The Invention of Wings: A Novel (31 page)

When Israel’s letter arrived in return, I was in the warming kitchen, surveying the pantries and writing a list of foods needed at the market. Handful had waylaid it from Sabe when it arrived at the door. She handed it to me, and waited.

I took a butter knife from the drawer and ripped the seal. I read it twice, once to myself, then aloud to her.

10 September 1820

Dear Miss Grimké,

I was gratified to receive your letter and most especially to learn that you are swayed to the Quakers. God’s way is narrow and the cost is great. I remind you of the scripture: “He that finds his life shall lose it, and he that loses his life shall find it.” Do not fear to lose what needs to be lost.

I regret to say I have grave and sorrowful news to impart. My dear Rebecca passed away last January. She died of a malignant influenza soon after our return to Philadelphia. My sister, Catherine, has come to care for the children. They miss their mother, as do I, but we are comforted that our beloved wife and mother is with God.

Write to me. I am here to encourage you in your path.

Your Friend,

Israel Morris

I sat in my room at midday with my eyes closed and my fingers laced in my lap, listening for the Voice the Quakers seemed so sure was inside of us. I’d been indulging in this dubious activity since receiving Israel’s letter, though I doubted the Quakers would’ve called it an
activity.
For them, this listening was the ultimate
inactivity,
a kind of capitulation to the stillness of one’s private heart. I wanted to believe God would eventually show up, murmuring little commands and illuminations. As usual, I heard nothing.

I’d responded to Israel’s letter immediately, my hand shaking so badly the ink lines had appeared rickety on the paper. I’d poured out my sympathy, my prayers, all sorts of pious assurances. Every word seemed trite, like the prattle that went on at my Bible studies. I felt protected behind it.

He’d responded with another letter and our correspondence had finally begun, consisting mostly of earnest inquires on my part and bits of guidance on his. I asked him pointedly what the Inner Voice sounded like. How will I recognize it? “I cannot tell you,” he wrote. “But when you hear it, you will know.”

That day the silence felt unusually dull and heavy, like the weight of water. It clogged my ears and throbbed against my drums. Fidgety thoughts darted through my mind, reminding me of squirrels loose in their trees. Perhaps I was too Anglican, too Presbyterian, too Grimké for this. I lifted my eyes to the fireplace and saw the coals had gone out.

Just a few more minutes, I told myself, and when my lids sank closed again, I had no expectations, no hope, no endeavoring—I’d given up on the Voice—and it was then my mind stopped racing and I began to float on some quiet stream.

Go north.

The voice broke into my small oblivion, dropping like a dark, beautiful stone.

I caught my breath. It was not like a common thought—it was distinct, shimmering, and dense with God.

Go north.

I opened my eyes. My heart leapt so wildly I placed a hand across my breast and pressed.

It was unthinkable. Unmarried daughters didn’t go off to live unprotected on their own in a foreign place. They lived at home with their mothers, and when there was no mother, with their sisters, and when there were no sisters, with their brothers. They didn’t break with everything and everyone they knew and loved. They didn’t throw over their lives and their reputations and their family name. They didn’t create scandals.

I rose to my feet and paced before the window, saying to myself it wasn’t possible. Mother would rain down Armageddon. Voice or no Voice, she would put a swift end to it.

Father had left all his properties and the vast share of his wealth to his sons, but he hadn’t forgotten his daughters. He’d left us each ten thousand dollars, and if I were frugal, if I lived on the interest, it would provide for me the rest of my life.

Beyond the window, the sky loomed large, filled with broken light, and I remembered suddenly that day last winter in the drawing room when Handful cleaned the chandelier, the allegation she’d leveled at me:
My body might be a slave, but not my mind. For you, it’s the other way round.
I’d dismissed the words—what could she know of it? But I saw now how exact they were. My mind had been shackled.

I strode to my dresser and opened the drawer of my Hepplewhite, the one I never opened, the one that held the lava box. Inside it, I found the silver button Handful had returned to me some years ago. It was black with tarnish and long forgotten. I took it in my palm.

How does one know the voice is God’s? I believed the voice bidding me to go north belonged to him, though perhaps what I really heard that day was my own impulse to freedom. Perhaps it was my own voice. Does it matter?

T
he house was named Green Hill. When Israel wrote, inviting me to stay with his family in the countryside of Philadelphia, I’d imagined an airy, white-frame house with a big veranda and shutters the color of pine. It was a shock to arrive at the end of spring and find a small castle made entirely of stone. Green Hill was a megalithic arrangement of pale gray rocks, arched windows, balconies, and turrets. Gazing up at it for the first time, I felt like a proper exile.

Israel’s late wife Rebecca had at least made the inside of the house soft. She’d filled it with hooked rugs and floral pillows, with simple Shaker furniture and wall clocks from which little birds popped out all day and coo-cooed the hour. It was a very odd place, but I came to like living inside a quarry. I liked the way the stone façade glistened in the rain and silvered over when the moon was full. I liked how the children’s voices echoed in slow spirals through the rooms and how the air stayed dim and cool in the heat of the day. Mostly, I liked how impenetrable it felt.

