The Invention of Wings: A Novel

by Sue Monk Kidd

  “… When they gave the verdict, they also issued an edict,” she said. “… A kind of order from the judges.”

  I studied her face, her red freckles burning bright in the sun and worry gathered tight in her eyes, and I knew why she was out here on the piazza with me—it was about this edict.

  “… Any black person, man or woman, who mourns Denmark Vesey in public will be arrested and whipped.”

  I looked away from her into the ornament garden where Goodis had left the rake and hoe and the watering pot. Every green thing was bowed down thirsty. Everything withering.

  “… Handful, please, listen to me now, according to the order, you cannot wear black on the streets, or cry, or say his name, or do anything to mark him. Do you understand?”

  “No, I don’t understand. I won’t never understand,” I said, and went on back inside to the scrub brush.

  On July 2 before the sun rose, I wriggled through the window in my room, braced my back against the house and my good leg against the wall, and shimmied up and over the fence the way I used to do. To hell with begging for a pass. White people signing their names so I could walk down the street. Hell with it.

  I hurried through the city while I still had the darkness for cover. When I got to Magazine Street, the light broke wide open. Spying the Work House, I stopped dead in my tracks, and for a minute my body felt like it was back inside there. I could hear the treadmill groaning, could smell the fear. In my head, I saw the cowhide slap the baby on its mauma’s back, and I felt myself falling. The only way I kept from turning back was thinking about Denmark, how any minute they’d bring him and his lieutenants out through the Work House gate.

  The judges had picked July 2 for the execution day, a secret everybody in the world knew. They said Denmark and five others would be put to death early in the morning at Blake’s Lands, a marshy place with a stand of oaks where they hung pirates and criminals. Every slave who could figure a way to get there would show up, and white people, too, I reckoned, but something told me to come to the Work House first and follow Denmark to Blake’s Lands. Maybe he’d catch sight of me and know he didn’t travel the last mile of his life alone.

  I crouched by the animal sheds near the gate, and soon enough four horse-drawn wagons came rolling out with the doomed men shackled in back, sitting on top of their own burial boxes. They were a swollen, beat-up lot—Rolla and Ned in the first wagon, Peter in the second, and two men I never had seen in the third. The last one held Denmark. He sat tall with his face grim. He didn’t see me get to my feet and limp along behind them on the side of the road. The Guard was heavy in the wagons, so I had to stay well back.

  The horses plodded along slow. I trailed them a good ways with my foot aching inside my shoe, working hard to keep up, wishing he’d look at me, and then a strange thing happened. The first three wagons turned down the road toward Blake’s Lands, but the fourth one with Denmark turned in the opposite direction. Denmark looked confused and tried to stand, but a guard pushed him down.

  He watched his lieutenants rumble away. He yelled, “Die like men!” He kept on yelling it while the distance grew between them and the dust from the wheels churned, and Rolla and Peter shouted it back. Die like men. Die like men.

  I didn’t know where Denmark’s wagon was headed, but I hurried behind it with their cries in the air. Then his eyes fell on me, and he turned quiet. The rest of the way, he watched me come along behind, lagging way back.

  They hung him from an oak tree on an empty stretch along Ashley Road. Nobody was there but the four guards, the horse, and me. All I could do was squat far off in the palmetto scrub and watch. Denmark stepped quiet onto the high bench and didn’t move when they tugged the noose over his head. He went like he shouted to the others, like a man. Up till they kicked the bench out from under his legs, he stared at the palm leaves where I hid.

  I looked away when he dropped. I kept my eyes on the ground, listening to the gasps that drifted from the tree. All round, the hermit crabs skittered, looking at me with their tiny stupid eyes, sliding in and out of holes in the black dirt.

  When I looked again, Denmark was swaying on the limb with the hanging moss.

  They took him down, put him in the wood coffin, and nailed the lid. After the wagon disappeared down the road, I eased out from my hiding place and walked to the tree. It was almost peaceful under there in the shade. Like nothing had happened. Just the scuff marks in the dust where the bench had fallen over.

