The Invention of Wings (46 page)

“… I-I didn’t say I wouldn’t go. Of course, I’ll go.”

“You’ve been so quiet, I don’t know what to think.”

“… I’m overjoyed. I am, Nina … It’s just … I’ll have to speak. To speak in the most public way … among strangers … I’ll have to use the voice in my throat, not the one on the page.”

All evening, I’d pictured how it would be, the moment when the words clotted on my tongue and the women in New York shifted in their chairs and stared at their laps.

“You stood in Meetings and spoke,” Nina said. “You didn’t let your stutter stop you from trying to become a minister.”

I stared at the black plank of rafter over my head and felt the truth and logic of that, and it came to me that what I feared most was not speaking. That fear was old and tired. What I feared was the immensity of it all—a female abolition agent traveling the country with a national mandate. I wanted to say,
Who am I to do this, a woman?
But that voice was not mine. It was Father’s voice. It was Thomas’. It belonged to Israel, to Catherine, and to Mother. It belonged to the church in Charleston and the Quakers in Philadelphia. It would not, if I could help it, belong to me.

I
was down near Adgers Wharf on an errand when the steamboat left the harbor and it was something in this world, the paddle thundering, the smokestack blowing, and people lined up on the top deck waving handkerchiefs. I watched it till the spume settled on the water and the boat dropped over the last blue edge.

Little missus had sent me to get two bottles of import scotch, and I hurried now not to be late. I was the one who did most of her bidding these days. When she sent her plantation slaves to fetch something, they’d come back with the basket empty or still holding the note they were supposed to deliver. They didn’t know the Battery from Wragg Square, and she’d make them go without supper if they were lucky, and if they weren’t, it was five lashes from Hector.

Last week Sky made up a rhyme and sang it in the garden.
Little missus Mary, mean as a snake. Little missus Mary, hit her with the rake.
I told her, don’t sing that cause Hector has ears to hear, but Sky couldn’t get the song off her tongue. She’d ended up with the iron muzzle latched on her mouth. It was used for when a slave stole food, but it worked just as good for a slave mouthing off. It took four men to hold Sky down, work the prongs inside her mouth, and clamp the contraption at the back of her head. She screamed so loud I bit the side of my cheek till blood seeped and the copper taste filled my mouth. Sky couldn’t eat or talk for two days. She slept sitting up so the iron wouldn’t cut her face, and when she woke groaning, I worked a wet rag under the edge of the gag so she could suck the water.

Coming out from the scotch store, I was thinking about the torn places on the sides of her mouth, how she hadn’t sung a tune since all that happened. Then I heard shouts and smelled the smoke.

A black billow was rising over the Old Exchange. The first thing that sprang in my head was Denmark, how the city was finally on fire like he wanted. I hitched up my skirt and jabbed the rabbit cane into the cobblestone, trying to make my leg go faster. The scotch bottles clanked in the basket. Pain jarred to my hip.

At the corner of Broad Street, I stopped in my tracks. What I thought was the city burning was a bonfire in front of the Exchange. A mob circled round it and the man from the post office was up on the steps throwing bundles of paper on the flames. Every time a packet landed, the cinders flew and the crowd roared.

I didn’t know what they were so stirred up about, and the last thing you want is to wade out in the middle of somebody else’s trouble, but I knew little missus doled out whippings for being late the same as she did for getting lost.

I was weaving my way, keeping my head down, when I saw one of the papers they were trying to burn laying on the street trampled underfoot, and I went over and picked it up.

It was singed along the bottom.
An Epistle to the Clergy of the Southern States by Sarah M. Grimké.

I stood stock-still. Sarah.
Sarah M. Grimké.

“Give that to me, nigger!” a man said. He was old and bald and smelled sour in the summer heat. “Hand it over!”

I looked at his red, watering eyes and poked the booklet inside my pocket. This was Sarah’s name and these were her words inside. They could burn the rest of the papers, but they weren’t burning this one.

Come later this night, Sky and Goodis would come to my bed and say,
Handful, what was you thinking? You should’ve give that to him,
but I did what I did.

I didn’t pay any heed to what he said. I turned my back and started walking off, getting away from his stink and his grabbing hand.

He caught hold of the handle on my basket and gave it a jerk. I yanked back, and he held on, swaying on his feet, saying, “What you think? I’m gonna let you walk off with that?” Then he looked down, that half-drunk fool, and saw the bottles of scotch in the basket, the best scotch in Charleston, and his gray tongue came out and wiped his lips.

I said, “Here, you take the liquor and I’ll take the booklet,” and I slid the basket off my arm and left him holding it. I limped off, me and that sly rabbit on the cane, disappearing in the crowd.

I kept going past Market Street. The sun was dripping orange on the harbor, the green shadows falling off the garden walls. Up and down the street, the horses were hightailing home.

I didn’t hurry. I knew what was waiting on me.

Near the Grimké house, I saw the steamboat landing and the whitewash building with a sign over the door,
Charleston Steamship Company
. A man holding a pocket watch was locking the front door. When he left, I wandered down to the landing and sat hidden behind the wood crates, watching the pelicans dive straight as blades. When I took the booklet from my pocket, little charred flakes came off in my hand. I had to work hard at some of the words. If one tripped me up, I stared at the letters, waiting for the meaning to show itself, and it would come, too, like pictures taking shape in the clouds.

