The Invention of Wings: A Novel

by Sue Monk Kidd

  When I’d returned to Philadelphia after my disastrous attempt to resume life in Charleston, I’d rented a room in the home of Lucretia Mott, determined to make some kind of life for myself, and I suppose I’d done that. Twice weekly, I traveled to Green Hill to tutor Becky, though my old foe, Catherine, had recently informed me that my little protégée would be going away to school next year and my tutoring would end at the first of the summer. If I was to stay useful, I would have to seek out another Quaker family in need of a teacher, but as yet, I hadn’t made the effort. Catherine was kinder to me now, though she still drew herself up tight as a bud when she saw Israel smile at me at Meeting, something he never failed to do. Nor did he fail in his visits to me, coming twice each month to call on me in the Motts’ parlor.

  I looked at him now and wondered how we’d gotten ourselves stranded on this endless plateau of friendship. One heard all sorts of rumors about it. That Israel’s two eldest sons opposed his remarriage, not on general principle, mind you, but specifically to me. That he’d promised Rebecca on her deathbed he would love no one but her. That some of the elders had counseled him against taking a wife for reasons that ranged from his unreadiness to my unprovenness. I was not, after all, a birthright Quaker. In Charleston, it was being born into the planter class that mattered, here it was the Quakers. Some things were the same everywhere. “You’re the most patient of women,” Israel had told me once. It didn’t strike me as much of a virtue.

  Today, except for the newness of his beard, Israel’s visit gradually began to seem like all the rest. I twiddled with my napkin as he talked about merino sheep farms and wool dyes. There was the clink of teacups when the silence came, children’s voices overhead mingled with racing footsteps on creaking floors, and then, abruptly, without preface, he announced, “My son Israel is getting married.”

  The way he said it, quiet and apologetic, embarrassed me.

  “… Israel? … Little Israel?”

  “He’s not so little now. He’s twenty-two.” He sighed, as if something had passed him by, and I wondered absurdly if there was a Quaker law forbidding fathers to marry after their sons. I wondered if the beard was not so much a new incarnation as a concession.

  When it was time to say goodbye, he took my hand and pressed it against the dark whorls of hair on his cheek. He closed his eyes, and when he opened them, I felt he was about to say something. I lifted my brows. But then, releasing my hand, he rose from the divan and whatever errant thought had wriggled from his heart returned to it, repentant and undeclared.

  He walked uncertainly to the door and let himself out, while I remained seated, seeing things with terrible clarity: the passivity, the hesitation about the future. Not Israel’s—mine.

  As Lucretia and I sat in the tiny room she called a studio, winter rain pricked the windowpane, turning to ice. We’d pulled our chairs close to the hearth where the fire was snapping and popping, zinging like harp strings. Lucretia was opening a small packet of mail that had arrived in the afternoon. I was reading a Sir Walter Scott novel banned by the Quakers, which somehow made it all the more enjoyable, but now, drowsy with heat, I lowered the book and stared into the flames.

  It was my favorite part of the day—after the children were put to bed and Lucretia’s husband, James, had retired to his study, and it was just the two of us gathered here in her odd little nook of a room. A studio. It was comprised of nothing more than two stuffed chairs, a large leafed table, a fireplace, wall shelves, and a wide window that looked out over a copse of red mulberries and black oaks behind the house. The room was not for cooking or sewing or childcare or entertaining. Scattered with papers and pamphlets, books and correspondence, art palettes and squares of velvet cloth on which she pinned the bright luna moths she found lifeless in the garden, this room was just for her.

  I don’t know how many evenings we’d spent in here talking, or like tonight, sitting quietly like two solitudes. Lucretia and I had formed a bond that went beyond friends. And yet I felt the difference between us. I noticed it at Meetings when I saw her on the Facing bench, the only female minister among all those men, the way she rose and spoke with such fearless beauty, and every morning when I went downstairs and there were her children sticky with oat gruel. I would get a faintly vacuous feeling in the pit of my stomach, not from envy that she had a profession, or these little ones, or even James, who was not like other men, but of some unknown species, a husband who beamed over her profession and made the oat gruel himself. No, it wasn’t that. It was the belonging I envied. She’d found her belonging.

