The Invention of Wings

  “No,” I said. “He did not.”

  Thomas exhaled with relief that embarrassed me in its extravagance.

  “. . . You said fiancées. Beside the acquaintance in Beaufort, there’s another?”

  “Yes, I believe she lives in Savannah.”

  “And how did you learn of this one? Not another cousin, I hope.”

  He gave me a weak smile. “No, this one I heard of from Burke himself. I confronted him last evening. He admitted to both young ladies.”

  “You confronted him? But why didn’t you let me—”

  “I wanted to spare you the pain and disgrace. Both of our parents agreed you should be left out of it. There’s no reason for you to see him again. I’ve broken the engagement on your behalf.”

  How could you? He’d usurped any chance I had for personal retribution. In that moment, I felt more enraged by Thomas’ babyish protection than by Burke’s cruelty. I sprang to my feet and stood with my back to him, almost gagging on mouthfuls of jumbled, scathing words.

  “I know how you must feel,” he said behind me. “But it’s better this way.”

  He knew nothing of how I felt. I wanted to shout at him for uttering so arrogant a claim, but when I whirled about, I saw his eyes were filled with tears and I forced myself to speak with civility. “. . . I would like to be alone. Please.”

  He stood. “There’s one more thing. You’ll need to withdraw from public for a brief time. Mother believes three weeks will be sufficient for the talk to die down. Then you can return to society.”

  He left me by the window, engulfed with anger and mortification, and with nowhere to hurl it except at myself. How could I have fallen prey to such a lascivious person? Was I so besotted, so needy, so blind that I imagined he loved me? I could see myself in the glare of the window, the flushed, round face, Father’s long nose, the pale eyes, the mis-colored hair. I’d clipped a piece of that hair for him. He must have laughed at that.

  I went to my desk and retrieved the letter with his proposal of marriage. I didn’t read it again, I tore it into as many pieces as I could manage. The tatters fell onto the desktop and the rug and the folds of my skirt.

  It was the time of year when migrating crows wheeled across the sky, thunderous flocks that moved like a single veil, and I heard them, out there in the wild chirruping air. Turning to the window, I watched the birds fill the sky before disappearing, and when the air was still again, I watched the empty place where they had been.

  Handful

  Sarah was up in her room with her heart broke so bad, Binah said you could hear it jangle when she walked. Her brother, Thomas, hadn’t even got his hat on to leave before the whole house knew what happened. Mr. Williams had himself two more fiancées. Now who has to remove himself hastily?

  Come teatime that day, missus said to Tomfry, “Sarah will not be receiving visitors for the next three weeks. Explain to any callers that she is indisposed. Indisposed, Tomfry. That’s the word I would like you to use.”

  “Yessum.”

  Missus saw me hovering. “Quit dawdling, Hetty, and take a tray to Sarah’s room.”

  I fixed it, but I knew she wouldn’t touch a bite. I got the hyssop tea she liked, thinking of us when we were little, how we drank it on the roof, her telling me about the silver button and the big plan she had. I’d worn that button in my neck pouch almost every day since she’d tossed it away.

  I slipped into the warming kitchen, slid off the pouch, and dug the button out. It was full of tarnish. Looked like a big shriveled grape. I studied it a minute, then I got out the polish and rubbed it till it gleamed.

  Sarah was sitting at her desk, writing in a notebook. Her eyes were so raw from crying I didn’t know how she could see to write. I set the tray in front of her. I said, “Look what’s on the tea saucer.”

  She hadn’t laid eyes on the button in all these years, but she knew right off what it was. “How did . . . Why, Handful, you saved it?”

  She didn’t touch it. Only stared.

  I said, “Awright then, there it is,” and went to the door.

