The Invention of Wings: A Novel (15 page)

The other thing was Little Nina. She was Miss Sarah’s own sister, more like a daughter to her. I loved Nina, too, you couldn’t help it, but she took over Miss Sarah’s heart. That was how it should be, but it left a hole in mine.

That day by the tree, me and mauma had the whole kit and comboodle of our sewing stuff lined up on the tree roots—threads, needle bags, pin cushions, shears, and a small tin of beeswax we used to grease our needles. A waxed needle would almost glide through the cloth by itself, and I got where I hated to sew without the smell of it. I had the brass thimble on my finger, finishing up a dressing table cover for missus’ bedchamber, embroidering it with some scuppernong vines going round the edges. Mauma said I’d outshined her with my sewing—I didn’t use a tracing wheel like her, and my darts lay perfect every time.

Back two years, when I’d turned fifteen, missus said, “I’m making you our apprentice seamstress, Hetty. You are to learn all you can and share in the work.” I’d been learning from mauma since I could hold a needle, but I guess this made me official, and it spread some of the burden off mauma over to me.

Mauma had her wooden patch box beside her, plus a stack of red and brown quilt squares, fresh-cut. She rooted through the box and came up with a scrap of black cloth. I watched her cut three figures purely by eye. No hesitation, that’s the trick. She pinned the shapes on a red square, and started appliquéing. She sat with her back rounded, her legs straight out, her hands moving like music against her chest.

When we’d made our spirit tree, I’d sewed a pouch for each of us out of old bed ticking. I could see hers peeking out from her dress collar, plumped with little pieces of the tree. I reached up and gave mine a pat. Beside the tree charms, mine had Miss Sarah’s button inside it.

I said, “So what kind of quilt you making?”

“This a story quilt,” she said, and that was the first time I heard of one. She said her mauma made one, and her mauma before her. All her kin in Africa, the Fon people, kept their history on a quilt.

I left off my embroidery and studied the figures she was sewing—a man, a woman, and a little girl between them. They were joined at the hands. “Who’re they supposed to be?”

“When I get it all done, I tell you the story square by square.” She grinned, showing the big space between her teeth.

After she stitched on the three people, she free-cut a tiny quilt top with black triangles and sewed it at the girl’s feet. She cut out little shackles and chains for their legs, then, a host of stars that she sewed all round them. Some stars had tails of light, some lay on the ground. It was the story of the night her mauma—my granny-mauma—got sold and the stars fell.

Mauma worked in a rush, needing to get the story told, but the more she cut and stitched, the sadder her face turned. After a while her fingers slowed down and she put the quilt square away. She said, “This gon take a while, I guess.” Then she picked up a half-done quilt with a flower appliqué. It was milk-white and rose-pink, something sure to sell. She worked on it lackluster. The sun guttered in the leaves over our heads, and I watched the shadows pass over her.

For the sake of some gossip, I told her, “Miss Sarah met a boy at one of her parties, and he’s all she wants to talk about.”

“I got somebody like that,” she said.

I looked at her like her head had fallen off. I set down the embroidery hoop, and the white dresser cover flopped in the dirt. “Well, who is he, where’d you get him?”

“Next trip to the market, I take you to see him. All I gon say is: he a free black, and he one of a kind.”

I didn’t like she’d been keeping things from me. I snapped at her. “And you gonna marry Mr. One of a Kind Free Black?”

“No, I ain’t. He already married.”

Course he was.

Mauma waited through my pique, then said, “He come into some money and bought his own freedom. He cost a fortune, but his massa have a gamble debt, so he only pay five hundred dollars for hisself. And he still have money after that to buy a house at 20 Bull Street. It sit three blocks from where the governor live.”

“How’d he get all this money?”

“Won it in the East Bay Street lottery.”

I laughed out loud. “
That’s
what he told you? Well, I reckon this is the luckiest slave that ever lived.”

