He rapped on the front door at a quarter past the appointed hour. When Tomfry ushered him into the room, I lifted my fan—an extravagant nosegay of hen feathers—and my parents rose with cool civility and offered him the Duncan Phyfe chair that flanked the right side of the fireplace. I’d been relegated to the chair on the left, which meant we were separated by the fire screen and forced to crane our necks for a glimpse of one another. A pity—he looked more handsome than I remembered. His face had bronzed with sun and his hair was longer, curling behind his ears. Detecting the scent of lime-soap drifting from his direction, my insides convulsed involuntarily—a full-blown paroxysm of carnality.
After the excuses and the trivialities, Father got right to the point. “Tell us, Mr. Williams, what is it that your father does?”
“Sir, my father owns the silver shop on Queen Street. It was founded by my great-grandfather and is the largest silver shop in the South.”
He spoke with unconcealed pride, but the stiff silence that had preceded his arrival descended again. A Grimké daughter would marry a son of the planter class who would study law, medicine, religion, or architecture in order to occupy himself until he inherited.
“A shop, you say?” Mother asked, giving herself time to absorb the blow.
“That’s correct, madame.”
She turned to Father. “A silver shop, John.”
Father nodded, and I read his thought: Merchant. It rose in the air above his forehead like a dark condensation.
“We’ve frequented the shop often,” I said, beaming as if those occasions had been the highlight of my life.
Mother came to my aid. “Indeed we have. It’s a lovely shop, John.”
Mr. Williams slid forward in his chair and addressed Father. “Sir, my grandfather’s wish was to provide our city with a silver shop that would live up to the one your own grandfather, John Paul Grimké, owned. I believe it was on the corner of Queen and Meeting, wasn’t it? My grandfather thought him to be the greatest silversmith in the country, greater than Mr. Revere.”
Oh, the adroitness of this man! I twisted in my chair the better to see him. In the guise of a compliment, he’d let it be known he was not the only one in the room descended from the merchant class. Of course, the difference was that John Paul Grimké had parlayed the success of his shop into cotton ventures and large land holdings in the low country. He’d been ambitious and prudent, and toiled his way into Charleston aristocracy. Nevertheless, Mr. Williams had landed his punch.
Father eyed him steadily and spoke two words. “I see.”
I think he did see, too. In that moment, he saw Mr. Williams quite well.
Tomfry served Hyson tea and biscuits, and the conversation turned back to trivialities, an interlude cut short when the curfew drums began. Mr. Williams rose, and I felt a sudden deflation. To my wonder, Mother entreated him to visit again, and I saw one of Father’s luxuriant eyebrows lift.
“May I see him to the door?” I asked.
“Of course, dear, but Tomfry will accompany you.”
We trailed Tomfry from the room, but once past the door, Mr. Williams stopped and placed his hand on my arm. “You look enchanting,” he whispered, drawing his face close to mine. “It would ease my regret in leaving, if you favored me with a lock of your hair.”
“My hair?”
“As a token of your affection.”
I lifted the hen feathers to cover the heat in my face.
He pressed a white handkerchief into my hand. “Fold the lock inside my kerchief, then toss it over the fence to George Street. I’ll be there, waiting.” With that titillating directive, he gave me a grin, such a grin, and strode toward the door, where Tomfry waited uncomfortably.
Returning to the drawing room to face my parents’ evaluations, I halted outside the door, realizing they were speaking about me.
“John, we must face reason. He may be her only chance.”
“You think our daughter so poor a marriage prospect she can draw no better than that?”
“His family is not poor. They are reasonably well-to-do.”
“But Mary, it is a mercantile family.”
“The man is a suitor, and he is likely the best she can do.”
I fled to my room, chagrined, but too preoccupied with my clandestine mission to be wounded. Having lit the lamps and turned down the bed, Handful was bent over my desk, frowning and picking her way through the poem Leonidas, which was an almost unreadable ode to men and their wars. As always, she wore a pouch about her neck filled with bark, leaves, acorns, and other gleanings from the oak in the work yard.
