The Invention of Wings: A Novel

by Sue Monk Kidd

  He went on with his jabber, while Nina’s hand sweated into mine.

  She saw my private agonies, but I saw hers, too. There was a place inside of her where it had all broken. The screams she’d heard coming from the Work House still inhabited her, and she would wake some nights, shouting into the dark. She put up an invincible show, but underneath I knew her to be bruised and vulnerable. After Mother’s scathing reprimands, she would vanish into her room for hours, emerging with her eyes bloodshot from weeping.

  The reverend’s kind but tedious speech had been floating in and out of my awareness. “I must point out,” I heard him say, “that you are placing your soul in jeopardy.”

  Nina spoke for the first time. “Pardon me, Reverend Sir, but the threat of hell will not move me.”

  Mother sank her eyes closed. “Oh, Angelina, for the love of God.”

  Nina had used the word hell. Even I was a little shocked by it. The rector sat back with resignation. He was done.

  Naturally, Mother was not. “Your father lies gravely ill. Surely you know it’s his wish that you be confirmed into the church. It could well be his last wish. Would you deny him that?”

  Nina squeezed my hand, struggling to hold on to herself.

  “… Should she deny her conscience or her father?” I said.

  Mother drew back as if I’d slapped her. “Are you going to sit there and encourage your sister’s disobedience?”

  “I’m encouraging her to be true to her own scruples.”

  “Her scruples?” The skin at Mother’s neck splotched like beetroot. She turned to the reverend. “As you see, Angelina is completely under Sarah’s sway. What Sarah thinks, Angelina thinks. What Sarah scruples, she scruples. It’s my own fault—I chose Sarah to be her godmother, and to this day, she leads the child astray.”

  “Mother!” Nina exclaimed. “I think for myself.”

  Mother shifted her calm, pitiless gaze from the reverend to Nina and uttered the question that would always lie between us. “Just so I’m not confused, when you said ‘Mother’ just now, were you referring to me, or to Sarah?”

  The rector squirmed on the settee and reached for his hat, but Mother continued. “As I was saying, Reverend, I’m at a loss of how to undo the damage. As long as the two of them are under the same roof, there’s small hope for Angelina.”

  As she escorted the reverend to the door, rain broke loose outside. I felt Nina slump slightly against me, and I pulled her to her feet and we slipped behind them up the stairs.

  In my room, I turned back the bed sheet and Nina lay down. Her face seemed stark and strange against the linen pillow. Rain was darkening the window, and she stared at it with her eyes gleaming, her back rising and falling beneath my hand.

  “Do you think Mother will send me away?” she asked.

  “I won’t allow it,” I told her, though I had no idea how to stop such a thing if Mother took it in her head to banish my sister. A rebellious girl could easily be sent off to a boarding school or deported to our uncle’s plantation in North Carolina.

  Handful

  Didn’t my Lord deliver Daniel?” Denmark Vesey shouted.

  The whole church answered, “Now he’s coming for me.”

  Must’ve been two hundred of us packed in there. I was sitting in the back, in the usual spot. Folks had started leaving it free for me, saying, “That’s Handful’s place.” Four months I’d been sitting there and hadn’t learned a thing about mauma, but I knew more than missus about the people God had delivered.

  Abraham, Moses, Samson, Peter, Paul—Mr. Vesey went down the list, chanting their names. Everybody was on their feet, clapping, and waving in the air, shouting, “Now he’s coming for me,” and I was smack-dab in the middle of them, doing the little hopping dance I used to do in the alcove when I was a girl singing to the water.

  Our reverend was a free black man named Morris Brown, and he said when we got worked up like this, it was the Holy Ghost that had got into us. Mr. Vesey, who was one of his four main helpers, said it wasn’t the Holy Ghost, it was hope. Whatever it was, it could burn a hole in your chest.

  The heat in the church was awful. While we shouted, sweat drenched our faces and clothes, and some of the men got up and opened all the windows. The fresh air flowed in and the shouting flowed out.

  When Mr. Vesey ran out of people in the Bible for God to deliver, he went along the benches calling names.

  Let my Lord deliver Rolla.

  Let my Lord deliver Nancy.