“It happen ten years ago, everybody know ’bout it. He buy a ticket, and his number come up. It happen.”

The lottery office was down the street from the market, near the docks. I’d passed it myself when mauma took me out to learn the shopping. There was always a mish-mash of people getting tickets: ship captains, City Guard, white laborers, free blacks, slaves, mulattoes, and creoles. There’d be two, three men in silk cravats with their carriages waiting.

I said, “How come
you
don’t buy a ticket?”

“And waste a coin on some fancy chance?”

For the last five years, every lick of strength mauma had left from sewing for missus had gone toward her dollar bill collection. She’d been hired out steady since I was eleven, but it wasn’t on the sly anymore, and thank you kind Jesus for that. Her counterfeit badge and all that sneaking out she’d done for the better part of a year had put white hair on my head. I used to pull it out and show it to her. I’d say, “Look what you’re doing to me.” She’d say, “Here I is, saving up to buy us freedom and you worrying ’bout hair.”

When I was thirteen, missus had finally given in and let mauma hire out. I don’t know why. Maybe she got tired of saying the word
no
. Maybe it was the money she wanted—mauma could put a hundred dollars a year in missus’ pocket—but I know this much, it didn’t hurt when mauma made missus a patchwork quilt for Christmas that year. It had a square for each of her children made from some remnant of theirs. Mauma told her, “I know this ain’t nothing much, but I sewed you a memory quilt of your family so you can wrap up in it after they gone.” Missus touched each square: “Why, this is from the dress Mary wore to her coming out … This is Charles’ baptism blanket … My goodness, this is Thomas’ first riding shirt.”

Mauma didn’t waste a breath. She asked missus right then to hire her out. A month later she was hired legal to sew for a woman on Tradd Street. Mauma kept twenty cents on the dollar. The rest went to missus, but I knew mauma was selling underhand on the side—frilled bonnets, quilt tops, candlewick bedcovers, all sorts of wears that didn’t call for a fitting.

She had me count the money regular. It came to a hundred ninety dollars. I hated to tell her her money-pile could hit the roof, but that didn’t mean missus would sell us, specially to ourselves.

Thinking about all this, I said, “We sew too good for missus to let us go.”

“Well if she refuse us, then our sewing gon get real bad, real fast.”

“What makes you think she wouldn’t sell us to somebody else for spite?”

Mauma stopped working and the fight seemed to almost leave her. She looked tired. “It’s a chance we has to take, or else we gon end up like Snow.”

Poor Snow, he’d died one night last summer. Fell over in the privy. Aunt-Sister tied his jaw to keep his spirit from leaving, and he was laid out on a cooling board in the kitchen house for two days before they put him in a burial box. The man had spent his whole life carrying the Grimkés round town. Sabe took his place as the coachman and they brought some new boy from their plantation to be the footman. His name was Goodis, and he had one lazy eye that looked sideways. He watched me so much with that eye mauma’d said, “That boy got his heart fix on you.”

“I don’t want him fixing his heart on me.”

“That’s good,” she’d said. “I can’t buy nobody’s freedom but mine and yours. You get a husband, and he on his own.”

I tied off a knot and moved the embroider hoop over, saying to myself,
I don’t want a husband and don’t plan on ending up like Snow on a cooling board in the kitchen house either.

“How much will it take to buy the both of us?” I asked.

Mauma rammed the needle in the cloth. She said, “That’s what you gon find out.”

I’
d never been inclined to keep a diary until I met Burke Williams. I thought by writing down my feelings, I would seize control over them, perhaps even curb what Reverend Hall called “the paroxysms of carnality.”

For what it’s worth, charting one’s passion in a small daybook kept hidden in a hatbox inside a wardrobe does not subdue passion in the least.

20 February 1811

I had imagined romantic love to be a condition of sweet utopia, not an affliction! To think, a few weeks ago, I thought my starved mind would be my worst hardship. Now my heart has its own ordeal. Mr. Williams, you torment me. It’s as if I’ve contracted a tropical fever. I cannot say whether I wish to be cured.

