The Invention of Wings: A Novel

by Sue Monk Kidd

  “Let them play,” she told me. “That’s what I do.”

  I was tempted. Since the reverend’s homily, I had little heart for the lesson.

  A pile of dusty, discarded kneeling cushions were heaped in the back corner, the needlepoint frayed beyond repair. I assumed they were for the children to sit on, as there wasn’t a stick of furniture in the room other than the teacher’s desk and chair. No curriculum leaflets, picture books, slate board, chalk, or adornment for the walls.

  I laid the kneeling cushions in rows on the floor, which started a game of kicking them about like balls. I’d been told to read today’s scripture and elaborate on its meaning, but when I finally succeeded in getting the children perched on the cushions and saw their faces, the whole thing seemed a travesty. If everyone was so keen to Christianize the slaves, why weren’t they taught to read the Bible for themselves?

  I began to sing the alphabet, a new little learning-ditty. A B C D E F G … Mary looked up surprised, then sighed and returned to her state of apathy. H I J K L M N O P … There had never been hesitation in my voice when I sang. The children’s eyes glittered with attention, Q R S … T U V … W X … Y and Z.

  I cajoled them to sing it in sections after me. Their pronunciations were lacking. Q came out coo, L M as ellem. Oh, but their faces! Such grins. I told myself when I returned next time, I would bring a slate board and write out the letters so they could see them as they sang. I thought then of Hetty. I’d seen the disarrangement of books on my desk and knew she explored them in my absence. How she would love to learn these twenty-six letters!

  After half a dozen rounds, the children sang with gusto, half-shouting. Mary plugged her ears with her fingers, but I sang full-pitch, using my arms like conductor sticks, waving the children on. I did not see Reverend Hall in the doorway.

  “What appalling mischief is going on here?” he said.

  We halted abruptly, leaving me with the dizzy sense the letters still danced chaotically in the air over our heads. My face turned its usual flamboyant colors.

  “… … … We were singing, Reverend Sir.”

  “Which Grimké child are you?” He’d baptized me as a baby, just as he had all my siblings, but one could hardly expect him to keep us straight.

  “She’s Sarah,” Mary said, leaping to her feet. “I had no part in the song.”

  “… … I’m sorry we were boisterous,” I told him.

  He frowned. “We do not sing in Colored Sunday School, and we most assuredly do not sing the alphabet. Are you aware it is against the law to teach a slave to read?”

  I knew of this law, though vaguely, as if it had been stored in a root cellar in my head and suddenly dug up like some moldy yam. All right, it was the law, but it struck me as shameful. Surely he wouldn’t claim this was God’s will, too.

  He waited for me to answer, and when I didn’t, he said, “Would you put the church in contradiction of the law?”

  The memory of Hetty that day when Mother caned her flashed through my mind, and I raised my chin and glared at him, without answering.

  Handful

  What came next was a fast, bitter wind.

  Monday, after we got done with devotions, Aunt-Sister took mauma aside. She said missus had a friend who didn’t like floggings and had come up with the one-legged punishment. Aunt-Sister went to a lot of trouble to draw us a picture of it. She said they wind a leather tie round the slave’s ankle, then pull that foot up behind him and hitch the tie round his neck. If he lets his ankle drop, the tie chokes his throat.

  We knew what she was telling us. Mauma sat down on the kitchen house steps and laid her head flat against her knees.

  Tomfry was the one who came to strap her up. I could see he didn’t want any part of it, but he wasn’t saying so. Missus said, “One hour, Tomfry. That will do.” Then she went inside to her window perch.

  He led mauma to the middle of the yard near the garden where tiny shoots had just broke through the dirt. All us were out there huddled under the spreading tree, except Snow who was off with the carriage. Rosetta started wailing. Eli patted her arm, trying to ease her. Lucy and Phoebe were arguing over a piece of cold ham left from breakfast, and Aunt-Sister went over there and smacked them both cross their faces.

  Tomfry turned mauma so she was facing the tree with her back to the house. She didn’t fight. She stood there limp as the moss on the branches. The scent of low tide coming from the harbor was everywhere, a rotted smell.

