The Invention of Wings: A Novel

by Sue Monk Kidd

  I went over everything I’d seen out there on the harbor, everything I knew. I sat with my hands still, my eyes closed, my mind flying with the gulls, the world tilting like a birdwing.

  When I stood up, every one of my limbs was shaking.

  The next week when Hector was handing out duties for the day, he told Minta, go strip the bedding in the house and take it out to the laundry house. I thought quick and said, “Oh, I’ll do that, poor Minta’s back is hurting her.” She looked at me curious, but didn’t argue. You take a rest whatever way you can get it.

  In the alcove that day, a picture had sprung in my head—dresses. I saw the black dresses the missuses had worn to mourn their husbands. I saw their spoon bonnets with the thick black veils and their black gloves. These things came to me clear as the bright of day.

  When I got to missus’ room, I tugged off the bed linens, listening for footsteps on the stairs, for a cane poking its way, then I opened the last drawer of her linen press. I’d folded away missus’ mourning dress, her bonnet and gloves my own self all those years back. I’d packed them in linen with camphor gum to keep out the moth eggs and laid them in the bottom drawer. Reaching back there, I worried they were long gone, that what warded off the moths had drawn the rats, but then my fingers brushed against the linen.

  I peeked inside the parcel. It was still the grandest dress I’d ever made—black velvet stitched with hundreds of black glass beads. Some of them had come loose and were scatter-rolling in the linen folds. The veil on the bonnet had two spider tears that would have to be fixed, plus I’d forgot the gloves were fingerless mitts. I’d have to sew fingers on them. I whisked everything into the bed sheets, bundled it up, and tied a topknot. Leaving it outside the door, I hurried into little missus’ room.

  Her funeral outfit was stored nearly the same way in her bureau but with cedar chips instead of camphor. I didn’t know how we’d air out all these rowdy smells. When I got her dress, hat, and gloves rolled tight in the sheets, I threw both of the bed bundles over my back and went down the stairs with my cane, straight to the cellar room.

  That night after me and Sky had dragged the bed over to block the door, she tried on missus’ black velvet dress and stood there with the buttons undone. Thick-waist as missus was, I’d still have to let the bodice out for Sky, add six inches to the length and two to the sleeves. She was her daddy’s girl, all right.

  Little missus was normal size, but there was enough room inside her dress for two of me.

  The only thing we didn’t have was shoes, proper shoes. What we had was slave shoes and that would have to do.

  I started to work that night. Sky fetched threads and shears for me and watched every stitch. She sang the Gullah song she liked best, If you don’t know where you’re going, you should know where you come from.

  I told her, “We know where we’re going now.”

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “We’ll be ready when the steamer leaves Thursday eight days from now.”

  She picked up her apron draped on the rocker and dug in the pocket, pulling out two little bottles like the kind Aunt-Sister used for tinctures. “I boiled us some white oleander tea.”

  A quiver ran from my neck to my fingers. White oleander was the most deadly plant in the world. A bush had caught fire on Hasell Street and a man dropped dead just breathing the smoke. The brown liquid in Sky’s bottle would curl us on the floor retching till the last breath, but it wouldn’t take long.

  “We leaving or die trying,” Sky said.

  Sarah

  I arrived in Charleston during a thunderstorm. As the steamer groaned into the harbor, lightning tore rifts in the sky and rain pelted sideways, and still, I stepped out beneath the roof of the upper deck so I could watch the city come into view. I hadn’t seen it in sixteen years.

  We churned past Fort Sumter at the harbor’s mouth, which didn’t look much further along in its construction than when I’d sailed away. The peninsula loomed up like an old mirage rising from the water, the white houses on the Battery blurred in the gray rain. For a moment I felt the quiet hungering thing that comes inside when you return to the place of your origins, and then the ache of mis-belonging. It was beautiful, this place, and it was savage. It swallowed you and made you a part of itself, or if you proved too inassimilable, it spit you out like the pit of a plum.

