That’s when I decided to get religion.
First chance I got, I told Sarah I was burdened down with the need for deliverance, and God was calling me to the African church. I dabbed at my eyes a little.
I was cut straight from my mauma’s cloth.
Next day, missus called me to her room. She was sitting by the window with her Bible laid open. “It has come to my attention you wish to join the new church that has been established in the city for your kind. Sarah informs me you want to attend nightly meetings. I’ll allow you to go twice a week in the evenings and on Sunday, as long as it doesn’t interfere with your work or cause problems of any sort. Sarah will prepare your pass.”
She looked at me through her little glasses. She said, “See to it you don’t squander the favor I’m granting you.”
“Yessum.” For measure, I added, “Praise the Lord.”
Sarah
I couldn’t imagine why Nina and I had been summoned to the first-floor drawing room—that was never a good thing. We entered to find the very corpulent Reverend Gadsden seated on the yellow silk settee, and beside him, Mother, squeezed way over to one side, gripping her cane as if she might bore it into the floor. Glancing at Nina, who, at fourteen, was taller than I was, I noticed her eyes flash beneath their thick, dark lashes. She gave her chin a tiny defiant yank upward, and for a moment, I felt a passing bit of pity for the reverend.
“Close the door behind you,” Mother said. Down the passageway, Father was in his room, too ill now to work. Dr. Geddings had ordered quiet, and for weeks, the slaves had padded about, speaking in whispers, careful not to rattle a tray for fear of their lives. When one’s physician prescribes quiet as a remedy, along with a syrup made from horseradish root, he has clearly given up.
I took my seat on the twin settee beside Nina, facing the pair of them. The accusation against me would be failing as Nina’s godmother. As usual.
This past Sunday, my sister had refused confirmation into St. Philip’s Church, and it wasn’t even that as much as the way she’d done it. She’d made a pageant of it. When the other youths left their chairs on the dais and went to the altar rail for the bishop to lay his hands on their sweet heads, Nina remained pointedly in her seat. Our entire family was there, except for Father, and I watched with a confused mix of embarrassment and pride as she sat with her arms crossed, her dark hair gleaming around her shoulders and a tiny circle of red blazing on each of her cheeks.
The bishop walked over and spoke to her, and she shook her head. Mother went stiff as a piece of wrought iron on the pew beside me, and I felt the air in the church clotting around our heads. There was more coaxing by the bishop, more obstinacy by Nina, until he gave up and continued the service.
I’d had no inkling what she planned, though perhaps I should have—this was Nina, after all. She was full of fiery opinions and mutinous acts. Last winter, she’d scandalized her classroom by taking off her shoes because the slave boy, who cleaned the slate boards, was barefooted. I’d lost count of the letters of apology Mother had ordered her to write. Rather than submit, she would sit before the blank paper for days until Mother relented. On her eleventh birthday, Nina had refused her human present with such vehemence, Mother had given up out of sheer weariness.
Even if I’d tried to prevent Nina’s display at church that day, she would’ve pointed out that I, too, had spurned the Anglicans. Well, I had, but I’d done so to embrace the Presbyterians, whereas Nina would’ve spurned the Presbyterians, too, given half a chance. She hated them for what she called their “gall and wormwood.”
If there was a wedge between my sister and me, it was religion.
Over the last several years, it seemed my entire life had been possessed of swings between asceticism and indulgence. I’d banished society in the aftermath of Burke Williams, yes, but I’d been a chronic backslider, succumbing every season to some party or ball, which had left me empty and sickened, which had then sent me crawling back to God. Nina had often found me on my knees, weeping as I prayed, begging forgiveness, engaged in one of my excruciating bouts of self-contempt. “Why must you be like this?” she would shout.
Why, indeed.