  “Why, this letter is for you,” Lucretia said, thrusting it toward me. It was Nina’s stationery, but not Nina’s script. The handwriting on the front was childlike and crude. Miss Sarah Grimké.

  Dear Sarah

  Mauma’s back. Nina said I could write you myself with the news. She ran away from the plantation where she’d been kept all this time. You should see her. She has scars and a full head of white hair and looks old as Methusal, but she’s the same inside. I nurse her day and night. She brought my sister with her named Sky. I know that’s some name. It comes from mauma and her longings. She always said one day we’d fly like blackbirds.

  Missus stays mad at Nina most all the time. Nina started some troubles at the presbyterry church where she goes. Some man came last week to punish her on something she said. Mauma and Sky are the one bright hope.

  It has taken too long to write this. Forgive my mistakes. I don’t get to read any more and work on my words. One day I will.

  Handful

  “I hope it isn’t bad news,” Lucretia said, studying my face, which must’ve been a confusion of elation and heart-wrench.

  I read the letter aloud to her. I hadn’t spoken much about the slaves my family held, but I had told her about Handful. She reached over and patted my hand.

  We fell quiet as the ice turned back to rain, coming in a dark, drowning wash on the window. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine the reunion between Handful and her mother. The sister named Sky. Charlotte’s scars and white hair.

  “… Why would God plant such deep yearnings in us … if they only come to nothing?” It was more of a sigh than a question. I was thinking of Charlotte and her longing to be free, but as the words left my mouth, I knew I was thinking of myself, too.

  I hadn’t really expected Lucretia to respond, but after a moment, she spoke. “God fills us with all sorts of yearnings that go against the grain of the world—but the fact those yearnings often come to nothing, well, I doubt that’s God’s doing.” She cut her eyes at me and smiled. “I think we know that’s men’s doing.”

  She leaned toward me. “Life is arranged against us, Sarah. And it’s brutally worse for Handful and her mother and sister. We’re all yearning for a wedge of sky, aren’t we? I suspect God plants these yearnings in us so we’ll at least try and change the course of things. We must try, that’s all.”

  I felt her words tear a hole in the life I’d made. An irreparable hole.

  I started to tell her that as a child I’d yearned for the entire firmament. For a profession completely untried among women. I didn’t want her to think I’d always been content to be a tutor when I had little passion for it, but I pushed the confession aside. Even Nina didn’t know about my aspiration to be a lawyer, how it’d ended in humiliation.

  “… But you did more than try to become a minister … You accomplished it … I’ve often wondered whether one must feel a special call from God to undertake that.”

  Quaker ministers were nothing like the Anglican or Presbyterian clergy I was used to. They didn’t stand behind a pulpit and preach sermons: they spoke during the Silence as inspired by God. Anyone could speak, of course, but the ministers were the most verbal, the ones who offered messages for worship, the ones whose voices seemed set apart.

  She pushed at the messy bun coiled at her neck. “I can’t say the call I felt was special. I wanted to have a say in things, that’s what it came down to.
I wanted to speak my conscience and to have it matter. Surely, God calls us all to that.”

  “… Do you think … I could become a Quaker minister?” The words had been tucked inside of me for a long time, perhaps since the moment on the ship when I first met Israel and he told me female ministers actually existed.

  “Sarah Grimké, you’re the most intelligent person I know. Of course you could.”

  Propped in bed, wearing my warmest woolen gown, my hair loosed, I bent over the bed-desk and pewter inkstand I’d recently indulged in buying and tried to answer Handful’s letter.

  19 January 1827

  Dear Handful,

  What joyous news! Charlotte is back! You have a sister!

  I lowered the pen and stared at the procession of exclamations. I sounded like a chirping bird. It was my fifth attempt at a beginning.

