The Invention of Wings (35 page)

The room was empty except for a straw mattress Sabe had laid on the floor for Minta and him, but the place still had the same old fragrance of horse shit. I looked down at the grungy mattress, while Goodis spread a clean blanket cross it, smoothing out every little wrinkle just-so, and seeing the care he took with it, I felt tenderness to him pour through me. He wasn’t old, but most of his hair was gone. The lid over his wandering eye drooped, while the other lid stayed up, so he always looked like he was half asleep, but he had a big, easy smile and he kept it on while he helped me out from my dress.

When I was stretched out on the blanket, he gazed at the pouch round my neck, stuffed fat with scraps of the spirit tree.

“I don’t take that off,” I said.

He gave it a pinch, feeling the hard lumps of bark and acorns. “These your jewels?”

“Yeah. Those are my gemstones.”

Pushing the pouch to the side, he held my breasts in his hands and said, “These ain’t big as two hazelnuts, but that’s how I like ’em, small and brown like this.” He kissed my mouth and shoulders and rubbed his face against the hazelnuts. Then he kissed my bad foot, his lip following the snarled path of scars. I wasn’t one to cry, but tears leaked from the sides of my eyes and ran behind my ears.

I never spoke a word the whole time, even when he pushed inside me. I felt like a mortar at first and he was the pestle. It was like pounding rice, but gentle and kind, breaking open the tough hulls. Once he laughed, saying, “This what you thought it’d be?” and I couldn’t answer. I smiled with the tears seeping out.

The next morning, I was sore from loving. At breakfast, Goodis said, “It’s a fine day. What you think, Handful?”

“Yeah, it’s fine.”

“Tomorrow gon be fine, too.”

“Might be,” I said.

After the meal, I found Nina and asked her could I have a pass for the market—Sabe wasn’t in a granting mood. I told her, “Aunt-Sister says molasses with a little whiskey would do your mauma a world of good, might calm her down, but we don’t have any.”

She wrote the pass and when she handed it to me, she said, “Any time you need … molasses or anything like that, you come to me. All right?”

That’s how I knew we had an understanding. Course, if she knew what I was about to do, she never would’ve signed her name on that paper.

I walked to the Arsenal with my rabbit cane, carrying a basket of rags, cleaning spirits, a feather duster, and a long broom over my shoulder. Gullah Jack had been watching the place for a good while now. He said on the first Monday of the month, they opened it up for inspection and maintenance, counting weapons, cleaning muskets, and what-not. A free black girl named Hilde came those days to sweep it out, dust, oil the gun racks, and clean the privy out back. Gullah Jack had given her a coin not to show up today.

Denmark had drawn me a picture of a bullet mold. It looked like a pair of nose pliers, except the nose came together to form a tiny bowl on the end where you poured the lead to make the musket ball. He said a bullet mold wasn’t much bigger than his hand, so get two if I could. The main thing, he said, was don’t get caught.

That was my main thing, too.

The Arsenal was a round building made out of tabby with walls two foot thick. It had three skinny windows high up with iron bars. Today, the shutters were thrown back to let the light in. The guard by the door wanted to know who I was and where was Hilde. I wound through the story about her getting sick and sending me for the stand-in. He said, “You don’t look like you could lift a broom.”

Well, how you think this broom got on my shoulder? All by itself?
That’s what I wanted to say, but I looked at the ground. “Yessir, but I’m a hard worker, you’ll see.”

He unlocked the bolt on the door. “They’re cleaning muskets today. Stay out of their way. When you’re done, tap on the door and I’ll let you out.”

I stepped inside. The door slammed. The bolt clicked.

Standing there, trying to get my bearings through the gloom, I sniffed mold and linseed oil and the rancid smell of cooped-up air. Two guards were on the far side with their backs to me, taking a musket apart under one of the windows—all the pieces spread out on a table. One of them turned and said, “It’s Hilde.”

I didn’t clear up the mistake. I started sweeping.

The Arsenal was a single room filled with weapons. My eyes roved over everything. Kegs of gunpowder were stacked in the middle halfway to the ceiling. Arranged neat along the walls were wooden racks filled with muskets and pistols, heaps of cannon balls, and in the back, dozens of wooden chests.

I kept the broom going, working my way round the whole floor, hoping the
swish-swish
covered the loud, ragged way my breath was coming. The guards’ voices came and went in echoes.

This one could fire on the half-cock. See the mainspring on the hammer? It’s gone bad.

Make sure the ramrod head is tight and there’s no rust on it.

When I was blocked from their view behind the powder kegs, my breath eased up. I got out the feather duster. One by one, I brushed the tops of the wooden chests, pausing each time to look over my shoulder before lifting the lid to peek inside. I found cow horns with leather straps. A tangle of iron hand cuffs. Bars of lead. Pieces of thin rope I guessed to be fuses. But no bullet molds.

Then I noticed an old snare drum propped up against the wall, and behind it was another chest. Picking my way over to it, my lame foot upset the drum, and
whamblam,
it hit the floor.

Here came the boots stomping. I grabbed the duster and the feathers twitched and shook in my hand like they’d come alive.

The guard yelled at me. “What was that racket?”

“This drum right here fell over.”

He narrowed his eyes. “You’re not Hilde.”

“No, she turned sick. I’m filling in.”

He had a long piece of metal in his hand from the musket. He pointed it at the drum. “We don’t need that sort of carelessness in here!”

“Yessir, I’ll take care.”