Respected Friends,

I address you as a repentant slaveholder of the South, one secure in the knowledge that the Negro is not chattel to be owned, but a person under God …

Little missus had me whipped by the light of the moon.

When I showed up late at the gate without her import scotch or the money she gave me to buy it, she told Hector to take care of me. It was dark out, the black sky full of sharp-edge, tin-cut stars and the moon so full Hector’s shadow lay perfect on the ground. He had the bullwhip wound up, hanging off his belt.

I’d always taken my hope from mauma and she was gone.

He lashed my hands to a post on the kitchen house. The last time I was whipped was for learning to read—one lash, a taste of sugar, they said—and Tomfry had tied me to this same post.

This time, ten lashes. The price to read Sarah’s words.

I waited with my back to Hector. I could see Goodis crouched in the shadows by the herb garden and Sky hidden up next to the warming kitchen, the flash of her eyes like a small night animal.

I let my eyelids fall shut on the world. What was it for anyway? What was any of this for?

The first strike came straight from the fire, a burning poker under my skin. I heard the cotton on my dress rip and felt the skin split. It knocked the legs from me.

I cried out cause I couldn’t help it, cause my body was small without padding. I cried out to wake God from his slumber.

The words in Sarah’s book came fresh to me.
A person under God.

In my head, I saw the steamboat. I saw the paddle turning.

Next day, I was measuring little missus for a dress, a walking costume made of silk taffeta, just what everybody needs, and her pretending nothing happened. Being obliging.
Handful, what do you think about this gold color, is it too pale? … Nobody sews like you do, Handful.

When I stretched the measure tape from her waist to her ankle, the tore-up skin on my back pinched and pulled and a trickle ran between my shoulders. Phoebe and Sky had laid brown paper soaked in molasses on my back to keep the raw places clean, but it didn’t turn the pain sweet. Every step I took hurt. I slid my feet on the floor without picking them up.

Little missus stood on the fitting box and turned a circle. It made me think of the old globe in master Grimké’s study, the way it turned.

The clapper went off on the front door and we heard Hector’s shoes slap down the hallway to the drawing room where missus was taking tea. He called out, “Missus, the mayor’s here. He say for you to come to the door.”

Mary stepped off the fitting box and stuck her head out to see what she could see. Missus was old now, her hair paper-white, but she got round. I heard her cane fast-tapping and then her toady voice drifted into the room. “Mr. Hayne! This is an honor. Please, come, join me for tea.” Like she’d caught the big fly.

Little missus started scrambling to get her shoes on. She and missus were always bragging on the mayor. Mr. Robert Hayne walked on Charleston water. He was what they called a nullifier.

“I’m afraid this isn’t a social call, Mrs. Grimké. I’m here on official business regarding your daughters, Sarah and Angelina.”

Little missus went still. She edged back to the doorway, one shoe on, one shoe off, and I eased over there, too.

“I regret to inform you that Sarah and Angelina are no longer welcome in the city. You should inform them if they return for a visit, they’ll be arrested and imprisoned until another steamer can return them to the North. It’s for their own welfare as much as the city’s—Charleston is so enraged against them now they would undoubtedly meet with violence if they showed their faces.”

It fell silent. The old bones of the house creaked round us.

“Do you understand, madame?” the mayor said.

“I understand perfectly, now you should understand
me.
My daughters may hold unholy opinions, but they will not be treated with this sort of insult and indignity.”

The front door banged, the cane tapped, then missus was standing in the doorway with her lip trembling.

The measure tape slipped from my fingers. It curled on the floor by my foot. I wasn’t likely to see Sarah ever again.

S
eated on the platform, I watched the faces in the audience grow more rapt as Nina spoke, the air crackling about their heads as if something was effervescing in it. It was our inaugural lecture, and we weren’t tucked away in a parlor somewhere before twenty ladies with embroidery hoops on their laps like the Anti-Slavery Society had first envisioned. We were here in a majestic hall in New York with carved balconies and red velvet chairs filled to overflowing.

All week the newspapers had railed against the unwholesome novelty of two sisters holding forth like Fanny Wrights. The streets had been papered with handbills admonishing women to stay home, and even the Anti-Slavery Society had grown nervous about moving the lecture to a public hall. They’d come close to canceling the whole thing and sending us back to the parlor.

It was Theodore Weld who’d stood and castigated the Society for their cowardice. They called him the Lion of the Tribe of Abolition, and for good reason—he could be quite forceful when he needed to. “I defend these ladies’ right to speak against slavery anywhere and everywhere. It’s supremely ridiculous for you to bully them from this great moment!”

He had saved us.

Nina swept back and forth across the stage, lifting her hands and sending her voice soaring into the balconies. “We stand before you as Southern women, here to speak the terrible truth about slavery …” She’d splurged on a stylish, deep blue dress that set off her hair, and I couldn’t help wondering what Mr. Weld would think if he could see her.

Even though he’d led the training sessions for Nina and me and the thirty-eight other agents, schooling us in the skills of oration, he’d never seemed sure how to advise the two of us. Should we stand motionless and speak softly as people expected of a woman or gesture and project like a man? “I leave it to you,” he’d told us.