The Invention of Wings: A Novel

by Sue Monk Kidd

  Handful

  It was springtime when all the heavy cleaning and airing-out was going on in the house and every night me and Sky would come back to the cellar room after being with the bristle-brush all day, and fall on the bed, and the first thing I’d see was the quilt frame, the one true roof over my head. I’d think about everything hidden up there—mauma’s story quilt, the money, Sarah’s booklet, her letter telling me about the promise she’d made to get me free—and I’d fall asleep glad they were safe over my head.

  Then one Sunday morning, I rolled the frame down. Sky watched me without a word while I ran my hand over the red quilt with the black triangles, feeling the money sewed inside. I peeled the muslin cloth from round Sarah’s booklet and gazed on it, then wrapped it back. Next, I spread the story quilt cross the frame and we stood there, looking down at the history of mauma. I laid my palm on the second square—the woman in the field and the slaves flying in the air over her head. All that hope in the wind.

  We didn’t hear little missus outside the door. The lock mauma used to have on the door was long gone, and little missus, she didn’t knock. She flounced on in. “I’m going to St. Philip’s, and I need my claret cape. You were supposed to mend it for me.” Her eyes wandered past me to the quilt frame. “What’s all this?”

  I stepped to block her view. “That’s right, I forgot about your cape.” I was trying to fan the moth from the flame, but she brushed past me to see the pinks, reds, oranges, purples, and blacks on the quilt. Mauma and her colors.

  “I’ll be straight over to mend the cape,” I said and took the rope off the hook to hike the frame up before she figured out what she was looking at.

  She put up her hand. “Hold on. You’re in an awful big hurry to hide this from me.”

  I fastened the rope back, the high-flutter coming in my chest. Sky started humming a thin nervous tune. I started to put my finger to my lip, but ever since she had that muzzle in her mouth, I couldn’t bear to hush her. We looked back and forth to each other while little missus squinted from one square to the next like she was reading a book. Everything done to mauma—there it was. The one-legged punishment, the whippings, the branding, the hammering. Mauma’s body laid on the quilt frame in pieces.

  The muslin cloth with Sarah’s booklet inside was in plain sight, and beside it, the quilt with the money inside. You could see the shape of the bundles laying in the batting. I wanted to tuck everything from view, but I didn’t move.

  When she turned to me, the morning glare fell over her face and the black in her eyes pulled into knots. She said, “Who made this?”

  “Mauma did. Charlotte.”

  “Well, it’s gruesome!”

  I never had wanted to scream as bad as I did right then. I said, “Those gruesome things happened to her.”

  A dark pink color poured into her cheeks. “For heaven’s sakes then, you would think her whole life was nothing but violence and cruelty. I mean, it doesn’t show what she did to warrant her punishments.”

  She looked at the quilt again, her eyes darting over the appliqués. “We treated her well here, no one can dispute that. I can’t speak for what happened to her when she ran away, she was out of our care then.” Little missus was rubbing her hands now like she was cleaning them at the wash bowl.

  The quilt had shamed her. She walked to the door and took one look back at it, and I knew she’d never let it stay in the world. She’d send Hector to get it the minute we were out of the room. He’d burn mauma’s story to ash.

  Standing there, waiting for little missus’ steps to fade, I looked down at the quilt, at the slaves flying in the sky, and I hated being a slave worse than being dead. The hate I felt for it glittered so full of beauty I sank down on the floor before it.

  Sky’s hair was a bushel basket without her scarf and when she bent over to see about me, the ends of it poked my face and smelled like the bristle-brush. She said, “You all right?”

  I looked up at her. “We’re leaving here.”

  She heard me, but she couldn’t be sure. She said, “What you say?”

  “We gonna leave here or die trying.”

  Sky pulled me to my feet like plucking a flower, and I saw Denmark’s face settle into hers, that day he rode to his death sitting on a coffin. I’d always wanted freedom, but there never had been a place to go and no way to get there. That didn’t matter anymore. I wanted freedom more than the next breath. We’d leave, riding on our coffins if we had to. That was the way mauma had lived her whole life. She used to say, you got to figure out which end of the needle you’re gon be, the one that’s fastened to the thread or the end that pierces the cloth.

