The Invention Of Wings Part 27

She halted on the browned gra.s.s, a harsh amber light falling out of the cloudless sky onto her face. "But you said the Negro pew was a barrier that must be broken!"

I had said that, just last night. It had seemed like a stirring idea then, but now, in the glare of day, it seemed less like breaking a barrier and more like a perilous lark. So far, the Arch Street members had put up with my anti-slavery statements the way you abide swarming insects in the outdoors-you swat and ignore them the best you can-but this was altogether different. This was an act of rebellion and it probably wouldn't help my long struggle to become a Quaker minister. The idea to sit on the Negro pew had come after reading The Liberator, an anti-slavery paper Nina and I had been smuggling home in our parcels and, once, folded inside Nina's bonnet. It was published by Mr. William Lloyd Garrison, possibly the most radical abolitionist in the country. I was sure if Catherine found a single copy in our rooms, she would promptly evict us. We kept them hidden beneath our mattresses, and I wondered now if we should go home and burn them.

The truth was none of this was safe. Pro-slavery mobs had been on a reign of terror all summer, and not in the South, but here in the North. They'd been tossing abolitionist printing presses into the rivers and burning down free black and abolitionist homes, nearly fifty of them in Philadelphia alone. The violence had been a shock to me and Nina-it seemed geography was no safeguard at all. Being an abolitionist could get you attacked right on the streets-heckled, flogged, stoned, killed. Some abolitionists had bounties on their heads, and most everyone had gone into hiding.

Standing there, seeing the disappointment on Nina's face, I wished for Lucretia. I wished she would appear next to me in her white organdy bonnet with her fearless eyes, but she and James had moved to another Meeting, finding Arch Street too conservative. I'd thought to follow her until Catherine made it clear Nina and I would have to seek other lodging, and there were few, if any, suitable places two spinster sisters could board together. Sometimes I thought back to that day by the Delaware when I'd told Lucretia I wouldn't look back, and I had carried on the best I could, but there were always compromises to be made, so many little concessions.

"You don't have cold feet, do you?" Nina was saying. "Tell me you don't."

I heard Israel's voice cut through the crowd, calling for Becky, and glancing up, I caught sight of his back disappearing into the meetinghouse. I stood a moment smelling the heat on the horse saddles, the stink of urine on the cobblestone.

". . . I always have cold feet . . . but come on, they won't stop me."

She slid her arm through mine, and I could barely keep up with her as she towed me to the door, her chin raised in that defiant way she'd had since childhood, and for a second, I saw her at fourteen, sitting on the yellow settee before Reverend Gadsden with her chin yanked up just like this, refusing to be confirmed into St. Philip's.

Soon after Nina had arrived in Philadelphia, the Quakers had made her a teacher in the Infant School, a job she despised. Our requests for another a.s.signment had been ignored-I believe they thought there was some pride to be knocked out of her by diapering babies. The eligible men, including Jane Bettleman's son, Edward, trampled over one another to a.s.sist her from the carriage, then loitered close by in case she dropped something they might retrieve, but she found them all tedious. When she turned thirty last winter, I began to quietly worry, not that she was becoming another Aunt Amelia Jane like me-indeed I told her if she got Mrs. Bettleman for a mother-in-law we would both have to drown ourselves in the river. No, my worry was that she would find herself forty-three like me, and still burping Quaker babies.

The Negro pew was in the low-slung spot beneath the stairs that led to the balcony. As usual, it was guarded by one of the men to ensure no white person sat on it by accident and no colored person pa.s.sed beyond it. Noticing Edward Bettleman was the guard today, I sighed. We were doomed, it seemed, to make fresh enemies of his family over and over.

Sarah Mapps Dougla.s.s and her mother, Grace, sat on the bench in their Quaker dresses and bonnets. Typically the only Negroes among us, Sarah Mapps, close in age to Nina, was a teacher in the school for black children she'd founded, and her mother was a milliner. They were both known for their abolitionist leanings, but as we stepped toward them, I wondered for the first time if they would mind what Nina and I were about to do, if it would implicate them in any way.

As the thought crossed my mind, I hesitated, and seeing me pause, no doubt worrying again about the temperature of my feet, Nina strode quickly to the bench and plopped down beside the older woman.

I remember a blur of things happening at once-the exhale of surprise that left Mrs. Dougla.s.s' lips, Sarah Mapps turning to look at me, comprehending, Edward Bettleman lunging toward Nina, saying too loudly, "Not here, you can't sit here."

