The Invention of Wings: A Novel (53 page)

Here and there, I’ve taken small liberties with time. The treadmill inside the Work House upon which I imagined Handful becoming crippled was all too real, but I’ve predated the treadmill’s installation there by seven years. The raid on the African church in Charleston that radicalized Denmark Vesey took place in June 1818, a year earlier than I’ve depicted it. I also predated the alphabet song, which I described Sarah singing to the children in Colored Sunday School, where she did in fact teach. And while Angelina’s letter to the abolitionist newspaper was indeed the fulcrum that propelled the sisters into the public arena, Sarah did not come to terms with her sister’s public declaration right away, as I’ve suggested. Sarah was often slower with her turning points than a novelist would wish. It took her a full year before finally letting go and throwing herself into the revolutionary work that would become her great flourishing. I also feel compelled to mention that Sarah and Angelina were not immediately expelled from their conservative branch of the Quakers, but Angelina’s letter did create condemnation, reprimands, and threats of disownment by the committee of Overseers. The sisters were actually expelled some three years later—Angelina for marrying a non-Quaker and Sarah for attending the wedding.

The strange and moving symbiosis that began when Sarah became her sister’s godmother at the age of twelve makes me think they wouldn’t mind too much that occasionally I’ve borrowed something Angelina said or did and given it to Sarah. One of the more glaring examples of this has to do with the anti-slavery pamphlets they wrote appealing to the women and clergy of the South. Angelina came up with the idea first, not Sarah, and she wrote her pamphlet a year ahead of Sarah. Nevertheless, once Sarah dived into composing her own essays, she became the more accomplished theoretician and writer, while Angelina went on to become one of the most luminous and persuasive orators of her day. Sarah’s daring feminist arguments in
Letters on the Equality of the Sexes,
published in 1837, would inspire and impact women such as Lucy Stone, Abby Kelley, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Lucretia Mott. Further, it was Angelina’s pamphlets that were publicly burned by the Charleston postmaster, prompting a warning to Mrs. Grimké that her daughter should not return to Charleston under threat of arrest. Let it be said, though, Sarah had no welcome in the city either.

I’ve abridged and consolidated events in the sisters’ public crusade that took place from December 1836 to May 1838, offering only a telescoped look at the attacks, censure, hostility, and violence they encountered for speaking out as they did. They shook, bent, and finally broke the gender barrier that denied American women a voice and a platform in the political and social spheres. During the furor, Angelina quipped, “We abolition women are turning the world upside down.” Sarah’s jibe, which I included in the novel, was more pointed: “All I ask of our brethren is that they will take their feet from off our necks.”

As for what became of the sisters after the narrative in the novel ends, they retired from the rigors of public life following Angelina’s wedding, in part due to Angelina’s fragile health. Together, they raised Angelina and Theodore’s three children and remained active in anti-slavery and suffrage organizations, tirelessly collecting petitions, and giving aid to a number of Grimké family slaves, whom they helped to set free. Their powerful document,
American Slavery As It Is
, sold more copies than any anti-slavery pamphlet ever written up until
Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
Sarah continued to write throughout the rest of her life, and I found it moving that she eventually published her translation of Lamartine’s biography of Joan of Arc, the female figure of courage whom she so greatly admired. The sisters started more than one boarding school and taught the children of many leading abolitionists. While teaching in the school of Raritan Bay Union, a cooperative, utopian community in New Jersey, they came in contact with reformers and intellectuals such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bronson Alcott, and Henry David Thoreau. I was amused to read that Thoreau found gray-haired Sarah to be a strange sight going about in a feminist bloomer costume.

My favorite event in Sarah’s later history occurred in 1870, a few years before she died in Hyde Park, Massachusetts, when she and Angelina led a procession of forty-two women to the polls amid a town election. They marched through a driving snowstorm, where they dropped their illegal ballots into a symbolic voting box. It was the sisters’ last act of public defiance. Sarah lived to be eighty-one. Angelina, seventy-four. Despite sisterly conflicts from time to time, the unusual bond that tethered them was never broken, nor were they ever separated.