“Quickly,” I blurted. “Take the shears from my dresser and cut off a lock of my hair.”
She squinted at me without moving a muscle. “Why do you wanna do something like that?”
“Just do it!” I was a wreck of impatience, but seeing how my tone miffed her, I explained the reason.
She cut a whorl as long as my finger and watched me secret it inside the handkerchief. She followed me downstairs to the ornamental garden where I glimpsed him through the palisade fence, a shadowed figure, leaning against the stuccoed brick wall of the Dupré house across the street.
“That him?” Handful asked.
I shushed her, afraid he would hear, and then I flung the amorous bundle over the fence. It landed in the crushed shell that powdered the street.
The next day Father announced we would depart immediately for Belmont. Because of Thomas’ upcoming nuptials, it’d previously been decided Father would journey to the upcountry plantation alone this spring, and now suddenly the entire family was thrown into a frenzied mass exodus. Did he think no one understood it had everything to do with the unsuitable son of a silversmith?
I penned a hurried letter, which I left for Tomfry to post.
17 March
Dear Mr. Williams,
I am sorry to inform you that my family will leave Charleston in the morning. I will not return until the middle of May. Leaving in such an impromptu manner prevents me saying farewell in person, which I much regret. I hope I might welcome you again to our home on East Bay as soon as I return to civilization. I trust you found your handkerchief and its contents, and keep them close.
With Affectionate Regards, I am
Sarah Grimké
The seven weeks of my separation from Mr. Williams were a cruel agony. I busied myself with the establishment of a slave infirmary on the plantation, installing it in a corner of the weaving house. It had once been a sickbay, years before, but had fallen into dereliction, and Peggy, the slave who did the weaving, had taken to storing her carded wool on the infirmary’s old cot. Nina helped me scrub the corner and assemble an apothecary of medicine, salves, and herbs that I begged or blended myself in the kitchen house. It didn’t take long for the sick and ailing to show up, so many the overseer complained to Father that my healing enterprise interfered with field production. I expected Father to shut our doors, but he left me to it, though not without instructing me on the numberless ways the slaves would abuse my efforts.
It was Mother who nearly ended the operation. Upon discovering I’d spent the night in the infirmary in order to care for a fifteen-year-old with childbirth fever, she shut the infirmary for two days, before finally relenting. “Your behavior is woefully intemperate,” she said, and then treading too closely to the truth, added, “I suspect it’s not compassion that drives you as much as the need to distract your mind from Mr. Williams.”
My afternoons were frittered away with needlework and teas or painting landscapes with Mary while Nina played at my feet, all of which took place in a stuffy parlor with poorly lit windows draped in velvet swags the color of Father’s port. My one respite was striking out alone on a high-spirited black stallion named Hiram. The horse had been given to me when I was fourteen, and since he didn’t fall into the category of slave, slave owner, or handsome beau, I was left to love him without complication. Whenever I could steal away from the parlor, Hiram and I gallop
ed at splendiferous speeds into a landscape erupting with the same intractable wildness I felt inside. The skies were bright cerulean, teeming with ferocious winds, spilling mallards and fat wood drakes from the clouds. Up and down the lanes, the fences were lit with yellow jasmine, its musk a sweet, choking smoke. I rode with the same drunk sensuality with which I had reclined in the copper tub, riding till the light smeared, returning with the falling dark.
Mother allowed me to write to Mr. Williams only once. Anything more, she insisted was woefully intemperate. I received no letter in return. Mary heard nothing from her intended either and claimed the mail to be atrocious, therefore I didn’t overly fret, but quietly and daily I wondered whether Mr. W. and his grin would be there when I returned. I placed my hope in the bewitching properties contained in the lock of my red hair. This wasn’t so different than Handful placing her faith in the bark and acorns she wore around her neck, but I wouldn’t have admitted it.
I’d thought little of Handful during my incarceration at Belmont, but on the day before we left, the fifteen-year-old slave I’d nursed appeared, cured of childbirth fever, but now with boils on her neck. Seeing her, I understood suddenly that it wasn’t only miles that separated Handful and me. It wasn’t any of those things I’d told myself, not my preoccupation with Nina, or Handful’s duties, or the natural course of age. It was some other growing gulf, one that had been there long before I’d left.