  Strewn about me on the bed were crumpled balls of paper. How happy you must be now, I’d written first, then worried she might think I was implying all her miseries were over now. Next: I was euphoric to receive your news, but what if she didn’t know the word euphoric? I couldn’t write a single line without fear of seeming insensitive or condescending, too removed or too familiar. I remembered us, as I always did, on the roof drinking tea, but that was gone and it was all balled-up paper now.

  I picked up the sheet of stationery with the glib exclamations and crushed it in my hands. A smear of ink licked across my palm. Holding my hand aloft from Lucretia’s white eiderdown, I lifted the bed-desk from across my legs and went to the basin. When soap failed to remove the stain, I rummaged in the dresser drawer for the cream of tartar, and there, lying beside the bottle, was the black lava box containing my silver fleur de lis button. I opened it and gazed down at the button. It was darkly silvered, like something pearling up from beneath the water.

  The button had been the most constant object in my life. I’d thrown it away that once, but it’d come back to me. I could thank Handful for that.

  I returned to the warmth of the bed and placed the button on the bed-desk, watching the lamplight spill over it. I lay back on the pillow, remembering my eleventh birthday party at which Handful had been presented to me, how I’d woken the next day with the overpowering sense I was meant to do something in the world, something large, larger than myself. I brushed my finger across the button. It had always held this knowing for me.

  In the room, everything magnified: cinders dropping on the hearth, a tiny scratching at the baseboard, the smell of ink, the etch of the fleur de lis on the button.

  I took a clean sheet of stationery.

  19 January 1827

  Dear Handful,

  My heart is full. I try to imagine you with Charlotte and a new sister, and I can’t dream what you must feel. I’m happy for you. At the same time, I’m sad to know of the scars your mother bears, all the horrors she must have lived through. But I won’t focus on that now, only on your togetherness.

  Did you know once, when we were girls, Charlotte made me vow that one day I would do whatever I could to help you get free? We were out by the woodpile where the little orphaned barn owl lived. I remember it like yesterday. I confess now, that’s why I taught you to read. I told myself reading was a kind of freedom, the only one I could give. I’m sorry, Handful. I’m sorry I couldn’t keep the vow any better.

  I still have the silver button you rescued after I tossed it out. As I write you now, it sits beside the inkwell, reminding me of the destiny I always believed was inside of me, waiting. How can I explain such a thing? I simply know it the way I know there’s an oak tree inside an acorn. I’ve been filled with a hunger to grow this seed my whole life. I used to think I was supposed to become a lawyer, perhaps because that’s what Father and Thomas did, but it was never that. These days, I feel inspired to become a Quaker minister. Doing so will at least provide me a way to do what I tried to do on my eleventh birthday, that day you were cruelly given to me to own. It will allow me to tell whoever might listen that I can’t accept this, that we can’t accept slavery, it must end. That’s what I was born for—not the ministry, not the law, but abolition. I’ve come to know it only this night, but it has always been the tree in the acorn.

  Tell your mother I’m glad she has found you again. Greet your sister for me. I’ve failed in many things, even in my love for you, but I think of you as my friend.

  Sarah

  Handful

  That winter mauma sat idle by the fire in the kitchen house. She got a little weight back on her, but sometimes she had spells when she couldn’t keep down her food and we’d be back where we started. Mauma said every time she saw me, I was coming at her with a piece of biscuit.

  We had plenty of vacant slave quarters, but the three of us stayed on together in the cellar room. Goodis brought in a little bed from the nursery, and we wedged it beside the big bed and slept three peas in a pod underneath the quilt frame. Sky asked one time what was all that wood nailed on the ceiling, and I said, “You never saw a quilt frame?” and mauma said, “Well, you ain’t never seen a rice field, so yawl even.”

  Mauma still wouldn’t talk about what’d happened to her. She’d say, “What’s done’s done.” Most nights, though, she’d wake up and pace the room, and it didn’t seem done at all. I realized the best curing thing for her was a needle, a thread, and a piece of cloth. One day, I told her I needed some help and handed her the mending basket. When I came back, the needle was a hummingbird in her fingers.

