The Invention of Wings: A Novel Read online

  It’s my earliest memory: arranging my brother’s marbles into words. It is summer, and I am beneath the oak that stands in the back corner of the work yard. Thomas, ten, whom I love above all the others, has taught me nine words: SARAH, GIRL, BOY, GO, STOP, JUMP, RUN, UP, DOWN. He has written them on a parchment and given me a pouch of forty-eight glass marbles with which to spell them out, enough to shape two words at a time. I arrange the marbles in the dirt, copying Thomas’ inked words. Sarah Go. Boy Run. Girl Jump. I work as fast as I can. Binah will come soon looking for me.

  It’s Mother, however, who descends the back steps into the yard. Binah and the other house slaves are clumped behind her, moving with cautious, synchronized steps as if they’re a single creature, a centipede crossing an unprotected space. I sense the shadow that hovers over them in the air, some devouring dread, and I crawl back into the green-black gloom of the tree.

  The slaves stare at Mother’s back, which is straight and without give. She turns and admonishes them. “You are lagging. Quickly now, let us be done with this.”

  As she speaks, an older slave, Rosetta, is dragged from the cow house, dragged by a man, a yard slave. She fights, clawing at his face. Mother watches, impassive.

  He ties Rosetta’s hands to the corner column of the kitchen house porch. She looks over her shoulder and begs. Missus, please. Missus. Missus. Please. She begs even as the man lashes her with his whip.

  Her dress is cotton, a pale yellow color. I stare transfixed as the back of it sprouts blood, blooms of red that open like petals. I cannot reconcile the savagery of the blows with the mellifluous way she keens or the beauty of the roses coiling along the trellis of her spine. Someone counts the lashes—is it Mother? Six, seven.

  The scourging continues, but Rosetta stops wailing and sinks against the porch rail. Nine, ten. My eyes look away. They follow a black ant traveling the far reaches beneath the tree—the mountainous roots and forested mosses, the endless perils—and in my head I say the words I fashioned earlier. Boy Run. Girl Jump. Sarah Go.

  Thirteen. Fourteen … I bolt from the shadows, past the man who now coils his whip, job well done, past Rosetta hanging by her hands in a heap. As I bound up the back steps into the house, Mother calls to me, and Binah reaches to scoop me up, but I escape them, thrashing along the main passage, out the front door, where I break blindly for the wharves.

  I don’t remember the rest with clarity, only that I find myself wandering across the gangplank of a sailing vessel, sobbing, stumbling over a turban of rope. A kind man with a beard and a dark cap asks what I want. I plead with him, Sarah Go.

  Binah chases me, though I’m unaware of her until she pulls me into her arms and coos, “Poor Miss Sarah, poor Miss Sarah.” Like a decree, a proclamation, a prophecy.

  When I arrive home, I am a muss of snot, tears, yard dirt, and harbor filth. Mother holds me against her, rears back and gives me an incensed shake, then clasps me again. “You must promise never to run away again. Promise me.”

  I want to. I try to. The words are on my tongue—the rounded lumps of them, shining like the marbles beneath the tree.

  “Sarah!” she demands.

  Nothing comes. Not a sound.

  I remained mute for a week. My words seemed sucked into the cleft between my collar bones. I rescued them by degrees, by praying, bullying and wooing. I came to speak again, but with an odd and mercurial form of stammer. I’d never been a fluid speaker, even my first spoken words had possessed a certain belligerent quality, but now there were ugly, halting gaps between my sentences, endless seconds when the words cowered against my lips and people averted their eyes. Eventually, these horrid pauses began to come and go according to their own mysterious whims. They might plague me for weeks and then remain away months, only to return again as abruptly as they left.

  The day I moved from the nursery to commence a life of maturity in John’s staid old room, I wasn’t thinking of the cruelty that had taken place in the work yard when I was four or of the thin filaments that had kept me tethered to my voice ever since. Those concerns were the farthest thing from my mind. My speech impediment had been absent for some time now—four months and six days. I’d almost imagined myself cured.

  So when Mother swept into the room all of a sudden—me, in a paroxysm of adjustment to my surroundings, and Binah, tucking my possessions here and there—and asked if my new quarters were to my liking, I was stunned by my inability to answer her. The door slammed in my throat, and the silence hung there. Mother looked at me and sighed.