Mr. Williams had been shaken from the lap of Charleston like a soiled napkin. He was married now to his cousin, keeping shop in his uncle’s dry goods store in Columbia. I’d put him behind me long ago, but I hadn’t been able to make peace with living here in this house till the end of my days. I had Nina, but not for much longer. As charismatic and beautiful as she was, she would be wooed by a dozen men and leave me here with Mother. It was the ubiquitous truth at the center of everything, and it had driven me to my backsliding. But there could be no more of that—at twenty-six I would be too old for the coming season. It was truly over, and I felt lost and miserable, galled and wormwood-ed, and there was nothing to be done about it.
Here in the drawing room, Reverend Gadsden looked reluctant and uncomfortable. He kept pursing and unpursing his lips. Nina sat erect beside me, as if to say, All right, let the castigation begin, but under the cover of our skirts, she reached for my hand.
“I’m here today because your mother asked me to reason with you. You gave us all a shock yesterday. It’s a grave thing to reject the church and her sacraments and salvation . . .”
He went on with his jabber, while Nina’s hand sweated into mine.
She saw my private agonies, but I saw hers, too. There was a place inside of her where it had all broken. The screams she’d heard coming from the Work House still inhabited her, and she would wake some nights, shouting into the dark. She put up an invincible show, but underneath I knew her to be bruised and vulnerable. After Mother’s scathing reprimands, she would vanish into her room for hours, emerging with her eyes bloodshot from weeping.
The reverend’s kind but tedious speech had been floating in and out of my awareness. “I must point out,” I heard him say, “that you are placing your soul in jeopardy.”
Nina spoke for the first time. “Pardon me, Reverend Sir, but the threat of hell will not move me.”
Mother sank her eyes closed. “Oh, Angelina, for the love of God.”
Nina had used the word hell. Even I was a little shocked by it. The rector sat back with resignation. He was done.
Naturally, Mother was not. “Your father lies gravely ill. Surely you know it’s his wish that you be confirmed into the church. It could well be his last wish. Would you deny him that?”
Nina squeezed my hand, struggling to hold on to herself.
“. . . Should she deny her conscience or her father?” I said.
Mother drew back as if I’d slapped her. “Are you going to sit there and encourage your sister’s disobedience?”
“I’m encouraging her to be true to her own scruples.”
“Her scruples?” The skin at Mother’s neck splotched like beetroot. She turned to the reverend. “As you see, Angelina is completely under Sarah’s sway. What Sarah thinks, Angelina thinks. What Sarah scruples, she scruples. It’s my own fault—I chose Sarah to be her godmother, and to this day, she leads the child astray.”
“Mother!” Nina exclaimed. “I think for myself.”
Mother shifted her calm, pitiless gaze from the reverend to Nina and uttered the question that would always lie between us. “Just so I’m not confused, when you said ‘Mother’ just now, were you referring to me, or to Sarah?”
The rector squirmed on the settee and reached for his hat, but Mother continued. “As I was saying, Reverend, I’m at a loss of how to undo the damage. As long as the two of them are under the same roof, there’s small hope for Angelina.”
As she escorted the reverend to the door, rain broke loose outside. I felt Nina slump slightly against me, and I pulled her to her feet and we slipped behind them up the stairs.
In my room, I turned back the bed sheet and Nina lay down. Her face seemed stark and strange
against the linen pillow. Rain was darkening the window, and she stared at it with her eyes gleaming, her back rising and falling beneath my hand.
“Do you think Mother will send me away?” she asked.
“I won’t allow it,” I told her, though I had no idea how to stop such a thing if Mother took it in her head to banish my sister. A rebellious girl could easily be sent off to a boarding school or deported to our uncle’s plantation in North Carolina.
Handful
Didn’t my Lord deliver Daniel?” Denmark Vesey shouted.
The whole church answered, “Now he’s coming for me.”
Must’ve been two hundred of us packed in there. I was sitting in the back, in the usual spot. Folks had started leaving it free for me, saying, “That’s Handful’s place.” Four months I’d been sitting there and hadn’t learned a thing about mauma, but I knew more than missus about the people God had delivered.