He went back to work, but my heart had been beat to butter.

I opened the chest where the drum had leaned and there must’ve been ten bullet molds inside. I pulled out two, slow so they wouldn’t clink, and stuck them in my basket under the rags.

Then I swept the air clean of cobwebs and wiped down the gun racks with oil. When I had the place good as Hilde would’ve done it, I gathered my stuff and tapped on the door.

“Don’t forget the latrine,” the guard at the door said, thumbing toward the rear of the Arsenal.

I headed back there, but I walked right past it and kept going.

That night in my room, I found a little piece of cobweb in my hair. I took a towel and rubbed myself clean, then lay down on top of the story quilt, remembering the smile on Denmark’s face when I’d showed up and pulled a bullet mold from my basket. When I drew out the second one, he’d slapped his leg and said, “You might be the best lieutenant I got.”

I waited for sleep, but it didn’t come. After a while, I went and sat on the back porch steps. The yard was quiet. I eyed the room over the carriage house and wondered if Goodis had looked for me after supper. He would be asleep now. Denmark, too. I was the only one up, worrying about the bowl on the end of the bullet mold, the place they pour the lead. How many people would those musket balls kill? I might’ve passed one of them on the street today. I might pass one tomorrow. I might pass a hundred people who would die cause of me.

The moon was round and white, sitting small at the top of the sky. It seemed the right size to sit in the bowl on the bullet mold. That was what I wished. I wished for the moon instead of lead.

I
arrived in Charleston wearing my best Quaker frock, a plain gray dress with a flat white collar and matching bonnet, the picture of humility. Before leaving Philadelphia, I’d been officially accepted into the Quaker fold. My probation had ended. I was one of them.

Upon seeing me for the first time in over a year, Mother received my kiss on her cheek and said, “I see you’ve returned as a Quaker. Really, Sarah, how can you show your face in Charleston dressed like that?”

I didn’t like the garb either, but it was at least made from wool, free of slave labor. We Quakers boycotted Southern cotton.
We Quakers—
how strange that sounded to me.

I tried to smile and make light of Mother’s comment, not yet grasping the full reason for it. “… Is that my welcome home, then? Surely you’ve missed me.”

She was sitting in the same spot where I’d last seen her, in the fading gold brocade wingchair by the window, and wearing the same black dress, holding her infernal gold-tip cane across her lap. It was as if she’d been sitting there since I left. Everything about her seemed unchanged, except she appeared more dilapidated around the edges. The skin of her neck folded turtle-like onto her collar and the hair at her forehead was fraying like an edge of cloth.

“I’ve missed you, dear, of course. The entire household suffered because of your desertion, but you can’t go about dressed like that—you would be taken at once for a Quaker, and their anti-slavery views are well known here.”

I hadn’t thought of this. I ran my palms down the sides of my skirt, feeling suddenly fond of my drab outfit.

A voice came from the doorway. “If
that’s
what this hideous dress of yours means, I’ll have to get one myself.”

Nina.
She looked like a whole new creature. She was taller, standing inches above me with her sable hair swept back, her cheeks higher, her brows thick and her eyes black. My sister had become a darkly beautiful woman.

She threw her arms around me. “You are never to leave again.”

As we clung to each other, Mother muttered, as if to herself, “For once, the child and I agree on something.”

Nina and I laughed, and then astonishingly, Mother laughed, and the sound the three of us made together in the room created a silly joy inside of me.

“… Look at you,” I said, cupping Nina’s face in my hands.

Mother’s eyes flitted from my collar to my hem and back. “I’m quite serious about the dress, Sarah. One of the Quaker families here had their home pelted with eggs. It was reported yesterday in the
Mercury.
Tell her, Nina. Explain to your sister that Charlestonians are in no mood to see her parading around like this.”

Nina sighed. “There are rumors in the city of a slave revolt.”

“… A revolt?”

“It’s nothing but twaddle,” Mother said, “but people are overwrought about it.”

“If you believe the stories,” Nina said, “the slaves are going to converge on the streets, kill the entire white population, and burn the city.”

The skin on my arms prickled.

“After the killing and burning, supposedly they will plunder the state bank and then raid the horses in the city stable or else board ships in the harbor and sail off to Haiti.”

A small scoff escaped Mother’s throat. “Can you imagine them devising such an elaborate plan?”

I felt a sort of plummeting in my chest. I could, in fact, imagine it. Not the part about the slaughter—that, my mind couldn’t fathom. But there were more slaves living in Charleston than whites, why shouldn’t they conceive a plot to free themselves? It would have to be elaborate and bold in order to succeed. And it couldn’t help but be violent.

Reflexively, I pressed my palms together beneath my chin, as if praying. “… Dear God.”

“But you can’t take it seriously,” Nina said. “There was a similar situation in Edgefield, remember? The white families were certain they would be murdered in their beds. It was simple hysteria.”

“… What’s behind it? How did the rumor start?”

“It started with Colonel John Prioleau’s house slave. Apparently, he heard news of a revolt at the wharves and reported it to the colonel, who went to the authorities. The Guard tracked down the source—a slave named William Paul, who’s well known, apparently, for being a braggart. The poor man was arrested and is being held at the Work House.” Nina paused, shuddering. “I can’t bear to think what they’ve done to him.”

Mother rapped the floor with her cane. “The mayor-intendent has dismissed the matter. Governor Bennett has dismissed the matter. I want no further talk of it. Just take heed, Sarah, the climate is a tinderbox.”