  Sarah

  The following morning, despite my protests, Mother sent Nina off to spend the day with one of the little Smith girls, whose family lived a block or so from the Work House. During Nina’s last visit there, she’d heard screams floating on the breezes and had leapt up in alarm, scattering jackstones across the piazza. At the time, my sister knew nothing of Charleston’s torture chamber—I’d tried to protect her from it—but the Smith boys had no such scruples. They informed her that the cries she heard came from a slave in the whipping room, describing it for her in lurid detail. Apparently there was a crane with pulleys by which the slaves’ bound hands were drawn over their heads, while their feet were chained to a plank. The boys told her of other horrors, too, which she reported to me through sobs, stories about the splitting of ears and the removal of teeth, about spiked collars and some sort of birdcage contraption that was locked over a slave’s head.

  I’d assured Nina she wouldn’t have to go back. But now, with Father’s career in dire straits, Mother was not above using a seven-year-old to make an inroad with the politically powerful Smiths.

  The rain began to fall not long after Nina left, a torrent coming at the peak of high tide, turning the streets into canals of mud. By early afternoon, after the storm had blown out to sea, I could bear it no longer. I put on Mary’s old black riding hat with the veils and slipped out the back door, determined to collect my sister no matter the cost.

  Sabe wasn’t in the stable, only Goodis, which seemed just as well as I felt I could trust him more. “I just the footman, I ain’t meant to drive the carriage,” he told me. It took some doing, but I convinced him it was an errand of great urgency, and off we set in the new cabriolet.

  The city was abuzz that day with talk of an astral event—a comet storm, it was said. Even sensible people like Father and Thomas had been speaking about the apocalypse, but I knew my scandal with Burke was being discussed in parlors throughout Charleston with more fervor than the end of the world. The cabriolet was new enough, however, to be unfamiliar on the streets, and with its hood up and Mary’s hat on, I didn’t see how I could be recognized. With any luck, Mother would never know I’d broken my seclusion.

  Feeling anxious about Nina, I closed my eyes and imagined scooping her into my arms. Then there was a terrible jolt, and the carriage came to a shuddering stop on Coming Street, the right wheel sunk into a mud hole.

  Goodis coaxed the horse with the whip, then climbed down and tugged at the bridle and collar. The mare, known for her keen spirit of revenge, jerked her head and stepped backward, sinking the carriage further. I heard Goodis quietly curse.

  He went to the rear of the carriage and shoved, causing it to rock forward a little, but nothing more. “Stay put where you is,” he told me. “I gon get us some help.”

  As he lumbered off, I surveyed the street. Despite the sogginess, there were ladies out strolling, men huddled in conclaves, Negro hawkers carrying troughs of shrimp and baskets of French coconut patties. I reached up nervously and touched the veil at my face, and it was at that moment I glimpsed Charlotte, walking toward Bull Street.

  She picked her way like a ropewalker, moving along a narrow shelf of grass that ran beside a brick wall. She wore her red bandana low on her forehead and carried a basket bulging with cloth, unaware of me or of the finely dressed woman with white skin who approached her on the same grassy ledge from the opposite direction. One of them would be forced to turn around and retrace her steps all the way back to where the brick wall began, or else yield way by stepping off into the muddy roadway. Face-offs of this sort played out on the streets so regularly a city ordinance had been passed requiring slaves to give deference. Had the slave been anyone other than Charlotte—had it been Binah, Aunt-Sister, Cindie, even Handful—I wouldn’t have worried so much, but
Charlotte.

  The two women stopped a few feet apart. The white woman lifted her parasol and tapped Charlotte’s arm. Move along now. Off with you.

  I didn’t detect the slightest movement in Charlotte. She seemed to solidify as she stood there. The woman’s umbrella thumped at her again: Shoo. Shoo.

  They exchanged words I didn’t understand, their voices rising, turning into jagged antlers over their heads. I looked around frantically for Goodis.

  A man wearing a City Guard uniform reined his horse in the middle of the street. “Step aside, Negress,” he yelled. He climbed from his horse, handing the reins to a slave boy who’d wandered up pulling a dray.

  Before the guard could reach the scene, Charlotte swung her basket. It moved in an arc, spilling what I realized were bonnets, then crashing against the woman’s arm, knocking her sideways. The mud in the street was like pudding, viscous and pale-brown as tapioca, and when the woman landed, perfectly seated, it made a little wave on either side of her.