  I’d left here of my own will, and yet it seemed the city had banished me in much the same way I’d banished it. Seeing it now after so long, seeing the marsh grass pitching wildly around the edges of the city, the rooftops hunkered together with their ship watches and widow walks, and behind them, the steeples of St. Philip’s and St. Michael’s lifted like dark fingers, I was not sorry for loving Charleston or for leaving it. Geography had made me who I was.

  Wind swept my bonnet off the back of my head, the sash catching at my neck, and turning to grab it, I saw the menacing couple through the window of the salon. Traveling home after socializing in Newport, they’d recognized me shortly after we’d left New York. I’d tried to keep aloof from everyone, but the woman had stared at me with unrelenting curiosity. “You’re the Grimké daughter, aren’t you?” she said. “The one who—” Her husband took her arm and steered her away before she could finish. She’d meant to say the one who betrayed us.

  They glared at me now, at my wet skirt and fluttering bonnet, and I felt certain the man would report my arrival to the authorities as soon as we landed. Perhaps returning had been a terrible mistake after all. I moved away from them to the bow of the boat as a crack of thunder broke overhead, becoming lost in the noise of the engine. Charleston would forgive its own many things, but not betrayal.

  I found Handful within an hour of my arrival. She was sewing in the upstairs alcove, of all places. When she saw me standing there, she leapt up, stumbling a little with her infirm leg, dropping the slave shirt on the floor along with the needle and thread. I reached to catch her as she righted herself and found myself embracing her, feeling her embrace me back.

  “I got your letter,” I told her, softly, in case there were listening ears somewhere.

  She shook her head. “But you didn’t come back cause of that, cause of me.”

  “Of course I did,” I said. I picked up the shirt and we sat down on the cushioned window seat.

  She was wearing her customary red scarf and seemed barely changed. Her eyes were still large as bowls, the golden color darkened somewhat, and she was tiny as ever. Not frail or insubstantial, but distilled, concentrated.

  There was a cane propped between us with a fanciful carving of a rabbit on the handle. Moving it to the side, she said, “You didn’t come to try and stop us, did you?”

  “It’s dangerous, Handful … I’m afraid for you.”

  “Well, that may be, but I’m more scared of bowing and scraping to your mauma and your sister the rest of my days.”

  Speaking barely above a whisper, I told her about my plan to try and convince Mother to sell the two of them to me.

  She laughed a bitter sound. “Uh huh.”

  I hadn’t expected that. I looked past her, scanning the harbor, noticing the steamer in the distance rinsed clean by the rain.

  She shifted herself on the cushion and I heard the breath leave her. “I just don’t see missus doing one thing favorable for me, that’s all. But here you are, all this way—nobody else would’ve done that for me—so it’s worth a try, and if she’s willing to sell us, I’ll pay you back everything I got, four hundred dollars.”

  “There would be no need—”

  “Well, I ain’t doing it any other way.”

  We stopped talking as Hector, the butler Mary had installed, came up the stairs with my trunk, his gaze lingering longer than was comfortable. I stood. “I should get settled.”

  “You go on and talk to her then,” Handful whispered. “But don’t be waiting too long.”

  I waited four days. It seemed imprudent to make the request before that—I wanted Mother to bel
ieve I’d returned solely to see her.

  I broached the matter on Tuesday afternoon while we sat in the drawing room, Mother, Mary, and I, swishing our fans at the vaporous heat. A languid silence had fallen that none of us seemed willing to break. We’d exhausted all the harmless subjects: the rainy weather, the spectacular wonder of the railroad that ran from Charleston to Savannah, an expurgated version of Nina’s wedding, news of my siblings, the nieces and nephews I’d never met. If I had any chance at securing freedom for Handful and Sky, we couldn’t speak of my scandalous adventures, which had been in all the papers. Nor of abolition, slavery, the North, the South, religion, politics, or the fact I’d been outlawed in the city the previous summer.

  “People are talking, Sarah,” Mary said, breaking the lull. She exchanged a look with Mother, and I glimpsed how in step they were with one another, how alike. An echo of loneliness reverberated from my girlhood, and I felt again like the odd-child-out. Even now. I heard Binah’s voice somewhere in my memory, Poor Miss Sarah. These irrational childish feelings, where had they come from suddenly?