  Let my Lord deliver Ned.

  If he called your name, you felt like it would fly straight to heaven and hit God between the eyes. Reverend Brown said, be careful, heaven would be whatever you picture it. His picture was Africa before the slaving—all the food and freedom you wanted and not a white person to blight it. If mauma was dead, she would have a big fine house somewhere and missus for her maid.

  Mr. Vesey, though, he didn’t like any kind of talk about heaven. He said that was the coward’s way, pining for life in the hereafter, acting like this one didn’t mean a thing. I had to side with him on that.

  Even when I was singing and hopping like this, part of me stayed small and quiet, noticing everything he said and did. I was the bird watching the cat circle the tree. Mr. Vesey had white wooly nubs in his hair now, but beside that, he looked like before. Wore the same scowl, had the same knife blades in his eyes. His arms were still thick and his chest big as a rain barrel.

  I hadn’t mustered the nerve to talk to him. People feared Denmark Vesey. I’d started telling myself the joke was on me—maybe I’d come to the African church for the Lord, after all. What’d I think I could learn about mauma anyway?

  Nobody heard the horses outside. Mr. Vesey had a new chant going—Joshua fought the battle of Jericho, and the walls came tumbling down. Gullah Jack, his right-hand man, was beating a drum, and we were stomping the floor. Jericho. Jericho.

  Then the doors busted open, and Gullah Jack’s hands stopped pounding, and the song died away. We looked round, confused, while the City Guard spread along the walls and in the aisle, one at every window, four barring the door.

  The head guard marched down front with a paper in one hand and a musket gun in the other. Denmark Vesey said with his booming voice, “What’s the meaning of this? This is the house of the Lord, you have no business here.”

  The guard looked like he couldn’t believe his luck. He took the butt of the gun and rammed it in Mr. Vesey’s face. A minute ago, he’d been shouting Jericho, and now he was on the floor with a shirt full of blood.

  People started screaming. One of the guards fired into the rafters, sending wood crumbs and smoke swirling down. The inside of my ears pounded, and when the head man read the warrant, he sounded like he was at the bottom of a dry well. He said the neighbors round the church found us a nuisance. We were charged with disorderly conduct.

  He stuffed the paper in his pocket. “You’ll be removed to the Guard House and sentenced in the morning with due and proper punishment.”

  A sob drifted from a woman on the far side, and the place came alive with fear and murmuring. We knew about the Guard House—it was where they held the lawbreakers, black and white, till they figured out what to do with them. The whites ones stayed till their hearings, and the black ones till their owners paid the fine. You just prayed to God you didn’t have a stingy master, cause if he refused to pay, you went to the Work House to work off the debt.

  Outside, the moon looked weak in the sky. They gathered us in four herds and marched us down the street. A slave sang, Didn’t my Lord deliver Daniel? and a guard told him to hush up. It was quiet from then on except for the clopping horses and a little baby tied on its mother’s back that whimpered like a kitten. I craned my neck for Mr. Vesey, but he wasn’t anywhere to see. Then I noticed the dark wet spatter-drops on the ground, and I knew he was on up ahead.

  We spent the night on the floor in a room filled with jail cells, men and women crammed in together, all of us ha
ving to pee in the same bucket in the corner. One woman coughed half through the night and two men got in a shove-fight, but mostly we sat in the dark and stared with flat eyes and dozed in and out. One time, I came awake, hearing that same little baby mewing.

  At first light, a guard with hair scruffing his shoulders brought a pail of water with a dipper and we took turns drinking while our stomachs rumbled for food. After that, we were left to wonder what was coming. One man in our cell had been picked up by the Guard six times and he told us the facts and figures. The fine was five dollars, and if your master didn’t pay, you got twelve lashes at the Work House, or worse, you got the treadmill. I didn’t know what the treadmill was and he didn’t say, just told us to beg for the whip. Then he lifted his shirt, and his back was grooved like the hide of an alligator. The sight brought bile to my throat. “My massa never pay,” he said.

  The morning stretched out and we waited, and then waited some more. All I could think about was the man’s back, where they’d put Mr. Vesey, how his bashed face was holding up. Heat cooked the air and the smell turned sour and the baby started bawling again. Somebody said, “Why don’t you feed the child?”

