The Invention of Wings (37 page)

And Handful.

She was cleaning the mahogany staircase late one afternoon in the aftermath of the event when a rock flew through the front window of the drawing room, shattering the pane. Hearing the explosion of glass all the way on the second floor, I hurried down to find Handful with her back pressed against the wall beside the broken window, trying to peer out without being seen. She waved me back. “Watch out, they could toss another one.”

A stone the size of a hen’s egg lay on the rug in a nest of shards. Shouts drifted from the street.
Slave lover. Nigger lover. Abolitionist. Northern whore.

We stared at each other as the sounds melted away. The room turned quiet, serene. Light was pouring in, hitting the scattered glass, turning it into pieces of fire on the crimson rug. The sight bereaved me. Not because I was despised, but because of how powerless I felt, because it seemed I could do nothing. I was soon to be thirty, and I’d done nothing.

They say in extreme moments time will slow, returning to its unmoving core, and standing there, it seemed as if everything stopped. Within the stillness, I felt the old, irrepressible ache to know what my point in the world might be. I felt the longing more solemnly than anything I’d ever felt, even more than my old innate loneliness. What came to me was the
fleur de lis
button in the box and the lost girl who’d put it there, how I’d twice carried it from Charleston to Philadelphia and back, carried it like a sad, decaying hope.

Across the room, Handful strode into the glowing debris on the rug, bent and picked up the stone. I watched as she turned it over in her hands, knowing I would leave this place yet again. I would return north to make what life I could.

T
he day of retribution passed without a musket ball getting fired, without a fuse being lit, without any of us getting free, but not one white person would look at us ever again and think we were harmless.

I didn’t know who was arrested and who wasn’t. I didn’t know if Denmark was safe or sorry, or both. Sarah said it was best to stay off the streets, but by Wednesday, I couldn’t wait anymore. I found Nina and told her I needed a pass to get some molasses. She wrote it out and said, “Be careful.”

Denmark was in the bedroom of his house, stuffing clothes and money in a knapsack. Susan led me back there, her eyes bloodshot with crying. I stood in the doorway and breathed the heavy air, and thought,
It all came to nothing, but he’s still here.

There was an iron bed against the wall covered with the quilt I’d made to hide the list of names. The black triangles were laid out perfect on the red squares, but they looked sad to me now. Like a bird funeral.

I said to him, “So, where’re you going?”

Susan started to cry, and he said, “Woman, if you’re going to make all that noise, do it somewhere else.”

She pushed past me through the door, sniffling, saying, “Go on to your other wife then.”

I said, “You leaving for another wife?”

The curtain had been yanked closed on the window, leaving a crack on the side where a piece of brightness came in. It pointed at him like a sundial. “It’s a matter of time before they come looking for me here,” he said. “Yesterday they picked up Ned, Rolla, and Peter. The three of them are in the Work House, and I don’t doubt their fortitude, but they’ll be tortured till they name names. If our plans live to see another day, I have to go.”

Dread slid down my back. I said, “What about my name? Will they say my name for stealing the bullet mold?”

He sat down on the bed, on top of the dead blackbird wings, with his arms dangling by his knees. When the recruits used to come to the house, he’d shout,
The Lord has spoken to me,
and he’d look stern and mighty as the Lord himself, but now he just looked cast down. “Don’t worry,” he said, “they’re after the leader—that’s me. Nobody will say your name.”

I hated to ask him the question, but I needed to know. “What happened to the plans?”

He shook his head. “The thing I worried about was the house slaves who can’t tell where they end and their owners begin. We got betrayed, that’s what happened. One of them betrayed us, and the Guard put spies out there.”

His jaw tightened, and he pushed off the bed. “The day we were set to strike, the troops were built up so heavy our couriers couldn’t get out of the city to spread the call. We couldn’t light the fuses or retrieve the weapons.” He picked up a tin plate with a candle stuck to it and hurled it at the wall. “Goddamn them. Goddamn them to hell.
God—
” His face twisted.

I didn’t move till his shoulders dropped and I felt the torment leave him. I said, “You did what you could. Nobody will forget that.”

“Yeah, they will. They’ll forget.” He peeled the quilt off the bed and draped it in my arms. “Here, you take this with you and burn the list. Burn it straightaway. I don’t have time.”

“Where will you be?”

“I’m a free black man. I’ll be where I’ll be,” he said, being careful in case Rolla and them said my name after all, and the white men came to torture me.

He picked up the knapsack and headed for the door. It wasn’t the last time I’d see him. But those words,
I’ll be where I’ll be,
were the last words he ever spoke to me.

I burned the list of names in the stove fire in the kitchen house. Then I waited for what would be.

Denmark was caught four days later in the house of a free mulatto woman. He had a trial with seven judges, and before it was over and done, every person in the city, white and black, knew his name. The hearsay from the trial flooded the streets and alleys and filled up the drawing rooms and the work yards. The slaves said Denmark Vesey was the black Jesus and even if they killed him, he would rise on the third day. The white folks said he was the Frozen Serpent that struck the bosom that sheltered him. They said he was a general who misled his own army, that he never had as many weapons as the slaves thought he did. The Guard found a few pikes and pistols and two bullet molds, but that was all. Maybe Gullah Jack, who managed to stay free till August, made the rest of the arms disappear, but I wondered if Denmark had pulled the truth like taffy the way they said. When I opened the quilt so I could burn the list, I counted two hundred eighty-three names on it, not six thousand like he’d said. Nowadays, I believe he just wanted to strike a flame, thinking if he did that, every able-body would join the fight.

