The Invention of Wings: A Novel

by Sue Monk Kidd

  The lawyer showed up to read the will two days after Sarah got back from the North. We gathered in the dining room, every one of the Grimké children and every slave. Seemed odd to me why missus wanted us slaves here. We stood in a straight line in the back of the room, half-thinking we’re part of the family.

  Sarah was on one side of the table and Nina on the other. Sarah would look over at her sister with a sad smile, and Nina would glance away. Those two were in a miff.

  Missus had on her nice black mourning dress. I wanted to tell her she needed to take it off and let Mariah launder it cause it had gray armpit rings. Seemed like she’d worn it every day since last August, but you couldn’t tell her a thing. The woman got worse in her ways by the day.

  The lawyer, his name was Mr. Huger, stood up with a handful of papers and said it was the last will and testament of John Faucheraud Grimké, drawn up last May. He read the wherefores, to wits, and hithermores. It was worse than the Bible.

  Missus didn’t get the house. That went to Henry, who wasn’t past eighteen, but least she could stay in it till she died. “I leave her the household furniture, plate, plated ware, a carriage and two of my horses, the stock of liquors and provisions which shall be on hand at the time of my death.” This went on and on. All the goods and chattels.

  Then he read something that made the hairs on my arms raise. “She shall receive any six of my Negroes whom she shall choose, and the rest she will sell or disperse among my children, as she determines.”

  Binah was standing next to me. I heard her whisper, “Lord, no.”

  I looked down the row of slaves. There was just eleven of us now—Rosetta had passed on in her sleep the year before.

  She shall receive any six … the rest she will sell or disperse. Five of us were leaving.

  Minta started to sniffle. Aunt-Sister said, “Hush up,” but even her old eyes darted round, looking scared. She’d trained Phoebe too good. Tomfry was getting on with age, too, and Eli’s fingers were twisted like tree twigs. Goodis and Sabe were still young, but you don’t need two slaves in the stable for two horses. Prince was strong and worked the yard, but he had glum spells now, sitting and staring and blowing his nose on his shirt. Mariah was a good worker, and I figured she’d stay, but Binah, she moaned under her breath cause she was the nursery mauma and there was no more children to rear.

  I said to myself, Missus will need a seamstress, but then I noticed the black dress again. From here on out, all she’d need was a few of those to wear, and she could hire somebody for that.

  All of a sudden, Sarah said, “… Father couldn’t have meant that!”

  Missus shot her a look of venom. “Your father wrote the words himself, and we’ll honor his wishes. We have no choice. Please allow Mr. Huger to continue.”

  When he started back reading, Sarah looked at me with the same sorrowful blue eyes she’d had the day she turned eleven years old and I was standing before her with the lavender ribbon round my neck. The world was a bashed-in place and she couldn’t fix it.

  In December, everybody was on their last nerve waiting for missus to say who’d go and who’d stay. If I was sold, how would mauma find me if she came back?

  Every night I put a hot brick in my bed to keep my feet warm and lay there thinking how mauma was alive. Out there somewhere. I wondered if the man who bought her was kind. I wondered if he’d put her in the fields. Was she doing any sewing? Did she have my little brother or sister with her? Was she still wearing the pouch round her neck? I knew she’d get back here if she could. This was where her spirit was, in the tree. This was where I was.

  Don’t let me be the one that has to go.

  Missus didn’t have Christmas that year, but she said go ahead and have Jonkonnu if you want to. That was a custom that got started a few years back brought by the Jamaica slaves. Tomfry would dress up in a shirt and pants tattered with strips of bright cloth sewed on, and a stove pipe hat on his head—what we called the Ragman. We’d traipse behind him, singing and banging pots, winding to the back door. He’d knock and missus and everybody would come out and watch him dance. Then missus would hand out little gifts to us. Could be a coin or a new candle. Sometimes a scarf or a cob pipe. This was supposed to keep us happy.

  We didn’t expect to feel in the mood this year, but on Jonkonnu day, here came Tomfry in the yard, wearing his shaggy outfit, and we made a lot of clatter and forgot our troubles for a minute.

