The Invention of Wings: A Novel

by Sue Monk Kidd

  My favorite event in Sarah’s later history occurred in 1870, a few years before she died in Hyde Park, Massachusetts, when she and Angelina led a procession of forty-two women to the polls amid a town election. They marched through a driving snowstorm, where they dropped their illegal ballots into a symbolic voting box. It was the sisters’ last act of public defiance. Sarah lived to be eighty-one. Angelina, seventy-four. Despite sisterly conflicts from time to time, the unusual bond that tethered them was never broken, nor were they ever separated.

  Besides Sarah and Angelina, I’ve included other historical figures in the book, rendering them through my own elucidations of their history: Theodore Weld, the famous abolitionist, whom Angelina married; Lucretia Mott, another famous abolitionist and women’s rights pioneer; Sarah Mapps Douglass, a free black abolitionist and educator; Israel Morris, a wealthy Quaker businessman and widower who proposed marriage to Sarah, twice. (Her diary suggests she loved him quite deeply, despite turning him down. She maintained that she was bound to her vocation to become a Quaker minister, perhaps believing she could not have marriage and independence both.) There is also Catherine Morris, Israel’s sister and a conservative Quaker elder, with whom Sarah and Angelina boarded; William Lloyd Garrison, editor of the radical abolitionist newspaper The Liberator; Elizur Wright, secretary of the American Anti-Slavery Society; and the poet John Greenleaf Whittier, Theodore Weld’s friend, who along with Theodore made a vow not to marry until slavery was ended, a vow Theodore broke. I might add that both men were supporters of women’s rights, and yet in letters to Sarah and Angelina, they strongly pressured the sisters to desist from the cause of women for fear it would split the abolitionist movement. Some of the more salient words that Angelina wrote back to Theodore are included in the imagined scene in which the men arrive at Mrs. Whittier’s cottage and order the sisters to stop their fight for women. Sarah and Angelina defied the men, and indeed as historian Gerda Lerner pointed out, they were the ones who attached the cause of women’s rights to the cause of abolition, creating what some saw as a dangerous split and others as a brilliant alliance. Either way, their refusal to desist played a vibrant part in propelling the cause of women into American life.

  I’ve tried to represent the members of the Grimké family with a fair amount of accuracy. Sarah’s mother, Mary Grimké, was by all accounts a proud and difficult woman. According to Catherine Birney, Sarah’s earliest biographer, Mrs. Grimké was devout, narrow, undemonstrative in her affections to her children, and often cruel to her slaves, visiting on them severe and common punishments. She did not, as far as I know, inflict the one-legged punishment on her slaves, but it was an actual punishment, one that Sarah herself described in detail as being used by “one of the first families in Charleston.” My representation of Sarah’s father, Judge John Grimké, and of the events in his life, are reasonably close to the record, as is the account of Sarah’s favorite brother, Thomas. I have no doubt that I deviated with Sarah’s older sister Mary (“little missus”), whose history is mostly unknown. Though I found one source that referred to her as unmarried and others that listed her spouse as unknown, I married her to a plantation owner and later had her return home as a widow. She did, however, remain committed to the cause of slavery and unapologetic about it until her death in 1865, a detail I built upon.

  It was a thrill for me to visit the Grimkés’ house on East Bay Street. Though the house can be dated only to circa 1789, it may have come into John Grimké’s possession at the time of his marriage in 1784. It remained in the family until Mrs. Grimké died in 1839. Today, it’s well preserved and occupied by a law firm. It is likely that some of the house’s original layout and interiors remain the same, including the fireplaces, cypress panels, Delft tiles, pine floors, and moldings. Wandering through the house, I could picture Handful in an alcove on the second floor, gazing out at the harbor, and Sarah slipping down the staircase to her father’s library as the slaves lay asleep on the floor outside the bedroom doors. I was even permitted into the attic, where I noticed a ladder leading to a hatch in the roof. I can’t say whether the hatch was always there, but I could envision Sarah and Handful climbing through it as girls, an idea that would prompt the scene of their having tea on the roof and telling one another their secrets.

