The Invention of Wings: A Novel (23 page)

“I’m here today because your mother asked me to reason with you. You gave us all a shock yesterday. It’s a grave thing to reject the church and her sacraments and salvation …”

He went on with his jabber, while Nina’s hand sweated into mine.

She saw my private agonies, but I saw hers, too. There was a place inside of her where it had all broken. The screams she’d heard coming from the Work House still inhabited her, and she would wake some nights, shouting into the dark. She put up an invincible show, but underneath I knew her to be bruised and vulnerable. After Mother’s scathing reprimands, she would vanish into her room for hours, emerging with her eyes bloodshot from weeping.

The reverend’s kind but tedious speech had been floating in and out of my awareness. “I must point out,” I heard him say, “that you are placing your soul in jeopardy.”

Nina spoke for the first time. “Pardon me, Reverend Sir, but the threat of
hell
will not move me.”

Mother sank her eyes closed. “Oh, Angelina, for the love of God.”

Nina had used the word
hell
. Even I was a little shocked by it. The rector sat back with resignation. He was done.

Naturally, Mother was not. “Your father lies gravely ill. Surely you know it’s his wish that you be confirmed into the church. It could well be his last wish. Would you deny him that?”

Nina squeezed my hand, struggling to hold on to herself.

“… Should she deny her conscience or her father?” I said.

Mother drew back as if I’d slapped her. “Are you going to sit there and encourage your sister’s disobedience?”

“I’m encouraging her to be true to her own scruples.”

“
Her
scruples?” The skin at Mother’s neck splotched like beetroot. She turned to the reverend. “As you see, Angelina is completely under Sarah’s sway. What Sarah thinks, Angelina thinks. What Sarah scruples, she scruples. It’s my own fault—I chose Sarah to be her godmother, and to this day, she leads the child astray.”

“Mother!” Nina exclaimed. “I think for myself.”

Mother shifted her calm, pitiless gaze from the reverend to Nina and uttered the question that would always lie between us. “Just so I’m not confused, when you said ‘Mother’ just now, were you referring to me, or to Sarah?”

The rector squirmed on the settee and reached for his hat, but Mother continued. “As I was saying, Reverend, I’m at a loss of how to undo the damage. As long as the two of them are under the same roof, there’s small hope for Angelina.”

As she escorted the reverend to the door, rain broke loose outside. I felt Nina slump slightly against me, and I pulled her to her feet and we slipped behind them up the stairs.

In my room, I turned back the bed sheet and Nina lay down. Her face seemed stark and strange against the linen pillow. Rain was darkening the window, and she stared at it with her eyes gleaming, her back rising and falling beneath my hand.

“Do you think Mother will send me away?” she asked.

“I won’t allow it,” I told her, though I had no idea how to stop such a thing if Mother took it in her head to banish my sister. A rebellious girl could easily be sent off to a boarding school or deported to our uncle’s plantation in North Carolina.

D
idn’t my Lord deliver Daniel?” Denmark Vesey shouted.

The whole church answered, “Now he’s coming for me.”

Must’ve been two hundred of us packed in there. I was sitting in the back, in the usual spot. Folks had started leaving it free for me, saying, “That’s Handful’s place.” Four months I’d been sitting there and hadn’t learned a thing about mauma, but I knew more than missus about the people God had delivered.

Abraham, Moses, Samson, Peter, Paul—Mr. Vesey went down the list, chanting their names. Everybody was on their feet, clapping, and waving in the air, shouting, “Now he’s coming for me,” and I was smack-dab in the middle of them, doing the little hopping dance I used to do in the alcove when I was a girl singing to the water.

Our reverend was a free black man named Morris Brown, and he said when we got worked up like this, it was the Holy Ghost that had got into us. Mr. Vesey, who was one of his four main helpers, said it wasn’t the Holy Ghost, it was hope. Whatever it was, it could burn a hole in your chest.

The heat in the church was awful. While we shouted, sweat drenched our faces and clothes, and some of the men got up and opened all the windows. The fresh air flowed in and the shouting flowed out.

When Mr. Vesey ran out of people in the Bible for God to deliver, he went along the benches calling names.

Let my Lord deliver Rolla.

Let my Lord deliver Nancy.

Let my Lord deliver Ned.

If he called your name, you felt like it would fly straight to heaven and hit God between the eyes. Reverend Brown said, be careful, heaven would be whatever you picture it. His picture was Africa before the slaving—all the food and freedom you wanted and not a white person to blight it. If mauma was dead, she would have a big fine house somewhere and missus for her maid.

Mr. Vesey, though, he didn’t like any kind of talk about heaven. He said that was the coward’s way, pining for life in the hereafter, acting like this one didn’t mean a thing. I had to side with him on that.

Even when I was singing and hopping like this, part of me stayed small and quiet, noticing everything he said and did. I was the bird watching the cat circle the tree. Mr. Vesey had white wooly nubs in his hair now, but beside that, he looked like before. Wore the same scowl, had the same knife blades in his eyes. His arms were still thick and his chest big as a rain barrel.

