The Invention of Wings (45 page)

Africa.
Wherever me and Sky were, that’s the only place mauma would be.

I
woke each day to a sick, empty feeling. Catherine had given us until the first day of October to pack our things and leave, but we could find no one who’d take in two sisters expelled by the Quakers, and Lucretia’s house was packed with children now. The streets had been flooded with hand fliers—they were tacked on light posts and buildings and strewn on the ground—the headline screaming out in the salacious way these street rags did:
OUTRAGE: An Abolitionist of the Most Revolting Character is Among You.
Below that, Nina’s letter to
The Liberator
was printed in full. Even the lowliest boardinghouses wouldn’t open their doors to us.

I’d reached the borders of despair when a letter came with no return name or address on the envelope.

29 September 1835

Dear Misses Grimké,

If you are bold enough to sit with us on the Negro pew, perhaps you will find it in yourself to share our home until you find more suitable lodging. My mother and I have nothing to offer but a partially furnished attic, but it has a window and the chimney runs through the middle of it and keeps it warm. It is yours, if you would have it. We ask that you not speak of the arrangement to anyone, including your present landlord Catherine Morris. We await you at 5 Lancaster Row.

Yours in Fellowship,

Sarah Mapps Douglass

We departed our old life the next day, leaving no forwarding address and no goodbye, arriving by coach at a tiny brick house in a poor, mostly white neighborhood. There was a crooked wooden fence around the front with a chain on the gate, which necessitated us dragging our trunks to the back door.

The attic was poorly lit and gauzy with cobwebs, and when a fire blazed below, the room filled with stultifying heat and smelled bitter with wood smoke, but we didn’t complain. We had a roof. We had each other. We had friends in Sarah Mapps and Grace.

Sarah Mapps was well educated, perhaps more than I, having attended the best Quaker academy for free blacks in the city. She would tell me that even as a child she’d known her only mission in life was to found a school for black children. “Few understand that kind of emphatic knowing,” she said. “Most people, including my mother, feel I’ve sacrificed too much by not marrying and having children, but the pupils, they are my children.” I understood far better than she realized. Like me, she loved books, keeping her precious volumes inside a chest in their small front sitting room. Each evening she read to her mother in her lovely singsong voice—Milton, Byron, Austen—continuing long after Grace had fallen asleep in her chair.

There were hats everywhere in various stages of construction, hanging on tree racks throughout the house, and if not actual hats, then sketches of hats scattered on tables and wedged into the frame of the mirror by the door. Grace made big, wild-feathered creations which she sold to the shops, creations that, as a Quaker, she never could’ve worn herself. Nina said she was living vicariously, but I think she simply possessed the urgings of an artist.

Our first week in the attic, we cleaned. We swept out the dust and spiders and shined the window glass. We polished the two narrow bed frames, the table and chair, and the creaky rocker. Sarah Mapps brought up a hand-braided rug, bright quilts, an extra table, a lantern, and a small bookshelf where we set our books and journals. We tucked evergreen boughs under the eaves to scent the air and hung our clothes on wall hooks. I placed my pewter inkstand on the extra table.

By the second week we were bored. Sarah Mapps had said we should be careful to conceal our comings and goings, that the neighbors would not tolerate racial mixing, but slipping out one day, we were spotted by a group of ruffian boys, who pelted us with pebbles and slurs.
Amalgamators. Amalgamators.
The next day the front of the house was egged.

The third week we became hermits.

When November arrived, I began to pace the oval rug as I reread books and old letters, holding them as I walked, trying not to disappear into the melancholic place I’d visited since childhood. I felt as if I was fighting to hold my ground, that if I stepped off the rug, I would fall into my old abyss.

Before we’d left Catherine’s, a letter had arrived from Handful telling us of Charlotte’s death. Every time I read it—so many times Nina had threatened to hide it from me—I thought of the promise I’d made to help Handful get free. It had plagued me my whole life, and now that Charlotte was gone, instead of releasing me, her death had somehow made the obligation more binding. I told myself I’d tried—I
had
tried. How many times had I written Mother begging to purchase Handful in order to free her? She’d not even acknowledged my requests.

Then one morning while my sister used the last of our paints to capture the bare willow outside the window and I walked my trenchant path on the rug, I suddenly stopped and gazed at the pewter inkstand. I stared at it for whole minutes. Everything was in shambles, and there was the inkstand.

“… Nina! Do you remember how Mother would make us sit for hours and write apologies? Well, I’m going to write one … a true apology for the antislavery cause. You could write, too … We both could.”

She stared at me, while everything I felt and knew offered itself up at once. “… It’s the South that must be reached,” I said. “… We’re Southerners … we know the slaveholders, you and I … We can speak to them … not lecture them, but appeal to them.”

Turning toward the window, she seemed to study the willow, and when she looked back, I saw the glint in her eyes. “We could write a pamphlet!”

She rose, stepping into the quadrangle of light that lay on the floor from the window. “Mr. Garrison printed my letter, perhaps he would print our pamphlet, too, and send it to all the cities in the South. But let’s not address it to the slaveholders. They’ll never listen to us.”

“… Who then?”

