The Invention of Wings Read online

  The cellar room was large as three slave rooms put together. It was bright whitewash and had its own tiny window near the ceiling, but looking through it, you didn’t see clouds in the sky, you saw bricks in the wall. Mauma made it a calico curtain anyway. She got hold of some pictures of sailing ships from a cast-off book and tacked them on the wall. A painted rocking chair turned up in there, along with a beat-up toilet table she covered with Ticklingburg cloth. On top, she set empty colored bottles, a box of candles, a cake of tallow, and a tin dish piled with coffee beans for her chewing pleasure. Where she got all this hoard, I don’t know. Along the wall shelf, she laid out our sewing stuff: the patch box, the pouch with needles and thread, the sack of quilt stuffing, pin cushion, shears, tracing wheel, charcoal, stamping papers, measuring ribbons. Sitting off by themselves was my brass thimble and the red thread I stole from Miss Sarah’s drawer.

  Once mauma got the place fixed like a palace, she asked Aunt-Sister could they all come give a prayer for her “poor sorry room.” One evening here came the lot of them all too glad to see how poor and sorry it was. Mauma offered each of them a coffee bean. She let them look to their hearts’ content, then showed them how the door locked with an iron slide bolt, how she had her own privy pot under the bed, which it fell to me to empty, considering how cripple she was. She made a lot over the wooden cane missus had given her for getting round.

  When Aunt-Sister left mauma’s party, she spit on the floor outside the door, and Cindie came behind her and did the same thing.

  Best thing was, I could get to the new room without leaving the house. More nights than not, I crept down the two flights from Sarah’s room, sidestepping the creaks. Mauma loved that lock on her door. If she was in her room, you could be sure it was latched, and if she was sleeping, I had to pound my knuckles sore till she roused.

  Mauma didn’t care anymore about me leaving my post. She’d snatch open her door, yank me in, and bolt it back. Under the covers, I’d ask her to tell me about the spirit tree, wanting more detail of it, every leaf, branch, and nest. When she thought I was sleeping, she got up and paced the room, humming a quiet sound through her lips. Those nights, something dark and heedless was loose in her.

  By day, she sat in her new room and sewed. Miss Sarah let me go down every afternoon and stay till suppertime. A little air might fuss round mauma’s window, but it was like a smelter in there most of the time. Mauma would say, “Get yoself busy.” I learned baste, gather, pleat, shire, gore, and gusset. Every stitch there is. I learned to do a button hole and a shank. Cut a pattern from scratch without stamping powder.

  That summer, I turned eleven years, and mauma said the pallet I slept on upstairs wasn’t fit for a dog. We were supposed to be working on the next ration of slave clothes. Every year the men got two brown shirts and two white, two pants, two vests. Women got three dresses, four aprons, and a head scarf. Mauma said all that could wait. She showed me how to cut black triangles each one big as the end of my thumb, then we appliquéd two hundred or more on red squares, a color mauma called oxblood. We sewed on tiny circles of yellow for sun splatter, then cranked down the quilt frame and pieced everything together. I hemmed on the homespun backing myself, and we filled the inside with all the batting and feathers we had. I cut a plug of my hair and plug of mauma’s and put them inside for charms. It took six afternoons.

  Mauma had stopped stealing and taken up safer ways to do harm and wreckage. She’d forget, so-call forget, that missus’ sleeves were basted loose, and one of them would pop open at church or somewhere. Mauma had me sew on buttons without knots, and they would fall off missus’ bosom on the first wear-round. Everybody with an ear could hear missus shout at mauma for her laziness, and mauma cry out, “Oh, missus, pray for me, I wants to do better.”

  I can’t say what all mischief mauma did, just what I saw, and that was plenty. She “accidently” broke whatever piece of china or table figurine was sitting round. Flipped it over and kept walking. When she saw the tea trays Aunt-Sister left in the warming kitchen for Cindie to take up, she would drop whatever bit of nastiness she could into the teapot. Dirt off the floor, lint off the rug, spit from her mouth. I told Miss Sarah, stay clear of the tea trays.