Besides Sarah and Angelina, I’ve included other historical figures in the book, rendering them through my own elucidations of their history: Theodore Weld, the famous abolitionist, whom Angelina married; Lucretia Mott, another famous abolitionist and women’s rights pioneer; Sarah Mapps Douglass, a free black abolitionist and educator; Israel Morris, a wealthy Quaker businessman and widower who proposed marriage to Sarah, twice. (Her diary suggests she loved him quite deeply, despite turning him down. She maintained that she was bound to her vocation to become a Quaker minister, perhaps believing she could not have marriage and independence both.) There is also Catherine Morris, Israel’s sister and a conservative Quaker elder, with whom Sarah and Angelina boarded; William Lloyd Garrison, editor of the radical abolitionist newspaper
The Liberator;
Elizur Wright, secretary of the American Anti-Slavery Society; and the poet John Greenleaf Whittier, Theodore Weld’s friend, who along with Theodore made a vow not to marry until slavery was ended, a vow Theodore broke. I might add that both men were supporters of women’s rights, and yet in letters to Sarah and Angelina, they strongly pressured the sisters to desist from the cause of women for fear it would split the abolitionist movement. Some of the more salient words that Angelina wrote back to Theodore are included in the imagined scene in which the men arrive at Mrs. Whittier’s cottage and order the sisters to stop their fight for women. Sarah and Angelina defied the men, and indeed as historian Gerda Lerner pointed out, they were the ones who attached the cause of women’s rights to the cause of abolition, creating what some saw as a dangerous split and others as a brilliant alliance. Either way, their refusal to desist played a vibrant part in propelling the cause of women into American life.

I’ve tried to represent the members of the Grimké family with a fair amount of accuracy. Sarah’s mother, Mary Grimké, was by all accounts a proud and difficult woman. According to Catherine Birney, Sarah’s earliest biographer, Mrs. Grimké was devout, narrow, undemonstrative in her affections to her children, and often cruel to her slaves, visiting on them severe and common punishments. She did not, as far as I know, inflict the one-legged punishment on her slaves, but it was an actual punishment, one that Sarah herself described in detail as being used by “one of the first families in Charleston.” My representation of Sarah’s father, Judge John Grimké, and of the events in his life, are reasonably close to the record, as is the account of Sarah’s favorite brother, Thomas. I have no doubt that I deviated with Sarah’s older sister Mary (“little missus”), whose history is mostly unknown. Though I found one source that referred to her as unmarried and others that listed her spouse as unknown, I married her to a plantation owner and later had her return home as a widow. She did, however, remain committed to the cause of slavery and unapologetic about it until her death in 1865, a detail I built upon.

It was a thrill for me to visit the Grimkés’ house on East Bay Street. Though the house can be dated only to circa 1789, it may have come into John Grimké’s possession at the time of his marriage in 1784. It remained in the family until Mrs. Grimké died in 1839. Today, it’s well preserved and occupied by a law firm. It is likely that some of the house’s original layout and interiors remain the same, including the fireplaces, cypress panels, Delft tiles, pine floors, and moldings. Wandering through the house, I could picture Handful in an alcove on the second floor, gazing out at the harbor, and Sarah slipping down the staircase to her father’s library as the slaves lay asleep on the floor outside the bedroom doors. I was even permitted into the attic, where I noticed a ladder leading to a hatch in the roof. I can’t say whether the hatch was always there, but I could envision Sarah and Handful climbing through it as girls, an idea that would prompt the scene of their having tea on the roof and telling one another their secrets.

The Historic Charleston Foundation was of great help to me and provided me with a document that contained an inventory and appraisement of all “the goods and chattels” in John Grimké’s Charleston house soon after his death in 1819. While poring over this long and meticulous list, I was stunned to come upon the names, ages, roles, and appraised values of seventeen slaves. They were recorded between the Brussels carpet and eleven yards of cotton and flax. The discovery haunted me, and eventually it found its way into the story with Handful unearthing the inventory in the library and finding hers and Charlotte’s names inscribed on it along with their supposed worth.