  The Historic Charleston Foundation was of great help to me and provided me with a document that contained an inventory and appraisement of all “the goods and chattels” in John Grimké’s Charleston house soon after his death in 1819. While poring over this long and meticulous list, I was stunned to come upon the names, ages, roles, and appraised values of seventeen slaves. They were recorded between the Brussels carpet and eleven yards of cotton and flax. The discovery haunted me, and eventually it found its way into the story with Handful unearthing the inventory in the library and finding hers and Charlotte’s names inscribed on it along with their supposed worth.

  All of the enslaved characters in the novel are conjured from my imagination, with the exception of Denmark Vesey’s lieutenants, who were actual figures: Gullah Jack, Monday Gell, Peter Poyas, and Rolla and Ned Bennett. All but Gell were hanged for their roles in the plotted revolt. Vesey himself was a free black carpenter, whose life, plot, arrest, trial, and execution I’ve tried to represent relatively close to historical accounts. I didn’t concoct that odd detail about Vesey winning the lottery with ticket number 1884, then using the payoff to buy both his freedom and a house on Bull Street. Frankly, I wonder if I would’ve had the courage to make such a thing up. In public reports, Vesey was said to have been hanged at Blake’s Lands along with five of his conspirators, but I chose to portray an oral tradition that has persisted among some black citizens of Charleston since the 1820s, which states that Vesey was hanged alone from an oak tree in order to keep his execution shrouded in anonymity. Vesey was said to have kept a number of “wives” around the city and to have fathered a number of children with them, so I took the liberty of making Handful’s mother one of these “wives” and Sky his daughter.

  Some historians have doubts about whether Vesey’s planned slave insurrection truly existed or to what extent, but I have followed the opinion that not only was Vesey more than capable of creating such a plot, he attempted it. I wanted this work to acknowledge the many enslaved and free black Americans who fought, plotted, resisted, and died for the sake of freedom. Reading about the protest and escapes of various actual female slaves helped me to shape the characters and stories of Charlotte and Handful.

  The story quilt in the novel was inspired by the magnificent quilts of Harriet Powers, an enslaved woman from Georgia who used African appliqué technique to tell stories about biblical events and historical legends. Her two surviving quilts are archived at the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. I made a pilgrimage to Washington to see Powers’ quilt, and after viewing it, it seemed plausible that enslaved women, forbidden to read and write, could have devised subversive ways to voice themselves, to keep their memories alive, and to preserve the heritage of their African traditions. I envisioned Charlotte using cloth and needle as others use paper and pen, creating a visual memoir, attempting to set down the events of her life in a single quilt. One of the most fascinating parts of my research had to be the hours I spent reading about slave quilts and the symbols and imagery in African textiles, which introduced me to the notion of black triangles representing blackbird wings.

  If you’re inclined to read further about the historical content in the novel or about Harriet Powers’ quilts, you might want to explore this sampling of very readable books:

  The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina: Pioneers for Women’s Rights and Abolition, by Gerda Lerner.

  The Feminist Thought of Sarah Grimké, by Gerda Lerner.

  Lift Up Thy Voice: The Grimké Family’s Journey from Slaveholders to Civil Rights Leaders, by Mark Perry.

  The Politics of Taste in Antebellum Charleston, by Maurie D. McInnis.

/>   Denmark Vesey: The Buried Story of America’s Largest Slave Rebellion and the Man Who Led It, by David Robertson.

  Africans in America: America’s Journey Through Slavery, by Charles Johnson, Patricia Smith, and the WGBH Series Research Team.

  To Be a Slave, by Julius Lester, with illustrations by Tom Feelings (Newberry Honor book).

  Stitching Stars: The Story Quilts of Harriet Powers, by Mary Lyons (ALA Notable Book for Children).

  Signs & Symbols: African Images in African American Quilts, by Maude Southwell Wahlman.

  In writing The Invention of Wings, I was inspired by the words of Professor Julius Lester, which I kept propped on my desk: “History is not just facts and events. History is also a pain in the heart and we repeat history until we are able to make another’s pain in the heart our own.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My deepest thanks to …

  Ann Kidd Taylor, an exceptionally gifted writer and author, who read and reread this manuscript in progress, offering me invaluable comments and endless believing.

  Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, my amazing agent and dear friend.

  My terrific editor, Paul Slovak, and Clare Ferraro, and the extraordinary team at Viking for their boundless support.

  Valerie Perry, Aiken-Rhett House museum manager at Historic Charleston Foundation, who gave so generously of her time and efforts and offered tremendous help with my research.

  Carter Hudgens, director of preservation and education at Drayton Hall in Charleston, for his time and insights into the life and history of enslaved people.

  The following institutions, which, along with Historic Charleston Foundation and Drayton Hall, served as resources: the Charleston Museum, the Charleston Library Society, the College of Charleston’s Addlestone Library and the Avery Research Center, the Charleston County Public Library, the South Caroliniana Library, the Aiken-Rhett House Museum, the Nathaniel Russell House Museum, the Charles Pinckney House, the Old Slave Mart, Magnolia Plantation and Gardens, Lowcountry Africana, Middleton Place, and Boone Hall Plantation.

  Pierce, Herns, Sloan & Wilson, LLC of Charleston, which allowed me to explore to my heart’s content the historic house that once belonged to the Grimké family (named the Blake House for its original owner).

  Jacqueline Coleburn, rare book cataloger at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., for her enormous assistance in providing me with a treasure trove of letters, newspapers, Anti-Slavery Convention proceedings, and other documents related to Sarah and Angelina Grimké and early-nineteenth-century history.

  Doris Bowman, associate curator and specialist, Textile Collection at the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., for welcoming me into the Smithsonian archives to view Harriet Powers’ Bible Quilt and for supplying me with a wealth of information about it.

  The New-York Historical Society for making available documents related to the Grimké sisters and Denmark Vesey, including official reports of Vesey’s insurrection and trial.

  The National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, which awed and educated me with its exhibits and interactive experiences on slavery and abolition.

  Marilee Birchfield, librarian at the University of South Carolina, for aid with research questions.

  Robert Kidd and Kellie Bayuzick Kidd for being willing and able research assistants.

  Scott Taylor for providing patient and expert technical help, especially the week my computer crashed.

  There were many primary sources, books, essays, and articles about the Grimkés, Denmark Vesey, slavery, abolition, quilts and African textiles, and early-nineteenth-century history that became the bedrock of my research, but I would like to especially mention my indebtedness to Dr. Gerda Lerner, whose scholarship and writings about the Grimké sisters greatly influenced me, particularly her biography The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina: Pioneers for Women’s Rights and Abolition. I’m also indebted to the research and writing of Mark Perry in his book Lift Up Thy Voice: The Grimké Family’s Journey from Slaveholders to Civil Rights Leaders; H. Catherine Birney in The Grimké Sisters; David Robertson in Denmark Vesey: The Buried Story of America’s Largest Slave Rebellion and the Man Who Led It; and Maurie D. McInnis in The Politics of Taste in Antebellum Charleston. I want to acknowledge an American black folktale, from which I drew inspiration, about people in Africa being able to fly and then losing their wings when captured into slavery. The story is beautifully told by Virginia Hamilton and magnificently illustrated by Leo and Diane Dillon in the ALA Notable Children’s Book The People Could Fly: American Black Folktales.

  I’m immensely grateful to the wonderful group of friends who listened to me recount the pull, challenges, and joys of writing this novel, and who never ceased to encourage me: Terry Helwig, Trisha Sinnott, Curly Clark, Carolyn Rivers, Susan Hull Walker, and Molly Lehman. I’m grateful, too, for Jim and Mandy Helwig, who along with Terry have long been part of my extended family.

  I was sustained every single day by the love and support of family: my parents Leah and Ridley Monk; my son Bob Kidd and his wife, Kellie; my daughter Ann Kidd Taylor and her husband, Scott; my grandchildren Roxie, Ben, and Max; and my husband, Sandy, who has journeyed with me since college and whose bravery during the past year both inspired and deepened me. No words can ever express my gratitude for each of them.