The Invention of Wings (43 page)

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?”

“We got that big tea to put on today and she wants the ribbons sewed on the napkins. She acts like you’re the only one can do it. She’s got me fixing the tables.”

“Where’s Sky?”

“Sky’s washing the front steps.”

Mauma looked so tired. I knew the pains in her stomach had got worse cause she’d picked at her food all week. She pushed herself up slow, so thin her body looked like a stem growing up from the mattress.

“Mauma, you lay on back down. I’ll get those ribbons done.”

“You a good girl, Handful, you always was.”

The story quilt was folded on the foot of the bed where she liked to keep it close. She spread it open cross her legs. It was July, a hot, sticky day, and for one tick of the clock, I wondered if she was feeling that cold you get toward the end. But then she turned the quilt till she found the first square. “This is my granny-mauma when the stars fall and she gets sold away.”

I sat down next to her. She wasn’t cold, she just wanted to tell the story on the quilt again. She loved to tell the story.

She’d forgot about the ribbons, and there could be trouble for me lingering, but this was mauma, and this was the story. She went through the whole quilt, every square, taking her time on the ones she’d sewed since she was back. Her being taken away in the wagon by the Guard. Working the rice fields with a baby on her back. A man branding her shoulder with the left hand and hammering out her teeth with the right. Running away under the moon. Finally, she came to the last square, the fifteenth one—it was me, mauma, and Sky with our arms woven together like a loop stitch.

I got to my feet. “Go back to sleep now.”

“No, I’m coming. I be on up there in a while.”

Her eyes glowed like the paper lanterns we used to set out for the garden parties.

I stood in the dining room, facing the window, stuffing big crystal horns with fruit, everything in the larder that wasn’t rotten, when I spotted mauma shuffling toward the spirit tree at the back of the yard. She had the story quilt clutched round her shoulders.

My hands came still—the way she slid one foot, rested, then slid the other one. When she reached the tree, she steadied her hand on the trunk and lowered herself to the ground. My heart started to beat strange.

I didn’t look to see if little missus was near, I hurried out the back door. Fast as I could, fast as the earth would pass beneath me.

“Mauma?”

She lifted her face. The light had gone from her eyes. There was only the black wick now.

I eased down beside her.
“Mauma?”

“It’s all right. I come to get my spirit to take with me.” Her voice sounded far off inside her. “I’m tired, Handful.”

I tried not to be scared. “I’ll take care of you. Don’t worry, we’ll get you some rest.”

She smiled the saddest smile, letting me know she’d get her rest, but not the kind I hoped. I took hold of her hands. They were ice cold. Little bird bones.

She said it again. “I’m tired.”

She wanted me to tell her it was all right, to get her spirit and go on, but I couldn’t say it. I told her, “Course, you’re tired. You worked hard your whole life. That’s all you did was work.”

“Don’t you remember me for that. Don’t you remember I’m a slave and work hard. When you think of me, you say, she never did belong to those people. She never belong to nobody but herself.”

She closed her eyes. “You remember that.”

“I will, mauma.”

I pulled the quilt round her shoulders. High in the limbs, the crows cawed. The doves moaned. The wind bent down to lift her to the sky.

W
e arrived at the meetinghouse in the swelter of an August morning with every intention of going inside and sitting on the Negro pew.

“… Are we certain we want to do this?” I asked Nina.

She halted on the browned grass, a harsh amber light falling out of the cloudless sky onto her face. “But you said the Negro pew was a barrier that must be broken!”

I
had
said that, just last night. It had seemed like a stirring idea then, but now, in the glare of day, it seemed less like breaking a barrier and more like a perilous lark. So far, the Arch Street members had put up with my anti-slavery statements the way you abide swarming insects in the outdoors—you swat and ignore them the best you can—but this was altogether different. This was an act of rebellion and it probably wouldn’t help my long struggle to become a Quaker minister. The idea to sit on the Negro pew had come after reading
The Liberator,
an anti-slavery paper Nina and I had been smuggling home in our parcels and, once, folded inside Nina’s bonnet. It was published by Mr. William Lloyd Garrison, possibly the most radical abolitionist in the country. I was sure if Catherine found a single copy in our rooms, she would promptly evict us. We kept them hidden beneath our mattresses, and I wondered now if we should go home and burn them.

The truth was none of this was safe. Pro-slavery mobs had been on a reign of terror all summer, and not in the South, but
here
in the North. They’d been tossing abolitionist printing presses into the rivers and burning down free black and abolitionist homes, nearly fifty of them in Philadelphia alone. The violence had been a shock to me and Nina—it seemed geography was no safeguard at all. Being an abolitionist could get you attacked right on the streets—heckled, flogged, stoned, killed. Some abolitionists had bounties on their heads, and most everyone had gone into hiding.

Standing there, seeing the disappointment on Nina’s face, I wished for Lucretia. I wished she would appear next to me in her white organdy bonnet with her fearless eyes, but she and James had moved to another Meeting, finding Arch Street too conservative. I’d thought to follow her until Catherine made it clear Nina and I would have to seek other lodging, and there were few, if any, suitable places two spinster sisters could board together. Sometimes I thought back to that day by the Delaware when I’d told Lucretia I wouldn’t look back, and I had carried on the best I could, but there were always compromises to be made, so many little concessions.