The Invention of Wings (47 page)

He’d taken what he called a brotherly interest in us, visiting us often at our lodgings. It was really Nina he’d taken an interest in, of course, and I doubted it was brotherly. She wouldn’t admit it, but she was drawn to him, too. Before arriving in New York, I’d pictured Mr. Weld as a stern old man, but as it turned out, he was a young man, and as kindly as he was stern. Thirty-three and unmarried, he was strikingly handsome, with thick brown curling hair and biting blue eyes, and he was color-blind to the point he wore all sorts of funny, mismatched shades. We thought it endearing. I was fairly sure, however, it wasn’t any of these qualities that attracted Nina. I suspected it was that saving speech of his. It was those five words,
I leave it to you.

“The female slaves are our sisters,” Nina exclaimed and stretched her arms from her sides as if we were encompassed by a great host of them. “We must not abandon them.” It was the final line of her speech, and it was followed by a thunderclap in the hall, the women coming to their feet.

As the handclapping went on, heat washed up the sides of my neck. Now it was my turn. Having listened to me practice my speech, the Society men had decided Nina would go first and I would follow, fearing if the order was reversed, few would persevere through my talk to hear her. Getting to my feet, I wondered if the words I planned to say were already retreating

When I stepped to the lectern, my legs felt squishy as a sponge. For a moment, I held on to the sides of the podium, overwhelmed by the realization that I, of all people, was standing here. I was gazing at a sea of waiting faces, and it occurred to me that after my tall, dazzling sister, I must’ve been a sight. Perhaps I was even a shock. I was short, middle-aged, and plain, with a tiny pair of spectacles on the end of my nose, and I still wore my old Quaker clothes. I was comfortable in them now.
I’m who I am.
The thought made me smile, and everywhere I looked, the women smiled back, and I imagined they understood what I was thinking.

I opened my mouth and the words fell out. I spoke for several minutes before I looked at Nina as if to say,
I’m not stammering!
She nodded, her eyes wide and brimming.

As a child, my stutter had come and gone mysteriously just like this, but it had been with me for so long now I’d thought it permanent. I talked on and on. I spoke quietly about the evils of slavery that I’d seen with my own eyes. I told them about Handful and her mother and her sister. I spared them nothing.

Finally, I peered over my glasses and took them in for a moment. “We won’t be silent anymore. We women will declare ourselves for the slave, and we won’t be silent until they’re free.”

I turned then and walked back to my chair while the women rose and filled the hall with their applause.

We spoke before large gatherings in New York City for weeks before holding a campaign in New Jersey, and then traveling on to towns along the Hudson. The women came in throngs, proliferating like the loaves and fishes in the Bible. In a church in Poughkeepsie, the crowd was so great the balcony cracked and the church had to be evacuated, forcing us to deliver our speeches outside in the frost and gloom of February, and not one woman left. In every town we visited, we encouraged the women to form their own anti-slavery societies, and we set them collecting signatures on petitions. My stutter came and went, though it kindly stayed away for most of my speeches.

We became modestly famous and extravagantly infamous. Throughout that winter and spring, news of our exploits was carried by practically every newspaper in the country. The anti-slavery papers published our speeches, and tens of thousands of our pamphlets were in print. Even our former president, John Quincy Adams, agreed to meet with us, promising he would deliver the petitions the women were collecting to Congress. In a few cities in the South, we were hung in effigy right along with Mr. Garrison, and our mother had sent word we could no longer set foot in Charleston without fear of imprisonment.

Mr. Weld was our lifeline. He wrote us joint letters, praising our efforts. He called us brave and stalwart and dogged. Now and then, he added a postscript for Nina alone.
Angelina, it’s widely said you keep your audiences in thrall. As director of your training, I wish I could take credit, but it’s all you.

On a balmy afternoon in April, he appeared without prior notice at Gerrit Smith’s country house in Peterboro, New York, where Nina and I were spending several days during our latest round of lectures. He’d come, he said, to discuss Society finances with Mr. Smith, the organization’s largest benefactor, but one could hardly miss the coincidence. Each morning, he and Nina took a walk along the lane that led through the orchards. He’d invited me as well, but I’d taken one look at Nina’s face and declined. He accompanied us to our afternoon lectures, waiting outside the halls, and in the evenings, the three of us sat with Mr. and Mrs. Smith in the parlor, as we debated strategies for our cause and recounted our adventures. When Mrs. Smith suggested it was time for the women to say good night, Theodore and Nina would glance at one another reluctant to part, and he would say, “Well then. You must get your rest,” and Nina would leave the room with painful slowness.

The day he departed, I watched from the window as the two of them returned from their walk. It had started to rain while they were out, one of those sudden downbursts during which the sun goes right on shining, and he was holding his coat over their heads, making a little tent for them. They walked without the least bit of hurry. I could see they were laughing.