  “Rumors are running rampant that you’ve returned,” Mary was saying. “It’s only a matter of time before the sheriff arrives to inquire about it, and if you’re here, I’m not sure what you expect us to say. We can hardly hide you like a fugitive.”

  I turned to Mother, watching her eyes veer away toward the piazza. The windows were open and the chocolaty smell of the oleander streamed in, sickeningly thick.

  “You wish me to leave?”

  “It’s not a matter of what we wish,” Mother said. “If the authorities come, I wouldn’t give you over to them, of course not. You’re my daughter. You’re still a Grimké. We only suggest it would be easier all around if you cut your visit short.”

  To my surprise, her eyes filled. She was plump now with thinned white hair and one of those ancient faces that’s deeply cobblestoned. She peered at me as the tears started to spill, and I left my chair and went to her. Bending down awkwardly, I put my arms about her.

  She clung to me an instant, then straightened. Instead of returning to my seat, I paced toward the window and back, gathering my bravery.

  “I won’t put you at risk, I’ll leave on the next steamer, but before I go, I have a request. I would like to purchase Hetty and her sister, Sky.”

  “Purchase them?” Mary said. “But why? You hardly barter in slaves.”

  “Mary, for heaven’s sake, she means to free them,” Mother said.

  “I’ll offer you any amount.” I walked to Mother’s side. “Please. I would consider it a great kindness to me.”

  Mary rose and came to the other side of Mother’s chair. “We can’t possibly do without Hetty,” she said. “There are few seamstresses in Charleston to match her. She’s irreplaceable. The other one is expendable, but not Hetty.”

  Mother stared at her hands. Her shoulders moved up and down with her breath, and I began to feel a prick of hope.

  “There are laws that make it difficult,” she said. “Emancipating them would require a special act of the legislature.”

  “Difficult, but it could be done,” I responded.

  Something inside of her seemed to bend, to arch toward me. Mary sensed it, too. She placed her hand on our mother’s, linking the two of them. She said, “We can’t do without Hetty. And we must think of her, as well. Where will she go? Who will take care of her? She has a home here.”

  “This is not her home, it’s her prison,” I said.

  Mary stiffened. “We don’t need you to come here and lecture us about slavery. I won’t stand here and defend it to you. It’s our way of life.”

  Her words infuriated me. I wondered for a moment if holding my tongue would help my cause with Mother. Was it ever right to sacrifice one’s truth for expedience? Mother would do what she would do, wouldn’t she? I wondered how it was possible I’d found my words out there in the world, but could lose them in the house where I was born.

  It gave way inside of me—years of being here, co-existing with the untenable. “Your way of life! What does that justify? Slavery is a hell-concocted system, it cannot be defended!”

  Small red wafers splotched along Mary’s neck. “God has ordained that we take care of them,” she said, flustered now, spluttering.

  I took a step toward her, my outrage breaking open. “You speak as if God was white and Southern! As if we somehow owned his image. You speak like a fool. The Negro is not some other kind of creature than we are. Whiteness is not sacred, Mary! It can’t go on defining everything.”

  I doubt anyone had ever spoken to her in such a manner, and she turned away from me, taken aback.

  I couldn’t explain that rising up, this coming fully to myself, the audacity and authority my life had found. It took me aback, as well, and I closed my eyes, and I blessed it. It was like arriving finally in the place I’d left, and I felt then I would never be an exile again.

  Mother lifted her hand. “This has tired me,” she said and struggled to her feet with her old gold-tip cane. She walked to the door, then turned back, leveling her eyes on mine. “I won’t sell Hetty or Sky to you, Sarah. I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I will compromise.”

  In the darkness of the cellar, the sound of my knocking seemed lost and swallowed up. It was past midnight. I’d waited until now to find Handful, slipping down here when the house was asleep, still wearing my sleeping clothes. The lantern swayed in my hand, swiveling the shadows, as I rapped again on Handful’s door. Come on, Handful, wake up.