  Missus stepped out from the back door in the black dress with a basket of gifts, Sarah, Nina, Henry, and Charles behind her. They were trying to smile at us. Even Henry, who took after his mauma, looked like a grinning angel.

  Tomfry did his jig. Twirled. Bounced. Wagged his arms. The ribbons whirled out, and when he was done, they clapped, and he took off the tall hat and rubbed the crust of gray on his scalp. Reaching in the basket, missus gave the women these nice fans made with painted paper. The men got two coins, not one.

  The sky had been cast down all day, but now the sun broke free. Missus leaned on her gold-tip cane and squinted at us. She called out Tomfry’s name. Then Binah. Eli. Prince. Mariah. She said, “I have something extra for you,” and handed each one a jar of gargling oil.

  “You’ve served me well,” she told them. “Tomfry, you will go to John’s household. Binah, you will go to Thomas. Eli, I’m sending you to Mary.” Then she turned to Prince and Mariah. “I’m sorry to say you must be sold. It’s not my wish, but it’s necessary.”

  Nobody spoke. The quiet sat on us like a stone you couldn’t lift.

  Mariah dropped down and walked on her knees to missus, crying for her to change her mind.

  Missus wiped her eyes. Then she turned and went in the house followed by her sons, but Sarah and Nina stayed behind, their faces full of pity.

  The axe didn’t fall on me. Didn’t my Lord deliver Handful? The axe didn’t fall on Goodis either, and I felt surprise over the relief this caused me. But there was no God in any of it. Nothing but the four of them standing there, and Mariah, still on her knees. I couldn’t bear to look at Tomfry with the hat squashed under his arm. Prince and Eli, studying the ground. Binah, holding her paper fan, staring at Phoebe. A daughter she’d never see again.

  Missus doled out their jobs to the ones of us left. Sabe took over for Tomfry as the butler. Goodis had the work yard, the stable, and drove the carriage. Phoebe got the laundry, and Minta and I got Eli’s cleaning duties.

  When the first of the year came, missus set me to work on the English chandelier in the drawing room. She said Eli hadn’t shined it proper in ten years. It had twenty-eight arms with crystal shades and teardrops of cut-glass hanging down. Using the ladder and wearing white cotton gloves, I took it apart and laid it out on the table and shined it with ammonia. Then, I couldn’t figure out how to put the thing back together.

  I found Sarah in her room, reading a leather book. “We’ll figure it out,” she said. We hadn’t talked much since she got back—she seemed woebegone all the time, always stuck in that same book.

  After we finally got the chandelier back on the ceiling in one piece, tears flared up in her eyes. I said, “You sad about your daddy?”

  She answered me the strangest way, and I knew what she said was the real hurt she’d brought back with her. “… I’m twenty-seven years old, Handful, and this is my life now.” She looked round the room, up at the chandelier, and back at me. “… This is my life. Right here for the rest of my days.” Her voice broke and she covered her mouth with her hand.

  She was trapped same as me, but she was trapped by her mind, by the minds of the people round her, not by the law. At the African church, Mr. Vesey used to say, Be careful, you can get enslaved twice, once in your body and once in your mind.

  I tried to tell her that. I said, “My body might be a slave, but not my mind. For you, it’s the other way round.”

  She blinked at me and the tears came again, shining like cut-glass.

  The day Binah left, I heard Phoebe crying
all the way from the kitchen house.

  Sarah

  1 February 1820

  Dear Israel,

  How often I have thought of our conversations on board ship! I read the book you entrusted to me and my spirit was deeply kindled. There are so many things I wish to ask you! How I wish we were together again—

  3 February 1820

  Dear Mr. Morris,

  After being away from the evils of slavery for six months, my mind burst with new horror at seeing it again on my return to Charleston. It was made all the worse upon reading the book you gave me. I have nowhere to turn but you—

  10 February 1820

  Dear Mr. Morris,

  I trust you are well. How is your dear wife, Rebecca—

  11 February 1820

  Thank you, sir, for the book. I find a bewildering beauty in your Quaker beliefs—the notion there is a seed of light inside of us, a mysterious Inner Voice. Would you kindly advise me how this Voice—

  I wrote to him over and over, letters I couldn’t finish. Invariably, I would stop mid-sentence. I would lay down the quill, fold the letter, and conceal it with the rest at the back of my desk drawer.

