping gowns, gloves, journals, letters, the little biography of Joan of Arc I’d stolen from Father’s study, a single strand of pearls, ivory brushes, bottles of French glass filled with lotions and powders, and dearest of all, my lava box with the silver button.

“You didn’t come down for supper.” Israel stood in the doorway, peering inside, afraid, it seemed, to cross into my small, messy sanctum.

My possessions were puny by Grimké standards, but I was nevertheless embarrassed by the excess, and in particular by the woolen underwear I was holding. He fixed his eyes on the open trunk, then swung his gaze to the eaves as if the sight of my packing stung him.

“… I had no appetite,” I said.

He stepped, finally, into the disarray. “I came to say, I’m sorry. I should’ve spoken in the meeting. I was wrong not to. What Catherine did was unpardonable—I’ve told her as much. I’ll go before the elders this week and make it clear I don’t wish you to leave.” His eyes gleamed with what I took to be anguish.

“… It’s too late, Israel.”

“But it isn’t. I can make them understand—”

“No!” It came out more forcefully than I intended.

He sank onto the end of my narrow bed and plowed his hand through his rampant black hair. It filled me with a sharp, almost exquisite pain to see him on the bed, there among my gowns and pearls and lava box. I thought how much I would miss him.

He stood and took my hand. “You’ll still come and teach the girls, won’t you? A number of people have offered to board you.”

I pulled my hand away. “… I’m going home.”

His eyes darted again to the trunk, and I watched his shoulders curve forward, his ribs dropping one onto the other. “Is it because of me?”

I paused, not knowing how to answer. Nina’s letter had come just when the bottom had fallen from things, and it was true, I welcomed the excuse to leave. Was I running away from him? “… No,” I told him. I was sure I would’ve left regardless, why dissect the reason?

When I recounted the contents of the letter, he said, “It’s terrible about your mother, but there must be other siblings who can tend to the situation.”

“… Nina needs
me.
Not someone else.”

“But it’s very sudden. You should think about it. Pray about it. God brought you here, you can’t deny that.”

I couldn’t deny it. Something good and right had brought me north, and even to this very place—to Green Hill and Israel and the children. The mandate to leave Charleston was still as radiant as the day I’d first felt it, but there was Nina’s letter lying on the desk. And then there was the other matter, the matter of Rebecca.

“Sarah, we need you here. You’ve become indispensable to—to all of us.”

“… It’s decided, Israel. I’m sorry. I’m going home to Charleston.”

He sighed. “At least tell me you’ll come back to us after things are settled there.”

The window was sheened with the glare of the room, but I stepped close to it and bent my head to the pane. I could see the bright helix of fireflies still out there. “… I don’t know. I don’t know anymore.”

T
he night before I went to the City Arsenal to steal a bullet mold, me and Goodis crept up to the empty room over the carriage house—the same one where me and mauma used to sleep—and I let him do what he’d been wanting to do with me for years, and I guess what I’d been wanting to do with him. I was twenty-nine years old now, and I told myself, if I get caught tomorrow, the Guard will kill me, and if they don’t, the Work House will, so before I leave the earth, I might as well know what the fuss is about.

The room was empty except for a straw mattress Sabe had laid on the floor for Minta and him, but the place still had the same old fragrance of horse shit. I looked down at the grungy mattress, while Goodis spread a clean blanket cross it, smoothing out every little wrinkle just-so, and seeing the care he took with it, I felt tenderness to him pour through me. He wasn’t old, but most of his hair was gone. The lid over his wandering eye drooped, while the other lid stayed up, so he always looked like he was half asleep, but he had a big, easy smile and he kept it on while he helped me out from my dress.

When I was stretched out on the blanket, he gazed at the pouch round my neck, stuffed fat with scraps of the spirit tree.

“I don’t take that off,” I said.

He gave it a pinch, feeling the hard lumps of bark and acorns. “These your jewels?”

“Yeah. Those are my gemstones.”

Pushing the pouch to the side, he held my breasts in his hands and said, “These ain’t big as two hazelnuts, but that’s how I like ’em, small and brown like this.” He kissed my mouth and shoulders and rubbed his face against the hazelnuts. Then he kissed my bad foot, his lip following the snarled path of scars. I wasn’t one to cry, but tears leaked from the sides of my eyes and ran behind my ears.

I never spoke a word the whole time, even when he pushed inside me. I felt like a mortar at first and he was the pestle. It was like pounding rice, but gentle and kind, breaking open the tough hulls. Once he laughed, saying, “This what you thought it’d be?” and I couldn’t answer. I smiled with the tears seeping out.

