The Invention of Wings: A Novel

by Sue Monk Kidd

  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 anti-slavery 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!”

  I wrote in bed on my lap desk, wrapped in a woolen shawl, while Nina bent over the small table in her old, furlined bonnet. The entire attic ached with cold and the scratch-scratch of our pens and the whippoorwills already calling to each other in the gathering dark.

  All winter the chimney had steeped the attic with heat and Nina would throw open the window to let in the icy air. We wrote sweltering or we wrote shivering, but rarely in between. Our pamphlets were nearly finished—mine, An Epistle to the Clergy of the Southern States, and Nina’s, An Appeal to the Christian Women of the South. She’d taken the women, and I the clergy, which I found ironic considering I’d done so poorly with men and she so well. She insisted it would’ve been more ironic the other way around—her writing about God when she’d done so poorly with him.

  We’d set down every argument the South made for slavery and refuted them all. I didn’t stutter on the page. It was an ecstasy to write without hesitation, to write everything hidden inside of me, to write with the sort of audacity I wouldn’t have found in person. I sometimes thought of Father as I wrote and the brutal confession he’d made at the end. Do you think I don’t abhor slavery? Do you think I don’t know it was greed that kept me from following my conscience? But it was mostly Charlotte who haunted my pages.

  Below us in the kitchen, I heard Sarah Mapps and Grace feeding wood into the stove, an ornery old Rumford that coughed up clouds of smut. Soon we smelled vegetables boiling—onions, parsnips, beet tops—and we gathered our day’s work and descended the ladder.

  Sarah Mapps turned from the stove as we entered, sheaves of smoke floating about her head. “Do you have new pages for us?” she asked, and her mother, who was pounding dough, stopped to hear our answer.

  “Sarah has brought down the last of hers,” Nina said. “She wrote the final sentence today, and I expect to complete mine tomorrow!”

  Sarah Mapps clapped her hands the way she might’ve done for the children in her class. Our habit was to gather in the sitting room after the meal, where Nina and I read our latest passages aloud to them. Grace sometimes grew so distressed at our eyewitness accounts of slavery she would interrupt us with all sorts of outbursts—Such an abomination! Can’t they see we are persons? There but for the grace of God. Finally, Sarah Mapps would fetch the millinery basket so her mother could distract herself by jabbing a needle into one of the hats she was making.

  “A letter came for you today, Nina,” Grace said, wiping dough from her hands and digging it from her apron.

  Few people knew of our whereabouts: Mother and Thomas in Charleston, and I’d sent the address to Handful as well, though I’d not heard back from her. Among the Quakers, we’d informed no one but Lucretia, afraid that Sarah Mapps and Grace would suffer for consorting with us. The handwriting on the letter, however, belonged to none of them.

  I gazed over Nina’s shoulder as she tore open the paper.

  “It’s from Mr. Garrison!” Nina cried. I’d forgotten—Nina had written him some weeks ago, describing our literary undertaking, and he’d responded with enthusiasm, asking us to submit our work when it was finished. I couldn’t imagine what he might want.

  21 March 1836

  Dear Miss Grimké,

  I have enclosed a letter to you from Elizur Wright in New York. Not knowing how to reach you, he entrusted the letter to me to forward. I think you will find it of utmost importance.

  I pray the monographs you and your sister are writing will reach me soon and that you will both rise to the moment that is now upon you.

  God Grant You Courage,

  William Lloyd Garrison

  Nina looked up, her eyes searching mine, and they were filled with a kind of wonder. With a deep breath, she read the accompanying letter aloud.

  2 March 1836

  Dear Miss Grimké,

  I write on behalf of the American Anti-Slavery Society, which is soon to commission and send forth forty abolition agents to speak at gatherings across the free states, winning converts to our cause and rousing support. After reading your eloquent letter to The Liberator and observing the outcry and awe it has elicited, the Executive Committee is unanimous in its belief that your insight into the evils of slavery in the South and your impassioned voice will be an invaluable asset.

  We invite you to join us in this great moral endeavor, and your sister, Sarah, as well, as we have learned of her sacrifice and staunch abolitionist views. We believe you may be more amenable to the mission if she accompanies you. If the two of you would consent to be our only female agents, we would have you speak to women in private parlors in New York.

  We would expect you the sixteenth of next September for two months of rigorous agent training under the direction of Theodore Weld, the great abolitionist orator. Your circuit of lectures will commence in December.

  We ask for your prayerful deliberation and your reply.

  Yours Most Sincerely,

  Elizur Wright

  Secretary, AASS

  The four of us stared at one another for a moment with blank, astonished expressions, and then Nina threw her arms around me. “Sarah, it’s all we could’ve hoped and more.”