  “I can’t raise no milk,” its mauma said, and another woman with stains on her dress front said, “Here, give me the baby. Mine’s back home and all this milk with nobody to suck it.” She pulled out her brown bosom, clear milk leaking from the nipple, and the baby latched on.

  When the long-hair guard came back, he said, “Listen for your name. If I call it out, you’re free to leave and go home to whatever awaits you.”

  We all got to our feet. I said to myself, Never has been a Grimké slave sent to the Work House. Never has.

  “Seth Ball, Ben Pringle, Tinnie Alston, Jane Brewton, Apollo Rutledge …” He read the names till it was just me and the scarred man and the mauma with the baby and a handful of others. “If you’re still here,” he said, “your owner has decided the Work House will put you in a wholesome frame of mind.”

  A man said, “I’m a free black, I don’t have an owner.”

  “If you’ve got the papers that say that, then you can pay the fine yourself,” the guard told him. “If you can’t pay it on the spot, then you’re going to the Work House with the rest.”

  I felt genuine confused. I said, “Mister. Mister? You left off my name. It’s Hetty. Hetty Grimké.”

  He answered me with the thud of the door.

  The treadmill was chomping and grinding its teeth—you could hear it before you got in the room. The Work House man led twelve of us to the upper gallery, poking us along with a stick. Denmark Vesey came behind me with the side of his face swollen so bad his eye was shut. He was the only one of us with shackles on his hands and feet. He took shuffle-steps, and the chain dragged and rattled.

  When he tripped on the stairs, I said over my shoulder, “Be careful now.” Then I whispered, “How come you didn’t pay the fine? Ain’t you supposed to have money?”

  “Whatever they do to the least of them, they do it unto me,” he said.

  I thought to myself, Mr. Vesey fancies himself like Jesus carrying the cross, and that’s probably cause he doesn’t have five dollars on him for the fine. Knowing him, though, he could’ve been throwing his lot with the rest of us. The man was big-headed and proud, but he had a heart.

  When we got to the gallery and looked over the rail at the torment waiting for us, we just folded up and sat down on the floor.

  One of the overseers fastened Mr. Vesey’s chain to an iron ring and told us to watch the wheel careful so we’d know what to do. The mauma with the baby on her back said to him, “Who gon watch my baby while I down there?”

  He said, “You think we got people to tend your baby?”

  I had to turn from her, the way her head dropped, the baby looking wide-eye over her shoulder.

  The treadmill was a spinning drum, twice as tall as a man, with steps on it. Twelve scrambling people were climbing it fast as they could go, making the wheel turn. They clung to a handrail over the top of it, their wrists lashed to it in case their grip slipped. The mill groaned and the corn cracked underneath. Two black-skin overseers paced with cowhides—cat o’nine tails, they called them—and when the wheel slowed, they hit the backs and legs of those poor people till you saw pink flesh ripple.

  Mr. Vesey’s good eye studied me. “Don’t I know you from somewhere?”

  “From the church.”

  “No, somewhere else.”

  I could’ve spit the truth out, but we were both in Daniel’s lion’s den, and God had left us to it. I said, “Where’s all that delivering God’s supposed to do?”

  He snorted. “You’re right, the only deliverance is the one we get for ourselves. The Lord doesn’t have any hands and feet but ours.”

  “That doesn’t say much for the Lord.”

  “It doesn’t say much for us, either.”

  A bell rang down below and the jaws on the wheel stopped chewing. The overseers loosed the people’s wrists and they climbed down a ladder to the floor. Some of them were so used-up they had to be dragged off.

  The overseer unlocked Mr. Vesey from the floor ring. “Get on your feet. It’s your turn.”

  Sarah

  Handful’s mangled foot was propped on a pillow, and Aunt-Sister was laying a plantain leaf across the wound. From the smell that drifted in the air, I knew her injury had been freshly plastered with potash and vinegar.

  “Miss Sarah’s here now,” Aunt-Sister said. Handful’s head rolled side to side on the mattress, but her eyes stayed closed. She’d been heavily sedated with laudanum, the apothecary already come and gone.