  Day before the storm came, a still feeling weighed on the air. You felt like you were waiting, but you didn’t know what for. Tomfry said it was a hurricane and batten down. Prince and Sabe closed the house shutters, stored the work yard tools in the shed, and fastened up the animals. Inside, we rolled up carpets on the first floor and moved the fragiles from near the windows. Missus had us bring the food rations inside from the kitchen house.

  It came in the night while I was in bed with mauma. The wind screamed and threw limbs against the house. So many palm trees rattled in the dark, mauma and I had to shout to hear each other. We sat in the bed and watched the rain pitch against the high window and pour in round the edges. Floodwater washed under the door. I sang my songs loud as I could to take my mind from it.

  Cross the water, cross the sea,

  Let them fishes carry me.

  If that water take too long,

  Carry me on, Carry me on.

  When the storm finally passed, we swung our legs onto the floor and the water cut circles above our ankles. Mauma’s so-call poor sorry room had turned into a poor sorry room.

  At low tide next day, the floodwater drew back and everyone got called to the cellar to shovel out the mud. The work yard was a mess of sticks and broken palm fans, water pails and horse feed, the door off the privy, whatever the wind had grabbed and dropped. A piece of ship sail was hung in the branches of the spreading tree.

  Once we got mauma’s room cleaned up, I went out to see the sail in the tree. It waved in the breeze, making a strange sight. Beneath the branches, the ground was a wet slate of clay. Taking a stick, I wrote BABY BOY BLUE BLOW YOUR HORN HETTY, digging the letters deep in the starchy mud, pleased at my penmanship. When Aunt-Sister called me to the kitchen house, I smeared over the words with the toe of my shoe.

  The rest of the day, the sun shone down and dried out the world.

  Next morning while me and mauma were in the dining room waiting for devotions, Miss Mary came hurrying down the hallway with missus trotting behind her. Headed for the back door.

  Mauma leaned on her cane, said, “Where they tearing off to?”

  Looking from the window, we saw Lucy, Miss Mary’s waiting maid, under the tree and the sail still caught in the branches. We saw Miss Mary lead missus cross the yard right to where Lucy stood looking at the ground, and a hot feeling came up from my stomach and spread over my chest.

  “What they looking at?” mauma said, watching how the three of them tipped from their waists and studied the dirt.

  Then Lucy ran full-tilt back toward the house. Drawing close, she yelled, “Handful! Handful! Missus say come out here right now.”

  I went, full-knowing.

  My words, straight from the speller, were baked in the clay. The smear-over of mud from my shoe had crackled and thinned away, leaving the deep crevice of the letters.

  BABY BOY BLUE BLOW YOUR HORN HETTY.

  Sarah

  Two days after a September hurricane sent tidewater over East Bay all the way to Meeting Street, Binah knocked on my door before breakfast, her eyes filled with fear and consolation, and I knew some catastrophe had fallen.

  “Has someone died? Is Father—”

  “No, ain’t nobody die. Your daddy, he want you in the library.”

  I’d never been summoned like this and it caused an odd, plummeting sensation in my legs, so much so I dipped a little at the knees while walking back to the Hepplewhite to inspect the ivory ribbon I’d been tying in my hair.

  “What’s happened?” I asked, tugging the bow, smoothing my dress, letting my hand rest for a moment across my jittery stomach.

  I could see her reflection in the glass. She shook
her head. “Miss Sarah, I can’t say what he want, but it ain’t help to poke.”

  Placing her hand at the small of my back, she nudged me from the room, past Handful’s new quilt lying in the hallway, its mass of triangles pinioned on the floor. We walked down the stairs, pausing outside the library door. Abstaining from her Poor Miss Sarahs, Binah said instead, “Listen to Binah now. Don’t be crying, and don’t be running away. Buck yourself up now.”

  Her words, meant to steady me, unnerved me further. As I tapped on the door, the airy feeling returned to the back of my knees. He sat at his desk with his hair oiled and combed back smooth and didn’t look up, intent on a stack of documents.