Abraham, Moses, Samson, Peter, Paul—Mr. Vesey went down the list, chanting their names. Everybody was on their feet, clapping, and waving in the air, shouting, “Now he’s coming for me,” and I was smack-dab in the middle of them, doing the little hopping dance I used to do in the alcove when I was a girl singing to the water.
Our reverend was a free black man named Morris Brown, and he said when we got worked up like this, it was the Holy Ghost that had got into us. Mr. Vesey, who was one of his four main helpers, said it wasn’t the Holy Ghost, it was hope. Whatever it was, it could burn a hole in your chest.
The heat in the church was awful. While we shouted, sweat drenched our faces and clothes, and some of the men got up and opened all the windows. The fresh air flowed in and the shouting flowed out.
When Mr. Vesey ran out of people in the Bible for God to deliver, he went along the benches calling names.
Let my Lord deliver Rolla.
Let my Lord deliver Nancy.
Let my Lord deliver Ned.
If he called your name, you felt like it would fly straight to heaven and hit God between the eyes. Reverend Brown said, be careful, heaven would be whatever you picture it. His picture was Africa before the slaving—all the food and freedom you wanted and not a white person to blight it. If mauma was dead, she would have a big fine house somewhere and missus for her maid.
Mr. Vesey, though, he didn’t like any kind of talk about heaven. He said that was the coward’s way, pining for life in the hereafter, acting like this one didn’t mean a thing. I had to side with him on that.
Even when I was singing and hopping like this, part of me stayed small and quiet, noticing everything he said and did. I was the bird watching the cat circle the tree. Mr. Vesey had white wooly nubs in his hair now, but beside that, he looked like before. Wore the same scowl, had the same knife blades in his eyes. His arms were still thick and his chest big as a rain barrel.
I hadn’t mustered the nerve to talk to him. People feared Denmark Vesey. I’d started telling myself the joke was on me—maybe I’d come to the African church for the Lord, after all. What’d I think I could learn about mauma anyway?
Nobody heard the horses outside. Mr. Vesey had a new chant going—Joshua fought the battle of Jericho, and the walls came tumbling down. Gullah Jack, his right-hand man, was beating a drum, and we were stomping the floor. Jericho. Jericho.
Then the doors busted open, and Gullah Jack’s hands stopped pounding, and the song died away. We looked round, confused, while the City Guard spread along the walls and in the aisle, one at every window, four barring the door.
The head guard marched down front with a paper in one hand and a musket gun in the other. Denmark Vesey said with his booming voice, “What’s the meaning of this? This is the house of the Lord, you have no business here.”
The guard looked like he couldn’t believe his luck. He took the butt of the gun and rammed it in Mr. Vesey’s face. A minute ago, he’d been shouting Jericho, and now he was on the floor with a shirt full of blood.
People started screaming. One of the guards fired into the rafters, sending wood crumbs and smoke swirling down. The inside of my ears pounded, and when the head man read the warrant, he sounded like he was at the bottom of a dry well. He said the neighbors round the church found us a nuisance. We were charged with disorderly conduct.
He stuffed the paper in his pocket. “You’ll be removed to the Guard House and sentenced in the morning with due and proper punishment.”
A sob drifted from a woman on the far side, and the place came alive with fear and murmuring. We knew about the Guard House—it was where they held the lawbreakers, black and white, till they figured out what to do with them. The whites ones stayed till their hearings, and the black ones till their owners paid the fine. You just prayed to God you didn’t have a stingy master, cause if he refused to pay, you went to the Work House to work off the debt.
Outside, the moon looked weak in the sky. They gathered us in four herds and marched us down the street. A slave sang, Didn’t my Lord deliver Daniel? and a guard told him to hush up. It was quiet from then on except for the clopping horses and a little baby tied on its mother’s back that whimpered like a kitten. I craned my neck for Mr. Vesey, but he wasn’t anywhere to see. Then I noticed the dark wet spatter-drops on the ground, and I knew he was on up ahead.