  I leapt from the carriage and ran toward them with no thought of what I might do. The guardsman had seized Charlotte by the arms, assisted by another man whom he’d enlisted. They dragged her down the street, while she spit and clawed.

  I chased them all the way to Beaufain where the men commandeered a wagon and forced her into the back, pushing her flat onto her stomach. The guardsman sat atop her. The driver snapped the reins, the horses jerked, and I could only stand there spattered with the pudding from the street.

  I swept back the veils on my hat and screamed her name. “Charlotte!”

  Her eyes found me. She did not make a sound, but held my gaze as the wagon rolled away.

  Handful

  Mauma disappeared two days after we watched the stars fall.

  We were standing in the work yard near the back gate. She had the red scarf on her head and wore her good dress, the one dyed indigo. Her apron was pressed to a crisp. She’d oiled her lips and borrowed Binah’s cowrie shell bracelets to dress up her wrists. In the sunlight her skin had a gold luster and her eyes shined like river rocks. That’s how I see her now in my dreams, with the look she had then. Almost happy.

  She pinned on her slave badge, full of haste. She’d got permission to deliver her fresh-made bonnets, but I knew before the last one left the basket, she’d be obliging that man, Mr. Vesey.

  I said, “Be sure your badge is on good.”

  Mauma hated my pestering. “It on there, Handful. It ain’t goin’ nowhere.”

  “What about your pouch?” I couldn’t see the bulge of it under her dress like usual. I kept both of our pouches fresh with scraps from our tree, and I meant for her to wear it, what with me going to all that trouble and her needing all the protection she could get. She fished it up from her bosom. Her fingers had faded smudges on them from the charcoal powder she’d used to trace designs on her bonnets.

  I wanted to say more to her. Why’re you wearing the good dress with all that mud out there? When are you planning on telling me about the baby? Now we got to buy freedom for the three of us? But I shoved all this to the side for later.

  I lingered while Tomfry unlocked the back gate and let her out. After she stepped through to the alley, she turned round and looked at me, then walked on off.

  After mauma left that day, I did everything usual. Cut sleeves and collars for the men slaves to have work shirts, got busy on missus’ splashers, these squares of cloth you tack up behind the washstands cause Lord forbid you get a drop of water on the wall. Each and every one had to be embroidered to the hilt.

  Middle of the afternoon, I went out to the privy. The sun had stayed put, and the sky was blue as cornflowers. Aunt-Sister was in the kitchen house baking whole apples with custard poured round them, what’s called a bird nest pudding, and that whole smell was in the air. I was on my way back inside, relishing the sweet air after being in the latrine, when the carriage came flying through the gate with Sarah and Nina, both of them looking scared to pieces. And look who was driving. Goodis. When it rolled to a stop, their feet hit the ground running. They passed me without a word and struck for the house. The little gray traveling cape I’d sewed Nina flapped behind her like a dove wing.

  Goodis gave me a long look of pity before he tugged the horse inside the stable.

  When the long shadows started, I sat on the porch steps to the kitchen house and watched the gate for mauma. Cross the yard, Goodis held vigil with me in the stable door, whittling on a piece of wood. He knew something I didn’t.

  The apple-eggs were still in the air when Aunt-Sister and Phoebe cleaned up and blew out the lamps. The dark came, and no moon.

  Sarah found me hunched on the steps. She sat down close next to me. “. . . Handful,” she said. “. . . I wanted to be the one to tell you.”

  “It’s mauma, ain’t it?”

  “She got in a dispute with a white lady . . . The lady wanted her to give way on the street. She prodded your mother with an umbrella, and . . . you know your mother, she wouldn’t stand aside. She . . . she struck the lady.” Sarah sighed into the dark, and took hold of my hand. “The City Guard was there. They took her away.”

  All this time I’d been waiting for her to say mauma was dead. Hope came back into me. “Where is she?”

