The Invention of Wings

Sarah

I arrived in Charleston wearing my best Quaker frock, a plain gray dress with a flat white collar and matching bonnet, the picture of humility. Before leaving Philadelphia, I’d been officially accepted into the Quaker fold. My probation had ended. I was one of them.

Upon seeing me for the first time in over a year, Mother received my kiss on her cheek and said, “I see you’ve returned as a Quaker. Really, Sarah, how can you show your face in Charleston dressed like that?”

I didn’t like the garb either, but it was at least made from wool, free of slave labor. We Quakers boycotted Southern cotton. We Quakers—how strange that sounded to me.
I tried to smile and make light of Mother’s comment, not yet grasping the full reason for it. “. . . Is that my welcome home, then? Surely you’ve missed me.”

She was sitting in the same spot where I’d last seen her, in the fading gold brocade wingchair by the window, and wearing the same black dress, holding her infernal gold-tip cane across her lap. It was as if she’d been sitting there since I left. Everything about her seemed unchanged, except she appeared more dilapidated around the edges. The skin of her neck folded turtle-like onto her collar and the hair at her forehead was fraying like an edge of cloth.

“I’ve missed you, dear, of course. The entire household suffered because of your desertion, but you can’t go about dressed like that—you would be taken at once for a Quaker, and their anti-slavery views are well known here.”

I hadn’t thought of this. I ran my palms down the sides of my skirt, feeling suddenly fond of my drab outfit.

A voice came from the doorway. “If that’s what this hideous dress of yours means, I’ll have to get one myself.”

Nina. She looked like a whole new creature. She was taller, standing inches above me with her sable hair swept back, her cheeks higher, her brows thick and her eyes black. My sister had become a darkly beautiful woman.

She threw her arms around me. “You are never to leave again.”

As we clung to each other, Mother muttered, as if to herself, “For once, the child and I agree on something.”

Nina and I laughed, and then astonishingly, Mother laughed, and the sound the three of us made together in the room created a silly joy inside of me.

“. . . Look at you,” I said, cupping Nina’s face in my hands.

Mother’s eyes flitted from my collar to my hem and back. “I’m quite serious about the dress, Sarah. One of the Quaker families here had their home pelted with eggs. It was reported yesterday in the Mercury. Tell her, Nina. Explain to your sister that Charlestonians are in no mood to see her parading around like this.”

Nina sighed. “There are rumors in the city of a slave revolt.” “. . . A revolt?”

“It’s nothing but twaddle,” Mother said, “but people are overwrought about it.” “If you believe the stories,” Nina said, “the slaves are going to converge on the streets, kill the
entire white population, and burn the city.”

The skin on my arms prickled.

“After the killing and burning, supposedly they will plunder the state bank and then raid the horses in the city stable or else board ships in the harbor and sail off to Haiti.”


A small scoff escaped Mother’s throat. “Can you imagine them devising such an elaborate plan?” I felt a sort of plummeting in my chest. I could, in fact, imagine it. Not the part about the slaughter—that, my mind couldn’t fathom. But there were more slaves living in Charleston than whites, why shouldn’t they conceive a plot to free themselves? It would have to be elaborate and bold in order to succeed. And it couldn’t help but be violent.

Reflexively, I pressed my palms together beneath my chin, as if praying. “. . . Dear God.” “But  you  can’t  take  it  seriously,”  Nina  said. “There  was  a  similar  situation  in  Edgefield, remember? The white families were certain they would be murdered in their beds. It was simple hysteria.”

“. . . What’s behind it? How did the rumor start?”

“It started with Colonel John Prioleau’s house slave. Apparently, he heard news of a revolt at the wharves and reported it to the colonel, who went to the authorities. The Guard tracked down the source —a slave named William Paul, who’s well known, apparently, for being a braggart. The poor man was arrested and is being held at the Work House.” Nina paused, shuddering. “I can’t bear to think what they’ve done to him.”

Mother rapped the floor with her cane. “The mayor-intendent has dismissed the matter. Governor Bennett has dismissed the matter. I want no further talk of it. Just take heed, Sarah, the climate is a tinderbox.”