  There was a potter’s field nearby. I knew they’d bury him there and nobody would know where he was laid. The edict from the judges said we couldn’t cry, or say his name, or do anything to mark him, but I took a little piece of red thread from my neck pouch and tied it round one of the twigs on a low, dipping branch to mark the spot. Then I cried my tears and said his name.

  PART FIVE

  November 1826–November 1829

  Handful

  It was long about November when Goodis caught a chest cough and I headed to the stable with some horehound and brown sugar for his throat, thinking it’s another dull-luster day in the world. One more stitch in the cloth.

  Up in the house missus and Nina were bickering. One minute it’s the way missus treats us slaves, next it’s Nina refusing to go back to society. Without Sarah here to separate them, they kept a fight going all day. Phoebe was in the kitchen house cooking a stew meat, getting more suggestions from Aunt-Sister than she needed. Minta was hiding out someplace, probably the laundry house, and Sabe, if I had to guess, was in the cellar, smoking master Grimké’s pipe. Now that the liquor was gone, I smelled pipe smoke all the time.

  I slowed down by the vegetable garden to see if Goodis planted it for the winter. It was nothing but dirt clods. The ornament garden was in a shamble, too—the rose vines choking the oleander and the myrtle spurting in twenty wrong directions. Missus said Goodis gave shiftless a bad name, but the man wasn’t lazy, he was sick to the back teeth of forcing himself to care about her squashes and flowers.

  While I was studying the dirt and worrying about him, I got the feeling somebody was watching me. I looked first at missus’ window, but it was empty. The stable door was open, but Goodis had his back to me, rubbing down the horse. Then, from the edge of my eye, I saw two figures at the back gate. They didn’t move when I looked their way, just stood there in the sharp light—an old slave woman and a slave girl. What’d they want? There was always a slave ready to sell you something, but I’d never seen one come peddling to the back gate. I hated to shoo them off. The old woman was bent and frail-looking. The girl was holding her by the arm.

  I walked back there, stepping with my cane, my fingers round the rabbit head, feeling how it was smoothed to the grain from all the years of holding. The woman and the girl didn’t take their eyes off me. Coming closer, I noticed their head scarves were the same washed-out red. The woman had yellow-brown skin. All of a sudden, her eyes flared wide and her chin started to shake. She said, “Handful.”

  I came to a stop, letting the sound flutter through the air and settle over me. Then I dropped the cane and broke into a run, the closest I could get to one. Seeing me come, the old woman sank to the ground. I didn’t have a key for the gate, just flew over it, like crossing the sky. Kneeling down, I scooped her in my arms.

  I must’ve been shouting cause Goodis came running, then Minta, Phoebe, Aunt-Sister, and Sabe. I remember them peering over the gate at us. I remember the strange girl saying, “Is you Handful?” And me on the ground, rocking the woman like a newborn.

  “Sweet Lord Jesus,” Aunt-Sister said. “It’s Charlotte.”

  Goodis carried mauma to the cellar room and laid her on the bed. Everybody crowded in and stared at her like she was a specter. We were deer in the woods, froze to stillness, afraid to move. I felt hot, the breath gone from me. Mauma’s lids rolled back and I saw the white skins of her eyes had started to yellow like the rest of her. She looked thin as thread. Her face had turned to wrinkles and her hair had
gone salt-white. She’d disappeared fourteen years ago, but she’d aged thirty.

  The girl hunkered next to her on the bed with her eyes darting face to face, her skin dark as char. She was big-boned, big-handed, big-footed with a forehead like the full moon. She looked just like her daddy. Denmark’s girl.

  I told Minta, get a wet rag. While I rubbed mauma’s face, she started to groan and twist her neck. Sabe hauled off running to fetch missus and Nina, and by the time they showed up, mauma’s eyes were starting to open to the right place.

  The smell of unwashed bodies hung round the bed, making missus draw back and cover her nose. “Charlotte,” she said, standing back a ways. “Is that you? I never thought we would see you again. Where on earth have you been?”

  Mauma opened her mouth, trying to speak, but her words scratched in the air without much sense.