  It was the middle of the afternoon, the winter gloom hovering as I pulled out the thick bundle, untied the black satin ribbon, and added the letter of February 11 to the heap. Mailing the letters would only bring anguish. I was too drawn to him. Every letter he answered would incite my feelings more. And it would do no good to have him encouraging me toward Quakerdom. The Quakers were a despised sect here, regarded as anomalous, plain-dressed, and strange, a tiny cluster of jarringly eccentric people who drew stares on the street. Surely, I didn’t need to invite that kind of ridicule and shun. And Mother—she would never allow it.

  Hearing her cane on the pine floor outside, I snatched up the letters and yanked open the drawer, my hands fumbling with panic. The stationery cascaded into my lap and onto the rug. As I stooped to collect it, the door swung open without a knock and she stood framed in the opening, her eyes moving across my hidden cache.

  I looked up at her with the black ribbon furling from my fingers.

  “You’re needed in the library,” she said. I couldn’t detect the slightest curiosity in her about the contents I’d spilled. “Sabe is packing your father’s books—I need you to oversee that he does it properly.”

  “Packing?”

  “They will be divided between Thomas and John,” she said, and turning, left me.

  I gathered up the letters, tied them with the ribbon, and slipped them back into the drawer. Why I kept them, I didn’t know—it was foolish.

  When I arrived in the library, Sabe wasn’t there. He’d emptied most of the shelves, stacking the books in several large trunks, which sat open on the floor, the same floor where I’d knelt all those years ago when Father forbade me the books. I didn’t want to think of it, of that terrible time, of the room stripped now, the books lost to me, always lost.

  I sank into Father’s chair. The clock in the main passage clicked, magnifying, and I felt the shadows gathering inside of me again, worse this time. Since returning, I’d slipped further into melancholy each day. It was the same trough of darkness I’d fallen into when I was twelve and the life had gone out of everything. Mother had summoned Dr. Geddings back then, and I feared she might do so again. Every day, I forced myself to come down for tea. I endured the visitations from her friends. I kept up my attendance at church, at Bible study, at alms meetings. I sat with Mother in the mornings, hoops of embroidery on our laps, willing the needle through the cloth. She’d given me the task of household records, and each week I sorted through the supplies, writing inventories and procurement lists. The house, the slaves, Charleston, Mother, the Presbyterians—they were the woof and warp of everything.

  Nina had pulled away. She was angry at me for remaining in Philadelphia after Father died. “You don’t know what it was like alone here,” she’d cried. “Mother instructed me constantly in the error of my ways, everything from church to slavery to my rebellious nature. It was horrible!”

  I’d been the buffer between her and Mother, and my remaining away for so long had left her exposed. “I’m sorry,” I told her.

  “You only wrote to me once!” Her beautiful face was contorted with hurt and resentment. “Once.”

  It was true. I’d been so enamored with my freedom up there, I hadn’t bothered. “I’m sorry,” I said again.

  I knew in time she would forgive the selfish months I’d abandoned her, but I sensed the estrangement came from more than that. At fifteen, she needed to break away, to come out from my shadow, to understand who she was separate from me. My retreat to Philadelphia was only the excuse she needed to declare her independence.

  As she fled to her room the day of our confrontation, she shouted, “Mother was right, I have no mind of my own. Only yours!”

  We passed now like strangers. I let her be, but it added to my despair.

  I stared at the trunks of books on the library floor, remembering the pangs I’d once had for a profession, for some purpose. The world had been such a beckoning place once.

  Sabe still had not returned. I got up from my chair and rummaged nostalgically among the books, coming upon The Sacred Biography of Jeanne d’Arc of France. I couldn’t say how many times I’d read that wondrous little volume of Saint Joan’s bravery before Father had banned me from his library. Opening it now, I gazed at a sketch of her coat of arms—two fleurs de lis. I’d forgotten it was there, and it made sudden sense to me why I’d latched onto the fleur de lis button when I was eleven. I slipped the book beneath my shawl.

