The Invention of Wings: A Novel

by Sue Monk Kidd

  I’d assured Nina she wouldn’t have to go back. But now, with Father’s career in dire straits, Mother was not above using a seven-year-old to make an inroad with the politically powerful Smiths.

  The rain began to fall not long after Nina left, a torrent coming at the peak of high tide, turning the streets into canals of mud. By early afternoon, after the storm had blown out to sea, I could bear it no longer. I put on Mary’s old black riding hat with the veils and slipped out the back door, determined to collect my sister no matter the cost.

  Sabe wasn’t in the stable, only Goodis, which seemed just as well as I felt I could trust him more. “I just the footman, I ain’t meant to drive the carriage,” he told me. It took some doing, but I convinced him it was an errand of great urgency, and off we set in the new cabriolet.

  The city was abuzz that day with talk of an astral event—a comet storm, it was said. Even sensible people like Father and Thomas had been speaking about the apocalypse, but I knew my scandal with Burke was being discussed in parlors throughout Charleston with more fervor than the end of the world. The cabriolet was new enough, however, to be unfamiliar on the streets, and with its hood up and Mary’s hat on, I didn’t see how I could be recognized. With any luck, Mother would never know I’d broken my seclusion.

  Feeling anxious about Nina, I closed my eyes and imagined scooping her into my arms. Then there was a terrible jolt, and the carriage came to a shuddering stop on Coming Street, the right wheel sunk into a mud hole.

  Goodis coaxed the horse with the whip, then climbed down and tugged at the bridle and collar. The mare, known for her keen spirit of revenge, jerked her head and stepped backward, sinking the carriage further. I heard Goodis quietly curse.

  He went to the rear of the carriage and shoved, causing it to rock forward a little, but nothing more. “Stay put where you is,” he told me. “I gon get us some help.”

  As he lumbered off, I surveyed the street. Despite the sogginess, there were ladies out strolling, men huddled in conclaves, Negro hawkers carrying troughs of shrimp and baskets of French coconut patties. I reached up nervously and touched the veil at my face, and it was at that moment I glimpsed Charlotte, walking toward Bull Street.

  She picked her way like a ropewalker, moving along a narrow shelf of grass that ran beside a brick wall. She wore her red bandana low on her forehead and carried a basket bulging with cloth, unaware of me or of the finely dressed woman with white skin who approached her on the same grassy ledge from the opposite direction. One of them would be forced to turn around and retrace her steps all the way back to where the brick wall began, or else yield way by stepping off into the muddy roadway. Face-offs of this sort played out on the streets so regularly a city ordinance had been passed requiring slaves to give deference. Had the slave been anyone other than Charlotte—had it been Binah, Aunt-Sister, Cindie, even Handful—I wouldn’t have worried so much, but Charlotte.

  The two women stopped a few feet apart. The white woman lifted her parasol and tapped Charlotte’s arm. Move along now. Off with you.

  I didn’t detect the slightest movement in Charlotte. She seemed to solidify as she stood there. The woman’s umbrella thumped at her again: Shoo. Shoo.

  They exchanged words I didn’t understand, their voices rising, turning into jagged antlers over their heads. I looked around frantically for Goodis.

  A man wearing a City Guard uniform reined his horse in the middle of the street. “Step aside, Negress,” he yelled. He climbed from his horse, handing the reins to a slave boy who’d wandered up pulling a dray.

  Before the guard could reach the scene, Charlotte swung her basket. It moved in an arc, spilling what I realized were bonnets, then crashing against the woman’s arm, knocking her sideways. The mud in the street was like pudding, viscous and pale-brown as tapioca, and when the woman landed, perfectly seated, it made a little wave on either side of her.

  I leapt from the carriage and ran toward them with no thought of what I might do. The guardsman had seized Charlotte by the arms, assisted by another man whom he’d enlisted. They dragged her down the street, while she spit and clawed.