  When she left, I willed my eyes to remain dry and turned away from Binah. I couldn’t bear to hear one more Poor Miss Sarah.

  Handful

  Aunt-Sister took me to the warming kitchen where Binah and Cindie were fussing over silver trays, laying them full of ginger cake and apples with ground nuts. They had on their good long aprons with starch. Off in the drawing room, it sounded like bees buzzing.

  Missus showed up and told Aunt-Sister to peel off my nasty coat and wash my face, then she said, “Hetty, this is Sarah’s eleventh birthday and we are having a party for her.”

  She took a lavender ribbon from the top of the pie safe and circled it round my neck, tying a bow, while Aunt-Sister peeled the black off my cheeks with her rag. Missus wound more ribbon round my waist. When I tugged, she told me in a sharp way, “Stop that fidgeting, Hetty! Be still.”

  Missus had done the ribbon too snug at my throat. It felt like I couldn’t swallow. I searched for Aunt-Sister’s eyes, but they were glued on the food trays. I wanted to tell her, Get me free of this, help me, I need the privy. I always had something smart to say, but my voice had run down my throat like a kitchen mouse.

  I danced on one leg and the other. I thought what mauma had told me, “You be good coming up on Christmas cause that when they sell off the extra children or else send them to the fields.” I didn’t know one slave master Grimké had sold, but I knew plenty he’d sent to his plantation in the back country. That’s where mauma had come from, bearing me inside her and leaving my daddy behind.

  I stopped all my fidget then. My whole self went down in the hole where my voice was. I tried to do what they said God wanted. Obey, be quiet, be still.

  Missus studied me, how I looked in the purple ribbons. Taking me by the arm, she led me to the drawing room where the ladies sat with their dresses fussed out and their china teacups and lacy napkins. One lady played the tiny piano called a harpsichord, but she stopped when missus gave a clap with her hands.

  Every eye fixed on me. Missus said, “This is our little Hetty. Sarah, dear, she is your present, your very own waiting maid.”

  I pressed my hands between my legs and missus knocked them away. She turned me a full circle. The ladies started up like parrots—happy birthday, happy birthday—their fancy heads pecking the air. Miss Sarah’s older sister, Miss Mary, sat there full of sulk from not being the center of the party. Next to missus, she was the worst bird in the room. We’d all seen her going round with her waiting maid, Lucy, smacking the girl six ways from Sunday. We all said if Miss Mary dropped her kerchief from the second floor, she’d send Lucy jumping out the window for it. Least I didn’t end up with that one.

  Miss Sarah stood up. She was wearing a dark blue dress and had rosy-colored hair that hung straight like corn silk and freckles the same red color all over her face. She took a long breath and started working her lips. Back then, Miss Sarah pulled words up from her throat like she was raising water from a well.

  When she finally got the bucket up, we could hardly hear what she was saying. “… … … I’m sorry, Mother… … I can’t accept.”

  Missus asked her to say it over. This time Miss Sarah bellowed it like a shrimp peddler.

  Missus’ eyes were frost blue like Miss Sarah’s, but they turned dark as indigo. Her fingernails bore into me and carved out what looked like a flock of birds on my arm. She said, “Sit down, Sarah dear.”

  Miss Sarah said, “… I don’t need a
waiting maid … I’m perfectly fine without one.”

  “That is quite enough,” missus said. How you could miss the warning in that, I don’t know. Miss Sarah missed it by a mile.

  “… Couldn’t you save her for Anna?”

  “Enough!”

  Miss Sarah plopped on her chair like somebody shoved her.

  The water started in a trickle down my leg. I jerked every way I could to get free of missus’ claws, but then it came in a gush on the rug.

  Missus let out a shriek and everything went hush. You could hear embers leap round in the fireplace.

  I had a slap coming, or worse. I thought of Rosetta, how she threw a shaking fit when it suited her. She’d let the spit run from her mouth and send her eyes rolling back. She looked like a beetle-bug upside down trying to right itself, but it got her free of punishment, and it crossed my mind to fall down and pitch a fit myself the best I could.

  But I stood there with my dress plastered wet on my thighs and shame running hot down my face.