I hadn’t mustered the nerve to talk to him. People feared Denmark Vesey. I’d started telling myself the joke was on me—maybe I’d come to the African church for the Lord, after all. What’d I think I could learn about mauma anyway?

Nobody heard the horses outside. Mr. Vesey had a new chant going—
Joshua fought the battle of Jericho, and the walls came tumbling down.
Gullah Jack, his right-hand man, was beating a drum, and we were stomping the floor.
Jericho. Jericho.

Then the doors busted open, and Gullah Jack’s hands stopped pounding, and the song died away. We looked round, confused, while the City Guard spread along the walls and in the aisle, one at every window, four barring the door.

The head guard marched down front with a paper in one hand and a musket gun in the other. Denmark Vesey said with his booming voice, “What’s the meaning of this? This is the house of the Lord, you have no business here.”

The guard looked like he couldn’t believe his luck. He took the butt of the gun and rammed it in Mr. Vesey’s face. A minute ago, he’d been shouting Jericho, and now he was on the floor with a shirt full of blood.

People started screaming. One of the guards fired into the rafters, sending wood crumbs and smoke swirling down. The inside of my ears pounded, and when the head man read the warrant, he sounded like he was at the bottom of a dry well. He said the neighbors round the church found us a nuisance. We were charged with disorderly conduct.

He stuffed the paper in his pocket. “You’ll be removed to the Guard House and sentenced in the morning with due and proper punishment.”

A sob drifted from a woman on the far side, and the place came alive with fear and murmuring. We knew about the Guard House—it was where they held the lawbreakers, black and white, till they figured out what to do with them. The whites ones stayed till their hearings, and the black ones till their owners paid the fine. You just prayed to God you didn’t have a stingy master, cause if he refused to pay, you went to the Work House to work off the debt.

Outside, the moon looked weak in the sky. They gathered us in four herds and marched us down the street. A slave sang,
Didn’t my Lord deliver Daniel?
and a guard told him to hush up. It was quiet from then on except for the clopping horses and a little baby tied on its mother’s back that whimpered like a kitten. I craned my neck for Mr. Vesey, but he wasn’t anywhere to see. Then I noticed the dark wet spatter-drops on the ground, and I knew he was on up ahead.

We spent the night on the floor in a room filled with jail cells, men and women crammed in together, all of us having to pee in the same bucket in the corner. One woman coughed half through the night and two men got in a shove-fight, but mostly we sat in the dark and stared with flat eyes and dozed in and out. One time, I came awake, hearing that same little baby mewing.

At first light, a guard with hair scruffing his shoulders brought a pail of water with a dipper and we took turns drinking while our stomachs rumbled for food. After that, we were left to wonder what was coming. One man in our cell had been picked up by the Guard six times and he told us the facts and figures. The fine was five dollars, and if your master didn’t pay, you got twelve lashes at the Work House, or worse, you got the treadmill. I didn’t know what the treadmill was and he didn’t say, just told us to beg for the whip. Then he lifted his shirt, and his back was grooved like the hide of an alligator. The sight brought bile to my throat. “My massa never pay,” he said.

The morning stretched out and we waited, and then waited some more. All I could think about was the man’s back, where they’d put Mr. Vesey, how his bashed face was holding up. Heat cooked the air and the smell turned sour and the baby started bawling again. Somebody said, “Why don’t you feed the child?”

“I can’t raise no milk,” its mauma said, and another woman with stains on her dress front said, “Here, give me the baby. Mine’s back home and all this milk with nobody to suck it.” She pulled out her brown bosom, clear milk leaking from the nipple, and the baby latched on.

When the long-hair guard came back, he said, “Listen for your name. If I call it out, you’re free to leave and go home to whatever awaits you.”

We all got to our feet. I said to myself,
Never has been a Grimké slave sent to the Work House. Never has.

“Seth Ball, Ben Pringle, Tinnie Alston, Jane Brewton, Apollo Rutledge …” He read the names till it was just me and the scarred man and the mauma with the baby and a handful of others. “If you’re still here,” he said, “your owner has decided the Work House will put you in a wholesome frame of mind.”

A man said, “I’m a free black, I don’t have an owner.”

“If you’ve got the papers that say that, then you can pay the fine yourself,” the guard told him. “If you can’t pay it on the spot, then you’re going to the Work House with the rest.”

I felt genuine confused. I said, “Mister. Mister? You left off my name. It’s Hetty. Hetty Grimké.”

He answered me with the thud of the door.

The treadmill was chomping and grinding its teeth—you could hear it before you got in the room. The Work House man led twelve of us to the upper gallery, poking us along with a stick. Denmark Vesey came behind me with the side of his face swollen so bad his eye was shut. He was the only one of us with shackles on his hands and feet. He took shuffle-steps, and the chain dragged and rattled.

When he tripped on the stairs, I said over my shoulder, “Be careful now.” Then I whispered, “How come you didn’t pay the fine? Ain’t you supposed to have money?”