Summer came, and Sky was still with us.
“Where you keep the scrap cloth?” mauma said. She was rummaging through the lacquer sewing table in the corner of the cellar room. There was a basket on the floor beside her feet heaped with spindles of thread, needle bags, pins, shears, and a measure tape.
“Scrap cloth? The same place it always was. In the patch bag.”
She reached for it. “You got some red and brown cotton in here?”
“Always got red and brown cotton.”
I followed her to the spirit tree, where the crows hid up in the branches. She sat on Aunt-Sister’s old fish-scaling stool with her back against the trunk and went to work. She cut a red square, then took the shears to the brown cloth and clipped the shape of a wagon.
I said, “Is that the wagon the Guard hauled you off in the day you disappeared?”
She smiled.
She was picking up with the rest of her story. She wouldn’t say what happened to her with words. She would tell it in the cloth.
Sarah
When autumn came, Lucretia and I attended the women’s meeting at Arch Street where we found ourselves standing in a crowded vestibule beside Jane Bettleman, who glared pointedly at the fleur de lis button I’d sewed at the throat of my gray dress. Granted, the button was ornate and expensive, and it was large, the size of a brooch. I’d freshly polished the silver, so there in the bright-lit atrium, it was shining like a small sun.
Reaching up, I touched the engraved lily, then turned to Lucretia and whispered, “My button has offended Mrs. Bettleman.”
She whispered back, “Since you keep Mr. Bettleman upset a great amount of the time, it seems only fair you should do the same for his wife.”
I suppressed a smile.
Arguably the most powerful figure at Arch Street, Samuel Bettleman criticized Lucretia and me on a weekly basis. During the past few months, the two of us had spoken out frequently in Meetings on the anti-slavery cause, and afterward he would descend on us, calling our messages divisive. None of our members favored slavery, of course, but many were aloof to the cause, and they differed, too, on how quickly emancipation should be accomplished. Even Israel was a gradualist, believing slavery should be dismantled slowly over time. But what most rankled Mr. Bettleman and others in the meeting was that women spoke about it. “As long as we talk about being good helpmates to our husbands, it’s well and good,” Lucretia had told me once, “but the moment we veer into social matters, or God forbid, politics, they want to silence us like children!”
She gave me courage, Lucretia did.
“Miss Grimké, Mrs. Mott, how are thee?” a voice said. Mrs. Bettleman was at my elbow, her eyes flickering over my extravagant button.
Before we could return the greeting, she said, “That’s an unusually decorative item at your collar.”
“… I trust you like it?”
I think she expected me to be apologetic. She rolled up her pale white lips, bringing to mind the fluted edges of a calla lily. “Well, it certainly matches this new personality of yours. You’ve been very outspoken in Meetings lately.”
“… I only try to speak as God would prompt me,” I said, which was far more pious than true.
“It is curious, though, that God prompts you to speak against slavery so much of the time. I hope you’ll receive what I’m about to say for your own edification, but to many of us it appears you’ve become overly absorbed by the cause.”
Undaunted even by Lucretia, who took a step closer to my side, Mrs. Bettleman continued. “There are those of us who believe the time for action has not yet come.”
Anger seared through me. “… You, who know nothing of slavery … nothing at all, you presume to say the time has not come?”
My voice sailed across the vestibule, causing the women to cease their conversations and turn in our direction. Mrs. Bettleman caught her breath—but I wasn’t finished. “If you were a slave toiling in the fields in Carolina … I suspect you would think the time had fully come.”
She turned on her heel and strode away, leaving Lucretia and me the object of shocked, silent stares.
“I need to find some air,” I said calmly, and we walked from the meetinghouse onto the street. We kept walking past the simple brick houses and charcoal vendors and fruit peddlers, all the way to Camden Ferry Slip. We strolled past the ferry house onto the quay, which brimmed with passengers arriving from New Jersey. At the far end of the dock, a flock of white gulls stood on the weathered planks, facing the wind. We stopped short of them and stared at the Delaware River, holding on to our bonnets.
