I didn’t recognize how my mother’s voice ranted inside me.
Handful started to speak, and I was terrified of what she would say, fearful it would be hateful and justifying, yet oddly, I feared an expression of shame and apology just as much. I stopped her. “Please. Don’t say anything. At least do that for me, say nothing.”
I turned my back while she dried herself and pulled on her dress. When I looked again, she was tying a kerchief around her hair. It was pale green, the same color as the tiny discolored patches on the copper. She bent to mop the puddles from the floor, and I saw the scarf darkening as it soaked the dampness.
She said, “You want me to empty the water out now or wait?”
“Let’s do it now. We can’t have Mother wander in and find it.”
With effort, I helped her roll the sloshing tub through the jib door onto the piazza, close to the rail, hoping the family was inside now and wouldn’t hear the gush of water. Handful yanked open the vent and it spilled in a long, silver beak over the side. I seemed to taste it in my mouth, the tang of minerals.
“I know you’re angry, Sarah, but I didn’t see any harm with me being in the tub, same as you.”
Not Miss Sarah, but Sarah. I would never again hear her put Miss before my name.
She had the look of someone who’d declared herself, and seeing it, my indignation collapsed and her mutinous bath turned into something else entirely. She’d immersed herself in forbidden privileges, yes, but mostly in the belief she was worthy of those privileges. What she’d done was not a revolt, it was a baptism.
I saw then what I hadn’t seen before, that I was very good at despising slavery in the abstract, in the removed and anonymous masses, but in the concrete, intimate flesh of the girl beside me, I’d lost the ability to be repulsed by it. I’d grown comfortable with the particulars of evil. There’s a frightful muteness that dwells at the center of all unspeakable things, and I had found my way into it.
As Handful began to shove the vessel back across the piazza, I tried to speak. “… … Wait… … I’ll… … help …”
She turned and looked at me, and we both knew. My tongue would once again attempt its suicide.
Handful
Missus sent me and mauma to the market for some good cotton to make a dress for Nina. She was growing out from everything. Missus said, get something pastel this time and see about some homespun for Tomfry and them to have new vests.
The market was a row of stalls that ran all the way from East Bay to Meeting and had whatever under the sun you wanted. Missus said the place was a vulgar bazaar, that was her words. The turkey buzzards wandered round the meat stands like regular customers. They had to keep a man in there with a palm branch to shoo them. Course, they flew to the roofs and waited him out, then came on back. The smells in there would knock you down. Ox tails, bullock hearts, raw pork, live chickens, cracked oysters, blue crabs, fish, and more fish. The sweet peanut cakes didn’t stand a chance. I used to go round holding my nose till mauma got some eucalyptus leaves to rub over my top lip.
The slave sellers, what they called higglers, were shouting their wares, trying to out-do each other. The men sang out, “Jimmie” (that’s what we called the male crabs), and the women sang back, “Sook” (those were the females). “Jimmieeee … Soooook … Jimmieeee … Soooook.” You needed something for your nose and your ears.
It was September, and I still hadn’t laid eyes on the man mauma had told me about, the lucky free black who won the money to buy his freedom. He had a carpenter shop out back of his house, and I knew every time she was let out for hire or sent to the market without me, she was dallying with him. One, two times a week, she came back smelling like wood shavings, the back of her dress sawdusted.
That day, when we got to the piece good stalls, I started saying how he was made-up. “Awright then,” mauma said. She grabbed up the first pastel she saw and some drab brown wool and we headed outside with our baskets loaded. A block down, they were selling slaves right on the street, so we crossed the other way toward King. I patted the pass inside my dress pocket three times and checked to see did mauma still have her badge fastened on her dress. Out in the streets, I always had the bad feeling of something coming, some meanness gathering. On Coming Street, we spotted a guard, couldn’t have been old as me, stop an old man who got so nervous he dropped his travel pass. The guard stepped on it, having his fun.