  That night, unable to sleep, I heard the clock downstairs bong two, then three. The rain began soon after, beating without mercy against the piazza and the windows. I climbed from the covers and lit the lantern. I would write to Israel. I would tell him how melancholy swallowed me at times, how I almost felt the grave would be a refuge. I would write yet another letter I wouldn’t mail. Perhaps it would relieve me.

  I pulled open the desk drawer and watched the light tumble inside it. There, as I’d left it, was my Bible and my Blackstone commentary, my stationery, ink, pen, ruler, and sealing wax, yet I didn’t see the bundle of letters. I drew the lamp closer and reached my hand into the empty corners. The black ribbon was there, curled like a malicious afterthought. My letters to Israel were gone.

  I wanted to scream at her. The need took hold of me with blinding violence, and I flung open my door and rushed down the stairs, clinging to the rail as my feet seemed to sweep out from under me.

  I battered her door with my fist, then rattled the knob. It was locked. “… How dare you take them!” I shrieked. “How dare you. Open the door. Open it!”

  I couldn’t imagine what she’d thought on reading my intimate implorings to a stranger in the North. A Quaker. A man with a wife. Did she think I’d remained in Philadelphia for him?

  Behind the door, I heard her call to Minta, who slept on the floor near her bed. I pounded again. “… Open it! You had no right!”

  She didn’t respond, but Nina’s scared voice came from the stair landing. “Sister?”

  Looking up, I saw her white gown glowing in the dark, Henry and Charles beside her, the three of them like wraiths.

  “… Go to bed,” I said.

  Their bare feet slapped the floor and I heard the doors to their rooms bang shut one by one. Turning back, I lifted my fist again, but my rage had begun to recede, flowing back into the terrible place it’d come from. Limp and exhausted, I leaned my head against the door sill, hating myself.

  The next morning, I couldn’t get out of bed. I tried very hard, but it was as if something in me had dropped anchor. I rolled my face into the pillow. I no longer cared.

  During the days that followed, Handful brought me trays of food, which I barely touched. I had no hunger for anything except sleep, and it eluded me. Some nights I wandered onto the piazza and stared over the rail at the garden, imagining myself fal
ling.

  Handful placed a gunny sack beside me on the bed one day. “Open it up,” she said. When I did, the smell of char wafted out. Inside, I found my letters, singed and blackened. She’d found Minta tossing them into the fire in the kitchen house, as Mother had ordered. Handful had rescued them with a poker.

  When spring came and my state of mind didn’t improve, Dr. Geddings arrived. Mother seemed genuinely afraid for me. She visited my room with handfuls of drooping jonquils and spoke sweetly, saying I should come for a stroll with her on Gadsden Green, or that she’d asked Aunt-Sister to bake me a rice pudding. She brought me notes of concern from members of my church, who were under the impression I had pleurisy. I would gaze at her blankly, then look away toward the window.

  Nina visited, too. “Was it me?” she asked. “Did I cause you to feel like this?”

  “Oh, Nina,” I said. “… You must never think that … I can’t explain what’s wrong with me, but it’s not you.”

  Then one day in May, Thomas appeared. He insisted we sit on the porch where the air was warm and weighed with the scent of lilacs. I listened as he went on heatedly about a recent compromise in Congress that had undone the ban on slavery in Missouri. “That damnable Henry Clay!” he said. “The Great Pacificator. He has started the cancer spreading again.”

  I had no idea what he was talking about. To my surprise, though, I felt curious. Later, I would realize that was Thomas’ intention—creating a little pulley to try and tow me back.

  “He’s a fool—he believes letting slavery into Missouri will placate the firebrands down here, but it’s only splitting the country further.” He reached for the newspaper he’d brought and spread it out for me. “Look at this.”

  A letter had been printed on the front page of the Mercury, which called Clay’s compromise a fire bell in the night.