We spent the night on the floor in a room filled with jail cells, men and women crammed in together, all of us having to pee in the same bucket in the corner. One woman coughed half through the night and two men got in a shove-fight, but mostly we sat in the dark and stared with flat eyes and dozed in and out. One time, I came awake, hearing that same little baby mewing.
At first light, a guard with hair scruffing his shoulders brought a pail of water with a dipper and we took turns drinking while our stomachs rumbled for food. After that, we were left to wonder what was coming. One man in our cell had been picked up by the Guard six times and he told us the facts and figures. The fine was five dollars, and if your master didn’t pay, you got twelve lashes at the Work House, or worse, you got the treadmill. I didn’t know what the treadmill was and he didn’t say, just told us to beg for the whip. Then he lifted his shirt, and his back was grooved like the hide of an alligator. The sight brought bile to my throat. “My massa never pay,” he said.
The morning stretched out and we waited, and then waited some more. All I could think about was the man’s back, where they’d put Mr. Vesey, how his bashed face was holding up. Heat cooked the air and the smell turned sour and the baby started bawling again. Somebody said, “Why don’t you feed the child?”
“I can’t raise no milk,” its mauma said, and another woman with stains on her dress front said, “Here, give me the baby. Mine’s back home and all this milk with nobody to suck it.” She pulled out her brown bosom, clear milk leaking from the nipple, and the baby latched on.
When the long-hair guard came back, he said, “Listen for your name. If I call it out, you’re free to leave and go home to whatever awaits you.”
We all got to our feet. I said to myself, Never has been a Grimké slave sent to the Work House. Never has.
“Seth Ball, Ben Pringle, Tinnie Alston, Jane Brewton, Apollo Rutledge . . .” He read the names till it was just me and the scarred man and the mauma with the baby and a handful of others. “If you’re still here,” he said, “your owner has decided the Work House will put you in a wholesome frame of mind.”
A man said, “I’m a free black, I don’t have an owner.”
“If you’ve got the papers that say that, then you can pay the fine yourself,” the guard told him. “If you can’t pay it on the spot, then you’re going to the Work House with the rest.”
I felt genuine confused. I said, “Mister. Mister? You left off my name. It’s Hetty. Hetty Grimké.”
He answered me with the thud of the door.
The treadmill was chomping and grinding its teeth—you could hear it before you
got in the room. The Work House man led twelve of us to the upper gallery, poking us along with a stick. Denmark Vesey came behind me with the side of his face swollen so bad his eye was shut. He was the only one of us with shackles on his hands and feet. He took shuffle-steps, and the chain dragged and rattled.
When he tripped on the stairs, I said over my shoulder, “Be careful now.” Then I whispered, “How come you didn’t pay the fine? Ain’t you supposed to have money?”
“Whatever they do to the least of them, they do it unto me,” he said.
I thought to myself, Mr. Vesey fancies himself like Jesus carrying the cross, and that’s probably cause he doesn’t have five dollars on him for the fine. Knowing him, though, he could’ve been throwing his lot with the rest of us. The man was big-headed and proud, but he had a heart.
When we got to the gallery and looked over the rail at the torment waiting for us, we just folded up and sat down on the floor.
One of the overseers fastened Mr. Vesey’s chain to an iron ring and told us to watch the wheel careful so we’d know what to do. The mauma with the baby on her back said to him, “Who gon watch my baby while I down there?”
He said, “You think we got people to tend your baby?”
I had to turn from her, the way her head dropped, the baby looking wide-eye over her shoulder.
The treadmill was a spinning drum, twice as tall as a man, with steps on it. Twelve scrambling people were climbing it fast as they could go, making the wheel turn. They clung to a handrail over the top of it, their wrists lashed to it in case their grip slipped. The mill groaned and the corn cracked underneath. Two black-skin overseers paced with cowhides—cat o’nine tails, they called them—and when the wheel slowed, they hit the backs and legs of those poor people till you saw pink flesh ripple.
Mr. Vesey’s good eye studied me. “Don’t I know you from somewhere?”
“From the church.”
The Invention of Wings Page 16