We walked in a hurry, outpacing the carriages. Mauma didn’t use her wooden cane anymore except special occasions. Those came along when she needed a letup from missus. She’d tell her, “Looks like the cure I prayed for my leg has worn off. I just need to rest up and pray for a few days.” Out came the cane.
Mauma’s free black man lived at 20 Bull. It was a white frame single house, had black shudders with the paint flecking off and scruffy bushes round the porch. She shook the powder shell from the street off her hemline and said, “If I stand here, he see me and come right out.”
“So we’re supposed to stand here till he looks out the window?”
“You want me to go up there and knock on the door? If his wife come, you want me to say, ‘Tell your husband his girlfriend out here?’”
“How come you’re fooling with somebody who has a wife anyway?”
“They not married legal, she his free-wife. He got two more of ’em, too. All mulatto.”
As she said the word, mulatto, he stepped from the house and stood on the porch looking at us. A bull of a man. I wanted to say, Well he sure does live on the right street. He was thickset and solid with a big chest and large forehead.
When he came over, mauma said to him, “This my girl, Handful.”
He nodded. I could see he was stern, and proud. He said, “I’m Denmark Vesey.”
Mauma sidled up to him and said for my benefit, “Denmark is a country next to France, and a real fine one, too.” She smiled at him in a way I had to look away from.
He slid his hand up the side of her arm, and I eased off down the street. If they wanted to carry on, all right, but I didn’t have to stand there and watch it.
In the coming year, we’d make this visit to 20 Bull more times than I care to tell. The two lovebirds would go in his workshop, and I’d sit outside and wait. After they were done, he’d come out and talk. And he could talk, Lord, could that man talk. Denmark the man never had been to Denmark the country, just the Danish Islands. To hear him tell it, though, he’d been everywhere else. He’d traveled the world with his owner Captain Vesey, who sailed a slave ship. He spoke French, Danish, Creole, Gullah, and the King’s English. I heard him speak every one of these tongues. He came from the Land of Barbados and liked to say Charleston didn’t trust slaves from there, cause they’d slit your throat. He said Charleston wanted saltwater blacks from Africa who knew rice planting.
The worst troubling thing he told me was how his neighbor down the street—a free black named Mr. Robert Smyth—owned three slaves. Now what you supposed to do with something like that? Mr. Vesey had to take me to the man’s house to meet the slaves before I allowed any truth to it. I didn’t know whether this Mr. Smyth was behaving like white people, or if it just showed something vile about all people.
Denmark Vesey read the Bible up and down. Give him five minutes and he’d tell you the story of Moses leading slaves from Egypt. He’d have the sea parting, frogs falling from the sky, firstborn baby boys stabbed in their beds. He mouthed a Bible verse from Joshua so many times, it still comes to me in full. They utterly destroyed all that were in the city, both man and woman, both young and old. The man was head-smart and reckless. He scared the wits out of me.
The two of us had a clash the first day we met. Like I said, I’d eased off down the street to let them know I didn’t have a need to see their urges. The street was busy, everybody from free blacks to the mayor and the governor lived on it, and when a white woman came along, walking in my path, I did the common thing you do—I stepped to the side to let her pass. It was th
e law, you were supposed to give way on the street, but here came Denmark Vesey charging down to where I stood with fury blowing from his nostrils, and mauma looking panic right behind him. He yanked me by the arm, yelled, “Is this the sort of person you want to be? The kind that steps aside? The kind that grovels in the street?”
I wanted to say, Get your hand off me, you don’t know nothing about me, I bathe in a copper tub, and you’re standing here and stink to heaven. The air round my head turned thick and my throat tightened on it. I managed to say, “Let me go.”
Behind him, mauma said, a little too sweet for my taste, “Take your hand off her.”
He dropped his grip. “Don’t let me see that from you again.” Then he smiled. And mauma, she smiled, too.
We walked home without a word between us.
Inside the Grimké house, the door to the library was open. The room was empty, so I went in and spun the globe. It made a screech sound. Like a nail on a slate board. Binah said that sound was the devil’s toenail. I looked over all the countries on the globe, round the whole earth. Denmark wasn’t next to France, it was up by Prussia, but looking at it, I knew why mauma chose him. He’d been places, and he was going places, and he set her alight with the notion she’d go places, too.