  When he lifted his face, his eyes were hardened. “You have disappointed me, Sarah.”

  I was too stunned to cry or run away, the two things Binah had warned against. “I would never knowingly disappoint you, Father. I only care to—”

  He thrust out his palm. “I have brought you here to listen. Do not speak.”

  My heart beat so ferociously my hands went to either side of my ribs to keep them from unhinging.

  “It has been brought to my attention that your slave girl has become literate. Do not think to deny it, as she wrote a number of words on the muddy ground in the yard and even took care to sign her name.”

  Oh Handful, no! I looked away from his harsh, accusing eyes, trying to arrange things into perspective. Handful had been careless. We’d been found out. But my disbelieving mind could not accept that Father, of all people, believed her ability to read was an unpardonable offense. He would chastise me as he must, undoubtedly at Mother’s urging. Then he would soften. In the depths of his conscience, he understood what I’d done.

  “How do you suppose she acquired this ability?” he asked calmly. “Did it descend upon her one day out of the blue? Was she born with it? Did she teach her own ingenious self to read? Of course, we know how the girl came to read—you taught her. You defied your mother, your father, the laws of your state, even your rector, who expressly admonished you about it.”

  He rose from his leather chair and walked toward me, stopping at arm’s reach, and when he spoke again, some of the hostility had left his voice. “I’ve asked myself how you are able to disobey with such ease and disregard. I fear the answer is you are a coddled girl who does not understand her place in the world, and that is partly my own fault. I’ve done you no favors with my lenience. My indulgence has given you the idea you can transgress a serious boundary such as this one.”

  Feeling the chill of some new and different terror, I dared to speak, and felt my throat clench in the familiar old way. I squeezed my eyes and forced out my thought. “. . . . . . . . . I’m sorry, Father. . . . . . I meant no harm.”

  “No harm?”

  He hadn’t noticed the return of my stammer. He paced about the stuffy room and lectured me, while Mr. Washington gazed serenely from the mantel. “You think there’s no detriment in a slave learning to read? There are sad truths in our world, and one is that slaves who read are a threat. They would be abreast of news that would incite them in ways we could not control. Yes, it’s unfair to deprive them, but there’s a greater good here that must be protected.”

  “. . . . . . . . . But Father, it’s wrong!” I cried.

  “Are you so impudent as to challenge me even now? When you left the document on my desk freeing your slave girl, I should have brought you to your senses then and there, but I cosseted you. I thought by tearing the fool thing in two and returning it to you, you would understand we Grimkés do not subvert the institutions and laws by which we live, even if we don’t agree with them.”

  I felt confused and very stupid. Father had torn up my manumission paper. Father.

  “Do not mistake me, Sarah, I will protect our way of life. I will not tolerate sedition in this family!”

  When I’d espoused my anti-slavery views during those dinner table debates, Father beaming and spurring me on, I’d thought he prized my position. I’d thought he shared my position, but it hit me suddenly that I’d been the collared monkey dancing to his master’s accordion. Father had been amusing himself. Or perhaps he’d encouraged my dissenting opinion only because it gave the rest of them a way to sharpen their own opposing views. Perhaps he’d tolerated my notions because the debates had been a pitying oral exercise to help a defective daughter speak?

  Father crossed his arms over his white shirt and stared at me from beneath the unclipped hedge of his brows. His eyes were clear and brown and empty of compassion, and that’s when I first saw my father as he really was—a man who valued principle over love.

  “You have quite literally committed a crime,” he said and resumed his pacing, making a wide, slow orbit around me. “I will not punish you accordingly, but you must learn, Sarah.”

  “From now on, you are denied entrance to this room. You shall not cross this threshold at any time, day or night. You are denied all access to the books here, and to any other books wherever they might be, except for those Madame Ruffin has allotted for your studies.”

  No books. God, please. My legs gave way then, and I went onto my knees.

  He kept circling. “You will study nothing but Madame’s approved subjects. No more Latin sessions with Thomas. You will not write it, speak it, or compose it in your head. Do you understand?”