All of the enslaved characters in the novel are conjured from my imagination, with the exception of Denmark Vesey’s lieutenants, who were actual figures: Gullah Jack, Monday Gell, Peter Poyas, and Rolla and Ned Bennett. All but Gell were hanged for their roles in the plotted revolt. Vesey himself was a free black carpenter, whose life, plot, arrest, trial, and execution I’ve tried to represent relatively close to historical accounts. I didn’t concoct that odd detail about Vesey winning the lottery with ticket number 1884, then using the payoff to buy both his freedom and a house on Bull Street. Frankly, I wonder if I would’ve had the courage to make such a thing up. In public reports, Vesey was said to have been hanged at Blake’s Lands along with five of his conspirators, but I chose to portray an oral tradition that has persisted among some black citizens of Charleston since the 1820s, which states that Vesey was hanged alone from an oak tree in order to keep his execution shrouded in anonymity. Vesey was said to have kept a number of “wives” around the city and to have fathered a number of children with them, so I took the liberty of making Handful’s mother one of these “wives” and Sky his daughter.

Some historians have doubts about whether Vesey’s planned slave insurrection truly existed or to what extent, but I have followed the opinion that not only was Vesey more than capable of creating such a plot, he attempted it. I wanted this work to acknowledge the many enslaved and free black Americans who fought, plotted, resisted, and died for the sake of freedom. Reading about the protest and escapes of various actual female slaves helped me to shape the characters and stories of Charlotte and Handful.

The story quilt in the novel was inspired by the magnificent quilts of Harriet Powers, an enslaved woman from Georgia who used African appliqué technique to tell stories about biblical events and historical legends. Her two surviving quilts are archived at the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. I made a pilgrimage to Washington to see Powers’ quilt, and after viewing it, it seemed plausible that enslaved women, forbidden to read and write, could have devised subversive ways to voice themselves, to keep their memories alive, and to preserve the heritage of their African traditions. I envisioned Charlotte using cloth and needle as others use paper and pen, creating a visual memoir, attempting to set down the events of her life in a single quilt. One of the most fascinating parts of my research had to be the hours I spent reading about slave quilts and the symbols and imagery in African textiles, which introduced me to the notion of black triangles representing blackbird wings.

If you’re inclined to read further about the historical content in the novel or about Harriet Powers’ quilts, you might want to explore this sampling of very readable books:

The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina: Pioneers for Women’s Rights and Abolition,
by Gerda Lerner.

The Feminist Thought of Sarah Grimké,
by Gerda Lerner.

Lift Up Thy Voice: The Grimké Family’s Journey from Slaveholders to Civil Rights Leaders,
by Mark Perry.

The Politics of Taste in Antebellum Charleston,
by Maurie D. McInnis.

Denmark Vesey: The Buried Story of America’s Largest Slave Rebellion and the Man Who Led It,
by David Robertson.

Africans in America: America’s Journey Through Slavery,
by Charles Johnson, Patricia Smith, and the WGBH Series Research Team.

To Be a Slave,
by Julius Lester, with illustrations by Tom Feelings (Newberry Honor book).

Stitching Stars: The Story Quilts of Harriet Powers,
by Mary Lyons (ALA Notable Book for Children).

Signs & Symbols: African Images in African American Quilts,
by Maude Southwell Wahlman.

In writing
The Invention of Wings,
I was inspired by the words of Professor Julius Lester, which I kept propped on my desk: “History is not just facts and events. History is also a pain in the heart and we repeat history until we are able to make another’s pain in the heart our own.”

My deepest thanks to …

Ann Kidd Taylor, an exceptionally gifted writer and author, who read and reread this manuscript in progress, offering me invaluable comments and endless believing.

Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, my amazing agent and dear friend.

My terrific editor, Paul Slovak, and Clare Ferraro, and the extraordinary team at Viking for their boundless support.

Valerie Perry, Aiken-Rhett House museum manager at Historic Charleston Foundation, who gave so generously of her time and efforts and offered tremendous help with my research.

Carter Hudgens, director of preservation and education at Drayton Hall in Charleston, for his time and insights into the life and history of enslaved people.