Ignoring him, Nina stared bravely ahead, while I slipped beside Sarah Mapps. Edward turned to me. "Miss Grimke, this is the Negro pew, you'll have to move."

". . . We're comfortable here," I said, noticing that entire rows of people nearby were twisting about to see the trouble.

Edward departed, and in the quiet that followed, I heard the women take up their fans and the men clear their throats, and I hoped the disturbance would die down now, but across the room on the Elders' bench, there was a spate of whispering, and then I saw Edward returning with his father.

The four of us instinctively slid together on the bench.

"I ask you to respect the sanct.i.ty and tradition of the meeting and remove yourselves from the pew," Mr. Bettleman said.

Mrs. Dougla.s.s began to breathe fast, and I was stabbed with fear that we'd put them in jeopardy. Belatedly, I recalled a free black woman who'd sat on a white pew at a wedding and had been forced to sweep the city streets. I gestured toward the two women. ". . . They're not part of-" I'd almost said, part of our dissidence, but stopped myself. ". . . They're not part of this."

"That's not so," Sarah Mapps said, glancing at her mother, then up at Mr. Bettleman. "We are fully part of it. We sit here together, do we not?"

She slipped her hands into the folds of her skirt to hide the way they trembled, and I was filled with love and grief at the sight.

He waited, and we didn't move. "I'll ask one final time," he said. He looked incredulous, incensed, certain of his righteousness, but he could hardly remove us forcibly. Could he?

Nina drew herself up, eyes blazing. "We shall not be moved, sir!"

His face reddened. Turning to me, he spoke in a tightly coiled whisper. "Heed me, Miss Grimke. Rein in your sister, and yourself as well."

As he left, I peered at Sarah Mapps and her mother, the way they grabbed hands and squeezed in relief, and then at Nina, at the small exultation on her face. She was braver than I, she always had been. I cared too much for the opinion of others, she cared not a whit. I was cautious, she was brash. I was a thinker, she was a doer. I kindled fires, she spread them. And right then and ever after, I saw how cunning the Fates had been. Nina was one wing, I was the other.

Nina and I were summoned from our rooms by Catherine ringing the tea bell on what we thought was a restful September afternoon. She often rang the bell when a letter arrived for one of us, a meal was served, or she needed help with some household task. We plodded downstairs without a trace of wariness, and there they were, the elders sitting ramrod straight in the chairs in Catherine's parlor, a few left to stand along the wall, Israel among them. Catherine, the only woman, was grandly installed on the frumpy velvet wingchair. We had stumbled into the Inquisition.

Neither of us had bothered to tuck up our hair. Mine hung in limp red ta.s.sels to my waist, while Nina's floated about her shoulders, all curls and corkscrews. It was improper for mixed company, but Catherine didn't send us back. She pursed her lips into something sour that pa.s.sed for a smile and gestured us into the room.

Three weeks had pa.s.sed since we'd first sat on the Negro bench and refused to get up, and except for Mr. Bettleman, no one had said an admonis.h.i.+ng word to us. We'd returned to sit with Sarah Mapps and Grace the following week and then the next, and no effort had been made to stop us. I'd been lulled into thinking the elders had acquiesced to what we'd done. Apparently, I'd been wrong.

We stood side by side waiting for someone to speak. The windowpanes burned with sunlight, baking the room to a kiln, and I felt a streak of cold sweat dart between my b.r.e.a.s.t.s. I tried to meet Israel's gaze, but he leaned back into the shadow from the cornice. Turning then to Catherine, I saw the newspaper lying on her lap. The Liberator.

My stomach caught.

Holding one corner between her thumb and forefinger, she lifted the paper as if it were a dead mouse she'd found in a trap and held by the tip of its tail. "A letter on the front page of the most notorious anti-slavery paper in the country has come to our attention." She adjusted her gla.s.ses-the lenses were thick as the bottom of a bottle. "Allow me to read aloud. 30 August, 1835, Respected Friend-"

Nina gasped. "Oh Sarah, I didn't know it would be published."

I squinted at her frantic eyes, trying to comprehend what she was saying. As it dawned on me, I tried to speak, yet nothing came but a spew of air. I had to strip the words like wallpaper. ". . . . . . You . . . wrote to . . . Mr. Garrison?"