  The hardest part was finding work for Sky. She couldn’t do the laundry to save her life. I got Sabe to try her in the house cleaning and serving tea with me and Minta, but missus said she didn’t look the part, and put off the guests. After that, she went to work in the kitchen house, but she drove Aunt-Sister crazy with her chatter, stories about rabbits out-tricking foxes and bears. She usually ended up on the porch, singing in Gullah. Ef oona ent kno weh oona da gwuine, oona should kno weh oona dum from. That same song, over and over. If you don’t know where you’re going, you should know where you came from.

  One morning on the tail end of winter, the knocker clacked on the front door and in came Mr. Huger, the solicitor, stomping the cold off his feet. He handed me his hat while Sabe went to get missus.

  I found Nina in her room, readying for the class she taught at church. I said, “Quick, you need to come see what your mauma’s up to. Mr. Huger’s down there—”

  She flew from the room before I could finish off the sentence.

  I dawdled outside the closed drawing room doors, but I couldn’t make out much they were saying—just passing words. Pension … Bank … Cotton crash … Sacrifice. The clock bonged ten times. The sound filled the house, turning it heavy, and when it stopped, I heard missus say the word sky. Maybe she was talking about the blue roof that hung over the world but I knew it was my sister.

  I flattened my ear to the door. Let Sabe find me and chase me off, I couldn’t care.

  “She’s thirteen years old, without any perceivable domestic skills, but she’s strong.” That was missus talking.

  Mr. Huger mumbled about going rates, selling in the spring when the planting started on the plantations.

  “You can’t separate Sky from her mother,” Nina cried. “It’s inhuman!”

  “I don’t care for it either,” missus said. “But we must face reality.”

  My breath clutched at my ribs like grabbing hands. I closed my eyes, tired of the sorry world.

  When I found mauma in the kitchen house, she was alone with the mending basket. I sank beside her. “Missus plans to sell Sky in the spring. We got to find a way for her to earn her keep.”

  “Sell?” She looked at me with stun, then pinched her eyes. “We ain’t come this far so she can sell my girl. That’s for damn sure.”

  “There must be something in the world Sky’s good at doing.” The way I said it, like my sister was slow in the head, caused mauma to flare at me.

  “Don’t you talk like that! Your sister has the smart of Denm
ark in her.” She shook her head. “He’s her daddy, but I guess you figure that.”

  “Yeah, I figured.” It seemed like the time to finally tell her. “Denmark, he—”

  “There ain’t a slave living who don’t know what happen to him. We heard it all the way to Beaufort.”

  I didn’t tell her I’d watched him dangle on the tree, but I told her everything else. I started with the church where we’d sung Jericho. I told her about the Work House, falling off the treadmill and crippling my foot. I told her the way Denmark took me in and called me daughter. “I stole a bullet mold for that man,” I said.

  She pushed her fingers hard against her eyelids, trying to keep them from spilling over. When she opened them, there was a map in her eyes of broken red lines.

  “Sky ask me one time who her daddy is,” she said. “I told her he was a free black in Charleston, but he’s dead. That’s all she know.”

  “How come you don’t tell her?”

  “Sky’s got a child’s way of talking out of turn. The minute you tell her ’bout Denmark, she’ll tell half the world. That ain’t gon help her.”

  “She needs to know about him.”

  “What she need is to keep from getting sold. The thing she know best is the rice fields. Put her to work in the yard.”

  Sky took the ornament garden and brought it back to its glory. It came natural to her—how deep to bury the jonquil bulbs, when to cut back the roses, how to trim the hedges to match the drawings in a book Nina showed her. When Sky planted the vegetables, she shoveled horse shit from the stable and mixed it in the dirt. She dug straight furrows for the seeds and covered them with her bare foot like she’d done with the rice. She sang Gullah songs to the plants when she hoed. When the beetles came, she picked them off with her fingers.

  Wouldn’t you know, the crookneck squash came up the size of drinking gourds. The heads on the peonies were big pink soup bowls. Even missus came out special to see them. As soon as the jonquils came up and turned the air choking sweet, she threw a garden tea for her friends that left them suffering with envy.