As they came onto the porch, shaking off the wetness, he bent and kissed my sister’s cheek.

In June we arrived in Amesbury, Massachusetts, for a two-week respite at the clapboard cottage of a Mrs. Whittier. We were soon to begin a crusade of lectures in New England that would last through the fall, but we were ragged with fatigue, in need of fresh, more seasonal clothes, and I had an airy little cough I couldn’t get rid of. Mrs. Whittier was cherry-cheeked and plump, and fed us rich soups, dosed us with cod liver oil, refused all visitors, and forced us to bed before the moon appeared.

It was several days before we discovered she was the mother of John Greenleaf Whittier, Theodore’s close friend. We were sitting in the parlor, having tea, when she began to speak of her son and his long friendship with Theodore, and we understood now why she’d taken us in.

“You must know Theodore well then,” Nina said.

“Teddy? Oh, he’s like a son to me, and a brother to John.” She shook her head. “I suppose you’ve heard of that awful pledge they made.”

“Pledge?” said Nina. “Why, no, we’ve heard nothing of it.”

“Well, I don’t approve. I think it too extreme. A woman my age would like grandchildren, after all. But they’re men of principle, those two, there’s no reasoning with them.”

Nina sat up on the edge of her chair, and I could see the brightness leave her. “What did they pledge?”

“They vowed neither of them would marry until slavery was abolished. Honestly, it will hardly be in their lifetimes!”

That night I was awakened by a knock on my door long after the moon set. Nina stood there with her face like a seawall, grim and braced. “I can’t bear it,” she said and fell against my shoulder.

That summer of 1837, New Englanders came by the thousands to hear us speak, and for the first time men began to appear in the audiences. At first a handful, then fifty, then hundreds. That we spoke publicly to women was bad enough—that we spoke publicly to men turned the Puritan world on its head.

“They’ll be lighting the pyres,” I said to Nina when the men first showed, trying to slough it off. We laughed, but it became not funny at all.

I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.
Was there ever a more galling verse in the Bible? It was preached that summer from every pulpit in New England with the Grimké sisters in mind. The Congregational churches passed a resolution of censure against us, urging a boycott of our lectures, and in its wake, a number of churches and public halls were closed to us. In Pepperell we were forced to deliver our message in a barn with the horses and cows. “As you see, there’s no room at the inn,” Nina told them. “But, still, the wise men have come.”

We tried to be brave and stalwart and dogged, as Theodore had described us in his letter, and we began using portions of our lectures to defend our right to speak. “What we claim for ourselves we claim for every woman!” That was our rally cry in Lowell and Worcester and Duxbury, indeed everywhere we went. You should have seen the women, how they flocked to our side, and some, like the brave ladies of Andover, wrote public letters in our defense. My old friend Lucretia got a message to us all the way from Philadelphia. It contained four words:
Press on, my sisters.

Without intending to, we set the country in an uproar. The matter of women having certain rights was new and strange and pilloried, but it was suddenly debated all the way to Ohio. They renamed my sister Devilina. They christened us “female incendiaries.” Somehow we’d lit the fuse.

The last week of August we returned to Mrs. Whittier’s cottage as if from battle. I felt tired and beleaguered, uncertain if I could continue with the fall lectures. The last teaspoon of fight had been scraped out of me. Our final meeting of the summer had ended with dozens of angered men standing on wagons outside the hall, shouting “Devilina!” and hurling rocks as we left. One had hit my mouth, transforming my lower lip into a fat, red sausage. I looked a sight. I wasn’t sure what Mrs. Whittier would say to all this, if she would even give us shelter—we were pariahs now—but when we arrived, she pulled us into her arms and kissed our foreheads.

On the third day of refuge, I returned from a stroll along the banks of the Merrimack to find Nina canting sharply against the window as if she’d fallen asleep, her head pressed to the glass, her eyes closed, her arms dropped by her sides. She looked like a spinning top that had come to rest.

Hearing my footsteps, she turned and pointed to the tea table where the
Boston Morning Post
lay open. Mrs. Whittier took care to hide the editorials, but Nina had found the paper in the bread box.

August 25

The Misses Grimké have made speeches, written pamphlets, and exhibited themselves in public in unwomanly ways for a while now, but they have not found husbands. Why are all the old hens abolitionists? Because not being able to obtain husbands, they think they may stand some chance for a Negro, if they can only make amalgamation fashionable …

I couldn’t finish it.

“If that’s not enough, Theodore will be arriving this afternoon along with Elizur Wright and Mrs. Whittier’s son, John. Their letter came while you were out. Mrs. Whittier is in there making mince pies.”

She hadn’t spoken of Theodore all summer, but she was sick with longing for him, it was plain on her face.