Looking down, I saw that my hands were shaking. Lucretia saw it, too. She said, “You won’t look over your shoulder, will you?” She was referring to the altercation, to the terrible inclination we women sometimes had to scurry back to safety.
“No,” I told her. “I won’t look back.”
16 February 1828
Dear Beloved Sister,
You are the first and only to know: I’ve lost my heart to Reverend William McDowell of Third Presbyterian Church. He’s referred to in Charleston as the “young, handsome, minister from New Jersey.” He’s barely past thirty, and his face is like that of Apollo in the little painting that used to hang in your room. He came here from Morristown when his health forced him to seek a milder climate. Oh, Sister, he has the strongest reservations about slavery!
Last summer, he enlisted me to teach the children in Sabbath School, a job I happily do each week. I once remarked on the evil of slavery during class and received a cautionary visit from Dr. McIntire, the Superintendent, and you should’ve seen the way William came to my defense. Afterward, he advised me that when it comes to slavery, we must pray and wait. I’m no good at either.
He calls on me weekly, during which we have discussions about theology and church and the state of the world. He never departs without taking my hand and praying. I open my eyes and watch as he creases his brow and makes his eloquent pleas. If God has the slightest notion of how it feels to be enamored, he’ll forgive me.
I don’t yet know William’s intentions toward me, but I believe he reciprocates my own. Be happy for me.
Yours,
Nina
When Nina’s letter arrived, I carried it to the bench beneath a red elm in the Motts’ tiny backyard. It was a warm day for March. The crocuses were breaking through the winter crust and the grasshoppers and birds were out making a rapturous commotion.
After tucking a small quilt over my knees, I arranged my new spectacles onto the end of my nose. Lately, words had begun to transform themselves into blurred squiggles. I thought I’d ruined my eyes from excessive reading—I’d been unrelenting in my studies for the ministry over the past year—but the physician I’d consulted ascribed the problem to middle age. I slit the letter, thinking, Nina, if you could see me now with my old-lady lap throw and my spectacles, you would think me seventy instead of half that.
I read about her Reverend McDowell with what I imagined to be a mother’s satisfaction and worries. I wondered if he was worthy of her. I wondered what Mother thought of him, and if I would return to Charleston for the wedding. I wondered what kind of clergy wife Nina would make and if the Reverend had any idea what sort of Pandora’s box he was about to open.
It will always be a quirk of fate that Israel arrived at this particular moment. I was folding the letter into my pocket when I looked up and saw him coming toward me without his coat or hat. It was the middle of the afternoon.
He’d never mentioned the episode with Jane Bettleman. He undoubtedly knew of it. Everyone at Arch Street knew of it. It had divided the members into those who thought I was haughty and brazen and those who thought I merely impassioned and precipitate. I assumed he was among the latter.
As he took a seat beside me, his knee pressed against my leg and a tiny heat moved across my chest. He still had his beard. It was well-clipped, but longer with more silver. I hadn’t seen him in weeks except at Meeting. T
here’d been no explanation for his absence. I’d told myself it was the inevitable way of things.
I removed my glasses. “… Israel … this is unexpected.”
There was an exigency about him. I felt it like a disturbance in the air.
“I’ve wanted to speak to you for some time, but I’ve resisted. I worried how you might receive what I have to say.”
Surely this wasn’t about the hubbub with Mrs. Bettleman. That had been months ago.
“… Is there some difficult news?” I asked.
“I imagine this will seem abrupt, Sarah, but I’ve come determined to speak and let things fall or stand as they will. For five years now, I’ve struggled with my feelings concerning you.”
I felt my breath suddenly leave me. He looked off toward the bare-bone trees at the perimeter of the yard. “I’ve grieved Rebecca, perhaps too long. It became a habit, grieving her. I’ve been enthralled to her memory to the exclusion of too many things.”
He bowed his head. I wanted to reassure him it was all right, but it had never been all right, and I remained quiet.