  Aunt-Sister came and toted me off. When we passed the stairs in the main hall, I saw mauma up on the landing, pressing her hands to her chest.

  That night doves sat up in the tree limbs and moaned. I clung to mauma in our rope bed, staring at the quilt frame, the way it hung over us from the ceiling rafters, drawn tight on its pulleys. She said the quilt frame was our guarding angel. She said, “Everything gon be all right.” But the shame stayed with me. I tasted it like a bitter green on my tongue.

  The bells tolled cross Charleston for the slave curfew, and mauma said the Guard would be out there soon beating on their drums, but she said it like this: “Bugs be in the wheat ’fore long.”

  Then she rubbed the flat bones in my shoulders. That’s when she told me the story from Africa her mauma told her. How the people could fly. How they flew over trees and clouds. How they flew like blackbirds.

  Next morning mauma handed me a quilt matched to my length and told me I couldn’t sleep with her anymore. From here on out, I would sleep on the floor in the hall outside Miss Sarah’s bed chamber. Mauma said, “Don’t get off your quilt for nothin’ but Miss Sarah calling. Don’t wander ’bout. Don’t light no candle. Don’t make noise. When Miss Sarah rings the bell, you make haste.”

  Mauma told me, “It gon be hard from here on, Handful.”

  Sarah

  I was sent to solitary confinement in my new room and ordered to write a letter of apology to each guest. Mother settled me at the desk with paper, inkwell, and a letter she’d composed herself, which I was to copy.

  “… … You didn’t punish Hetty, did you?” I asked.

  “Do you think me inhuman, Sarah? The girl had an accident. What could I do?” She shrugged with exasperation. “If the rug cannot be cleaned, it will have to be thrown out.”

  As she walked to the door, I struggled to pry the words from my mouth before she exited. “… … Mother, please, let me… … let me give Hetty back to you.”

  Give Hetty back. As if she was mine after all. As if owning people was as natural as breathing. For all my resistance about slavery, I breathed that foul air, too.

  “Your guardianship is legal and binding. Hetty is yours, Sarah, there is nothing to be done about it.”

  “… … But—”

  I heard the commotion of her petticoats as she crossed the rug back to me. She was a woman the winds and tides obeyed, but in that moment, she was gentle with me. Placing a finger under my chin, she tilted my face to hers and smiled. “Why must you fight this? I don’t know where you get these alien ideas. This is our way of life, dear one, make your peace with it.” She kissed the top of my head. “I expect all eighteen letters by the morning.”

  The room filled with an orange glow that lit the cypress panels, then melted into dusk and shadows. In my mind, I could see Hetty clearly—the confused, mortified look on her face, her hair braids cocked in every direction, the disgraceful lavender ribbons. She was puny in the extreme, a year younger than I, but she looked all of six years old. Her limbs were stick and bone. Her elbows, the curves of two fastening pins. The only thing of any size about her was her eyes, which were colored a strange shade of gold and floated above her black cheeks like shiny half-moons.

  It seemed traitorous to ask forgiveness for something I didn’t feel sorry for in the least. What I regretted was how pathetic my protest had turned out. I wanted nothing more than to sit here unyielding through the night, for days and weeks if need be, but in the end I gave in and wrote the damnable letters. I knew myself to be an odd girl with my mutinous ideas, ravenous intellect, and funny looks, and half the time I sputtered like a horse straining at its bit, qualities in the female sex that were not endearing. I was on my way to being the family pariah, and I feared the ostracism. I feared it most of all.

  Over and over I wrote:

  Dear Madame,

  Thank you for the honor and kindness you bestowed upon me by attending my eleventh birthday tea. I regret that though I have been well-taught by my parents, my behavior on this occasion was exceedingly ill-mannered. I humbly beg your pardon for my rudeness and disrespect.

  Your Remorseful Friend,

  Sarah Grimké

  I climbed the preposterous height to the mattress and had only just settled when a bird outside my window began to trill. First, a stream of pelting whistles, then a soft, melancholic song. I felt alone in the world with my alien ideas.