  Sarah looked away from me then. “. . . That’s what I’ve been trying to discover . . . We don’t know where she is . . . They were taking her to the Guard House, but when Thomas went to pay the fine, he was told Charlotte had managed to wrestle free . . . Apparently, she ran off . . . They said the Guard chased her, but lost her in the alleys. They’re out there looking for her now.”

  All I could hear was breathing—Sarah, Goodis cross the yard, the horses in the stable, the creatures in the brush, the white people on their feather beds, the slaves on their little pallets thin as wafers, everything breathing but me.

  Sarah walked with me to the basement. She said, “Would you like some warmed tea? I can put a little brandy in it.”

  I shook my head. She wanted to draw me to her for solace, I could tell, but she held back. Instead, she laid her hand gentle on my arm and said, “She’ll come back.”

  I said those words all night long.

  I didn’t know how to be in the world without her.

  Sarah

  Charlotte’s disappearance brought a severe and terrible mercy, for not once throughout the harrowing weeks that followed Burke’s betrayal was I uncertain which event was tragic and which was merely unfortunate.

  Someone—Mother, Father, perhaps Thomas—placed an ad in the Charleston Mercury.

  Disappeared, Female Slave

  Mulatto. Wide space between upper front teeth. Occasional limp. Answers to the name of Charlotte. Wearing red scarf and dark blue dress. A seamstress of skill and value. Belongs to Judge John Grimké. Large reward for her return.

  The appeal brought no response.

  Each day I watched from the back window in my room as Handful walked a repetitive circuit in the work yard. Sometimes she walked the entirety of the morning. Never varying her path, she started at the back of the house, moved toward the kitchen house, past the laundry, cut over to the oak tree, where she touched the trunk as she passed, then back to the house by way of the stable and carriage house. Upon reaching the porch steps, she would simply begin again. It was a circumambulation of such precise, ritualistic grief no one interfered. Even Mother left her to walk a rut of anguish into the yard.

  I didn’t much mourn the loss of Burke or the demise of our wedding. I felt little heartbreak. Was that not strange? I did cry buckets, but mostly from the shame of it all.

  I didn’t break my seclusion again. Instead, I took refuge in it.

  Almost daily I received notes of concern in flowery scripts. I was being prayed for by everyone imaginable. It was hoped my reputation wouldn’t suffer too much. Did I know that Burke had vacated the city a
nd was staying indefinitely with his uncle in Columbia? Wasn’t it a shame that his mother had taken ill with apoplexy? How was my own mother bearing up? I was missed at tea, but my absence was commended. I shouldn’t despair, for surely a young man would come forth who wouldn’t be put off by my disgrace.

  I wrote rants and rebukes in my diary, then tore them out and burned them along with all the supercilious notes. Gradually, the lava in me subsided and there remained only a young woman whose life course had been demolished. Unlike Handful, I had no notion what path to walk.

  One month after Charlotte’s disappearance, a frigid wind brought down most of the leaves on the oak. Handful still walked obsessively each morning, but only a quick loop or so now. The week before, Mother had put a stop to her unremitting march and sent her back to her duties. The high social season with its quota of gowns awaited—all the sewing now fell to Handful. Charlotte was gone. No one believed she was coming back.

  I’d managed to stretch my three weeks of seclusion into four, but on this day, my reprieve ended. Mother had ordered me back to my duties, as well: procuring a husband. She’d informed me that a rowboat traversing the Atlantic might eventually be rescued by a passing ship, but only if the rowboat bravely set out upon the water—this, her hapless metaphor of my marital prospects. My sister Mary arrived with similar encouragement. “Lift your chin, Sarah. Behave as if nothing has happened. Be gay and act assured. You’ll find a husband, God willing.”

  God willing. How strangely that strikes me now.

  On the evening my solitude ended, I shoved myself out into the public domain by attending a lecture at the Second Presbyterian Church delivered by the Reverend Henry Kollack, a famed preacher. Those were not the waters Mother had in mind. The Episcopal Church might pass for society, but certainly not the Presbyterians with their revivalism and shouts for repentance—but she didn’t object. I was at least rowing, wasn’t I?