  Tomfry told mauma, “Hold on to me,” and she rested her hand on his shoulder while he bound her ankle with what looked like an old leather belt. He pulled it up behind her so she was standing on one leg, then he wound the other end of the strap round her throat and buckled it.

  Mauma saw me hanging on to Binah, my lips and chin trembling, and she said, “You ain’t got to watch. Close your eyes.”

  I couldn’t do it, though.

  After he got her trussed up, Tomfry moved off so she couldn’t grab on to him, and she took a hard spill. Split the skin over her brow. When she hit the ground, the strap yanked tight and mauma started choking. She threw back her head and gulped for air. I ran to help her, but the tat-tat, tat-tat of missus’ cane landed on the window, and Tomfry pulled me away and got mauma to her feet.

  I closed my eyes then, but what I saw in the dark was worse as the real thing. I cracked my eyes and watched her trying to keep her leg from dropping down and cutting off her air, fighting to stay upright. She set her eyes on top of the oak tree. Her standing leg quivered. Blood from her head-cut ran down her cheek. It clung to her jaw like rain on the roof eave.

  Don’t let her fall anymore. That’s the prayer I said. Missus told us God listened to everybody, even a slave got a piece of God’s ear. I carried a picture of God in my head, a white man, bearing a stick like missus or going round dodging slaves the way master Grimké did, acting like he’d sired a world where they don’t exist. I couldn’t see him lifting a finger to help.

  Mauma didn’t fall again, though, and I reckoned God had lent me an ear, but maybe that ear wasn’t white, maybe the world had a colored God, too, or else it was mauma who kept her own self standing, who answered my prayer with the strength of her limbs and the grip of her heart. She never whimpered, never made a sound except some whisperings from her lips. Later on, I asked if her whispers were for God, and she said, “They was for your granny-mauma.”

  When that hour passed and Tomfry loosed the strap off her neck, she fell down and curled up on the dirt. Tomfry and Aunt-Sister lifted her up by the arms and lugged her and her numb legs up the stairs of the carriage house to her room. I ran behind, trying to keep her ankles from bumping on the steps. They laid her on the bed like flopping down a sack of flour.

  When we were left to our selves, I lay beside her and stared up at the quilt frame. From time to time, I said, “You want some water? Your legs hurting?”

  She nodded her answers with her eyes shut.

  In the afternoon, Aunt-Sister brought some rice cakes and broth off a chicken. Mauma didn’t touch it. We always left the door open to get the light, and all day, noise and smells from the yard wandered in. Long a day as I ever lived.

  Mauma’s legs would walk again same as ever, but she never was the same inside. After that day, it seemed part of her was always back there waiting for the strap to be loosed. It seemed like that’s when she started laying her cold fire of hate.

  Sarah

  The morning after Easter, there was still no sign of Hetty. Between breakfast and my departure for Madame Ruffin’s school on Legare Street, Mother saw to it that I was shut in my room, copying a letter of apology to Reverend Hall.

  Dear Reverend Sir,

  I apologize for failing in my duties as a teacher in the Colored Sunday School of our dear St. Philip’s. I beg forgiveness for my reckless disregard of the curriculum and ask your forgiveness for my insolence toward you and your holy office.

  Your Remorseful and Repentant Soul,

&nbs
p; Sarah Grimké

  No sooner had I signed my name than Mother whisked me to the front door where Snow waited with the carriage, Mary already inside. Typically, Mary and I met the carriage out back, while Snow tarried, making us late.

  “Why has he come to collect us at the front?” I asked, to which Mother replied I should be more like my sister and not ask tedious questions.

  Snow turned and looked at me, and a kind of foreboding leaked from him.

  The whole day seemed strung upon a thin, vibrating wire. When I met with Thomas that afternoon on the piazza for my studies—my real studies—my unease had reached a peak.

  Twice weekly, we delved into Father’s books, into points of law, Latin, the history of the European world, and recently, the works of Voltaire. Thomas insisted I was too young for Voltaire. “He’s over your head!” He was, but naturally I’d flung myself into the Sea of Voltaire anyway and emerged with nothing more than several aphorisms. “Every man is guilty of all the good he didn’t do.” Such a notion made it virtually impossible to enjoy life! And this, “If God did not exist, man would have to invent him.” I didn’t know whether Reverend Hall had invented his God or I’d invented mine, but such ideas tantalized and disturbed me.