“We’ll write to the Southern clergy and to the women. We’ll set the preachers upon them, and their wives and mothers and daughters!”

I wrote in bed on my lap desk, wrapped in a woolen shawl, while Nina bent over the small table in her old, fur-lined bonnet. The entire attic ached with cold and the
scratch-scratch
of our pens and the whippoorwills already calling to each other in the gathering dark.

All winter the chimney had steeped the attic with heat and Nina would throw open the window to let in the icy air. We wrote sweltering or we wrote shivering, but rarely in between. Our pamphlets were nearly finished—mine,
An Epistle to the Clergy of the Southern States,
and Nina’s,
An Appeal to the Christian Women of the South.
She’d taken the women, and I the clergy, which I found ironic considering I’d done so poorly with men and she so well. She insisted it would’ve been more ironic the other way around—her writing about God when she’d done so poorly with him.

We’d set down every argument the South made for slavery and refuted them all. I didn’t stutter on the page. It was an ecstasy to write without hesitation, to write everything hidden inside of me, to write with the sort of audacity I wouldn’t have found in person. I sometimes thought of Father as I wrote and the brutal confession he’d made at the end.
Do you think I don’t abhor slavery? Do you think I don’t know it was greed that kept me from following my conscience?
But it was mostly Charlotte who haunted my pages.

Below us in the kitchen, I heard Sarah Mapps and Grace feeding wood into the stove, an ornery old Rumford that coughed up clouds of smut. Soon we smelled vegetables boiling—onions, parsnips, beet tops—and we gathered our day’s work and descended the ladder.

Sarah Mapps turned from the stove as we entered, sheaves of smoke floating about her head. “Do you have new pages for us?” she asked, and her mother, who was pounding dough, stopped to hear our answer.

“Sarah has brought down the last of hers,” Nina said. “She wrote the final sentence today, and I expect to complete mine tomorrow!”

Sarah Mapps clapped her hands the way she might’ve done for the children in her class. Our habit was to gather in the sitting room after the meal, where Nina and I read our latest passages aloud to them. Grace sometimes grew so distressed at our eyewitness accounts of slavery she would interrupt us with all sorts of outbursts—
Such an abomination! Can’t they see we are persons? There but for the grace of God.
Finally, Sarah Mapps would fetch the millinery basket so her mother could distract herself by jabbing a needle into one of the hats she was making.

“A letter came for you today, Nina,” Grace said, wiping dough from her hands and digging it from her apron.

Few people knew of our whereabouts: Mother and Thomas in Charleston, and I’d sent the address to Handful as well, though I’d not heard back from her. Among the Quakers, we’d informed no one but Lucretia, afraid that Sarah Mapps and Grace would suffer for consorting with us. The handwriting on the letter, however, belonged to none of them.

I gazed over Nina’s shoulder as she tore open the paper.

“It’s from Mr. Garrison!” Nina cried. I’d forgotten—Nina had written him some weeks ago, describing our literary undertaking, and he’d responded with enthusiasm, asking us to submit our work when it was finished. I couldn’t imagine what he might want.

21 March 1836

Dear Miss Grimké,

I have enclosed a letter to you from Elizur Wright in New York. Not knowing how to reach you, he entrusted the letter to me to forward. I think you will find it of utmost importance.

I pray the monographs you and your sister are writing will reach me soon and that you will both rise to the moment that is now upon you
.

God Grant You Courage,

William Lloyd Garrison

Nina looked up, her eyes searching mine, and they were filled with a kind of wonder. With a deep breath, she read the accompanying letter aloud.

2 March 1836

Dear Miss Grimké,

I write on behalf of the American Anti-Slavery Society, which is soon to commission and send forth forty abolition agents to speak at gatherings across the free states, winning converts to our cause and rousing support. After reading your eloquent letter to
The Liberator
and observing the outcry and awe it has elicited, the Executive Committee is unanimous in its belief that your insight into the evils of slavery in the South and your impassioned voice will be an invaluable asset.

We invite you to join us in this great moral endeavor, and your sister, Sarah, as well, as we have learned of her sacrifice and staunch abolitionist views. We believe you may be more amenable to the mission if she accompanies you. If the two of you would consent to be our only female agents, we would have you speak to women in private parlors in New York.

We would expect you the sixteenth of next September for two months of rigorous agent training under the direction of Theodore Weld, the great abolitionist orator. Your circuit of lectures will commence in December.

We ask for your prayerful deliberation and your reply.

Yours Most Sincerely,

Elizur Wright

Secretary, AASS

The four of us stared at one another for a moment with blank, astonished expressions, and then Nina threw her arms around me. “Sarah, it’s all we could’ve hoped and more.”

I could only stand there immobile while she clasped me. Sarah Mapps scooped a handful of flour from the bowl and tossed it over us like petals at a wedding, and their laughter rose into the steamy air.

“Think of it, we’re to be trained by Theodore Weld,” Nina said. He was the man who’d “abolitionized” Ohio. He was said to be demanding, fiercely principled, and uncompromising.

I muddled through the meal and the reading, and when we slipped into bed, I was glad for the dark. I lay still and hoped Nina would think me asleep, but her voice came from her bed, two arm-lengths away. “I won’t go to New York without you.”