The Invention of Wings: A Novel (45 page)

We stood side by side waiting for someone to speak. The windowpanes burned with sunlight, baking the room to a kiln, and I felt a streak of cold sweat dart between my breasts. I tried to meet Israel’s gaze, but he leaned back into the shadow from the cornice. Turning then to Catherine, I saw the newspaper lying on her lap.
The Liberator.

My stomach caught.

Holding one corner between her thumb and forefinger, she lifted the paper as if it were a dead mouse she’d found in a trap and held by the tip of its tail. “A letter on the front page of the most notorious anti-slavery paper in the country has come to our attention.” She adjusted her glasses—the lenses were thick as the bottom of a bottle. “Allow me to read aloud.
30 August, 1835, Respected Friend—
”

Nina gasped. “Oh Sarah, I didn’t know it would be published.”

I squinted at her frantic eyes, trying to comprehend what she was saying. As it dawned on me, I tried to speak, yet nothing came but a spew of air. I had to strip the words like wallpaper. “… … You … wrote to … Mr. Garrison?”

A chair scraped on the floor, and I saw Mr. Bettleman stride toward us. “You want us to believe that you, the daughter of a slaveholding family, penned a letter to an agitator like William Lloyd Garrison, thinking he wouldn’t publish it? It’s exactly the sort of inflammatory material he spreads.”

She was not remorseful, she was defiant. “Yes, perhaps I did think he would publish it!” she said. Then to me, “People are risking their lives for the cause of the slave, and we do nothing but sit on the Negro pew! I did what I had to do.”

It did feel, all of a sudden, that what she’d done was inevitable. Our lives would never go back to the way they’d been, she’d seen to it, and I both wanted to pull her into my arms and thank her, and to shake her.

Their faces were all the same, grim and accusing, frowning through the glaze of light, all but Israel’s. He stared at the floor as if he wished to be anywhere but here.

As Catherine resumed reading, Nina fixed her eyes on the far wall, on some high, removed place above their heads. The letter was long and eloquent, and yes, highly flammable.

“If persecution is the means by which we will accomplish emancipation, then I say, let it come, for it is my deep, solemn, deliberate conviction that this is a cause worth dying for. Angelina Grimké
.
”
Catherine folded the paper and laid it on the floor.

News of her letter would reach Charleston, of course. Mother, Thomas, the entire family would read it with outrage and disgrace. She would never go home again—I wondered if she’d thought of that, how those words slammed shut whatever door was left there.

Just then Israel spoke from the back of the room, and I closed my eyes at the gentleness in his voice, the sudden kindness. “You are both our sisters. We love you as Christ loves you. We’ve come here only to bring you back into good standing with your Quaker brethren. You may still return to us in full repentance, as the prodigal son returned to his father—”

“You must recant the letter or be expelled,” Mr. Bettleman said, terse and plain.

Expelled.
The word hung like a small blade, almost visible in the brightness. This could not happen. I’d spent thirteen years with the Quakers, six pursuing the ministry, the only profession left to me. I’d given up everything for it, marriage, Israel, children.

I hastened to speak before Nina. I knew what she would say and then the blade would fall. “… Please, I know you’re a merciful people.”

“Try and understand, Sarah, we looked the other way while you sat on the Negro pew,” Catherine said. “But it’s gone too far now.” She laced her fingers beneath her chin and her knuckles shone white. “And you have to consider, too, where you’ll go if you don’t recant. I care for you both, but naturally you couldn’t stay here.”

Panic arched into my throat. “… Is it so wrong to write a letter? … Is it so wrong to put feet to our prayers?”

“Matters like this—they aren’t the work of a woman’s life,” Israel said, stepping from the shadowed place along the wall. “Surely you’re not blind to that.” His voice was mired in hurt and frustration, the same tone he’d had when I turned down his proposal, and I knew he was speaking about more than the letter. “We have no choice. What you’ve done by declaring yourself in this manner is outside the bounds of Quakerism.”

I reached for Nina’s hand. It felt clammy and hot. I looked at Israel, only Israel. “… We cannot recant the letter. I only wish I’d signed it, too.”

Nina’s hand tightened on mine, squeezing to the point of pain.

4 August

Dear Sarah

Mauma passed on last month. She fell into a sleep under the oak tree and never roused. She stayed asleep six days before she died in her bed, me beside her and Sky too. Your mauma paid for her to have a pine box.

They put her in the slave burial ground on Pitt Street. Missus let Goodis carry me and Sky over there in the carriage to see her resting place and say goodbye. Sky has turned 22 now and stands tall as a man. When we stood by the grave, I didn’t come up to her shoulder. She sang the song the women on the plantation sing when they pound rice to leave on the graves. She said they put rice there to help the dead find their way back to Africa. Sky had a pocketful from the kitchen house and she spread it over mauma while she sang.

What came to me was the old song I made up when I was a girl. Cross the water, cross the sea, let them fishes carry me, carry me home. I sang that, then I took the brass thimble, the one I loved from the time I was little, and I left it on top of her grave so she’d have that part of me.

Well, I wanted you to know. I guess she’s at peace now.

I hope this letter makes it to you. If you write me, take care cause your sister Mary watches everything. The black driver from her plantation named Hector is the butler now and he does her spying.

Your friend

Handful

I wrote Sarah’s name and address on the front by the light of the candle, copying missus’ handwriting as close as I could manage. Missus’ penship had fallen off so bad I could’ve set down any kind of lettering and passed it off for hers. I closed the letter with a drop of wax and pressed it with missus’ seal-stamp. I’d stole the stamp from her room—let’s say, borrowed it. I planned to take it back before it was missed. The stationery, though, was just plain stolen.