Sarah
Nina came up with the idea that my speech infirmity might be cured by kneading my tongue, a process typically applied to dough. The child was nothing if not pioneering. She’d listened to my tortured sentences throughout the summer and into the fall and came to believe the ornery protuberance in my mouth could be molded in a way that caused words to plump and rise as effortless as yeast. She was six and a half.
Once Nina was seduced by a problem, she wouldn’t give up until she’d improvised a solution and acted on it, and these solutions of hers could be outlandish, but also wondrously imaginative. Not wishing to dampen this fascinating proclivity of hers, I stuck out my tongue and allowed her to grasp it with what I hoped to be a clean drying towel.
This experiment was being performed on the second-floor piazza—me, sitting on the swing, neck craned, mouth open, eyes bulging—the vision of a voracious baby bird awaiting her worm, though to any observer, I’m sure it appeared the worm was being extracted rather than deposited.
An autumn sun was climbing over the harbor, spilling like yolk onto the clouds. From the corner of my watering eye, I could see the sheen of it angling sharply toward Sullivan’s Island. Mr. Williams and I had cantered along that island’s shoreline on horseback in what had turned out to be a sullen affair. Fearing my freshly returned stammer would cause him to abandon the courtship, I’d barely opened my mouth. Nevertheless, he’d continued to call—there’d been five occasions since I’d returned from Belmont last June. I expected each one to be the last. The boundary of feeling between Nina and me was permeable to a fault, and I believe my fear had become Nina’s. She seemed uncommonly determined to cure me.
Grasping my tongue, she pressed and pulled. In return, it flailed like the tentacle of an octopus.
She sighed. “Your tongue is being implacable.”
Implacable! Where did the little genius get these words? I was teaching her to read, as I’d once taught Handful, but I was sure I’d never introduced the word implacable.
“And you are holding your breath,” she added. “Let it out. Try to loosen yourself.”
Very bossy she was, too. Already she possessed more authority and self-assurance than I. “… I’ll try,” I said, though perhaps what really happened was an accidental not-trying. I closed my eyes and breathed, and in my mind, I saw the bright water in the harbor and then the image of Handful’s bathwater streaming over the side of the piazza like a falling ribbon, and I felt my tongue unknot and grow tranquil beneath Nina’s fingers.
I don’t know how long she persisted with her efforts. I quite lost myself in the flow of water. Finally she said, “Repeat after me: Wicked Willy Wiggle.”
“Wicked Willy Wiggle,” I said, without a trace of stutter.
This odd interlude on the piazza brought me not a cure, but the nearest thing to a cure I would ever find, and it had nothing to do with Nina’s fanciful tongue kneading. It had somehow to do with breathing and repose and the vision of water.
So it would be from now on—whenever my stints of stammering came, I would close my eyes and breathe and watch Handful’s bathwater. I would see it pouring down and down, and opening my eyes, I would often speak with ease, sometimes for hours.
In November my nineteenth birthday came and went without acknowledgement except Mother’s reminder at breakfast that I’d reached a prime marriageable age. There were weekly dress fittings in preparation for the winter season, providing practically the only contact I had with Handful. She spent her days sewing in Charlotte’s room in the cellar or beneath the oak when the weather was mild. Her forbidden bath all those months ago still hung leaden between us, though Handful didn’t seem the least bit shamed by my discovery of it. Rather the opposite, she was like someone who’d risen to her full measure. During the fittings, Handful sang as she pinned me into half-made dresses. Standing on the fitting box, turning slow rotations, I wondered if she sang to avoid conversation. Whatever motivated her, I was relieved.
Then, one day in January, I noticed my father and older brothers huddled in the library with the door agape. The first icing of the winter had come in the night and glazed the city, and Tomfry had set the fireplaces ablaze. From where I stood in the main passage, I could see Father rubbing his hands before the flames, while Thomas, John, and Frederick gestured and flitted like moths in the light around his shoulders. Frederick, who’d recently returned from Yale and followed Thomas to the bar, slammed his fist into the palm of his hand. “How dare they, how dare they!”