A chair sc.r.a.ped on the floor, and I saw Mr. Bettleman stride toward us. "You want us to believe that you, the daughter of a slaveholding family, penned a letter to an agitator like William Lloyd Garrison, thinking he wouldn't publish it? It's exactly the sort of inflammatory material he spreads."

She was not remorseful, she was defiant. "Yes, perhaps I did think he would publish it!" she said. Then to me, "People are risking their lives for the cause of the slave, and we do nothing but sit on the Negro pew! I did what I had to do."

It did feel, all of a sudden, that what she'd done was inevitable. Our lives would never go back to the way they'd been, she'd seen to it, and I both wanted to pull her into my arms and thank her, and to shake her.

Their faces were all the same, grim and accusing, frowning through the glaze of light, all but Israel's. He stared at the floor as if he wished to be anywhere but here.

As Catherine resumed reading, Nina fixed her eyes on the far wall, on some high, removed place above their heads. The letter was long and eloquent, and yes, highly flammable.

"If persecution is the means by which we will accomplish emanc.i.p.ation, then I say, let it come, for it is my deep, solemn, deliberate conviction that this is a cause worth dying for. Angelina Grimke." Catherine folded the paper and laid it on the floor.

News of her letter would reach Charleston, of course. Mother, Thomas, the entire family would read it with outrage and disgrace. She would never go home again-I wondered if she'd thought of that, how those words slammed shut whatever door was left there.

Just then Israel spoke from the back of the room, and I closed my eyes at the gentleness in his voice, the sudden kindness. "You are both our sisters. We love you as Christ loves you. We've come here only to bring you back into good standing with your Quaker brethren. You may still return to us in full repentance, as the prodigal son returned to his father-"

"You must recant the letter or be expelled," Mr. Bettleman said, terse and plain.

Expelled. The word hung like a small blade, almost visible in the brightness. This could not happen. I'd spent thirteen years with the Quakers, six pursuing the ministry, the only profession left to me. I'd given up everything for it, marriage, Israel, children.

I hastened to speak before Nina. I knew what she would say and then the blade would fall. ". . . Please, I know you're a merciful people."

"Try and understand, Sarah, we looked the other way while you sat on the Negro pew," Catherine said. "But it's gone too far now." She laced her fingers beneath her chin and her knuckles shone white. "And you have to consider, too, where you'll go if you don't recant. I care for you both, but naturally you couldn't stay here."

Panic arched into my throat. ". . . Is it so wrong to write a letter? . . . Is it so wrong to put feet to our prayers?"

"Matters like this-they aren't the work of a woman's life," Israel said, stepping from the shadowed place along the wall. "Surely you're not blind to that." His voice was mired in hurt and frustration, the same tone he'd had when I turned down his proposal, and I knew he was speaking about more than the letter. "We have no choice. What you've done by declaring yourself in this manner is outside the bounds of Quakerism."

I reached for Nina's hand. It felt clammy and hot. I looked at Israel, only Israel. ". . . We cannot recant the letter. I only wish I'd signed it, too."

Nina's hand tightened on mine, squeezing to the point of pain.

Handful.

4 August.

Dear Sarah.

Mauma pa.s.sed on last month. She fell into a sleep under the oak tree and never roused. She stayed asleep six days before she died in her bed, me beside her and Sky too. Your mauma paid for her to have a pine box.

They put her in the slave burial ground on Pitt Street. Missus let Goodis carry me and Sky over there in the carriage to see her resting place and say goodbye. Sky has turned 22 now and stands tall as a man. When we stood by the grave, I didn't come up to her shoulder. She sang the song the women on the plantation sing when they pound rice to leave on the graves. She said they put rice there to help the dead find their way back to Africa. Sky had a pocketful from the kitchen house and she spread it over mauma while she sang.

What came to me was the old song I made up when I was a girl. Cross the water, cross the sea, let them fishes carry me, carry me home. I sang that, then I took the bra.s.s thimble, the one I loved from the time I was little, and I left it on top of her grave so she'd have that part of me.

Well, I wanted you to know. I guess she's at peace now.

I hope this letter makes it to you. If you write me, take care cause your sister Mary watches everything. The black driver from her plantation named Hector is the butler now and he does her spying.

Your friend.

Handful.

I wrote Sarah's name and address on the front by the light of the candle, copying missus' handwriting as close as I could manage. Missus' pens.h.i.+p had fallen off so bad I could've set down any kind of lettering and pa.s.sed it off for hers. I closed the letter with a drop of wax and pressed it with missus' seal-stamp. I'd stole the stamp from her room-let's say, borrowed it. I planned to take it back before it was missed. The stationery, though, was just plain stolen.

