The Invention of Wings (22 page)

After a while, I heard footsteps overhead—Tomfry, Cindie, Binah up there lighting lamps. I didn’t have to worry with Sarah’s lamp anymore. I just had sewing duties now. Some time ago, Sarah had given me back to missus, official on paper. She said she didn’t want part in owning a human person. She’d come special to my room to tell me, so nerve-racked she couldn’t hardly get the words up. “… … I would’ve freed you if I could … but there’s a law … It doesn’t allow owners to easily free slaves anymore … Otherwise, I would have … you know that … don’t you?”

After that, it was plain as the freckles on her face—the only way I was getting away from missus was drop dead, get sold, or find the hid-place mauma had gone. Some days I mooned over the money mauma’d saved—it never had turned up. If I could find that fortune, I could try and buy my freedom from missus like we’d planned on. Least I’d have a chance—a horse-piss of a chance, but it would be enough to keep me going.

Six years gone. I rolled over on the bed, my face to the window. I said, “Mauma, what happened to you?”

When the new year came round, I was in the market getting what Aunt-Sister needed when I overheard the slave who cleaned the butcher stall talking about the African church. This slave’s name was Jesse, a good, kind man. He used to take the leftover pig bladders and fill them with water for the children to have a balloon. I didn’t usually pay him any mind—he was always wagging his tongue, putting
Praise the Lord
at the end of every sentence—but this day, I don’t know why it was, I went over there to hear what he was saying.

Aunt-Sister had told me to hurry back, that it looked like sleet coming, but I stood there with the raw smell hanging in the air while he talked about the church. I found out the proper name was African Methodist Episcopal Church, and it was just for coloreds, slaves and free blacks together, and it was meeting in an empty hearse house near the black burial ground. Said the place was packed to the rafters every night.

A slave man next to me, wearing some worn-out-looking livery, said, “Since when is the city so fool-trusting to let slaves run their own church?”

Everybody laughed at that, like the joke was on Charleston.

Jesse said, “Well, ain’t that the truth, Praise the Lord. There’s a man at the church who’s always talking ’bout Moses leading the slaves from Egypt, Praise the Lord. He say, Charleston is Egypt all over again. Praise the Lord.”

My scalp pricked. I said, “What’s the man’s name?”

Jesse said, “Denmark Vesey.”

For years, I’d refused to think of Mr. Vesey, how mauma had sewed him on the last square on her story quilt. I didn’t like the man being on it, didn’t like the man period. I’d never thought he knew anything about what happened to her, why would he, but standing there, a bell rang in my head and told me it was worth a try. Maybe then I could put mauma to rest.

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.”

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.

D
idn’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.