  I lived for these sessions with Thomas, but seated on the joggling board that day with the Latin primer on my lap, I couldn’t concentrate. The day was full of torpid warmth, of the smell of crabs being trolled from the ginger waters of the Ashley River.

  “Go on. Proceed,” said Thomas, leaning over to tap the book with his finger. “Water, master, son—nominative case, singular and plural.”

  “… … Aqua, aquae … Dominus, domini … Filius, filii… … Oh, Thomas, something is wrong!” I was thinking of Hetty’s absence, Mother’s behavior, Snow’s glumness. I’d sensed a moroseness in all of them—Aunt-Sister, Phoebe, Tomfry, Binah. Thomas must’ve felt it, too.

  “Sarah, you always know my mind,” he said. “I thought I’d concealed it, I should’ve known.”

  “… What is it?”

  “I don’t want to be a lawyer.”

  He’d misread my intent, but I didn’t say so—this was as riveting a secret as he’d ever revealed to me.

  “… Not a lawyer?”

  “I’ve never wanted to be a lawyer. It goes against my nature.” He gave me a tired smile. “You should be the lawyer. Father said you would be the greatest in South Carolina, do you remember?”

  I remembered the way one remembers the sun, the moon, and the stars hanging in the sky. The world seemed to rush toward me, sheened and beautiful. I looked at Thomas and felt confirmed in my destiny. I had an ally. A true, unbending ally.

  Running his hands through the waves of his hair, torrential like Father’s, Thomas began to pace the length of the piazza. “I want to be a minister,” he said. “I’m less than a year from following John to Yale, and I’m treated as if I can’t think for myself. Father believes I don’t know my own mind, but I do know.”

  “He won’t allow you to study theology?”

  “I begged for his blessing last evening and he refused. I said, ‘Don’t you care that it’s God’s own call I wish to answer?’ And do you know what he said to that? ‘Until God informs me of this call, you will study the law.’”

  Thomas plopped into a chair, and I went and knelt before him, pressing my cheek against the back of his hand. His knuckles were prickly with heat bumps and hair. I said, “If I could, I would do anything to help you.”

  As the sun lowered over the back lot, Hetty was still nowhere to be seen. Unable to contain my fears any longer, I planted myself outside the window of the kitchen house, where the female slaves always congregated after the last meal of the day.

  The kitchen house was their sanctum. Here, they told stories and gossiped and carried on their secret life. At times, they would break into song, their tunes sailing across the yard and slipping into the house. My favorite was a chant that grew rowdier as it went:

  Bread done broken.

  Let my Jesus go.

  Feet be tired.

  Let my Jesus go.

  Back be aching.

  Let my Jesus go.

  Teeth done fell out.

  Let my Jesus go.

  Rump be dragging.

  Let my Jesus go.

  Their laughter would ring out abruptly, a sound Mother welcomed. “Our slaves are happy,” she would boast. It never occurred to her their gaiety wasn’t contentment, but survival.

  On this evening, though, the kitchen house was wrapped in a pall. Heat and smoke from the oven glugged out the window, reddening my face and neck. I caught glimpses of Aunt-Sister, Binah, Cindie, Mariah, Phoebe, and Lucy in their calico dresses, but heard only the clunk of cast iron pots.

  Finally, Binah’s voice carried to me. “You mean to say she ain’t eat all day?”

  “Not one thing,” Aunt-Sister said.

  “Well, I ain’t eating neither if they strap me up like they done her,” Phoebe said.

  A cold swell began in my stomach. Strapped her up? Who? Not Hetty, surely.

  “What she think would happen if she pilfer like that?” I believed that voice to be Cindie’s. “What’d she say for herself?”

  Aunt-Sister spoke again. “She won’t talk. Handful up there in bed with her, talking for both of ’em.”

  “Poor Charlotte,” said Binah.

  Charlotte! They’d strapped her up. What did that mean? Rosetta’s melodic keening rose in my memory. I saw them bind her hands. I saw the cowhide split her back and the blood-flowers open and die on her skin.