  “Who’s out there?” Her voice sounded alarmed and muffled behind the door.

  “It’s all right. It’s me, it’s Sarah.”

  She made a slit in the door, then let me inside. She held a candle that flickered beneath her chin. Her eyes appeared almost luminous.

  “I’m sorry to wake you, but we must talk.”

  Across the room, Sky was sitting up in her bed, her hair splayed out like a great dark fan. I sat the lantern down and nodded at her. Soon after my arrival, I’d seen her in the ornamental garden, down on her knees, digging with a trowel. The garden had been turned into a kind of wonderland, a cloister of colorful blooms, groomed shrubberies, and winding paths, and I’d gone out there as if to take a stroll. Sky hadn’t waited for me to approach her, but pushed to her feet and strode over to me, smelling of fresh dirt and green plants. She didn’t look like Handful, or Charlotte either for that matter. She was strapping. She looked feral and cunning to me. She said, “You Sarah?” When I said I was, she grinned. “Handful said you the best of the Grimkés.”

  “I’m not sure that’s saying a great deal,” I answered, smiling at her.

  “Maybe not,” she said, and I liked her instantly.

  I glanced about the cellar room, a little more crowded now with two beds. They’d shoved them together side by side beneath the window.

  “What is it?” Handful said, but before I could speak, I saw it dawn on her. “Your mauma won’t sell us, will she?”

  “No, I’m sorry. She refused. But—”

  “But what?”

  “She did agree to free both of you upon her death. She said she would have the paper drawn up and added to her will.”

  Handful stood with the light puddling around her and stared at me. It was not what any of us wanted, but it was something.

  “She’s seventy-four,” I said.

  “She’ll outlive the last cockroach,” Handful said. She looked at Sky. “We’ll be leaving here day after tomorrow.”

  I was relieved and terrified in the same moment. I studied the compact defiance that made up so much of who she was. I said, “Tell me how I can help.”

  Handful

  The night before we were to take our leave, me and Sky scurried in the dark, collecting everything together. We stole out to the stable to get mauma’s quilt from the horse blankets, trekking cross the work yard with the stars pouring down. We climbed up to Sarah’s room from the cellar to the second floor, three trips,
carrying quilts, black dresses, hats, veils, gloves, and hankies. Up and down, me and my lame foot, passing right by missus’ and little missus’ doors. We went in stocking feet, taking soft steps like the floor might sink.

  On the last trip, Sarah locked the door behind us, and I had a tarnish memory of her screening the keyhole while she taught me to read, how we whispered by the lamplight like we were doing now. I hung our dresses in her wardrobe. They fit us tailor-made. The veils were pressed perfect, and I’d sprinkled the velvet and crepe with missus’ lavender water so they had a white lady scent. I’d sewed pockets on the inside of the dresses to hold our money, along with Sarah’s booklet, mauma’s red scarf, and the address in Philadelphia where we hoped to end up.

  Sky said the rabbit was outfoxing the fox.

  Sarah opened her steamer trunk and I rested mauma’s story quilt on the satin lining at the bottom. I’d brought the quilt with red squares and black triangles, hoping to pack it, too—the first blackbird wings I ever sewed—but now that I saw how little the trunk was, I felt bad for taking up the precious space. I said, “I can leave this behind.”

  Sarah took it from me and laid it in the trunk. “I would rather leave my dresses—they’re not worth much.”

  I knew the perils of what she was doing same as she did. I read the papers. Twenty years in prison for circulating publications of a seditious nature. Twenty years for assisting a slave to escape.

  I watched her fold her few belongings on top of the quilts and thought, This ain’t the same Sarah who left here. She had a firm look in her eye and her voice didn’t dither and hesitate like it used to. She’d been boiled down to a good, strong broth.

  Her hair was loose, dangling along the sides of her neck like silk vines, like the red threads I used to tie round the spirit tree, and I saw it then, the strange thing between us. Not love, is it? What is it? It was always there, a roundness in my chest, a pin cushion. It pricked and fastened. Those girls on the roof with the tea gone cold in the cup.