  I blinked to keep tears away—it was the sight of her lying there maimed, but some of my anguish came from guilt. I didn’t know she’d been arrested, that Mother had decided to let her suffer the consequences in the Work House. I hadn’t even missed Handful’s presence. This would never have happened if I hadn’t returned Handful’s ownership to Mother. I’d known Handful would be worse off with her, and I’d given her back anyway. That awful self-righteousness of mine.

  Sabe had brought Handful home in the carriage while I’d been away at Bible study. Bible study. I felt shame to think of myself, probing verses in the thirteenth chapter of Corinthians—Though I have all knowledge and all faith, and have not charity, I am nothing.

  I forced myself to look across the bed at Aunt-Sister. “How bad is it?”

  She answered by peeling back the green leaf so I could see for myself. Handful’s foot was twisted inward at an unnatural angle and there was a gash running from her ankle to the small toe, exposing raw flesh. A row of bright blood beaded through the poultice. Aunt-Sister dabbed it with a towel before smoothing the leaf back in position.

  “How did this happen?” I asked.

  “They put her on the treadmill, say she fell off and her foot went under the wheel.”

  A sketch of the newly installed monstrosity had appeared in the Mercury recently with the caption, A More Resourceful Reprimand. The article speculated it would earn five hundred dollars profit for the city the first year.

  “The apothecary say the foot ain’t broken,” Aunt-Sister said. “The cords that hold the bones are torn up, and she gon be cripple now, I can tell from looking at it.”

  Handful moaned, then muttered something that came out slurred and indistinguishable. I took her hand in mine, startled by how slight it felt, wondering how her foot hadn’t crumbled to dust. She looked small lying there, but she was no longer childlike. Her hair was cut ragged an inch from her head. Little sags drooped beneath her eyes. Her forehead was pleated with frown-lines. She’d aged into a tiny crone.

  Her lids fluttered, but didn’t open, as she attempted again to speak. I bent close to her lips.

  “Go away,” she hissed. “Go. Away.”

  Later I would tell myself her mind was addled with opiates. She couldn’t have known what she was saying. Or perhaps she’d been referring to her own desire to go away.<
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  Handful didn’t leave her room for ten days. Aunt-Sister and Phoebe carried her meals and tended her foot, and Goodis always seemed to linger by the back steps, waiting for news, but I stayed away, fearing her words had been for me after all.

  The ban on Father’s study had never been lifted and I rarely set foot there, but while Handful convalesced, I slipped in and took two books—Pilgrim’s Progress by Bunyan and Shakespeare’s The Tempest, a sea adventure I thought she would especially like—and left them at her door, knocking and hurrying away.

  On the morning Handful emerged, we Grimkés were having breakfast in the dining room. There were only four children who hadn’t yet married or gone off to school: Charles, Henry, Nina, and of course myself, the red-headed maiden aunt of the family. Mother was seated at the head of the table with the hinged silk screen directly behind her, its hand-painted jasmine all but haloing her head. She turned to the window, and I saw her mouth part in surprise. There was Handful. She was crossing the work yard toward the oak, using a wooden cane too tall for her. She maneuvered awkwardly, thrusting herself forward, dragging her right foot.

  “She’s walking!” cried Nina.

  I pushed back my chair and left the table with Nina chasing after me.

  “You’re not excused!” Mother called.

  We didn’t so much as turn our heads in her direction.

  Handful stood beneath the budding tree on a patch of emerald moss. There were drag marks in the dirt from her foot, and I found myself stepping over them as if they were sacrosanct. As we approached, she began to wind fresh red thread around the trunk. I couldn’t imagine what this odd practice meant. It’d been going on, though, for years.

  Nina and I waited while she pulled a pair of shears from her pocket and cut away the faded old thread. Several pink strands clung to the bark, and as she plucked at them, her cane slipped and she grabbed the tree to catch herself.

  Nina picked up the cane and handed it to her. “Does it hurt?”

  Handful looked past Nina at me. “Not all that much now.”

  Nina squatted unselfconsciously to inspect the way Handful’s foot pigeoned inward, the odd hump that had formed across the top of it, how she’d fitted a shoe over it by trimming the opening and leaving off the lace.