I longed to dismiss the possibility of a revolt, too, but I felt it inside of me now like a tidal pull.

Seeking out Handful the next morning, I found her sitting on the kitchen house steps beside Goodis with a needle in her hand and a brass thimble on her pushing finger, hemming what looked like an apron. The two of them were snickering as I approached, giving each other affectionate little jabs. Seeing me, they ceased.

Goodis leapt to his feet and the top of his coveralls flopped down on one side. Seized by a sudden ripple of nerves over how Handful would respond to me, I pointed to where his button was missing. “. . . You’ll have to get Handful to repair that for you,” I said, and regretted it instantly. It sounded bossy and condescending. It was not how I’d wanted to reunite with her.

“Yessum,” he said, and with a glance at Handful, left us.

I bent over and embraced her, looping my arms about her shoulders. After a moment, she raised her arms and patted me on the sides of my ribs.

“Nina said you were coming back. You staying put now?” “. . . I might.” I took a seat beside her. “. . . We’ll see.” “Well, if I was you, I’d get back on the boat.”

I smiled at her. A strip of dark blue shade draped over us from the eave, darkening as we fell silent. I found myself staring at the distorted way her foot hooked inward, at the soughing rhythm of her hands, at her back curved over her work, and I felt the old guilt.

I plied her with questions: how she’d fared since I left, how Mother had treated her, how the other slaves had held up. I asked if perhaps she had a special friendship with Goodis. She showed me the scar on her forehead, calling it Mother’s handiwork. She said Aunt-Sister’s eyesight was failing and Phoebe did most of the cooking, that Sabe couldn’t hold a candle to Tomfry, and Minta was a good soul who took the brunt of “missus’ nastiness.” At the subject of Goodis, she merely grinned, which


gave her away.

“. . . What do you know about rumors of a slave revolt?” I finally asked. Her hand grew still for a moment. “Why don’t you tell me what you know about it?” I repeated what Nina had said about the slave, William Paul, and his claims of an uprising. “. . .
The officials are telling the public they’re untrue,” I added.

She laid the apron down. “They are? They don’t believe it’s true?” Her face was flooded with such relief I got the feeling the revolt was not only real, but that she knew a great deal about it.
“. . . Even if they believe such a plan exists, they would deny it,” I told her, wanting her to understand the danger. “I doubt they’d acknowledge it publicly. They wouldn’t want to cause a panic. Or tip their hand. If they’ve found the slightest evidence of a plot, believe me, they’ll respond.”
She picked up the needle and thread and the hush fell again, heavier this time. I watched her hand move up and down, making peaks and valleys, then the flash of her thimble, and I remembered us— little girls on the roof, her telling me about the true brass thimble. This same one, I imagined. I could see her lying against the roof tiles, squinting at the blur of sky and clouds, the teacup balanced on her tummy, her dress pocket stuffed with feathers, their ruffled ends poking out. We’d spilled all of our secrets to one another there. It was the closest thing to parity the two of us had ever found. I tried to hold the picture in my mind, to breathe it back to life, but it dissolved.

I didn’t expect her to confide in me anymore. She would keep her secrets now.

Nina and I set out by foot for the tiny Quaker meetinghouse on Sunday, an exceptionally long walk that took us to the other side of the city. We strolled arm in arm as she told me about the letters that had arrived at the house for weeks after my departure, inquiring about my health. I’d forgotten about the consumption story Mother had concocted to explain my absence, and Nina and I laughed about it all the way down Society Street.

A fierce summer rain had swept through overnight and the air was cool and fresh, flooded with the scent of tea olive. Pink bougainvillea petals floated on the rain puddles, and seeing them, having Nina beside me like this on such a glorious day, I felt I might re-find my sense of belonging.
The past ten days had passed in relative quiet. I’d spent the time trying to put the household back in order and having long talks with Nina, who asked endless questions about the North, about the Quakers, about Israel. I’d hoped to avoid all mention of him, but he slipped through the tiny fractures anyway. Handful had avoided me. Gratefully, nothing out of the ordinary had transpired in the city and reports of the slave insurrection had dwindled as folks returned to the business at hand. I’d begun to think I’d overreacted about it.

