9 March
A month has passed, and I see now what transpired between Mr. Williams and my naïve self on the balcony was a farce. He has toyed with me shamelessly. I knew it even then! He is a fickle-hearted cad, and I would no sooner speak to him now than I would speak to the devil.
When I was not engaged in aerating my feelings, or caring for little Nina, or fending off Mother’s attempts to draw me into my dutiful female tasks, I was foraging among the invitations and calling cards left on the desk by the front door. When Nina napped in the afternoon, I had Handful wheel the copper bathtub into my room and fill it with buckets of blistering water from the laundry.
This copper tub was a modern wonder imported from France by way of Virginia, and it was the talk of Charleston. It sat on noisy little wheels and traveled room to room like a portable dipping cart. You sat in it. You did not stand over a basin and pat water on yourself—no, you were quite immersed! To top it off, one side of the tub possessed a vent that could be opened to release the used water. Mother instructed the slaves to trundle the tub onto the piazza near the rail and discharge the bathwater over the side. The waterfalls splattering into the garden alerted neighbors the hygienic Grimkés had been bathing again.
When a note with scratchy penmanship arrived at the house shortly before noon on the ides of March, I swooped upon it before Mother.
15 March
Burke Williams compliments Sarah Grimké, requesting the pleasure of her company tomorrow night. If he can serve her in any way in the meantime, he would be honored.
P.S. Please excuse the borrowed paper.
I stood still for several moments, then placed the note back on the pile, thinking, Why should anyone care if the paper is borrowed, and then the stupefaction wore off. Caught in a sudden swell of elation, I ascended the stairs to my room, where I danced about like some tipsy bird. I’d forgotten Handful and Nina were there. They’d spread the doll tea set on the floor beneath the window, and when I turned, I saw them staring at me, holding tiny cups of pretend-tea in the air.
“You must’ve heard from that boy,” Handful said. She was the only one who knew of his existence.
“What boy?” Nina asked, and I was forced to tell her about Mr. Williams, too. At this moment Mother would be dispatching an acceptance while singing Glory be to God in the Highest. She would be so jubilant with allelujahs, it would not occur to her to wonder at his credentials.
“Will you get married like Thomas?” Nina asked. His wedding was two and a half months away and a reference point for everything.
“I do believe I will,” I told her, and the idea seemed altogether plausible. I would not be a pressed flower in a book after all.
We’d expected Mr. Williams at 8:00 P.M., but at ten past, he was still absent. Mother’s neck was splotched red with patches of insult, and Father, who’d joined Mother and me in the drawing room, held his watch in his hand. The three of us sat as if waiting for a funeral procession to pass. I feared he wouldn’t appear at all, and if he did, that our visit would be cut short. By custom, the slave’s curfew—9:00 in the winter, 10:00 in the summer—cleared gentlemen callers from the drawing rooms. When the City Guard beat drums to summon the slaves off the streets, the suitors would rise on cue.
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.
“Quic
kly,” 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 galloped 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. 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.
The Invention of Wings Page 11