  I chased them all the way to Beaufain where the men commandeered a wagon and forced her into the back, pushing her flat onto her stomach. The guardsman sat atop her. The driver snapped the reins, the horses jerked, and I could only stand there spattered with the pudding from the street.

  I swept back the veils on my hat and screamed her name. “Charlotte!”

  Her eyes found me. She did not make a sound, but held my gaze as the wagon rolled away.

  Handful

  Mauma disappeared two days after we watched the stars fall.

  We were standing in the work yard near the back gate. She had the red scarf on her head and wore her good dress, the one dyed indigo. Her apron was pressed to a crisp. She’d oiled her lips and borrowed Binah’s cowrie shell bracelets to dress up her wrists. In the sunlight her skin had a gold luster and her eyes shined like river rocks. That’s how I see her now in my dreams, with the look she had then. Almost happy.

  She pinned on her slave badge, full of haste. She’d got permission to deliver her fresh-made bonnets, but I knew before the last one left the basket, she’d be obliging that man, Mr. Vesey.

  I said, “Be sure your badge is on good.”

  Mauma hated my pestering. “It on there, Handful. It ain’t goin’ nowhere.”

  “What about your pouch?” I couldn’t see the bulge of it under her dress like usual. I kept both of our pouches fresh with scraps from our tree, and I meant for her to wear it, what with me going to all that trouble and her needing all the protection she could get. She fished it up from her bosom. Her fingers had faded smudges on them from the charcoal powder she’d used to trace designs on her bonnets.

  I wanted to say more to her. Why’re you wearing the good dress with all that mud out there? When are you planning on telling me about the baby? Now we got to buy freedom for the three of us? But I shoved all this to the side for later.

  I lingered while Tomfry unlocked the back gate and let her out. After she stepped through to the alley, she turned round and looked at me, then walked on off.

  After mauma left that day, I did everything usual. Cut sleeves and collars for the men slaves to have work shirts, got busy on missus’ splashers, these squares of cloth you tack up behind the washstands cause Lord forbid you get a drop of water on the wall. Each and every one had to be embroidered to the hilt.

  Middle of the afternoon, I went out to the privy. The sun had stayed put, and the sky was blue as cornflowers. Aunt-Sister was in the kitchen house baking whole apples with custard poured round them, what’s called a bird nest pudding, and that whole smell was in the air. I was on my way back inside, relishing the sweet air after being in the latrine, when the carriage came flying through the gate with Sarah and Nina, both of them looking scared to pieces. And look who was driving. Goodis. When it rolled to a stop, their feet hit the ground running. They passed me without a word and struck for the house. The little gray traveling cape I’d sewed Nina flapped behind her like a dove wing.

  Goodis gave me a long look of pity before he tugged the horse inside the stable.

  When the long shadows started, I sat on the porch steps to the kitchen house and watched the gate for mauma. Cross the yard, Goodis held vigil with me in the stable door, whittling on a piece of wood. He knew something I didn’t.

  The apple-eggs were still in the air when Aunt-Sister and Phoebe cleaned up and blew out the lamps. The dark came, and no moon.

  Sarah found me hunched on the steps. She sat down close next to me. “… Handful,” she said. “… I wanted to be the one to tell you.”

  “It’s mauma, ain’t it?”

  “She got in a dispute with a white lady … The lady wanted her to give way on the street. She prodded your mother with an umbrella, and … you know your mother, she wouldn’t stand aside. She … she struck the lady.” Sarah sighed into the dark, and took hold of
my hand. “The City Guard was there. They took her away.”

  All this time I’d been waiting for her to say mauma was dead. Hope came back into me. “Where is she?”

  Sarah looked away from me then. “… That’s what I’ve been trying to discover … We don’t know where she is … They were taking her to the Guard House, but when Thomas went to pay the fine, he was told Charlotte had managed to wrestle free … Apparently, she ran off … They said the Guard chased her, but lost her in the alleys. They’re out there looking for her now.”