On this morning I was wearing my “abolition clothes,” as Mother insisted on calling them. As a Quaker, that was all I was permitted to wear, and heaven knows, I was nothing if not earnest. Earlier at breakfast, upon learning of my intention to attend the Quaker Meeting and take Nina with me, Mother had displayed a fit of temper so predictable we’d practically yawned through it. It was just as well she didn’t know we’d decided to walk.

Nearing the market, we began to hear the steady clomp of thunder in the distance, then shouting. As we turned the corner, two slave women broke past us, holding up their skirts and sprinting. Marching toward us were at least a hundred South Carolina militia with their sabers and pistols drawn. They were flanked by the City Guard, who carried muskets instead of their typical truncheons.

It was Market Sunday, a day when the slaves were heavily congregated on the streets. Standing frozen, Nina and I watched them flee in panic as hussars on horseback rushed at them, shouting at them to disperse.

“What’s happening?” Nina said.

I gazed at the pandemonium, oddly stunned. We’d come to a standstill before the Carolina Coffee House, and I thought at first we would duck inside, but it was locked. “We should go back,” I told her.
As we turned to leave, however, a street vendor, a slave girl no more than twelve, bolted toward us, and in her fright and panic, she stumbled, spilling her basket of vegetables across our path. Instinctively, Nina and I bent to help her retrieve the radishes and cabbages and rolling potatoes.
“Step away!” a man yelled. “You!”

Lifting my forehead, I glimpsed an officer trotting toward us on his horse. He was speaking to me and Nina. We straightened, while the girl went on crawling about in the dirt after her bruised wares.
“. . . We’re doing no harm by assisting her,” I said as he reined to a stop. His attention, though, was not on the turnip in my hand, but on my dress.

“Are you Quaker?”

He had a large, bony face with slightly bulging eyes that made him look more terrorizing perhaps than he truly was, but such logic was lost to me then. Fear and dread rushed up from my throat, and my tongue, feeble creature, lay in my mouth like a slug in its cleft.

“Did you hear me?” he said calmly. “I asked if you’re one of those religious pariahs who agitate against slavery.”

I moved my lips, yet nothing came, only this terrible, silent mouthing. Nina stepped close and interlocked her fingers in mine. I knew she wanted to speak for me, but she refrained, waiting. Closing my eyes, I heard the gulls from the harbor calling to each other. I pictured them gliding on currents of air and resting on swells of water.

“I am a Quaker,” I said, the words arriving without the jerk of hesitation that preceded most of my sentences. I heard Nina release her breath.

Sensing an altercation, two white men stopped to stare. Behind them, I saw the slave girl dashing away with her basket.

“What’s your name?” the officer asked. “I’m Sarah Grimké. Who, sir, are you?”

He didn’t bother to answer. “You aren’t Judge Grimké’s daughter—surely.” “He was my father, yes. He has been dead almost three years.” “Well, it’s a good thing he didn’t live to see you like this.”

“. . . I beg your pardon? I don’t see that my beliefs are any of your concern.” I had the feeling of floating free from my moorings. What came to me was the memory of being adrift in the sea that day at Long Branch while Father lay ill. Floating far from the rope.

The columns of militia had finally reached us and were passing behind the officer in a wave of noise and swagger. His horse began to bob its head nervously as he raised his voice over the din. “Out of respect for the judge, I won’t detain you.”

Nina broke in. “What right do you have—”

I interrupted, wanting to keep her from wading into waters that were becoming increasingly treacherous. Strangely, I felt no such compunction for myself. “. . . Detain me?” I said. “On what grounds?”

By now, a horde of people had joined the two leering men. A man wearing a Sunday morning coat spit in my direction. Nina’s hand tightened on mine.

“Your beliefs, even your appearance, undermine the order I’m trying to keep here,” the officer said. “They disturb the peace of good citizens and give unwanted notions to the slaves. You’re feeding


the very kind of insurgency that’s going on right now in our city.”
“. . . What insurgency?”

“Are you going to pretend you haven’t heard the rumors? There was a plot among the slaves to massacre their owners and escape. That would, I believe, include you and your sister here. It was to take place this night, but I assure you it has been thoroughly outwitted.”