  I don’t remember returning to the house, only that I was suddenly in the warming kitchen, ransacking the locked cupboard where Mother kept her curatives. Having unlocked it often to retrieve a bromide for Father, I easily found the key and removed the blue bottle of liniment oil and a jar of sweet balm tea. Into the tea, I dropped two grains of laudanum.

  As I stuffed them into a basket, Mother entered the corridor. “What, pray tell, are you doing?”

  I threw the question back at her. “… … What did you do?”

  “Young lady, hold your tongue!”

  Hold my tongue? I’d held the poor, tortured thing the near whole of my life.

  “… … What did you do?” I said again, almost shouting.

  She drew her lips tight and yanked the basket from my arm.

  An unknown ferocity took me over. I wrenched the basket back from her and strode toward the door.

  “You will not set foot from this house!” she ordered. “I forbid it.”

  I stepped through the back door into the soft gloom, into the terror and thrill of defiance. The sky had gone cobalt. Wind was coursing in hard from the harbor.

  Mother followed me, shrieking, “I forbid it.” Her words flapped off on the breezes, past the oak branches, over the brick fence.

  Behind us, shoes scraped on the kitchen house porch, and turning, we saw Aunt-Sister, Binah, Cindie, all of them shadowed in the billowy dark, looking at us.

  Mother stood white-faced on the porch steps.

  “I’m going to see about Charlotte.” I said. The words slid effortlessly over my lips like a cascade of water, and I knew instantly the nervous affliction in my voice had gone back into hibernation, for that was how it had happened in the past, the debility gradually weakening, until one day I opened my mouth and there was no trace of it.

  Mother noticed, too. She said nothing more, and I trod toward the carriage house without looking back.

  Handful

  When dark fell, mauma started to shake. Her head lolled and her teeth clattered. It wasn’t like Rosetta and her fits, where all her limbs jerked, it was like mauma was cold inside her bones. I didn’t know what to do but pat her arms and legs. After a while, she grew still. Her breathing drew heavy, and before I knew it, I drifted off myself.

  I started dreaming and in that dream I was sleeping. I slept under an arbor of thick green. It was bent perfect over me. Vines hung round my arms.
Scuppernongs fell alongside my face. I was the girl sleeping, but at the same time I could see myself, like I was part of the clouds floating by, and then I looked down and saw the arbor wasn’t really an arbor, it was our quilt frame covered in vines and leaves. I went on sleeping, watching myself sleeping, and the clouds went on floating, and I saw inside the thick green again. This time, it was mauma herself inside there.

  I don’t know what woke me. The room was quiet, the light gone.

  Mauma said, “You wake?” Those were the first words she’d said since Tomfry strapped her.

  “I’m awake.”

  “Awright. I gon tell you a story. You listening, Handful?”

  “I’m listening.”

  My eyes had got used to the dark, and I saw the door still propped wide to the hallway, and mauma beside me, frowning. She said, “Your granny-mauma come from Africa when she was a girl. ’Bout same as you now.”

  My heart started to beat hard. It filled up my ears.

  “Soon as she got here, her mauma and daddy was taken from her, and that same night the stars fell out the sky. You think stars don’t fall, but your granny-mauma swore it.”

  Mauma tarried, letting us picture how the sky might’ve looked.

  “She say everything over here sound like jibber jabber to her. The food taste like monkey meat. She ain’t got nothin’ but this little old scrap of quilt her mauma made. In Africa, her mauma was a quilter, best there is. They was Fon people and sewed appliqué, same like I do. They cut out fishes, birds, lions, elephants, every beast they had, and sewed ’em on, but the quilt your granny-mauma brought with her didn’t have no animals on it, just little three-side-shapes, what you call a triangle. Same like I put on my quilts. My mauma say they was blackbird wings.”

  The floor creaked in the hallway and I heard somebody out there breathing high and fast, the way Miss Sarah breathed. I eased up on my elbow and craned my neck, and there she was—her shadow blotted on the hall window. I lowered myself back to the mattress and mauma went on telling her story with Miss Sarah listening in.