Cross the room, Sky was sleeping, thrashing in the heat. I watched her arms search the spot on the mattress where mauma used to lay, then I blew out the flame and watched the smoke tail away in the dark. Tomorrow I’d slip the letter in the batch going to the post and hope nobody took a hard look.

Sky sang out in her sleep, sounded like Gullah, and I thought of the rice she’d sprinkled on mauma’s grave, trying to send her spirit to Africa.

Africa.
Wherever me and Sky were, that’s the only place mauma would be.

I
woke each day to a sick, empty feeling. Catherine had given us until the first day of October to pack our things and leave, but we could find no one who’d take in two sisters expelled by the Quakers, and Lucretia’s house was packed with children now. The streets had been flooded with hand fliers—they were tacked on light posts and buildings and strewn on the ground—the headline screaming out in the salacious way these street rags did:
OUTRAGE: An Abolitionist of the Most Revolting Character is Among You.
Below that, Nina’s letter to
The Liberator
was printed in full. Even the lowliest boardinghouses wouldn’t open their doors to us.

I’d reached the borders of despair when a letter came with no return name or address on the envelope.

29 September 1835

Dear Misses Grimké,

If you are bold enough to sit with us on the Negro pew, perhaps you will find it in yourself to share our home until you find more suitable lodging. My mother and I have nothing to offer but a partially furnished attic, but it has a window and the chimney runs through the middle of it and keeps it warm. It is yours, if you would have it. We ask that you not speak of the arrangement to anyone, including your present landlord Catherine Morris. We await you at 5 Lancaster Row.

Yours in Fellowship,

Sarah Mapps Douglass

We departed our old life the next day, leaving no forwarding address and no goodbye, arriving by coach at a tiny brick house in a poor, mostly white neighborhood. There was a crooked wooden fence around the front with a chain on the gate, which necessitated us dragging our trunks to the back door.

The attic was poorly lit and gauzy with cobwebs, and when a fire blazed below, the room filled with stultifying heat and smelled bitter with wood smoke, but we didn’t complain. We had a roof. We had each other. We had friends in Sarah Mapps and Grace.

Sarah Mapps was well educated, perhaps more than I, having attended the best Quaker academy for free blacks in the city. She would tell me that even as a child she’d known her only mission in life was to found a school for black children. “Few understand that kind of emphatic knowing,” she said. “Most people, including my mother, feel I’ve sacrificed too much by not marrying and having children, but the pupils, they are my children.” I understood far better than she realized. Like me, she loved books, keeping her precious volumes inside a chest in their small front sitting room. Each evening she read to her mother in her lovely singsong voice—Milton, Byron, Austen—continuing long after Grace had fallen asleep in her chair.

There were hats everywhere in various stages of construction, hanging on tree racks throughout the house, and if not actual hats, then sketches of hats scattered on tables and wedged into the frame of the mirror by the door. Grace made big, wild-feathered creations which she sold to the shops, creations that, as a Quaker, she never could’ve worn herself. Nina said she was living vicariously, but I think she simply possessed the urgings of an artist.

Our first week in the attic, we cleaned. We swept out the dust and spiders and shined the window glass. We polished the two narrow bed frames, the table and chair, and the creaky rocker. Sarah Mapps brought up a hand-braided rug, bright quilts, an extra table, a lantern, and a small bookshelf where we set our books and journals. We tucked evergreen boughs under the eaves to scent the air and hung our clothes on wall hooks. I placed my pewter inkstand on the extra table.

By the second week we were bored. Sarah Mapps had said we should be careful to conceal our comings and goings, that the neighbors would not tolerate racial mixing, but slipping out one day, we were spotted by a group of ruffian boys, who pelted us with pebbles and slurs.
Amalgamators. Amalgamators.
The next day the front of the house was egged.

The third week we became hermits.

When November arrived, I began to pace the oval rug as I reread books and old letters, holding them as I walked, trying not to disappear into the melancholic place I’d visited since childhood. I felt as if I was fighting to hold my ground, that if I stepped off the rug, I would fall into my old abyss.

Before we’d left Catherine’s, a letter had arrived from Handful telling us of Charlotte’s death. Every time I read it—so many times Nina had threatened to hide it from me—I thought of the promise I’d made to help Handful get free. It had plagued me my whole life, and now that Charlotte was gone, instead of releasing me, her death had somehow made the obligation more binding. I told myself I’d tried—I
had
tried. How many times had I written Mother begging to purchase Handful in order to free her? She’d not even acknowledged my requests.

Then one morning while my sister used the last of our paints to capture the bare willow outside the window and I walked my trenchant path on the rug, I suddenly stopped and gazed at the pewter inkstand. I stared at it for whole minutes. Everything was in shambles, and there was the inkstand.

“… Nina! Do you remember how Mother would make us sit for hours and write apologies? Well, I’m going to write one … a true apology for the antislavery cause. You could write, too … We both could.”

She stared at me, while everything I felt and knew offered itself up at once. “… It’s the South that must be reached,” I said. “… We’re Southerners … we know the slaveholders, you and I … We can speak to them … not lecture them, but appeal to them.”

Turning toward the window, she seemed to study the willow, and when she looked back, I saw the glint in her eyes. “We could write a pamphlet!”

She rose, stepping into the quadrangle of light that lay on the floor from the window. “Mr. Garrison printed my letter, perhaps he would print our pamphlet, too, and send it to all the cities in the South. But let’s not address it to the slaveholders. They’ll never listen to us.”

“… Who then?”

“We’ll write to the Southern clergy and to the women. We’ll set the preachers upon them, and their wives and mothers and daughters!”