  I lifted the quilt from the frame and folded it up, thinking of the feathers inside it, and inside the feathers, the memory of the sky.

  “Here,” I said, laying the quilt in Sky’s arms. “I got to go mend that woman’s cape. Put the quilt in the gunny sack and take it to Goodis and tell him to hide it with the horse blankets and don’t let anybody near it.”

  Mending her cape was not all I did. I took little missus’ seal-stamp right off her desk while she was standing in the room and I dropped it in my pocket.

  I waited till dark to write my letter.

  23 April 1838

  Dear Sarah

  I hope this makes it to you. Me and Sky will be leaving here or die trying. That’s how we put it. I don’t know how we’re doing it, but we’ve got mauma’s money. All we need is a place to come to. I have the address on this letter. I hope I see you again one day.

  Your friend

  Handful

  Sarah

  The wedding took place in a house on Spruce Street in Philadelphia on May 14 at two o’clock in the afternoon—a day full of glinting sunlight and pale blue clouds. It was the sort of day that seemed sharply real and not real at all. I remember standing in the dining room watching it unfold as if from a distance, as if I was climbing up from the bottom of sleep, coming up from the cool sheets to a new day, one life ending and another beginning.

  Mother had sent a note of congratulation, which we hadn’t expected, begging us to send a letter describing the wedding in detail. What will Nina wear? she’d asked. Oh, that I could see her! Naturally, she’d conveyed how relieved she was that Nina had a husband now and she hoped we would both retire from the unnatural life we’d been living, but despite that, her letter was plaintive with the love of an aging mother. She called us her dear daughters and lamented the distance between us. Will I see you again? she wrote. The question haunted me for days.

  I gazed at Nina and Theodore standing now before the window about to say their vows, or as Nina had phrased it, whatever words their hearts gave them at the moment, and I thought it just as well Mother was not here. She would’ve expected Nina to be in ivory lace, perhaps blue linen, carrying roses or lilies, but Nina had dismissed all of that as unoriginal and embarked on a wedding designed to shock the masses.

  She was wearing a brown dress made from free-labor cotton with a broad white sash and white gloves, and she’d matched up Theodore in a brown coat, a white vest, and beige pantaloons. She clutched a handful of white rhododendrons cut fresh from the backyard, and I noticed she’d tucked a sprig in the button hole of Theodore’s coat. Mother wouldn’t have made it past the brown dress, much less the opening prayer, which had been delivered by a Negro minister.

  When the Philadelphia newspaper announced the wedding, alluding to the mixed-race guests expected to attend, we’d worried there might be demonstrators—slurs and shouts and rocks whizzing by—but mercifully, no one had showed up but those invited. Sarah Mapps and Grace were here, along with several freed slaves with whom we were acquainted, and we’d timed the wedding to coincide with the Anti-Slavery Convention in the city so that some of the most prominent abolitionists in the country were in the room: Mr. Garrison, Mr. and Mrs. Gerrit Smith, Henry Stanton, the Motts, the Tappans, the Westons, the Chapmans.

  It would become known as the abolition wedding.


  Nina was speaking now, her face turned up to Theodore’s, and I thought suddenly, involuntarily of Israel and a tiny grief came over me. Every time it happened, it was like coming upon an empty room I didn’t know was there, and stepping in, I would be pierced by it, by the ghost of the one who’d once filled it up. I didn’t stumble into this place much anymore, but when I did, it hollowed out little pieces of my chest.

  Gazing at Nina, radiant Nina, I pictured myself in her place, Israel beside me, the two of us saying vows, and the idea of such a thing cured me. It was the truth I always came back to, that I didn’t want Israel anymore, I didn’t want to be married now, and yet the phantom of what might’ve been, the terrible allure of it could still snatch me.

  Closing my eyes, I gave my head a shake to clear the remnants of longing away, and when I looked back at the bride and groom, there were dragonflies darting beyond the window, a green tempest, and then it was gone.