  All I could hear was breathing—Sarah, Goodis cross the yard, the horses in the stable, the creatures in the brush, the white people on their feather beds, the slaves on their little pallets thin as wafers, everything breathing but me.

  Sarah walked with me to the basement. She said, “Would you like some warmed tea? I can put a little brandy in it.”

  I shook my head. She wanted to draw me to her for solace, I could tell, but she held back. Instead, she laid her hand gentle on my arm and said, “She’ll come back.”

  I said those words all night long.

  I didn’t know how to be in the world without her.

  Sarah

  Charlotte’s disappearance brought a severe and terrible mercy, for not once throughout the harrowing weeks that followed Burke’s betrayal was I uncertain which event was tragic and which was merely unfortunate.

  Someone—Mother, Father, perhaps Thomas—placed an ad in the Charleston Mercury.

  Disappeared, Female Slave

  Mulatto. Wide space between upper front teeth. Occasional limp. Answers to the name of Charlotte. Wearing red scarf and dark blue dress. A seamstress of skill and value. Belongs to Judge John Grimké. Large reward for her return.

  The appeal brought no response.

  Each day I watched from the back window in my room as Handful walked a repetitive circuit in the work yard. Sometimes she walked the entirety of the morning. Never varying her path, she started at the back of the house, moved toward the kitchen house, past the laundry, cut over to the oak tree, where she touched the trunk as she passed, then back to the house by way of the stable and carriage house. Upon reaching the porch steps, she would simply begin again. It was a circumambulation of such precise, ritualistic grief no one interfered. Even Mother left her to walk a rut of anguish into the yard.

  I didn’t much mourn the loss of Burke or the demise of our wedding. I felt little heartbreak. Was that not strange? I did cry buckets, but mostly from the shame of it all.

  I didn’t break my seclusion again. Instead, I took refuge in it.

  Almost daily I received notes of concern in flowery scripts. I was being prayed for by everyone imaginable. It was hoped my reputation wouldn’t suffer too much. Did I know that Burke had vacated the city and was staying indefinitely with his uncle in Columbia? Wasn’t it a shame that his mother had taken ill with apoplexy? How was my own mother bearing up? I was missed at tea, but my absence was commended. I shouldn’t despair, for surely a young man would come forth who wouldn’t be put off by my disgrace.

  I wrote rants and rebukes in my diary, then tore them out and burned them along with all the supercilious notes. Gradually, the lava in me subsided and there remained only a young woman whose life course had been demolished. Unlike Handful, I had no notion what path to walk.

  One month after Charlotte’s disappearance, a frigid wind brought down most of the leaves on the oak. Handful still walked obsessively each morning, but only a quick loop or so now. The week before, Mother had put a stop to her unremitting march and sent her back to her duties. The high social season with its quota of gowns awaited—all the sewing now fell to Handful. Charlotte was gone. No one believed she was coming back.

  I’d managed to stretch my three weeks of seclusion into four, but on this day, my reprieve ended. Mother had ordered me back to my duties, as well: procuring a husband. She’d informed me that a rowboat traversing the Atlantic might eventually be rescued by a passing ship, but only if the rowboat bravely set out upon the water—this, her hapless metaphor of my marital prospects. My sister Mary arrived with similar encouragement. “Lift your chin, Sarah. Behave as if nothing has happened. Be gay and act assured. You’ll find a husband, God willing.”

  God willing. How strangely that strikes me now.

  On the evening my solitude ended, I shoved myself out into the public domain by attending a lecture at the Second Presbyterian Church delivered by the Reverend Henry Kollack, a famed preacher. Those were not the waters Mother had in mind. The Episcopal Church might pass for society, but certainly not the Presbyterians with their revivalism and shouts for repentance—but she didn’t object. I was at least rowing, wasn’t I?

  Sitting in a pew beside the devout friend who’d invited me, I scarcely listened at first. Words—sin, moral degradation, retribution—flitted in and out of my awareness, but at some point during that hour, I became morbidly engrossed.