  “We’re glad you’re back, Charlotte,” Nina said. Mauma blinked at her like she didn’t have the first inkling who was saying it. Nina must’ve been six or seven when mauma disappeared.

  “Is she in her right mind?” missus asked.

  Aunt-Sister set her hands on her hips. “She’s wore-out. What she need is food and a good long rest.” Then she sent Phoebe for the stew broth.

  Missus studied the girl. “Who’s this?”

  Course, that’s what everybody wanted to know. The girl drew up straight and gave missus a look that could cut paper.

  “She’s my sister,” I said.

  The room went silent.

  “Your sister?” said missus. “As I live and breathe. What am I supposed to do with her? I can barely keep the rest of you fed.”

  Nina tugged her mother toward the door. “Charlotte needs rest. Let them see to her.”

  When the door closed behind them, mauma looked up at me with her old smile. She had a big ugly hole where her two front teeth used to be. She said, “Handful, look at you. Just look at you. My girl, all grown.”

  “I’m thirty-three now, mauma.”

  “All that time—” Her eyes watered up, the first tears I’d ever seen her shed in my life. I eased down on the bed beside her and put my face to hers.

  She said low against my ear, “What happen to your leg?”

  “I took a bad fall,” I whispered.

  Sabe sent everybody to their chores while I fed mauma spoonfuls of broth and the girl gulped hers straight from the bowl. They slept side by side through the afternoon. Time to time, Aunt-Sister stuck her head in the door and said, “Yawl all right?” She brought short bread, castor oil boiled in milk, and blankets for a floor pallet that I reckoned would be my bed for the night. She helped me ease off their shoes without waking them, and when she saw their feet festered over with sores, she left soap and a bucket of water by the door.

  The girl roused once and asked for the chamber pot. I led her out to the privy and waited, watching the leaves on the oak tree drop, the soft way they floated down. Mauma’s here. The wonder of it hadn’t broken through to me yet, the need to go down on my knees. I couldn’t stop feeling the shock of what she looked like, and I was worried what missus might do. She’d looked at them like two bloodsuckers she wanted to thump off her skin.

  When the girl came out of the privy barefoot, I said, “We need to wash your feet.”

  She looked down at them with her mouth parted and the pink tip of her tongue poking out. She couldn’t be but thirteen. My sister.

  I sat her down on the three-legged stool in the yard in the last warm spot from the sun. I brought the bucket and soap outside and stuck her feet in the water to soak. I said, “How many days did you and mauma walk to get here?”

  She had barely spoken since this morning at the gate, and now the backwash of words rushed from her lips and wouldn’t stop. “I ain’t sure. Three weeks. Could be more. We come all the way from Beaufort. Massa Wilcox place. We travel by night. Use the foot paths the traders take and stay to the creeks. In the daytime, we hide in the fields and ditches. This the fifth time we run, so we learn which-a-way to go. Mauma, she rub pepper and onion peel on our shoes and legs to muddle the dogs. She say this time we ain’t going back, we gon die trying.”

  “Wait now. You and mauma ran off four times before this and got caught every time?”

  She nodded and looked off at the clouds. She said, “One time we get to the Combahee River. Another time to the Edisto.”

  I lifted her feet from the bucket one at a time and rubbed them with soap while she talked, and that was something she liked to do—talk.

  “We carry parched corn and dried yams with us. But that run out, so we eat poke leaves and berries. Whatever we find. When mauma’d get where she can’t go no more, I’d put her on my back and carry her. I’d go a ways, then rest and carry her some more. She say, if something happen to me, keep on till you find Handful.”

  The things she told me. How they drank from puddles and licked drops off sassafras leaves, how they climbed trees in the swamp and tied themselves to the limbs and slept, how they wandered lost under the moon and stars. She said one time a buckruh came by in a wagon and didn’t see them laying right beside him in a ditch. Came to find out, she spoke Gullah, the language the slaves used on the islands. She’d picked it up natural from the plantation women. If she saw a bird, she’d say, there’s a bidi. A turtle was a cooter. A white man, a buckruh.

  I dried her feet good in my lap. “You didn’t tell me your name.”