My diary overflowed with this sort of purple outburst.

3 March

Mr. Williams, why do you not call? It’s unfair that I must wait for you to act. Why must I, as a female, be at your disposal? Why can’t I send a calling note to you? Who made up these unjust rules? Men, that’s who. God devised women to be the minions. Well, I quite resent it!

9 March

A month has passed, and I see now what transpired between Mr. Williams and my naïve self on the balcony was a farce. He has toyed with me shamelessly. I knew it even then! He is a fickle-hearted cad, and I would no sooner speak to him now than I would speak to the devil.

When I was not engaged in aerating my feelings, or caring for little Nina, or fending off Mother’s attempts to draw me into my dutiful female tasks, I was foraging among the invitations and calling cards left on the desk by the front door. When Nina napped in the afternoon, I had Handful wheel the copper bathtub into my room and fill it with buckets of blistering water from the laundry.

This copper tub was a modern wonder imported from France by way of Virginia, and it was the talk of Charleston. It sat on noisy little wheels and traveled room to room like a portable dipping cart. You
sat
in it. You did not stand over a basin and pat water on yourself—no, you were quite immersed! To top it off, one side of the tub possessed a vent that could be opened to release the used water. Mother instructed the slaves to trundle the tub onto the piazza near the rail and discharge the bathwater over the side. The waterfalls splattering into the garden alerted neighbors the hygienic Grimkés had been bathing again.

When a note with scratchy penmanship arrived at the house shortly before noon on the ides of March, I swooped upon it before Mother.

15 March

Burke Williams compliments Sarah Grimké, requesting the pleasure of her company tomorrow night. If he can serve her in any way in the meantime, he would be honored.

P.S. Please excuse the borrowed paper.

I stood still for several moments, then placed the note back on the pile, thinking,
Why should anyone care if the paper is borrowed,
and then the stupefaction wore off. Caught in a sudden swell of elation, I ascended the stairs to my room, where I danced about like some tipsy bird. I’d forgotten Handful and Nina were there. They’d spread the doll tea set on the floor beneath the window, and when I turned, I saw them staring at me, holding tiny cups of pretend-tea in the air.

“You must’ve heard from that boy,” Handful said. She was the only one who knew of his existence.

“What boy?” Nina asked, and I was forced to tell her about Mr. Williams, too. At this moment Mother would be dispatching an acceptance while singing Glory be to God in the Highest. She would be so jubilant with allelujahs, it would not occur to her to wonder at his credentials.

“Will you get married like Thomas?” Nina asked. His wedding was two and a half months away and a reference point for everything.

“I do believe I will,” I told her, and the idea seemed altogether plausible. I would not be a pressed flower in a book after all.

We’d expected Mr. Williams at 8:00 p.m., but at ten past, he was still absent. Mother’s neck was splotched red with patches of insult, and Father, who’d joined Mother and me in the drawing room, held his watch in his hand. The three of us sat as if waiting for a funeral procession to pass. I feared he wouldn’t appear at all, and if he did, that our visit would be cut short. By custom, the slave’s curfew—9:00 in the winter, 10:00 in the summer—cleared gentlemen callers from the drawing rooms. When the City Guard beat drums to summon the slaves off the streets, the suitors would rise on cue.

He rapped on the front door at a quarter past the appointed hour. When Tomfry ushered him into the room, I lifted my fan—an extravagant nosegay of hen feathers—and my parents rose with cool civility and offered him the Duncan Phyfe chair that flanked the right side of the fireplace. I’d been relegated to the chair on the left, which meant we were separated by the fire screen and forced to crane our necks for a glimpse of one another. A pity—he looked more handsome than I remembered. His face had bronzed with sun and his hair was longer, curling behind his ears. Detecting the scent of lime-soap drifting from his direction, my insides convulsed involuntarily—a full-blown paroxysm of carnality.