  I could only stand there immobile while she clasped me. Sarah Mapps scooped a handful of flour from the bowl and tossed it over us like petals at a wedding, and their laughter rose into the steamy air.

  “Think of it, we’re to be trained by Theodore Weld,” Nina said. He was the man who’d “abolitionized” Ohio. He was said to be demanding, fiercely principled, and uncompromising.

  I muddled through the meal and the reading, and when we slipped into bed, I was glad for the dark. I lay still and hoped Nina would think me asleep, but her voice came from her bed, two arm-lengths away. “I won’t go to New York without you.”

  “… I-I didn’t say
I wouldn’t go. Of course, I’ll go.”

  “You’ve been so quiet, I don’t know what to think.”

  “… I’m overjoyed. I am, Nina … It’s just … I’ll have to speak. To speak in the most public way … among strangers … I’ll have to use the voice in my throat, not the one on the page.”

  All evening, I’d pictured how it would be, the moment when the words clotted on my tongue and the women in New York shifted in their chairs and stared at their laps.

  “You stood in Meetings and spoke,” Nina said. “You didn’t let your stutter stop you from trying to become a minister.”

  I stared at the black plank of rafter over my head and felt the truth and logic of that, and it came to me that what I feared most was not speaking. That fear was old and tired. What I feared was the immensity of it all—a female abolition agent traveling the country with a national mandate. I wanted to say, Who am I to do this, a woman? But that voice was not mine. It was Father’s voice. It was Thomas’. It belonged to Israel, to Catherine, and to Mother. It belonged to the church in Charleston and the Quakers in Philadelphia. It would not, if I could help it, belong to me.

  Handful

  I was down near Adgers Wharf on an errand when the steamboat left the harbor and it was something in this world, the paddle thundering, the smokestack blowing, and people lined up on the top deck waving handkerchiefs. I watched it till the spume settled on the water and the boat dropped over the last blue edge.

  Little missus had sent me to get two bottles of import scotch, and I hurried now not to be late. I was the one who did most of her bidding these days. When she sent her plantation slaves to fetch something, they’d come back with the basket empty or still holding the note they were supposed to deliver. They didn’t know the Battery from Wragg Square, and she’d make them go without supper if they were lucky, and if they weren’t, it was five lashes from Hector.

  Last week Sky made up a rhyme and sang it in the garden. Little missus Mary, mean as a snake. Little missus Mary, hit her with the rake. I told her, don’t sing that cause Hector has ears to hear, but Sky couldn’t get the song off her tongue. She’d ended up with the iron muzzle latched on her mouth. It was used for when a slave stole food, but it worked just as good for a slave mouthing off. It took four men to hold Sky down, work the prongs inside her mouth, and clamp the contraption at the back of her head. She screamed so loud I bit the side of my cheek till blood seeped and the copper taste filled my mouth. Sky couldn’t eat or talk for two days. She slept sitting up so the iron wouldn’t cut her face, and when she woke groaning, I worked a wet rag under the edge of the gag so she could suck the water.

  Coming out from the scotch store, I was thinking about the torn places on the sides of her mouth, how she hadn’t sung a tune since all that happened. Then I heard shouts and smelled the smoke.

  A black billow was rising over the Old Exchange. The first thing that sprang in my head was Denmark, how the city was finally on fire like he wanted. I hitched up my skirt and jabbed the rabbit cane into the cobblestone, trying to make my leg go faster. The scotch bottles clanked in the basket. Pain jarred to my hip.

  At the corner of Broad Street, I stopped in my tracks. What I thought was the city burning was a bonfire in front of the Exchange. A mob circled round it and the man from the post office was up on the steps throwing bundles of paper on the flames. Every time a packet landed, the cinders flew and the crowd roared.

  I didn’t know what they were so stirred up about, and the last thing you want is to wade out in the middle of somebody else’s trouble, but I knew little missus doled out whippings for being late the same as she did for getting lost.

  I was weaving my way, keeping my head down, when I saw one of the papers they were trying to burn laying on the street trampled underfoot, and I went over and picked it up.

  It was singed along the bottom. An Epistle to the Clergy of the Southern States by Sarah M. Grimké.

  I stood stock-still. Sarah. Sarah M. Grimké.

  “Give that to me, nigger!” a man said. He was old and bald and smelled sour in the summer heat. “Hand it over!”

  I looked at his red, watering eyes and poked the booklet inside my pocket. This was Sarah’s name and these were her words inside. They could burn the rest of the papers, but they weren’t burning this one.

  Come later this night, Sky and Goodis would come to my bed and say, Handful, what was you thinking? You should’ve give that to him, but I did what I did.

  I didn’t pay any heed to what he said. I turned my back and started walking off, getting away from his stink and his grabbing hand.