Lifting the reins from the horn of his saddle, he glanced at the passing militia, then turned back to me. “Go home, Miss Grimké. Your presence on the street is unwanted and inflammatory.”
“Go home!” someone in the crowd shouted, and then they all took it up.

I drew myself up, glaring at their angry faces. “. . . What would you have the slaves do?” I cried. “. . . If we don’t free them, they will free themselves by whatever means.”
“Sarah!” Nina cried in surprise.

As the crowd began to hurl vicious epithets at me, I took her by the arm and we hurried back the way we’d come, walking quickly. “Don’t look back,” I told her.

“Sarah,”  she  said,  breathless,  her  voice  overflowing  with  awe. “You’ve  become  a  public
mutineer.”


The slave revolt didn’t come that night, or any night. The city fathers had indeed ferreted out the plot through the cruel persuasions of the Work House. During the days that followed, news of the intended revolt ravaged Charleston like an epidemic, leaving it dazed and petrified. Arrests were made, and it was said there would be a great many more. I knew it was the beginning of what would become a monstrous backlash. Residents were already fortifying their fence tops with broken bottles until permanent iron spikes could be installed. The chevaux-de-frise would soon encircle the most elegant homes like ornamental armor.

In the months ahead, a harsh new order would be established. Ordinances would be enacted to control and restrict slaves further, and severer punishments would ensue. A Citadel would be built to protect the white populace. But that first week, we were all still gripped with shock.
My defiance on the street became common knowledge. Mother could barely look at me without blanching, and even Thomas showed up to warn me that the patronage of his firm would be harmed if I persisted in that kind of folly. Only Nina stood by me.

And Handful.

She was cleaning the mahogany staircase late one afternoon in the aftermath of the event when a rock flew through the front window of the drawing room, shattering the pane. Hearing the explosion of glass all the way on the second floor, I hurried down to find Handful with her back pressed against the wall beside the broken window, trying to peer out without being seen. She waved me back. “Watch out, they could toss another one.”

A stone the size of a hen’s egg lay on the rug in a nest of shards. Shouts drifted from the street. Slave lover. Nigger lover. Abolitionist. Northern whore.

We stared at each other as the sounds melted away. The room turned quiet, serene. Light was pouring in, hitting the scattered glass, turning it into pieces of fire on the crimson rug. The sight bereaved me. Not because I was despised, but because of how powerless I felt, because it seemed I could do nothing. I was soon to be thirty, and I’d done nothing.

They say in extreme moments time will slow, returning to its unmoving core, and standing there,

it seemed as if everything stopped. Within the stillness, I felt the old, irrepressible ache to know what my point in the world might be. I felt the longing more solemnly than anything I’d ever felt, even more than my old innate loneliness. What came to me was the fleur de lis button in the box and the lost girl who’d put it there, how I’d twice carried it from Charleston to Philadelphia and back, carried it like a sad, decaying hope.

Across the room, Handful strode into the glowing debris on the rug, bent and picked up the stone. I watched as she turned it over in her hands, knowing I would leave this place yet again. I would return north to make what life I could.

Handful

The day of retribution passed without a musket ball getting fired, without a fuse being lit, without any of us getting free, but not one white person would look at us ever again and think we were harmless.
I didn’t know who was arrested and who wasn’t. I didn’t know if Denmark was safe or sorry, or both. Sarah said it was best to stay off the streets, but by Wednesday, I couldn’t wait anymore. I found Nina and told her I needed a pass to get some molasses. She wrote it out and said, “Be careful.”
Denmark was in the bedroom of his house, stuffing clothes and money in a knapsack. Susan led me back there, her eyes bloodshot with crying. I stood in the doorway and breathed the heavy air, and thought, It all came to nothing, but he’s still here.

There was an iron bed against the wall covered with the quilt I’d made to hide the list of names. The black triangles were laid out perfect on the red squares, but they looked sad to me now. Like a bird funeral.

I said to him, “So, where’re you going?”

Susan started to cry, and he  said, “Woman, if  you’re  going to make  all  that  noise, do it
somewhere else.”


She pushed past me through the door, sniffling, saying, “Go on to your other wife then.” I said, “You leaving for another wife?”