“I’ve come to say I’m sorry,” he said. “It seemed unfair to ask you to be my wife when I felt so tied to her.”
It was an apology then, not a proposal. “… You don’t need to apologize.”
He went on as if I’d said nothing. “Some weeks ago, I dreamed of her. She came to me, holding the locket, the one Becky insisted you wear that time. She placed it in my hand. When I woke, it felt as if she’d released me.”
I’d been staring miserably at my hands, but I gazed up at him, aware of how palpable the word released had been in his voice, how the moment was rearranging itself.
“You must know I care deeply for you,” he said. “A man is not meant to be alone. The children are growing, but the younger ones still need a mother, and Green Hill is in need of a mistress. Catherine has expressed a wish to move back to her house in town. I’m saying it poorly. I’m asking—I’m hoping you’ll be my wife.”
I’d imagined this moment: I would feel an outpouring of joy. I would close my eyes and know that my life had truly begun. I would say, Dearest Israel, yes. Everything in the world would be yes.
It was not like that. What I felt was quiet and strange. It was happiness defiled by fear. For an imperishable minute I couldn’t speak.
My silence distressed him. “Sarah?” he said.
“… I want to say yes … and yet, as you know, I’ve set my course for a vocation. The ministry … What I mean to say is … could I be your wife and a minister?”
His eyes widened. “I hadn’t imagined you would want to continue with your ambition after we married. Would you really want that?”
“I would. With all my heart.”
His face furrowed. “Forgive me, I only thought you chose it because you’d given up on me.”
He thought my ambition was a consolation? Reflexively, I stood and took a few steps.
I thought of the knowing that had come to me about my mission on the night I wrote to Handful. It was pure as the voice that had brought me north. When I’d sewed the button on my dress, I knew it couldn’t be undone.
I turned back to him and saw he was on his feet, waiting. “I can’t be Rebecca, Israel. Her whole life was for you and the children, and I would love you no less than she did, but I’m not like her. There are things I must do. Please, Israel, don’t make me choose.”
He took my hands and kissed them, first one, then the other, and it came to me that I’d spoken of love, but he had not. He’d spoken of caring, of need—his, the children’s, Green Hill’s.
“Wouldn’t I, wouldn’t we be enough for you?” he said. “You would be a wonderful wife and the best of mothers. We would see to it that you never missed your ambition.”
It was his way of telling me. I could not have him and myself both.
Handful
I spread a pallet under the tree and set my sewing basket on it. Missus had decided she needed new curtains and covers for the drawing room, which was the last thing she needed, but it gave me a reason to come out here and sew with mauma.
She sat under the tree every day, working her story onto the quilt. Even if it drizzled, I couldn’t budge her—she was like God mending the world. When she came to bed at night, she brought the tree with her. The smell of bark and white mushrooms. Crumbs from the earth all over the mattress.
Winter had packed and gone. The leaves had wriggled out on the tree branches and the gold tassels were falling from the limbs like shedding fur. Settling on the pallet next to mauma, I wondered about Sarah up north, if her pale face ever saw the sun. She’d written me a while back, first letter I ever got. I carried it in my pocket most of the time.
Thomas’ wife had given missus a brass bird that fastened cloth in its beak, what they called a sew bird. I stuck one end of the curtain panel in its mouth while I measured and cut. Mauma was cutting out the appliqué of a man holding a branding iron in the fire.
“Who’s the man?” I said.
“That’s massa Wilcox,” she said. “He brand me the first time we run off. Sky was ’bout seven then—I had to wait on her to get old enough to travel.”
“Sky said yawl ran four times.”
“We run the next year when she’s eight, and then when she’s nine, and that time they whip her, too, so I stop trying.”
“How come you tried this last time then?”
“When I first get there, before Sky was born, massa Wilcox come down to see me. Everybody know what he want, too. When he put his hand on me, I take a scoop of red coals off the fire and toss ’em. Burn the man’s arm clean through his shirt. I got my first whipping, but it’s the last time he try that with me. When Sky turn thirteen last year, here he come back, sniffing round her. I tell her, we leaving, and this time we gon die trying.”