“We’ll mount a defense,” Thomas said. “You mustn’t worry, Father, we won’t be defeated, I promise you that.”
Someone had wronged Father? I drew as close to the door as I dared, but I could make little sense of the discussion. They spoke of an outrage, but didn’t name it. They vowed a defense, but against what? Through the gap in the door, I watched them move to the desk, where they closed ranks around a document. They pointed at various passages, jabbing it with their fingers, debating in low, purposeful tones. The sight of them roused my ravenous old hunger to take my place in the world, too, to have my part matter. How many years had elapsed since I threw away the silver button?
I moved from the door, suddenly flush with anger. I was sorry for Father. He’d been wronged in some way, but here they all were ready to move heaven and earth to right it, and their wives, their mother, their sisters had no rights, not even to their own children. We couldn’t vote or testify in a court, or make a will—of course we couldn’t, we owned nothing to leave behind! Why didn’t the Grimké men assemble in our defense?
My anger dissipated, but my ignorance went on for another week. During those interminable days, Mother stayed in her chamber with a headache and even Thomas refused my queries, saying it was Father’s matter to disclose, not his. As it turned out, I would learn the news at a parlor concert held at one of the plantations northwest of the city.
Mary and I arrived on the plantation as the afternoon turned gray with twilight, our carriage met by a bevy of peacocks that strolled about the grounds for no reason other than ornamentation. They created a beautiful blue shimmer in the fading light, but I found them a sad spectacle, the way they made little rushes at the air, going nowhere.
The concert was already under way when I reached the parlor door. Burke slipped from his seat and greeted me with unusual warmth. He looked dashing in his long cerise vest and silk suit. “I was worried you weren’t coming,” he whispered and led me quickly to the empty chair beside his. As I slipped off the emerald jacket that Handful had so wondrously crafted, he placed a letter upon my lap. I raised my brows to him as if to ask whether I should break the seal and read it while Miss Parodi and the harpsichord vied for the room. “Later,” he mouthe
d.
It was unconventional to pass a note in this manner, and my mind fretted throughout the program at what it might contain. When Mrs. Drayton, Thomas’ motherin-law, played the final piece on the harp, we adjourned to the dining room where the table was spread with a Charlotte Russe dessert and a selection of French wines, brandy, and Madeira, of which I couldn’t partake for all my apprehension. Burke gulped a brandy, then maneuvered me toward the front door.
“… Where are we going?” I asked, unsure of the propriety.
“Let’s take a stroll.”
We stepped onto the porch beneath the palladium fanlight and gazed at the sky. It was purple, almost watery-looking. The moon was rising over the tree line. I couldn’t, however, think of anything but the letter. I pulled it from my purse and ripped the seal.
My Dearest Darling,
I beg the privilege of becoming your most attached and devoted fiancé. My heart is yours.
I await your answer.
Burke
I read it once, then again, mildly disoriented, as if the letter he’d slipped to me earlier had been swapped for this one that had nothing at all to do with me. He seemed entertained by my confusion. He said, “Your parents will want you to wait and give your answer after you’ve consulted with them.”
“I accept your proposal,” I said, smiling at him, overwhelmed with a queer mixture of jubilation and relief. I would be married! I would not end up like Aunt Amelia Jane.
He was right, though, Mother would be horrified I’d answered without her say-so, but I didn’t doubt my parents’ response. After swallowing their disapproval, they would seize upon the miracle of Burke Williams’ proposal like it was the cure for a dread disease.
We walked along the carriage way, my arm looped in his. A little tremor was running rib to rib to rib inside of me. Abruptly, he steered me off the path toward a camellia grove. We disappeared into the shadows that hung in swaths between the huge, flowering bushes, and without preamble, he kissed me full on the mouth. I reared back. “… Why … why, you surprise me.”
The Invention of Wings: With Notes Page 12