I took up residence in a garret room on the third floor, following months of correspondence with Israel and endless skirmishes with Mother. My tactic had been to convince her the whole thing was God’s idea. She was a devout woman. If anything could trump her social obsessions, it was piety, but when I told her about the Inner Voice, she was horrified. In her mind, I’d gone the way of the lunatic female saints who’d gotten themselves boiled in oil and burned at the stake. When I finally confessed I meant to live under the roof of the man I’d written those scandalous, unsent letters to, she broke out in symptoms, cold sores to chest pain. The chest pains were real enough, as evidenced by her drawn, perspiring face, and I worried my intentions might literally kill her.

“If there’s a shred of decency in you, you will not run off to live in the house of a Quaker widower,” she’d shouted during our final clash.

We were in her bedchamber at the time, and I stood with my back to the window, looking at her face streaked with anger.

“… Israel’s unmarried sister lives there, too,” I told her for the tenth time. “… I’m simply renting a room. I’ll help with the children, I’m to be in charge of the girls’ lessons … It’s all very respectable. Think of me as a tutor.”

“A
tutor.
” She pressed the back of her hand to her forehead as if warding off some heavenly debris. “This would kill your father, if he weren’t already dead.”

“… Don’t bring Father into this. He would want me to be happy.”

“I cannot—I will not bless this!”

“… Then I’ll go without your blessing.” I was dazed at my boldness.

She drew back in the chair, and I knew I’d stung her. She glared at me with taut, blistering eyes. “Then
go
! But keep this sordid business of hearing voices to yourself. You’re going north for your health, do you understand?”

“… And what exactly is my affliction?”

She looked toward the window and seemed to survey a piece of the saffron sky. Her silence went on for so long, I wondered if I’d been dismissed. “Coughing,” she said. “We fear you have consumption.”

That was the pact I made. Mother would tolerate my sojourn and refrain from severing me from the family, and I would pretend my lungs were threatened with consumption.

During the three months I’d been at Green Hill, I’d often felt dislocated and homesick. I missed Nina, and Handful was always at the edges of my mind. To my surprise, I missed Charleston, certainly not its slavery or its social castes, but the wash of light on the harbor, the salt brining the air, Birds of Paradise in the gardens with their orange heads raised, summer winds flapping the hurricane shutters on the piazzas. When I closed my eyes, I heard the bells on St Philip’s and sniffed the choking sweetness of the privet hedge that fell over the city.

Mercifully, the days here had been busy. They were filled with eight forlorn children ranging from five years all the way to sixteen and the domestic chores I undertook for Israel’s sister, Catherine. Even in my most severe Presbyterian moments, I’d been no match for her. She was a well-meaning woman afflicted with an incurable primness. Despite her spectacles, she had weak, watery eyes that couldn’t see enough to thread a needle or measure flour. I didn’t know how they’d managed before me. The girls’ dresses were unevenly hemmed and we were as apt to get salt in the sponge cake as sugar.

There were long, weekly rides to the Arch Street Meetinghouse in town, where I was now a Quaker probationer, having endured the interrogation from the Council of Elders about my convictions. I had only to wait now for their decision and be on my best behavior.

Every evening, to Catherine’s immense displeasure, Israel and I walked down the hill to the little pond to feed the ducks. Decked in green iridescent feathers and fancy black hoods, they were the most un-Quaker of ducks. Catherine had once compared their plumage to my dresses. “Do all Southern ladies adorn themselves in this ostentatious manner?” she’d asked.
If the woman only knew.
I’d left the most grandiose of my wardrobe behind. I’d given Nina a number of silk frocks adorned with everything from feathers to fur; a lavish lace headdress; an imported van-dyked cap; a shawl of flounced tulle; a lapis brooch; strands of pearls; a fan inlaid with tiny mirrors.

At some point, I would have to un-trim my bonnet. I would have to go through the formal divestment, getting rid of all my lovely things and resorting to gray dresses and bare bonnets, which would make me appear plainer than I already was. Catherine had already presented several of these mousy outfits to me as “encouragement,” as if the sight of them encouraged anything but aversion. Fortunately, the un-trimming ritual wasn’t required until my probation ended, and I had no intention of hurrying it.

When Israel and I visited the pond, we tossed crusts of bread on the water and watched the ducks paddle after them. There was a weathered rowboat turned upside down in the cattails on the far side, but we never ventured into it. We sat instead on a bench he’d built himself and conversed about the children, politics, God, and inevitably, the Quaker faith. He spoke a great deal about his wife, who’d been gone a year and a half. She could’ve been canonized, his Rebecca. Once, after speaking of her, his voice choked and he held my hand as we lingered silently in the deepening violet light.

In September, before summer left us, I was fathoms deep on the mattress in my room when the sound of crying broke into my slumber and I came swimming up from a dark blue sleep. The window was hinged open, and for a moment I heard nothing but the crickets in their percussion. Then it came again, a kind of whimpering.

I cracked the door to find Becky, Israel’s six-year-old, swallowed in an oversized white gown, blubbering and rubbing her eyes. She not only had her mother’s name, but her wilted, flaxen hair, and yet in some ways the child reminded me of myself. She had brows and lashes so light they were barely visible, giving her the same whitewashed look I wore. More than that, she chewed and mumbled her words, for which her siblings teased her unmercifully. Overhearing one of her brothers call her Mealy Mouth, I’d given him a talking-to. He avoided me nowadays, but Becky had followed me about ever since like a bear cub.