The curtain had been yanked closed on the window, leaving a crack on the side where a piece of brightness came in. It pointed at him like a sundial. “It’s a matter of time before they come looking for me here,” he said. “Yesterday they picked up Ned, Rolla, and Peter. The three of them are in the Work House, and I don’t doubt their fortitude, but they’ll be tortured till they name names. If our plans live to see another day, I have to go.”

Dread slid down my back. I said, “What about my name? Will they say my name for stealing the bullet mold?”

He sat down on the bed, on top of the dead blackbird wings, with his arms dangling by his knees. When the recruits used to come to the house, he’d shout, The Lord has spoken to me, and he’d look stern and mighty as the Lord himself, but now he just looked cast down. “Don’t worry,” he said, “they’re after the leader—that’s me. Nobody will say your name.”

I hated to ask him the question, but I needed to know. “What happened to the plans?” He shook his head. “The thing I worried about was the house slaves who can’t tell where they end
and their owners begin. We got betrayed, that’s what happened. One of them betrayed us, and the Guard put spies out there.”

His jaw tightened, and he pushed off the bed. “The day we were set to strike, the troops were built up so heavy our couriers couldn’t get out of the city to spread the call. We couldn’t light the fuses or retrieve the weapons.” He picked up a tin plate with a candle stuck to it and hurled it at the wall. “Goddamn them. Goddamn them to hell. God—” His face twisted.

I didn’t move till his shoulders dropped and I felt the torment leave him. I said, “You did what you could. Nobody will forget that.”

“Yeah, they will. They’ll forget.” He peeled the quilt off the bed and draped it in my arms. “Here, you take this with you and burn the list. Burn it straightaway. I don’t have time.”
“Where will you be?”

“I’m a free black man. I’ll be where I’ll be,” he said, being careful in case Rolla and them said my name after all, and the white men came to torture me.

He picked up the knapsack and headed for the door. It wasn’t the last time I’d see him. But those


words, I’ll be where I’ll be, were the last words he ever spoke to me.

burned the list of names in the stove fire in the kitchen house. Then I waited for what would be.
Denmark was caught four days later in the house of a free mulatto woman. He had a trial with seven judges, and before it was over and done, every person in the city, white and black, knew his name. The hearsay from the trial flooded the streets and alleys and filled up the drawing rooms and the work yards. The slaves said Denmark Vesey was the black Jesus and even if they killed him, he would rise on the third day. The white folks said he was the Frozen Serpent that struck the bosom that sheltered him. They said he was a general who misled his own army, that he never had as many weapons as the slaves thought he did. The Guard found a few pikes and pistols and two bullet molds, but that was all. Maybe Gullah Jack, who managed to stay free till August, made the rest of the arms disappear, but I wondered if Denmark had pulled the truth like taffy the way they said. When I opened the quilt so I could burn the list, I counted two hundred eighty-three names on it, not six thousand like he’d said. Nowadays, I believe he just wanted to strike a flame, thinking if he did that, every ablebody would join the fight.

On the day the verdict came, Sabe had me on my hands and knees rolling up carpets and scrubbing floors in the main passageway. The heat was so bad I could’ve washed the soap off the floor with the sweat pouring down my face. I told Sabe floor-scrubbing was winter work and he said, well good, you can do it next winter, too. I swear, I didn’t know what Minta saw in him.
I’d just slipped out to the piazza to catch a breeze when Sarah stepped out there and said, “. . . I thought you would want to know, Denmark Vesey’s trial is over.”

Course, there wasn’t a way in the world the man was getting free, but still, I reached back for the bannister, weak with hope. She came close to me and laid her hand on my soaked-through dress. “. . . They found him guilty.”

“What happens to him now?” “. . . He’ll be put to death. I’m sorry.”

I didn’t let on anything inside me, the way sorrow was already singing again in the hollow of my bones.

It didn’t cross my mind yet to wonder why Sarah sought me out with the news. She and Nina both knew I left the premises sometimes for reasons of my own, but they didn’t know I went to his house. They didn’t know he called me daughter. They didn’t know he was anything special to me.
“. . . When they gave the verdict, they also issued an edict,” she said. “. . . A kind of order from the judges.”

