The Invention of Wings (15 page)

The lottery office was down the street from the market, near the docks. I’d passed it myself when mauma took me out to learn the shopping. There was always a mish-mash of people getting tickets: ship captains, City Guard, white laborers, free blacks, slaves, mulattoes, and creoles. There’d be two, three men in silk cravats with their carriages waiting.

I said, “How come
you
don’t buy a ticket?”

“And waste a coin on some fancy chance?”

For the last five years, every lick of strength mauma had left from sewing for missus had gone toward her dollar bill collection. She’d been hired out steady since I was eleven, but it wasn’t on the sly anymore, and thank you kind Jesus for that. Her counterfeit badge and all that sneaking out she’d done for the better part of a year had put white hair on my head. I used to pull it out and show it to her. I’d say, “Look what you’re doing to me.” She’d say, “Here I is, saving up to buy us freedom and you worrying ’bout hair.”

When I was thirteen, missus had finally given in and let mauma hire out. I don’t know why. Maybe she got tired of saying the word
no
. Maybe it was the money she wanted—mauma could put a hundred dollars a year in missus’ pocket—but I know this much, it didn’t hurt when mauma made missus a patchwork quilt for Christmas that year. It had a square for each of her children made from some remnant of theirs. Mauma told her, “I know this ain’t nothing much, but I sewed you a memory quilt of your family so you can wrap up in it after they gone.” Missus touched each square: “Why, this is from the dress Mary wore to her coming out … This is Charles’ baptism blanket … My goodness, this is Thomas’ first riding shirt.”

Mauma didn’t waste a breath. She asked missus right then to hire her out. A month later she was hired legal to sew for a woman on Tradd Street. Mauma kept twenty cents on the dollar. The rest went to missus, but I knew mauma was selling underhand on the side—frilled bonnets, quilt tops, candlewick bedcovers, all sorts of wears that didn’t call for a fitting.

She had me count the money regular. It came to a hundred ninety dollars. I hated to tell her her money-pile could hit the roof, but that didn’t mean missus would sell us, specially to ourselves.

Thinking about all this, I said, “We sew too good for missus to let us go.”

“Well if she refuse us, then our sewing gon get real bad, real fast.”

“What makes you think she wouldn’t sell us to somebody else for spite?”

Mauma stopped working and the fight seemed to almost leave her. She looked tired. “It’s a chance we has to take, or else we gon end up like Snow.”

Poor Snow, he’d died one night last summer. Fell over in the privy. Aunt-Sister tied his jaw to keep his spirit from leaving, and he was laid out on a cooling board in the kitchen house for two days before they put him in a burial box. The man had spent his whole life carrying the Grimkés round town. Sabe took his place as the coachman and they brought some new boy from their plantation to be the footman. His name was Goodis, and he had one lazy eye that looked sideways. He watched me so much with that eye mauma’d said, “That boy got his heart fix on you.”

“I don’t want him fixing his heart on me.”

“That’s good,” she’d said. “I can’t buy nobody’s freedom but mine and yours. You get a husband, and he on his own.”

I tied off a knot and moved the embroider hoop over, saying to myself,
I don’t want a husband and don’t plan on ending up like Snow on a cooling board in the kitchen house either.

“How much will it take to buy the both of us?” I asked.

Mauma rammed the needle in the cloth. She said, “That’s what you gon find out.”

I’
d never been inclined to keep a diary until I met Burke Williams. I thought by writing down my feelings, I would seize control over them, perhaps even curb what Reverend Hall called “the paroxysms of carnality.”

For what it’s worth, charting one’s passion in a small daybook kept hidden in a hatbox inside a wardrobe does not subdue passion in the least.

20 February 1811

I had imagined romantic love to be a condition of sweet utopia, not an affliction! To think, a few weeks ago, I thought my starved mind would be my worst hardship. Now my heart has its own ordeal. Mr. Williams, you torment me. It’s as if I’ve contracted a tropical fever. I cannot say whether I wish to be cured.

My diary overflowed with this sort of purple outburst.

3 March

Mr. Williams, why do you not call? It’s unfair that I must wait for you to act. Why must I, as a female, be at your disposal? Why can’t I send a calling note to you? Who made up these unjust rules? Men, that’s who. God devised women to be the minions. Well, I quite resent it!

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.

“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.