On the day the verdict came, Sabe had me on my hands and knees rolling up carpets and scrubbing floors in the main passageway. The heat was so bad I could’ve washed the soap off the floor with the sweat pouring down my face. I told Sabe floor-scrubbing was winter work and he said, well good, you can do it next winter, too. I swear, I didn’t know what Minta saw in him.

I’d just slipped out to the piazza to catch a breeze when Sarah stepped out there and said, “… I thought you would want to know, Denmark Vesey’s trial is over.”

Course, there wasn’t a way in the world the man was getting free, but still, I reached back for the bannister, weak with hope. She came close to me and laid her hand on my soaked-through dress. “… They found him guilty.”

“What happens to him now?”

“… He’ll be put to death. I’m sorry.”

I didn’t let on anything inside me, the way sorrow was already singing again in the hollow of my bones.

It didn’t cross my mind yet to wonder why Sarah sought me out with the news. She and Nina both knew I left the premises sometimes for reasons of my own, but they didn’t know I went to
his
house. They didn’t know he called me daughter. They didn’t know he was anything special to me.

“… When they gave the verdict, they also issued an edict,” she said. “… A kind of order from the judges.”

I studied her face, her red freckles burning bright in the sun and worry gathered tight in her eyes, and I knew why she was out here on the piazza with me—it was about this edict.

“… Any black person, man or woman, who mourns Denmark Vesey in public will be arrested and whipped.”

I looked away from her into the ornament garden where Goodis had left the rake and hoe and the watering pot. Every green thing was bowed down thirsty. Everything withering.

“… Handful, please, listen to me now, according to the order, you cannot wear black on the streets, or cry, or say his name, or do anything to mark him. Do you understand?”

“No, I don’t understand. I won’t never understand,” I said, and went on back inside to the scrub brush.

On July 2 before the sun rose, I wriggled through the window in my room, braced my back against the house and my good leg against the wall, and shimmied up and over the fence the way I used to do. To hell with begging for a pass. White people signing their names so I could walk down the street. Hell with it.

I hurried through the city while I still had the darkness for cover. When I got to Magazine Street, the light broke wide open. Spying the Work House, I stopped dead in my tracks, and for a minute my body felt like it was back inside there. I could hear the treadmill groaning, could smell the fear. In my head, I saw the cowhide slap the baby on its mauma’s back, and I felt myself falling. The only way I kept from turning back was thinking about Denmark, how any minute they’d bring him and his lieutenants out through the Work House gate.

The judges had picked July 2 for the execution day, a secret everybody in the world knew. They said Denmark and five others would be put to death early in the morning at Blake’s Lands, a marshy place with a stand of oaks where they hung pirates and criminals. Every slave who could figure a way to get there would show up, and white people, too, I reckoned, but something told me to come to the Work House first and follow Denmark to Blake’s Lands. Maybe he’d catch sight of me and know he didn’t travel the last mile of his life alone.

I crouched by the animal sheds near the gate, and soon enough four horse-drawn wagons came rolling out with the doomed men shackled in back, sitting on top of their own burial boxes. They were a swollen, beat-up lot—Rolla and Ned in the first wagon, Peter in the second, and two men I never had seen in the third. The last one held Denmark. He sat tall with his face grim. He didn’t see me get to my feet and limp along behind them on the side of the road. The Guard was heavy in the wagons, so I had to stay well back.

The horses plodded along slow. I trailed them a good ways with my foot aching inside my shoe, working hard to keep up, wishing he’d look at me, and then a strange thing happened. The first three wagons turned down the road toward Blake’s Lands, but the fourth one with Denmark turned in the opposite direction. Denmark looked confused and tried to stand, but a guard pushed him down.

He watched his lieutenants rumble away. He yelled, “Die like men!” He kept on yelling it while the distance grew between them and the dust from the wheels churned, and Rolla and Peter shouted it back.
Die like men. Die like men.

I didn’t know where Denmark’s wagon was headed, but I hurried behind it with their cries in the air. Then his eyes fell on me, and he turned quiet. The rest of the way, he watched me come along behind, lagging way back.

They hung him from an oak tree on an empty stretch along Ashley Road. Nobody was there but the four guards, the horse, and me. All I could do was squat far off in the palmetto scrub and watch. Denmark stepped quiet onto the high bench and didn’t move when they tugged the noose over his head. He went like he shouted to the others, like a man. Up till they kicked the bench out from under his legs, he stared at the palm leaves where I hid.

I looked away when he dropped. I kept my eyes on the ground, listening to the gasps that drifted from the tree. All round, the hermit crabs skittered, looking at me with their tiny stupid eyes, sliding in and out of holes in the black dirt.

When I looked again, Denmark was swaying on the limb with the hanging moss.

They took him down, put him in the wood coffin, and nailed the lid. After the wagon disappeared down the road, I eased out from my hiding place and walked to the tree. It was almost peaceful under there in the shade. Like nothing had happened. Just the scuff marks in the dust where the bench had fallen over.