I couldn’t measure words against any of that. I said, “Well, you made it. You’re here now.”
Our needles started back. Over in the garden, Sky was singing. Ef oona ent kno weh oona da gwuine, oona should kno weh oona dum from.
Sky had never set foot past the Grimké walls since she got here. Missus didn’t have owner papers on her and Nina said it was dangerous business out there. Since Denmark, the codes had got stricter and the buckrahs had got meaner, but the next market day, I told Nina, “Write Sky a pass, just do it for me. I’ll watch after her.”
I tied a fresh scarf on Sky’s head and wrapped a pressed apron round her waist. I said, “Now, don’t be talking too much out there, all right?”
On the street, I showed her the alleys to duck in. I pointed out the guards, how to walk past and lower her eyes, how to step aside for the whites, how to survive in Charleston.
The market was busy—the men carrying wood slats piled with fish and the women walking round with vegetable baskets on their heads the size of laundry tubs. The little slave girls were out, too, selling peanut patties from their straw hats. By the time we passed by the butcher tables with the bloody calf heads lined up, Sky’s eyes were big as horse hooves. “Where all this stuff come from?” she said.
“You’re in the city now,” I told her.
I showed her how to pick and choose what Aunt-Sister needed—coffee, tea, flour, corn meal, beef rump, lard. I taught her how to haggle, how to do the money change. The girl could do numbers in her head quicker than me.
When the shopping was done, I said, “Now we going somewhere, and I don’t want you telling mauma, or Goodis, or anybody about it.”
When we came to Denmark’s house, we stood on the street and looked at the battered whitewash. I’d come by here a few months after they lynched Denmark, and a free black woman I’d never seen answered the door. She said her husband had bought the house from the city, said she didn’t know what came of Susan Vesey.
I said to Sky, “You’re always singing how we should know where we come from.” I pointed to the house. “That’s where your daddy lived. His name was Denmark Vesey.”
&
nbsp; She kept her eyes on the porch while I told her about him. I said he was a carpenter, a big, brave-hearted man who had wits sharper than any white man. I said the slave people in Charleston called him Moses and he’d lived for getting us free. I told her about the blood he’d meant to spill. Blood I’d long since made peace with.
She said, “I know ’bout him. They hung him.”
I said, “He would’ve called you daughter if he’d had the chance.”
We hadn’t blown out the candle five minutes when mauma’s voice whispered cross the bed. “What happen to the money?”
My eyes popped open. “What?”
“The money I saved to buy our freedom. What happen to it?”
Sky was already sleeping deep with a wheeze in her breath. She rolled over at our voices, mumbling nonsense. I raised on my elbow and looked at mauma laying in the middle between us. “I thought you took it with you.”
“I was delivering bonnets that day. What would I be carrying all that money in my pocket for?”
“I don’t know,” I whispered. “But it ain’t here. I looked high and low for it.”
“Well, it’s right under your nose the whole time—if it was a snake, it’d bite you. Where’s that first quilt you made—has red squares and black triangles?”
I should’ve known.
“I keep it on the quilt frame with the other quilts. Is that where you put it?”
She whipped back the cover and climbed from bed, me fumbling behind her, lighting a candle. Sky sat up in the hot, sputtering dark.
“Come on, get up,” mauma told her. “We fixing to roll the quilt frame down over the bed.”
Sky lumbered over to us, looking confused, while I grabbed the rope and brought it down, the pulley wheels begging for oil.
Mauma dug through the pile on the frame and found the quilt near the bottom. When she shook it out, the old quilt smell filled the room. She slit the backing and sent her hand rooting inside. Grinning, she pulled out a thin bundle, then five more, all wrapped in muslin and tied with string so rotted it came apart in her hands. “Well, look here,” she said.
The Invention of Wings: A Novel Page 28