  “The man who work us in the rice field call me Jenny. Mauma say that ain’t no name. She say our people use to fly like blackbirds. The day I was born, she look at the sky and that’s what she call me. Sky.”

  The girl didn’t look like her name. She was like the trunk of a tree, like a rock in a field you plow round, but I was glad mauma had given it to her. I heard Goodis coughing in the stable and the horse whinny. When I stood, she peered up at me and said, “When we was lost, she tell me the story ’bout the blackbirds, I don’t know how many times.”

  I smiled at her. “She used to tell me that story, too.”

  My sister wasn’t much to look at, and to hear her talk, you’d think she was too simple to learn, but I felt the toughness of mauma inside her from the start.

  I came awake that night on the floor pallet and mauma was standing in the middle of the room with her back to me, not moving, gazing at the high-up window. The darkness was tucked round her, but her kerchief had slipped off and her hair was shining like fresh polish silver. Over on the mattress, Sky was snoring loud and peaceful. Hearing me stir, mauma turned round and spread open her arms to me. Without making a sound, I got up and went to her. I walked right into her arms. That’s when she came home to me.

  The next time I woke, early light had settled and mauma was sitting up in bed, looking at her story quilt. She’d been sleeping under it all night and didn’t know it.

  I went over and patted her arm. “I sewed it all together.”

  The last time she’d seen the quilt, it was a jumble-pile of squares. Some of the color had died out from them, but her story was all there, put together in one piece.

  “You got every square in the right place,” she said. “I don’t know how you did that.”

  “I went by the order of what happened to you is all.”

  When Phoebe and Aunt-Sister brought breakfast, mauma was still hunched over the quilt, studying every stitch. She touched the figure on the last square, the one I knew to be Denmark. It pained me to think I might have to tell her what happened to him.

  The air in the room had turned frigid during the night, so I got bathwater from the laundry house where Phoebe kept it good and scalding. Sky went over in the corner and washed her thick body, while I undid mauma’s dress buttons. “We gonna burn this dress,” I said, and mauma laughed the best sound.

  The pouch I’d made for her hung shriveled from her neck with a new strap cut from a piece of hide. She pulled it over her head and handed it to me. “Ain’t much left in it now.”

  When I opened it, a molderin
g smell drifted out. Digging my finger inside, I felt old leaves ground to powder.

  Mauma sat low on the stool while I pulled her arms out of the dress sleeves and let the top drop to her waist, showing the grooves between her ribs and her breasts shrunk like the neck pouch. I dipped the rag in the basin, and when I stepped round to wash her back, she stiffed up. She had whip scars gnarled like tree roots from the top of her back down to her waist. On her right shoulder, she’d been branded with the letter W. It took me a minute before I could touch all that aching sadness.

  When I finally set her feet in the basin, I asked, “What happened to your teeth?”

  “They fell out one day,” she said.

  Sky made a sound like hmmmf. She said, “More like they got knocked out.”

  “You don’t need to be talking, you tell too many tales,” mauma told her.

  The truth was Sky would tell more tales than mauma ever knew. Before the week was out, she’d tell me how mauma set loose mischief on the plantation every chance she got. The more they whipped mauma, the more holes she’d cut in the rice sacks. She broke things, stole things, hid things. Buried the threshing sickles in the woods, chopped down fences, one time set fire to the overseer’s privy house.

  Over in the corner, Sky wouldn’t let go of the story about mauma’s teeth. “It happen the second time we run. The overseer say, if she do it again, she be easy to spot with her teeth gone. He took a hammer—”

  “Hush up!” mauma cried.

  I squatted down and stared her in the eyes. “Don’t you spare me. I’ve seen my share. I know what the world is.”

  Sarah

  Israel came to call on me wearing a short, freshly grown Quaker beard. We were seated side by side on the divan in the Motts’ parlor, and he stroked the whiskers constantly as he talked about the cost of wholesale wool and the marvels of the weather. The beard was thick as velvet brush-fringe and peppered with gray. He looked handsomer, sager, like a new incarnation of himself.