  The reverend’s eyes found me—I can’t explain it. Nor did he look away as he spoke. “Are you not sick of the frivolous being you have become? Are you not mortified at your own folly, weary of the ballroom and its gilded toys? Will you not give up the vanities and gaieties of this life for the sake of your soul?”

  I felt utterly spoken to, and in the most direct and supernatural way. How could he know what lay inside me? How did he know what I was only that moment able to see myself?

  “God calls you,” he bellowed. “God, your beloved, begs you to answer.”

  The words ravished me. They seemed to break down some great artifice. I sat on the pew quietly shaken while Reverend Kollack looked at me now without focus or interest, and perhaps it had been so all along, but it didn’t matter. He’d been God’s mouthpiece. He’d delivered me to the precipice where one’s only choice was between paralysis or abandon.

  With the reverend praying a long, earnest prayer for our souls, I took my leap. I vowed I would not return to society. I would not marry, I would never marry. Let them say what they would, I would give myself to God.

  Two weeks later, on my twentieth birthday, I entered the drawing room, where the family had gathered to offer me well wishes, accompanied by Nina, who clung to my hand. Seeing that I’d chosen to wear one of my simpler dresses and no jewelry, Mary smiled at me sadly as if I wore the costume of a nun. I gathered Mother had confided my religious conversion to my sisters, perhaps to my father and brothers, as well.

  Aunt-Sister had baked my favored dessert, a two-tiered election cake, filled with currants and sugar. Such cakes were molded on a board with yeast and left to rise, if they so elected, and this one had done so with majesty. Nina pranced about it impatiently until Mother signaled Aunt-Sister to cut the slices.

  Father was seated with my brothers, who were engaged in a debate of some sort. Edging to the fringes, I determined that Thomas had evoked their wrath by promoting a program known as colonization. From what I could gather, the term had little to do with the British occupation of the last century and everything to do with the slaves.

  “… What’s this concept?” I asked, and they turned to me as if a housefly had pried through a slat in the shutters and was buzzing wantonly about.

  “It’s a new and advanced idea,” Thomas answered. “Despite what any of you believe, it will soon expand into a national movement. Mark my words.”

  “But what is it?” I said.

  “It proposes we free the slaves and send them back to Africa.”

  Nothing had prepared me for so radical a scheme. “… Why, that’s preposterous!”

  My reaction took them by surprise. Even Henry and Charles, now thirteen and twelve, gaped at me. “Christ preserve us,” said John. “Sarah is against it!”

  He assumed I’d outgrown my rebellions and become like the rest of them—a guardian of slavery. I couldn’t fault him for it. When was the last time any of them had heard me speak out against the peculiar institution? I’d been wandering about in the enchantments of romance, afflicted with the
worst female curse on earth, the need to mold myself to expectations.

  John was laughing. A fire raged on the grate and Father’s face was bright and sweating. He wiped at it and joined the mirth.

  “Yes, I am against colonization,” I began. There was no falter now in my throat. I forced myself to keep on. “I’m against it, but not for the reason you think. We should free the slaves, but they should remain here. As equals.”

  An odd intermezzo ensued during which no one spoke. There’d been mounting talk from certain clergy and pious women about treating slaves with Christian sympathy, and now and then some rare soul would speak of freeing the slaves altogether. But equality, ludicrous!

  By law, a slave was three-fifths of a person. It came to me that what I’d just suggested would seem paramount to proclaiming vegetables equal to animals, animals equal to humans, women equal to men, men equal to angels. I was upending the order of creation. Strangest of all, it was the first time thoughts of equality had entered my head, and I could only attribute it to God, with whom I’d lately taken up and who was proving to be more insurrectionary than law-abiding.

  “My goodness, did you learn this from the Presbyterians?” Father asked. “Are they saying slaves should live among us as equals?” The question was sarcastic, meant for my brothers and for the moment itself, yet I answered him.