Handful
Late in the afternoon, after the Grimkés had gone off to their plantation and the few slaves left on the premise were in their quarters, mauma sent me into master Grimké’s library to find out what me and her would sell for.O She stood lookout for Tomfry. I told her, don’t worry about Tomfry, the one you have to watch for is Lucy, Miss Come-Look-at-the-Writing-Under-the-Tree.
A man had come last winter and written down everything master Grimké owned and what it was worth. Mauma had been there while he wrote down the lacquer sewing table, the quilt frame, and every one of her sewing tools in a brown leather book he’d tied with a cord. She said, “If we in that book, then it say what our price is. That book got to be in the library somewhere.”
This seemed like a tolerable idea till I closed the door behind me, then it seemed like a damn fool one. Master Grimké had books in there the likes you wouldn’t believe, and half of them were brown leather. I opened drawers and rummaged the shelves till I found one with a cord. I sat at the desk and opened it up.
After I got caught for the crime of reading, Miss Sarah stopped teaching me, but she set out books of poems—that was all she got to read now—and she’d say, “It doesn’t take long to read a poem. Just close the door, and if there’s a word you can’t make out, point to it, and I’ll whisper it to you.” I’d learned a legion of words this way, legion being one of them. Some words I learned couldn’t be worked into a conversation: heigh-ho; O hither; alas; blithe and bonny; Jove’s nectar. But I held on to them just the same.
The words inside the leather book weren’t fit for poems. The man’s writing looked like scribble. I had to crack every word one by one and pick out the sound the way we cracked blue crabs in the fall and picked out the meat till our fingers bled. The words came lumps at a time.
City of Charleston, to wit … We the undersigned … To the best of our judgment, … the personal inventory … Goods and chattels …
2 Mahogany card tables … 20.50.
General Washington picture and address … 30.
2 Brussels carpets & cover … 180.
Harpsichord … 29.
I heard footsteps in the passage. Mauma said she’d sing if I needed to hit out for cover, but I didn’t hear anything and went back to running my finger down the list. It went for thirty-six pages. Silk this and ivory that. Gold this, silver that. But no Hetty and no Charlotte Grimké.
Then I turned the last page and there were all us slaves, right after the water trough, the wheelbarrow, the claw hammer, and the bushel of flint corn.
Tomfry, 51 yrs. Butler, Gentleman’s Servant … 600.
Aunt-Sister, 48 yrs. Cook … 450.
Charlotte, 36 yrs. Seamstress… 550.
I read it two times—Charlotte, my mauma, her age, what she did, what she sells for—and I felt the pride of a confused girl, pride mauma was worth so much, more than Aunt-Sister.
Binah, 41 yrs. Nursery Servant … 425.
Cindie, 45 yrs. Lady’s Maid … 400.
Sabe, 29 yrs. Coachman, House Servant … 600.
Eli, 50 yrs. House Servant … 550.
Mariah, 34 yrs. Plain Washer, Ironer, Clear Starcher … 400.
Lucy, 20 yrs. Lady’s Maid … 400.
Hetty, 16 yrs. Lady’s Maid, Seamstress … 500.
My breath hung high in my chest. Five hundred dollars! I ran my finger over the figure, over the dregs of dried ink. I marveled how they’d left off apprentice, how it said seamstress full and clear, how I was worth more than every female slave they had, beside mauma. Five hundred dollars. I was good on figures and I added me and mauma together. We were a thousand fifty dollars’ worth of slaves. I was blinkered like a horse and I smiled like this made us somebody and read on to see what the rest were valued.
Phoebe, 17 yrs. Kitchen Servant … 400.
Prince, 26 yrs. Yard Servant … 500.
Goodis, 21 yrs. Footman, Stable Mucker, Yard Servant… 500.
Rosetta, 73 yrs. Useless … 1.
I put the book back, then went out and told mauma what I found out. A thousand fifty dollars. She sank on the bottom step of the stairs and held on to the bannister. She said, “How I gon raise all that much money?”