I studied her face, her red freckles burning bright in the sun and worry gathered tight in her eyes, and I knew why she was out here on the piazza with me—it was about this edict.
“. . . Any black person, man or woman, who mourns Denmark Vesey in public will be arrested and whipped.”

I looked away from her into the ornament garden where Goodis had left the rake and hoe and the watering pot. Every green thing was bowed down thirsty. Everything withering.
“. . . Handful, please, listen to me now, according to the order, you cannot wear black on the streets, or cry, or say his name, or do anything to mark him. Do you understand?”
“No, I don’t understand. I won’t never understand,” I said, and went on back inside to the scrub


brush.

On July 2 before the sun rose, I wriggled through the window in my room, braced my back against the house and my good leg against the wall, and shimmied up and over the fence the way I used to do. To hell with begging for a pass. White people signing their names so I could walk down the street. Hell with it.

I hurried through the city while I still had the darkness for cover. When I got to Magazine Street, the light broke wide open. Spying the Work House, I stopped dead in my tracks, and for a minute my body felt like it was back inside there. I could hear the treadmill groaning, could smell the fear. In my head, I saw the cowhide slap the baby on its mauma’s back, and I felt myself falling. The only way I kept from turning back was thinking about Denmark, how any minute they’d bring him and his lieutenants out through the Work House gate.

The judges had picked July 2 for the execution day, a secret everybody in the world knew. They said Denmark and five others would be put to death early in the morning at Blake’s Lands, a marshy place with a stand of oaks where they hung pirates and criminals. Every slave who could figure a way to get there would show up, and white people, too, I reckoned, but something told me to come to the Work House first and follow Denmark to Blake’s Lands. Maybe he’d catch sight of me and know he didn’t travel the last mile of his life alone.

I crouched by the animal sheds near the gate, and soon enough four horse-drawn wagons came rolling out with the doomed men shackled in back, sitting on top of their own burial boxes. They were a swollen, beat-up lot—Rolla and Ned in the first wagon, Peter in the second, and two men I never had seen in the third. The last one held Denmark. He sat tall with his face grim. He didn’t see me get to my feet and limp along behind them on the side of the road. The Guard was heavy in the wagons, so I had to stay well back.

The horses plodded along slow. I trailed them a good ways with my foot aching inside my shoe, working hard to keep up, wishing he’d look at me, and then a strange thing happened. The first three wagons turned down the road toward Blake’s Lands, but the fourth one with Denmark turned in the opposite direction. Denmark looked confused and tried to stand, but a guard pushed him down.
He watched his lieutenants rumble away. He yelled, “Die like men!” He kept on yelling it while the distance grew between them and the dust from the wheels churned, and Rolla and Peter shouted it back. Die like men. Die like men.

I didn’t know where Denmark’s wagon was headed, but I hurried behind it with their cries in the air. Then his eyes fell on me, and he turned quiet. The rest of the way, he watched me come along behind, lagging way back.

They hung him from an oak tree on an empty stretch along Ashley Road. Nobody was there but the four guards, the horse, and me. All I could do was squat far off in the palmetto scrub and watch. Denmark stepped quiet onto the high bench and didn’t move when they tugged the noose over his head. He went like he shouted to the others, like a man. Up till they kicked the bench out from under his legs, he stared at the palm leaves where I hid.

I looked away when he dropped. I kept my eyes on the ground, listening to the gasps that drifted from the tree. All round, the hermit crabs skittered, looking at me with their tiny stupid eyes, sliding in and out of holes in the black dirt.

When I looked again, Denmark was swaying on the limb with the hanging moss. They took him down, put him in the wood coffin, and nailed the lid. After the wagon disappeared
down the road, I eased out from my hiding place and walked to the tree. It was almost peaceful under there in the shade. Like nothing had happened. Just the scuff marks in the dust where the bench had fallen over.

There was a potter’s field nearby. I knew they’d bury him there and nobody would know where he was laid. The edict from the judges said we couldn’t cry, or say his name, or do anything to mark him, but I took a little piece of red thread from my neck pouch and tied it round one of the twigs on a low, dipping branch to mark the spot. Then I cried my tears and said his name.