  Sliding from my perch, I stole to the window where I shivered in my white woolen gown, gazing along East Bay, past the dark rooftops toward the harbor. With hurricane season behind us, there were close to a hundred topsails moored out there, shimmering on the water. Plastering my cheek against the frigid pane, I discovered I had a partial view of the slave quarters above the carriage house where I knew Hetty to be spending her last night with her mother. Tomorrow she would take up her duties and sleep outside my door.

  It was then I had a sudden epiphany. I lit a candle from the dwindling coals in the fire, opened my door, and stepped into the dark, unheated passageway. Three dark shapes lay on the floor beside the bedroom doors. I’d never really seen the world beyond the nursery at night and it took a moment to realize the shapes were slaves, sleeping close by in case a Grimké rang his bell.

  Mother wished to replace the archaic arrangement with one that had recently been installed in the house of her friend, Mrs. Russell. There, buttons were pressed that rang in the slaves’ quarters, each with a special chime. Mother was bent on the innovation, but Father thought it wasteful. Though we were Anglicans, he had a mild streak of Huguenot frugality. There would be ostentatious buttons in the Grimké household over his dead body.

  I crept barefooted down the wide mahogany stairs to the first floor where two more slaves slept, along with Cindie, who sat wide awake with her back against the wall outside my parents’ chamber. She eyed me warily, but didn’t ask what I was doing.

  I picked my way along the Persian rug that ran the near-length of the main passage, turned the knob to Father’s library, and stepped inside. An ornately framed portrait of George Washington was lit with a scrim of moonlight coming through the front window. For almost a year, Father had looked the other way as I’d slipped beneath Mr. Washington’s nose to plunder the library. John, Thomas, and Frederick had total reign over his vast trove—books of law, geography, philosophy, theology, history, botany, poetry, and the Greek humanities—while Mary and I were officially forbidden to read a word of it. Mary didn’t seem to care for books, but I … I dreamed of them in my sleep. I loved them in a way I couldn’t fully express even to Thomas. He pointed me to certain volumes and drilled me on Latin declensions. He was the only one who knew my desperation to acquire a true education, beyond the one I received at the hands of Madame Ruffin, my tutor and French nemesis.

  She was a small, hot-tempered woman who wore a widow’s cap with strings floating at her cheeks, and when it was cold, a squirrely fur cloak and tiny furlined shoes. She was known to line gir
ls up on the Idle Bench for the smallest infraction and scream at them until they fainted. I despised her, and her “polite education for the female mind,” which was composed of needlework, manners, drawing, basic reading, penmanship, piano, Bible, French, and enough arithmetic to add two and two. I thought it possible I might die from tracing teensy flowers on the pages of my art tablet. Once I wrote in the margin, “If I should die of this horrid exercise, I wish these flowers to adorn my coffin.” Madame Ruffin was not amused. I was made to stand on the Idle Bench, where she ranted at my insolence, and where I forced myself not to faint.

  Increasingly, during those classes, longings had seized me, foreign, torrential aches that overran my heart. I wanted to know things, to become someone. Oh, to be a son! I adored Father because he treated me almost as if I were a son, allowing me to slip in and out of his library.

  On that night, the coals in the library’s fireplace lay cold and the smell of cigar smoke still pooled in the air. Without effort, I located Father’s South Carolina Justice of the Peace and Public Laws, which he himself had authored. I’d thumbed through it enough to know somewhere in the pages was a copy of a legal manumission document.

  Upon finding it, I took paper and quill from Father’s desk and copied it:

  I hereby certify that on this day, 26 November 1803, in the city of Charleston, in the state of South Carolina, I set free from slavery, Hetty Grimké, and bestow this certificate of manumission upon her.

  Sarah Moore Grimké

  What could Father do but make Hetty’s freedom as legal and binding as her ownership? I was following a code of law he’d fashioned himself! I left my handiwork atop the backgammon box on his desk.

  In the corridor, I heard the tingle of Mother’s bell, summoning Cindie, and I broke into a run back upstairs that blew out the flame on my candle.

  My room had turned even colder and the little bird had ceased its song. I crept beneath the stack-pile of quilts and blankets, but couldn’t sleep for excitement. I imagined the thanksgiving Hetty and Charlotte would heap on me. I imagined Father’s pride when he discovered the document, and Mother’s annoyance. Legal and binding, indeed! Finally, overcome with fatigue and satisfaction, I drifted to sleep.