  He caught hold of the handle on my basket and gave it a jerk. I yanked back, and he held on, swaying on his feet, saying, “What you think? I’m gonna let you walk off with that?” Then he looked down, that half-drunk fool, and saw the bottles of scotch in the basket, the best scotch in Charleston, and his gray tongue came out and wiped his lips.

  I said, “Here, you take the liquor and I’ll take the booklet,” and I slid the basket off my arm and left him holding it. I limped off, me and that sly rabbit on the cane, disappearing in the crowd.

  I kept going past Market Street. The sun was dripping orange on the harbor, the green shadows falling off the garden walls. Up and down the street, the horses were hightailing home.

  I didn’t hurry. I knew what was waiting on me.

  Near the Grimké house, I saw the steamboat landing and the whitewash building with a sign over the door, Charleston Steamship Company. A man holding a pocket watch was locking the front door. When he left, I wandered down to the landing and sat hidden behind the wood crates, watching the pelicans dive straight as blades. When I took the booklet from my pocket, little charred flakes came off in my hand. I had to work hard at some of the words. If one tripped me up, I stared at the letters, waiting for the meaning to show itself, and it would come, too, like pictures taking shape in the clouds.

  Respected Friends,

  I address you as a repentant slaveholder of the South, one secure in the knowledge that the Negro is not chattel to be owned, but a person under God …

  Little missus had me whipped by the light of the moon.

  When I showed up late at the gate without her import scotch or the money she gave me to buy it, she told Hector to take care of me. It was dark out, the black sky full of sharp-edge, tin-cut stars and the moon so full Hector’s shadow lay perfect on the ground. He had the bullwhip wound up, hanging off his belt.

  I’d always taken my hope from mauma and she was gone.

  He lashed my hands to a post on the kitchen house. The last time I was whipped was for learning to read—one lash, a taste of sugar, they said—and Tomfry had tied me to this same post.

  This time, ten lashes. The price to read Sarah’s words.

  I waited with my back to Hector. I could see Goodis crouched in the shadows by the herb garden and Sky hidden up next to the warming kitchen, the flash of her eyes like a small night animal.

  I let my eyelids fall shut on the world. What was it for anyway? What was any of this for?

  The first strike came straight from the fire, a burning poker under my skin. I heard the cotton on my dress rip and felt the skin split. It knocked the legs from me.

  I cried out cause I couldn’t help it, cause my body was small without padding. I cried out to wake God from his slumber.

  The words in Sarah’s book came fresh to me. A person under God.

  In my head, I saw the steamboat. I saw the paddle turning.

  Next day, I was measuring little missus for a dress, a walking costume made of silk taffeta, just what everybody needs, and her pretending nothing happened. Being obliging. Handful, what do you think about this gold color, is it too pale? … Nobody sews like you do, Handful.

  When I stretched the measure tape from her waist to her ankle, the tore-up skin on my back pinched and pulled and a trickle ran between my shoulders. Phoebe and Sky had laid brown paper soaked in molasses on my back to keep t
he raw places clean, but it didn’t turn the pain sweet. Every step I took hurt. I slid my feet on the floor without picking them up.

  Little missus stood on the fitting box and turned a circle. It made me think of the old globe in master Grimké’s study, the way it turned.

  The clapper went off on the front door and we heard Hector’s shoes slap down the hallway to the drawing room where missus was taking tea. He called out, “Missus, the mayor’s here. He say for you to come to the door.”

  Mary stepped off the fitting box and stuck her head out to see what she could see. Missus was old now, her hair paper-white, but she got round. I heard her cane fast-tapping and then her toady voice drifted into the room. “Mr. Hayne! This is an honor. Please, come, join me for tea.” Like she’d caught the big fly.

  Little missus started scrambling to get her shoes on. She and missus were always bragging on the mayor. Mr. Robert Hayne walked on Charleston water. He was what they called a nullifier.

  “I’m afraid this isn’t a social call, Mrs. Grimké. I’m here on official business regarding your daughters, Sarah and Angelina.”

  Little missus went still. She edged back to the doorway, one shoe on, one shoe off, and I eased over there, too.

  “I regret to inform you that Sarah and Angelina are no longer welcome in the city. You should inform them if they return for a visit, they’ll be arrested and imprisoned until another steamer can return them to the North. It’s for their own welfare as much as the city’s—Charleston is so enraged against them now they would undoubtedly meet with violence if they showed their faces.”

  It fell silent. The old bones of the house creaked round us.

  “Do you understand, madame?” the mayor said.

  “I understand perfectly, now you should understand me. My daughters may hold unholy opinions, but they will not be treated with this sort of insult and indignity.”