Cross the room, Sky was sleeping, thras.h.i.+ng in the heat. I watched her arms search the spot on the mattress where mauma used to lay, then I blew out the flame and watched the smoke tail away in the dark. Tomorrow I'd slip the letter in the batch going to the post and hope n.o.body took a hard look.

Sky sang out in her sleep, sounded like Gullah, and I thought of the rice she'd sprinkled on mauma's grave, trying to send her spirit to Africa.

Africa. Wherever me and Sky were, that's the only place mauma would be.

Sarah.

I woke each day to a sick, empty feeling. Catherine had given us until the first day of October to pack our things and leave, but we could find no one who'd take in two sisters expelled by the Quakers, and Lucretia's house was packed with children now. The streets had been flooded with hand fliers-they were tacked on light posts and buildings and strewn on the ground-the headline screaming out in the salacious way these street rags did: OUTRAGE: An Abolitionist of the Most Revolting Character is Among You. Below that, Nina's letter to The Liberator was printed in full. Even the lowliest boardinghouses wouldn't open their doors to us.

I'd reached the borders of despair when a letter came with no return name or address on the envelope.

29 September 1835 Dear Misses Grimke, If you are bold enough to sit with us on the Negro pew, perhaps you will find it in yourself to share our home until you find more suitable lodging. My mother and I have nothing to offer but a partially furnished attic, but it has a window and the chimney runs through the middle of it and keeps it warm. It is yours, if you would have it. We ask that you not speak of the arrangement to anyone, including your present landlord Catherine Morris. We await you at 5 Lancaster Row.

Yours in Fellows.h.i.+p, Sarah Mapps Dougla.s.s We departed our old life the next day, leaving no forwarding address and no goodbye, arriving by coach at a tiny brick house in a poor, mostly white neighborhood. There was a crooked wooden fence around the front with a chain on the gate, which necessitated us dragging our trunks to the back door.

The attic was poorly lit and gauzy with cobwebs, and when a fire blazed below, the room filled with stultifying heat and smelled bitter with wood smoke, but we didn't complain. We had a roof. We had each other. We had friends in Sarah Mapps and Grace.

Sarah Mapps was well educated, perhaps more than I, having attended the best Quaker academy for free blacks in the city. She would tell me that even as a child she'd known her only mission in life was to found a school for black children. "Few understand that kind of emphatic knowing," she said. "Most people, including my mother, feel I've sacrificed too much by not marrying and having children, but the pupils, they are my children." I understood far better than she realized. Like me, she loved books, keeping her precious volumes inside a chest in their small front sitting room. Each evening she read to her mother in her lovely singsong voice-Milton, Byron, Austen-continuing long after Grace had fallen asleep in her chair.

There were hats everywhere in various stages of construction, hanging on tree racks throughout the house, and if not actual hats, then sketches of hats scattered on tables and wedged into the frame of the mirror by the door. Grace made big, wild-feathered creations which she sold to the shops, creations that, as a Quaker, she never could've worn herself. Nina said she was living vicariously, but I think she simply possessed the urgings of an artist.

Our first week in the attic, we cleaned. We swept out the dust and spiders and s.h.i.+ned the window gla.s.s. We polished the two narrow bed frames, the table and chair, and the creaky rocker. Sarah Mapps brought up a hand-braided rug, bright quilts, an extra table, a lantern, and a small bookshelf where we set our books and journals. We tucked evergreen boughs under the eaves to scent the air and hung our clothes on wall hooks. I placed my pewter inkstand on the extra table.

By the second week we were bored. Sarah Mapps had said we should be careful to conceal our comings and goings, that the neighbors would not tolerate racial mixing, but slipping out one day, we were spotted by a group of ruffian boys, who pelted us with pebbles and slurs. Amalgamators. Amalgamators. The next day the front of the house was egged.

The third week we became hermits.

When November arrived, I began to pace the oval rug as I reread books and old letters, holding them as I walked, trying not to disappear into the melancholic place I'd visited since childhood. I felt as if I was fighting to hold my ground, that if I stepped off the rug, I would fall into my old abyss.