It would take ten years to come up with that much. “I don’t know,” I told her. “Some things can’t be done—that’s all.”
She got up and headed for the basement, talking with her back to me. “Don’t be telling me—can’t be done. That’s some god damney white talk, that’s what that is.”
I lugged myself up the stairs and went straight for the alcove. Next to the tree out back, this was my chosen spot, up here where I could see the water. With the house empty, I was the only one upstairs, and I stayed by the window till all the light bled from the sky and the water turned black. Cross the water, cross the sea, let them fishes carry me. The songs I used to sing back when I first belonged to Miss Sarah still came to me, but I didn’t feel like the water would take me much of anywhere.
I said under my breath, Five hundred dollars.
Goods and chattel. The words from the leather book came into my head. We were like the gold leaf mirror and the horse saddle. Not full-fledge people. I didn’t believe this, never had believed it a day of my life, but if you listen to white folks long enough, some sad, beat-down part of you starts to wonder.O All that pride about what we were worth left me then. For the first time, I felt the hurt and shame of just being who I was.
After a while, I went down to the cellar. When mauma saw my raw eyes, she said, “Ain’t nobody can write down in a book what you worth.”
Sarah
Our caravan of two carriages, two wagons, and seventeen people returned to Charleston in May on the high crest of spring. Rains had left the city rinsed and clean, scented with newly flowering myrtle, privet, and Chinese tallow. The bougainvillea had advanced en masse over garden gates, and the sky was bright and creamed with thin, swirling clouds. I felt exultant to be back.
As we lumbered through the back gate into an empty work yard, Tomfry hurried from the kitchen house at an old man’s trot, calling, “Massa, you back early.” He had a napkin stuffed at his collar and looked anxious, as if we’d caught him in the dilatory act of eating.
“Only by a day,” Father said, climbing from the Barouche. “You should let the others know we’re here.”
I squirmed past everyone, leaving even Nina behind, and broke for the house where I pillaged the calling cards on the desk, and there it was—the borrowed paper.
3 May
Burke Williams requests Sarah Grimké�
��s company on a (chaperoned) horseback outing at Sullivan’s Island, upon her return to Charleston.
Yours, most truly.
I let out an exhale, behemoth in nature, and ascended the stairs.
I remember very clearly coming to a full halt on the second-floor landing and gazing curiously at the door to my room. It alone was shut, while the others stood open. I walked toward it uncertainly, with a vague sense of portent. I paused with my hand over the knob for a second and cocked my ear. Hearing nothing, I turned the knob. It was locked.
I gave the knob a second determined try, and then a third and fourth, and that’s when I heard the tentative voice inside.
“That you, mauma?”
Handful? The thought of her inside my room with the door locked was so incongruent I could not immediately answer back.
She called out, “Coming.” Her voice sounded exasperated, reluctant, breathy. There was the sound of water splashing, a key thrust into the lock. Click. Click.
She stood in the doorway dripping wet, naked but for a white linen towel clutched around her waist. Her breasts were two small, purple plums protruding from her chest. I couldn’t help gazing at her wet, black skin, the small compact power of her torso. She’d unloosed her braids, and her hair was a wild corona around her head, shimmering with beaded water.
She stepped backward and her mouth parted. Behind her, the wondrous copper tub sat in the middle of the room, filled with water. Vapor was lifting off the surface, turning the air rheumy. The audacity of what she’d done took my breath. If Mother discovered this, the consequences would be swift and dire.
I moved quickly inside and closed the door, my instinct even now to protect her. She made no attempt to cover herself. I glimpsed defiance in her eyes, in the way she wrested back her chin as if to say, Yes, it’s me, bathing in your precious tub.
The silence was terrible. If she thought my reserve was due to anger, she was right. I wanted to shake her. Her boldness seemed like more than a frolic in the tub, it seemed like an act of rebellion, of usurpation. What had possessed her? She’d violated not only the privacy of my room and the intimacy of our tub, she’d breached my trust.
The Invention of Wings: With Notes Page 11