  Nina promised aloud to love and honor him, carefully omitting the word obey, and Theodore launched into an awkward monologue, deploring the laws that gave control of a wife’s property to the husband and renouncing all claim to Nina’s, and then he coughed selfconsciously, as if catching himself, and professed his love.

  We’d put the confrontation in Mrs. Whittier’s cottage behind us, not that Theodore ever fully conceded his position, but he’d softened his rhetoric after that day, as any man in love would. The abolition movement had split into two camps just as the men predicted, and Nina and I became even worse pariahs, but it had set the cause of women in motion.

  I’d been present when Nina opened the letter containing Theodore’s proposal. It had come late last winter during a long reprieve in Philadelphia with Sarah Mapps and Grace, as we’d prepared for a series of lectures at the Boston Odeon. Reading it, she’d dropped the pages onto her lap and broken into tears. When she read it to me, I cried too, but my tears were a mix of joy and wretchedness and fear. I wanted this marriage for her, I wanted her happiness as much as my own, but where would I go? For days I couldn’t concentrate on the lecture I was trying to write or hide the bereft feeling I carried inside. I couldn’t bear to think of life without her, life alone, but neither did I want to be the burdensome relative living in the back room, getting in the way, and I couldn’t imagine Theodore would want me there.

  Then one day Nina came to me, plopping on the footstool beside my chair in Sarah Mapps’ front room. Without a word she opened her Bible and read aloud the passage in which Ruth speaks to Naomi:

  Entreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy people will be my people, and thy God my God. Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried. The Lord do so to me, and more also, if ought but death part thee and me.

  Closing the Bible, she said, “We can’t be separated, it isn’t possible. You must come and live with me after I’m married. Theodore asked me to tell you that my wish is also his wish.”

  Theodore had bought a small farm in Fort Lee, New Jersey. We would make an odd trinity there, the three of us, but I would still have Nina. We could go on writing and working for abolition and for women, and I would help with the house, and when there were children, I would be auntie. One life ending, another beginning.

  In the dining room, the minister was offering a prayer, and for some reason I didn’t close my eyes as I always did, but watched Nina reach for Theodore’s hand. We’d made a plan that I would give the married pair two weeks of privacy and then join them in Fort Lee, but I thought now of Mother and the question in her letter, Will I see you again? It seemed more than the elegiac pondering in an old woman’s heart, and I wondered if I shouldn’t seize the break in our work and go to her.

  “What do you know, we are husband and wife,” Nina said when the prayer ended, pronouncing it herself.

  The dining table sat out in the garden laid with a white linen cloth strewn with platters of sweets and fresh-picked flowers—foxglove, pink azalea, and feathery fleabane petals. The confectioner had iced the wedding cake with frothed egg whites and darkened the layers with molasses in keeping with Nina’s brown and white theme, and there was a large bowl of sugared raspberry-currant juice where all of the teetotaler abolitionists were lined up, pretending it hadn’t fermented. I’d consumed a sloshing cup of it too quickly and my head was floating about.

  I walked among the guests, some forty or fifty of them, searching for Lucretia, for Sarah Mapps and Grace, thinking, a little tipsily, Here are our friends, our people, and thank God no one is speaking today about the cruelties in the world. I came upon Mrs. Whittier’s son John, whom I’d not seen since our head-to-head last August. He was amusing everyone with a poem he’d written that skewered Theodore for breaking his vow not to marry. He compared him to the likes of Benedict Arnold. When he saw me, he greeted me like a sister.

  Lucretia found me before I could find her. It had been years. Beaming, she pulled me to the edge of the garden beside the blooming rhododendron where we could be alone. “My dear Sarah, I can scarcely believe what you’ve managed to accomplish!”

  A blush crept to my face.

  “It’s true,” she said. “You and Angelina are the most famous women in America.”

  “… The most notorious, you mean.”

  She smiled. “That, too.”

  I pictured Lucretia and me in her little studio, talking and talking all those evenings. That fretful young woman I’d been, so stalled, so worried she would never find her purpose. I wished I could go back and tell her it would turn out all right.

