The Invention of Wings: A Novel (44 page)

“We got that big tea to put on today and she wants the ribbons sewed on the napkins. She acts like you’re the only one can do it. She’s got me fixing the tables.”

“Where’s Sky?”

“Sky’s washing the front steps.”

Mauma looked so tired. I knew the pains in her stomach had got worse cause she’d picked at her food all week. She pushed herself up slow, so thin her body looked like a stem growing up from the mattress.

“Mauma, you lay on back down. I’ll get those ribbons done.”

“You a good girl, Handful, you always was.”

The story quilt was folded on the foot of the bed where she liked to keep it close. She spread it open cross her legs. It was July, a hot, sticky day, and for one tick of the clock, I wondered if she was feeling that cold you get toward the end. But then she turned the quilt till she found the first square. “This is my granny-mauma when the stars fall and she gets sold away.”

I sat down next to her. She wasn’t cold, she just wanted to tell the story on the quilt again. She loved to tell the story.

She’d forgot about the ribbons, and there could be trouble for me lingering, but this was mauma, and this was the story. She went through the whole quilt, every square, taking her time on the ones she’d sewed since she was back. Her being taken away in the wagon by the Guard. Working the rice fields with a baby on her back. A man branding her shoulder with the left hand and hammering out her teeth with the right. Running away under the moon. Finally, she came to the last square, the fifteenth one—it was me, mauma, and Sky with our arms woven together like a loop stitch.

I got to my feet. “Go back to sleep now.”

“No, I’m coming. I be on up there in a while.”

Her eyes glowed like the paper lanterns we used to set out for the garden parties.

I stood in the dining room, facing the window, stuffing big crystal horns with fruit, everything in the larder that wasn’t rotten, when I spotted mauma shuffling toward the spirit tree at the back of the yard. She had the story quilt clutched round her shoulders.

My hands came still—the way she slid one foot, rested, then slid the other one. When she reached the tree, she steadied her hand on the trunk and lowered herself to the ground. My heart started to beat strange.

I didn’t look to see if little missus was near, I hurried out the back door. Fast as I could, fast as the earth would pass beneath me.

“Mauma?”

She lifted her face. The light had gone from her eyes. There was only the black wick now.

I eased down beside her.
“Mauma?”

“It’s all right. I come to get my spirit to take with me.” Her voice sounded far off inside her. “I’m tired, Handful.”

I tried not to be scared. “I’ll take care of you. Don’t worry, we’ll get you some rest.”

She smiled the saddest smile, letting me know she’d get her rest, but not the kind I hoped. I took hold of her hands. They were ice cold. Little bird bones.

She said it again. “I’m tired.”

She wanted me to tell her it was all right, to get her spirit and go on, but I couldn’t say it. I told her, “Course, you’re tired. You worked hard your whole life. That’s all you did was work.”

“Don’t you remember me for that. Don’t you remember I’m a slave and work hard. When you think of me, you say, she never did belong to those people. She never belong to nobody but herself.”

She closed her eyes. “You remember that.”

“I will, mauma.”

I pulled the quilt round her shoulders. High in the limbs, the crows cawed. The doves moaned. The wind bent down to lift her to the sky.

W
e arrived at the meetinghouse in the swelter of an August morning with every intention of going inside and sitting on the Negro pew.

“… Are we certain we want to do this?” I asked Nina.

She halted on the browned grass, 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 assignment 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 assist 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 passed 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 Douglass 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. Douglass’ 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 Grimké, 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 sanctity and tradition of the meeting and remove yourselves from the pew,” Mr. Bettleman said.

Mrs. Douglass 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 Grimké. 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 tassels 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 passed for a smile and gestured us into the room.

Three weeks had passed since we’d first sat on the Negro bench and refused to get up, and except for Mr. Bettleman, no one had said an admonishing 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.