Before we'd left Catherine's, a letter had arrived from Handful telling us of Charlotte's death. Every time I read it-so many times Nina had threatened to hide it from me-I thought of the promise I'd made to help Handful get free. It had plagued me my whole life, and now that Charlotte was gone, instead of releasing me, her death had somehow made the obligation more binding. I told myself I'd tried-I had tried. How many times had I written Mother begging to purchase Handful in order to free her? She'd not even acknowledged my requests.

Then one morning while my sister used the last of our paints to capture the bare willow outside the window and I walked my trenchant path on the rug, I suddenly stopped and gazed at the pewter inkstand. I stared at it for whole minutes. Everything was in shambles, and there was the inkstand.

". . . Nina! Do you remember how Mother would make us sit for hours and write apologies? Well, I'm going to write one . . . a true apology for the anti-slavery cause. You could write, too . . . We both could."

She stared at me, while everything I felt and knew offered itself up at once. ". . . It's the South that must be reached," I said. ". . . We're Southerners . . . we know the slaveholders, you and I . . . We can speak to them . . . not lecture them, but appeal to them."

Turning toward the window, she seemed to study the willow, and when she looked back, I saw the glint in her eyes. "We could write a pamphlet!"

She rose, stepping into the quadrangle of light that lay on the floor from the window. "Mr. Garrison printed my letter, perhaps he would print our pamphlet, too, and send it to all the cities in the South. But let's not address it to the slaveholders. They'll never listen to us."

". . . Who then?"

"We'll write to the Southern clergy and to the women. We'll set the preachers upon them, and their wives and mothers and daughters!"

I wrote in bed on my lap desk, wrapped in a woolen shawl, while Nina bent over the small table in her old, fur-lined bonnet. The entire attic ached with cold and the scratch-scratch of our pens and the whippoorwills already calling to each other in the gathering dark.

All winter the chimney had steeped the attic with heat and Nina would throw open the window to let in the icy air. We wrote sweltering or we wrote s.h.i.+vering, but rarely in between. Our pamphlets were nearly finished-mine, An Epistle to the Clergy of the Southern States, and Nina's, An Appeal to the Christian Women of the South. She'd taken the women, and I the clergy, which I found ironic considering I'd done so poorly with men and she so well. She insisted it would've been more ironic the other way around-her writing about G.o.d when she'd done so poorly with him.

We'd set down every argument the South made for slavery and refuted them all. I didn't stutter on the page. It was an ecstasy to write without hesitation, to write everything hidden inside of me, to write with the sort of audacity I wouldn't have found in person. I sometimes thought of Father as I wrote and the brutal confession he'd made at the end. Do you think I don't abhor slavery? Do you think I don't know it was greed that kept me from following my conscience? But it was mostly Charlotte who haunted my pages.

Below us in the kitchen, I heard Sarah Mapps and Grace feeding wood into the stove, an ornery old Rumford that coughed up clouds of s.m.u.t. Soon we smelled vegetables boiling-onions, parsnips, beet tops-and we gathered our day's work and descended the ladder.

Sarah Mapps turned from the stove as we entered, sheaves of smoke floating about her head. "Do you have new pages for us?" she asked, and her mother, who was pounding dough, stopped to hear our answer.

"Sarah has brought down the last of hers," Nina said. "She wrote the final sentence today, and I expect to complete mine tomorrow!"

Sarah Mapps clapped her hands the way she might've done for the children in her cla.s.s. Our habit was to gather in the sitting room after the meal, where Nina and I read our latest pa.s.sages aloud to them. Grace sometimes grew so distressed at our eyewitness accounts of slavery she would interrupt us with all sorts of outbursts-Such an abomination! Can't they see we are persons? There but for the grace of G.o.d. Finally, Sarah Mapps would fetch the millinery basket so her mother could distract herself by jabbing a needle into one of the hats she was making.

"A letter came for you today, Nina," Grace said, wiping dough from her hands and digging it from her ap.r.o.n.

Few people knew of our whereabouts: Mother and Thomas in Charleston, and I'd sent the address to Handful as well, though I'd not heard back from her. Among the Quakers, we'd informed no one but Lucretia, afraid that Sarah Mapps and Grace would suffer for consorting with us. The handwriting on the letter, however, belonged to none of them.

I gazed over Nina's shoulder as she tore open the paper.

"It's from Mr. Garrison!" Nina cried. I'd forgotten-Nina had written him some weeks ago, describing our literary undertaking, and he'd responded with enthusiasm, asking us to submit our work when it was finished. I couldn't imagine what he might want.