  Glancing up, I caught sight of Sarah Mapps and Grace across the garden, striding toward us. Nina and I had traveled almost constantly for the past year and a half, and except for our visit last winter, we’d seen little of them. I wrapped my arms around them, along with Lucretia, who’d known them back at Arch Street.

  When Sarah Mapps pulled a letter from her purse and handed it to me, I recognized Handful’s writing immediately, though it bore my sister Mary’s seal. Unable to wait, I ripped it open and read Handful’s brief message with a sinking feeling. There were reports of runaways beginning to find their way across the Ohio River from Kentucky, or to Philadelphia and New York from Maryland, but rarely from that far south. We’re leaving here or die trying.

  “What’s the matter?” Lucretia said. “You look shaken.”

  I read them the letter, then folded it back, my hands trembling visibly. “… They’ll be caught. Or killed,” I said.

  Sarah Mapps frowned. “They must know what they’re attempting. They’re not children.”

  She’d never been to Charleston. She had no idea of the laws and edicts that controlled every moment of a slave’s life, of the City Guard, the curfew, the passes, the searches, the night watch, the vigilante committees, the slave catchers, the Work House, the impossibility, the sheer brutality.

  “They’re coming to us,” Grace said, as if it had just sunk in.

  “And we’ll welcome them,” Sarah Mapps added. “They can live in your old room in the attic. They can help out at the school.”

  “They’ll never make it this far,” I said.

  It occurred to me that Handful and Sky might already have left, and I opened up the letter again to look at the date: 23 April.

  “It was written only three weeks ago,” I said more to myself than to them. “… I doubt they’ve left by now. There may still be time for me to do something.”

  “But what could you possibly do?” Lucretia asked.

  “I don’t know if I can do anything, but I can’t sit here on my hands … I’m going back to Charleston. I can at least try and convince my mother to sell them to me so I can set them free.”

  I’d asked before, but this time I would beg her in person.

  She had called me her dear daughter.

  Handful

  Upstairs in the alcove, I peered out the window at the harbor, remembering when I w
as ten years old seeing the water for the first time, how tireless and far it traveled, making up that little song, prancing round, and now I was coming on forty-five and my feet didn’t dance anymore. They just wanted to be gone from here. Little missus hadn’t let me out since the whipping, but every free chance I slipped up here. Sometimes like today, I brought my hand sewing and spent the morning on the window seat with the needle. Little missus didn’t care as long as I did my work, kept my tongue, bobbed my head, said yessum, yessum, yessum.

  Today, it was hot, the sun eyeing straight in. I opened the window and the wind blew stiff, dredging up the smell of mudflats. From my perch, I could see the steamboat landing down on East Bay. I’d learned plenty watching the world come and go from that dock. A steamer came most every week day. I’d watch the snag boat ply ahead of it, clearing the way, then I’d hear the paddle on the steamer roar and the tug boats huff and the dock slaves holler back and forth, making haste to grab the ropes and put down the plank.

  When it was time for it to leave again, I’d watch the carriages pull up at the whitewash building with the Steamship Company sign, and people would go inside and wait for a spell. Down on the landing, the slaves would unload trunks and goods and bags of mail onto the ship. When ten o’clock came, the passengers crossed the street and the slaves helped the ladies over the gangplank. The boat never left till the Guard showed up. Always two of them, sometimes three, they passed through the ship—first deck, second deck, pilot house, bottom to top. One time they opened every humpback trunk before it went onboard. That’s when I knew they were searching for stowaways, for slaves.

  The Thursday boat went all the way to New York, and then you got on another one going to Philadelphia—I’d learned that from reading the Charleston Post and Courier, which I’d swiped from the drawing room. It printed all the schedules, said the tickets cost fifty-five dollars.

  Today, the steamboat landing was empty, but I wasn’t up here in the alcove to watch the boat, I was up here to figure a way to get on it. All these weeks I’d been patient. Careful. Yessum, yessum. Now I sat here with the palmettos clacking in the wind and thought of the girl who bathed in a copper tub. I thought of the woman who stole a bullet mold. I loved that girl, that woman.