The next morning, I was sore from loving. At breakfast, Goodis said, “It’s a fine day. What you think, Handful?”

“Yeah, it’s fine.”

“Tomorrow gon be fine, too.”

“Might be,” I said.

After the meal, I found Nina and asked her could I have a pass for the market—Sabe wasn’t in a granting mood. I told her, “Aunt-Sister says molasses with a little whiskey would do your mauma a world of good, might calm her down, but we don’t have any.”

She wrote the pass and when she handed it to me, she said, “Any time you need … molasses or anything like that, you come to me. All right?”

That’s how I knew we had an understanding. Course, if she knew what I was about to do, she never would’ve signed her name on that paper.

I walked to the Arsenal with my rabbit cane, carrying a basket of rags, cleaning spirits, a feather duster, and a long broom over my shoulder. Gullah Jack had been watching the place for a good while now. He said on the first Monday of the month, they opened it up for inspection and maintenance, counting weapons, cleaning muskets, and what-not. A free black girl named Hilde came those days to sweep it out, dust, oil the gun racks, and clean the privy out back. Gullah Jack had given her a coin not to show up today.

Denmark had drawn me a picture of a bullet mold. It looked like a pair of nose pliers, except the nose came together to form a tiny bowl on the end where you poured the lead to make the musket ball. He said a bullet mold wasn’t much bigger than his hand, so get two if I could. The main thing, he said, was don’t get caught.

That was my main thing, too.

The Arsenal was a round building made out of tabby with walls two foot thick. It had three skinny windows high up with iron bars. Today, the shutters were thrown back to let the light in. The guard by the door wanted to know who I was and where was Hilde. I wound through the story about her getting sick and sending me for the stand-in. He said, “You don’t look like you could lift a broom.”

Well, how you think this broom got on my shoulder? All by itself?
That’s what I wanted to say, but I looked at the ground. “Yessir, but I’m a hard worker, you’ll see.”

He unlocked the bolt on the door. “They’re cleaning muskets today. Stay out of their way. When you’re done, tap on the door and I’ll let you out.”

I stepped inside. The door slammed. The bolt clicked.

Standing there, trying to get my bearings through the gloom, I sniffed mold and linseed oil and the rancid smell of cooped-up air. Two guards were on the far side with their backs to me, taking a musket apart under one of the windows—all the pieces spread out on a table. One of them turned and said, “It’s Hilde.”

I didn’t clear up the mistake. I started sweeping.

The Arsenal was a single room filled with weapons. My eyes roved over everything. Kegs of gunpowder were stacked in the middle halfway to the ceiling. Arranged neat along the walls were wooden racks filled with muskets and pistols, heaps of cannon balls, and in the back, dozens of wooden chests.

I kept the broom going, working my way round the whole floor, hoping the
swish-swish
covered the loud, ragged way my breath was coming. The guards’ voices came and went in echoes.

This one could fire on the half-cock. See the mainspring on the hammer? It’s gone bad.

Make sure the ramrod head is tight and there’s no rust on it.

When I was blocked from their view behind the powder kegs, my breath eased up. I got out the feather duster. One by one, I brushed the tops of the wooden chests, pausing each time to look over my shoulder before lifting the lid to peek inside. I found cow horns with leather straps. A tangle of iron hand cuffs. Bars of lead. Pieces of thin rope I guessed to be fuses. But no bullet molds.

Then I noticed an old snare drum propped up against the wall, and behind it was another chest. Picking my way over to it, my lame foot upset the drum, and
whamblam,
it hit the floor.

Here came the boots stomping. I grabbed the duster and the feathers twitched and shook in my hand like they’d come alive.

The guard yelled at me. “What was that racket?”

“This drum right here fell over.”

He narrowed his eyes. “You’re not Hilde.”

“No, she turned sick. I’m filling in.”

He had a long piece of metal in his hand from the musket. He pointed it at the drum. “We don’t need that sort of carelessness in here!”

“Yessir, I’ll take care.”

He went back to work, but my heart had been beat to butter.

I opened the chest where the drum had leaned and there must’ve been ten bullet molds inside. I pulled out two, slow so they wouldn’t clink, and stuck them in my basket under the rags.

Then I swept the air clean of cobwebs and wiped down the gun racks with oil. When I had the place good as Hilde would’ve done it, I gathered my stuff and tapped on the door.

“Don’t forget the latrine,” the guard at the door said, thumbing toward the rear of the Arsenal.

I headed back there, but I walked right past it and kept going.