  I lifted my hands, palms up, as high as my head, molding myself into the shape of a supplicant. “. . . . . . . . . Father, I beg you . . . P-please, don’t take books from me . . . I can’t bear it.”

  “You have no need of books, Sarah.”

  “. . . . . . F-f-father!”

  He strode back to his desk. “It causes me distress to see your misery, Sarah, but it’s fait accompli. Try not to take it so hard.”

  From the window came the rumble of drays and carriages, the cries of slave vendors on the street—the old woman with the basket atop her head who squawked, “Red ROSE to-may-TOES.” The din of commerce went on without regard. Opening the library door, I saw Binah had waited. She took my hand and led me up the stairs to the doorway of my room. “I get you some breakfast and bring it up here on a tray,” she said.

  After she left, I peered beneath the bed where I’d kept the slate board, spellers, and primer. They were gone. The books on my desk were gone, too. My room had been scoured.

  It was not until Binah returned with the tray that I thought to ask, “. . . . . . Where’s Handful?”

  “Oh, Miss Sarah, that just it. She ’bout to get her own punishing out back.”

  I have no memory of my feet grazing the stairs.

  “It just one lash,” Binah cried, racing behind me. “One lash, missus say. That be all.”

  I flung open the back door. My eyes swept the yard. Handful’s skinny arms were tied to the porch rail of the kitchen house. Ten paces behind her, Tomfry held a strap and stared at the ground. Charlotte stood in the wheel ruts that cut from the carriage house to the back gate, while the rest of the slaves clustered beneath the oak.

  Tomfry raised his arm. “No!” I screamed. “Nooooo!” He turned toward me, hesitating, and relief filled his face.

  Then I heard Mother’s cane tap the glass on the upstairs window, and Tomfry lifted his tired eyes toward the sound. He nodded and brought the lash down across Handful’s back.

  Handful

  Tomfry said he tried not to put much force in it, but the strike flayed open my skin. Miss Sarah made a poultice with Balm of Gilead buds soaked in master Grimké’s rum, and mauma handed the whole flask to me and said, “Here, go on, drink it, too.” I don’t hardly remember the pain.

  The gash healed fast, but Miss Sarah’s hurt got worse and worse. Her voice had gone back to stalling and she pined for her books. That was one wretched girl.

  It’d been Lucy who ran tattling to Miss Mary about my lettering under the tree, and Miss Mary had run tattling to missu
s. I’d judged Lucy to be stupid, but she was only weak-willed and wanting to get in good with Miss Mary. I never did forgive her, and I don’t know if Miss Sarah forgave her sister, cause what came from all that snitching turned the tide on Miss Sarah’s life. Her studying was over and done.

  My reading lessons were over, too. I had my hundred words, and I figured out a good many more just using my wits. Now and then, I said my ABCs for mauma and read words to her off the picture pages she’d tacked on her wall.

  One day I went to the cellar and mauma was making a baby gown from muslin with lilac bands. She saw my face and said, “That’s right, another Grimké coming. Sometime this winter. Missus ain’t happy ’bout it. I heard her tell massa, that’s it, this the last one.”

  When mauma finished hemming the little gown, she dug in the gunny sack and pulled out a short stack of clean paper, a half full inkwell, and a quill pen, and I knew she’d stole every one of these things. I said, “Why you keep doing this?”

  “I need you to write something. Write, ‘Charlotte Grimké has permission for traveling.’ Under that, put the month, leave off the day, and sign Mary Grimké with some curlicue.”

  “First off, I don’t know how to write Charlotte. I don’t know the word permission either.”

  “Then, write, ‘This slave is allowed for travel.’”

  “What you gonna do with it?”

  She smiled, showing me the gap in her front teeth. “This slave gon travel. But don’t worry, she always coming back.”

  “What you gonna do when a white man stops you and asks to see your pass and it looks like some eleven-year-old wrote it?”

  “Then you best write it like you ain’t some eleven-year-old.”

  “How you plan on getting past the wall?”