The Invention of Wings: A Novel (43 page)

Reverend McDowell agrees with me in spirit, but when I pressed him to preach publicly what he says to me in private, he refused. “Pray and wait,” he told me. “Pray and act,” I snapped. “Pray and speak!”

How could I marry someone who displays such cowardice?

I have no choice now but to leave his church. I’ve decided to follow in your steps and become a Quaker. I shudder to think of the gruesome dresses and the barren meetinghouse, but my course is set.

Fine riddance to Israel! Be consoled in knowing the world depends upon the small beating in your heart.

Yours,

Nina

When I finished reading, I pulled a chair from the pine table and sat. Motes of flour-dust were drifting in the air. It seemed an odd convergence that Nina and I would both taste this pain only weeks apart.
Fine riddance to Israel,
she’d written, but it wasn’t fine. I feared I would love him the rest of my life, that I would always wonder what it would’ve been like to spend my life with him at Green Hill. I longed for it in that excruciating way one has of romanticizing the life she didn’t choose. But sitting here now, I knew if I’d accepted Israel’s proposal, I would’ve regretted that, too. I’d chosen the regret I could live with best, that’s all. I’d chosen the life I belonged to.

I’d struggled for nearly two years to be acknowledged as a minister, without success, and I bore down now on my efforts, performing charitable work at the children’s asylum in order to win over the Quaker women and spending so many evenings reading texts on Quaker thought and worship I smelled perpetually of paraffin. The crucial factor, though, was my utterances in Meeting, which were completely dismal. My nervousness about speaking always made my stammer worse, and Mr. Bettleman complained loudly about my “incoherent mumblings.” It was said that rhetorical polish wasn’t required for the ministry, but the fact was all the ministers on the Facing bench were appallingly eloquent.

I sought out the doctor who’d provided my spectacles, in hope, finally, of a cure, but he terrified me with talk of operations in which the root of one’s tongue was sliced and the excess tissue removed. I left, vowing I would never return. That night, unable to sleep, I sat in the kitchen with warm milk and nutmeg, repeating
Wicked Willy Wiggle
over and over, the little tongue exercise Nina had once insisted I do when she was a child.

8 October 1828

My Dear Sarah,

I am to be publicly expelled from Third Presbyterian Church. It seems they do not take well to my attending Quaker meetings these past few months. Mother is appalled. She insists my downfall began when I refused confirmation into St. Philip’s. According to her, I was a twelve-year-old marionette whose strings you pulled, and now I’m a grown marionette of twenty-four whose strings you’re manipulating all the way from Philadelphia. How skilled you are! Mother also felt compelled to add that I’m an unmarried marionette, thanks to my pride and my opinionated tongue.

Yesterday, Reverend McDowell visited, informing me I must return to “the fold of God’s elect” or be summoned before the church session to stand trial for broken vows and neglect of worship. Have you ever? I spoke as calmly as I could: “Deliver your document citing me to appear in your court, and I’ll come and defend myself.” Then I offered him tea. As Mother says, I’m proud, proud even of my pride. But when he departed, I fled to my room and gave way to tears. I am on trial!

Mother says I must give up my Quaker foolishness and return to the Presbyterians or bring public scandal upon the Grimkés. Well, we’ve endured them before, haven’t we? Father’s impeachment, that despicable Burke Williams, and your aweing “desertion” to the North. It’s my turn now.

I remain firm. Your Sister,

Nina

Over the next year, my letters to Nina were the nearest thing to a diary I’d written since Father’s death. I told her how I practiced saying
Wicked Willy Wiggle,
of the fear my voice would keep me from realizing my largest hopes. I wrote of the anguish of seeing Israel each week at Meetings, the way he avoided me while his sister, Catherine, warmed to me considerably, a
volte-face
I couldn’t have imagined when I first returned here.

I sent Nina sketches I drew of the studio and recounted the talks Lucretia and I had there. I kept her abreast of the livelier petitions that circulated in Philadelphia: to keep free blacks from being turned out of white neighborhoods, to ban the “colored bench” in meetinghouses.

“It has come as a great revelation to me,” I wrote her, “that abolition is different from the desire for racial equality. Color prejudice is at the bottom of everything. If it’s not fixed, the plight of the Negro will continue long after abolition.”

In response, Nina wrote, “I wish I might nail your letter onto a public post on Meeting Street!”

The thought of that was not at all unpleasant to me.

She wrote of her battles with Mother, the dryness of sitting in the Quaker meetinghouse, and the rampant ostracism she faced in Charleston for doing so. “How long must I remain in this land of slavery?” she wrote.

Then, on a languid summer day, Lucretia placed a letter in my hands.

12 August 1829

Dear Sarah,

Several days ago, in route to visit one of the sick in our Meeting, I was standing on the corner of Magazine and Archdale when I encountered two boys—they were mere boys!—escorting a terrified slave to the Work House. She was pleading with them to change their minds, and seeing me, she begged more tearfully, “Please missus, help me.” I could do nothing.

I see now that I can do nothing here. I’m coming to you, Sister. I will quit Charleston and sail to Philadelphia in late October after the storms. We shall be together, and together nothing shall deter us.

With Abiding Love,

Nina

I’d been expecting Nina for over a week, keeping vigil at the window of my new room in Catherine’s house. The November weather had been spiteful, delaying her ship, but yesterday the clouds had broken.

Today. Surely, today.

On my lap was a slender compendium on Quaker worship, but I couldn’t concentrate. Closing it, I paced back and forth in the narrow room, an unadorned little cell similar to the one that awaited Nina across the hall. I wondered what she’d think of it.

It had been hard to leave Lucretia’s, but there was no guest room there for Nina. Israel’s daughter-in-law had taken over Green Hill, allowing Catherine to move back to her small house in the city, and when she’d offered to board the both of us, I’d accepted with relief.

I went again to the window and peered at the outcroppings of blue overhead and then at the river of elm leaves in the street, brimming yellow, and I felt surprised suddenly at my life. How odd it had turned out, how different than I’d imagined. The daughter of Judge John Grimké—a Southern patriot, a slaveholder, an aristocrat—living in this austere house in the North, unmarried, a Quaker, an abolitionist.

A coach turned at the end of the street. I froze for a moment, arrested by the
clomp clomp
of the chestnut horses, the way their high stride made eddies in the leaves, and then I broke into a run.

When Nina opened the door of the coach and saw me rushing toward her without a shawl, my hair falling in red skeins from its pins, she began to laugh. She wore a black, full-length cloak with a hood, and tossing it back, she looked dark and radiant.

“Sister!” she cried and stepped off the carriage rung into my arms.

I
stood by the bed that morning, looking down on mauma still sleeping, the way she had her hands balled under her chin like a child. I hated to wake her, but I patted her foot, and her eyes rolled open. I said, “You feel like getting up? Little missus sent me out here to get you.”

Little missus was what we called Mary, the oldest Grimké daughter. She’d turned a widow the first of the summer, and before they got her husband in the ground good, she’d handed off the tea plantation to her boys, said the place had kept her cut off from the world too long. Next we know, she showed up here with nine slaves and more clothes and furniture than we could fit in the house. I heard missus tell her, “You didn’t need to bring the entire plantation with you.” And Mary said, “Would you prefer I’d left my money behind, too?”

Just when missus had got where she couldn’t swing the gold-tip cane with the strength of a three-year-old, here came little missus, ready to pick up the slack. She had lines round her eyes like dart seams and silver thread in her hair, but she was the same. What we remembered most from when Mary was a girl was the bad way she treated her waiting maid, Lucy—Binah’s other girl. On the day Mary got here with her procession, Phoebe bolted from the kitchen house, shouting, “Lucy. Lucy?” When nobody answered, she rushed up to little missus and said, “You bring my sister Lucy with you?”

Little missus looked stumped, then she said, “Oh, her. She died a long time ago.” She didn’t see Phoebe’s broken face, just her kitchen apron. “I don’t know what time you serve the midday meal,” she said, “but from now on it will be at two.”

The slave quarters were busting seams. Every room taken, some sleeping on the floor. Aunt-Sister and Phoebe yowled about the mouths to feed, and little missus had me and mauma sewing new livery coats and house dresses for everybody. Welcome to the Grimkés’. She hadn’t brought a seamstress with her, but she’d brought everybody else and their second cousin. We had a new butler, a laundress, little missus’ personal chamber maid, a coachman, a footman, a groomsman, new help for the kitchen, the house, and the yard. Sabe got demoted back to the gardens with Sky, and Goodis, poor Goodis, he sat in the stable all day, whittling sticks. Me and him even lost the little room where we still went sometimes to love each other.

Now, here in the cellar room, mauma didn’t raise her head off the pillow. She didn’t have a use for little missus. She said, “What she want with me?”