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.
She rushed at me now, throwing herself into my arms.
“. . . My goodness, what’s all this?”
“I dreamed about Ma Ma. She was in a box in the ground.”
“. . . Oh, Sweet One, no. Your mother is with God and his angels.”
“But I saw her in the box. I saw her.” Her cries landed in wet bursts against my gown.
I cupped the back of her head, and when her tears stopped, I said, “Come on . . . I’ll take you back to your room.”
Pulling away, she darted past me to my bed and pulled the comforter to her chin. “I want to sleep with you.”
I climbed in beside her, an unaccountable solace washing over me as she edged close, nuzzling my shoulder. Her head smelled like the sweet marjoram leaves Catherine sewed into their pillows. As her hand fell across my chest, I noticed a chain dangling from her clamped fist.
“. . . What’s this in your hand?”
“I sleep with it,” she said. “But when I do, I dream of her.”
She unfurled her fingers to reveal a round, gold-plated locket. The front was engraved with a spray of flowers, daffodils tied with a bow, and below them, a name. Rebecca.
“That’s my name,” she said.
“. . . And the locket, is it yours, too?”
“Yes.” Her fingers curled back over it.
I’d never seen a trace of jewelry on Catherine or on Becky’s older sister, but in Charleston lockets were as common on little girls as hair barrettes.
“I don’t want it anymore,” she said. “I want you to wear it.”
“. . . Me? Oh, Becky, I couldn’t wear your locket.”
“Why?” She raised up, her eyes clouding over again.
“Because . . . it’s yours. It has your name on it, not mine.”
“But you can wear it for now. Just for now.”
She gave me a look of such pleading, I took it from her. “. . . I’ll keep it for you.”
“You’ll wear it?”
“. . . I’ll wear it once, if it makes you happy. But only once.”
Gradually her breath grew elongated and whispery, the sound of ribbons fluttering, and I heard her mutter, “Ma Ma.”
All week, Becky greeted me with a searching look at the collar of my dress. I’d hoped she would forget the episode with the locket, but my wearing it seemed to have built to an implausible height in her mind. Seeing I was without it, she would slump in disappointment.
Was it silly of me to feel wary? Wound inside the locket was a tendril of hair, Becky’s, I supposed, but the vaporous color of it must’ve conjured memories of her mother. If seeing the necklace on me brought her some fleeting consolation, surely it harmed nothing.
I wore the locket to the girls’ tutoring session on Thursday. The boys met in the classroom each morning with a male tutor who came from the city, while I instructed the two girls there in the afternoons. Israel had built a single strip of desktops and attached it to the wall, as well as a long bench. He’d installed a slate board, shelves for books, and a teacher’s table that smelled of cedar. That morning I wore my emerald dress, which had seen precious little wear considering how like the ducks’ feathers it was. The neckline contoured to my collar bones, where the gold locket nestled in the gully between them.
When Becky spied it, she rose on her toes, her body swelled with delight, the tiny features on her face levitating for a moment. For the next hour, she rewarded me by raising her hand whenever I asked a question, whether she knew the answer or not.
I had free rein over their curriculum, and I was determined my old adversary, Madame Ruffin, and her “education for the gentle female mind” would get nowhere near it. I meant to teach the girls geography, world history, philosophy, and math. They would read the humanities, and when I was done, know Latin better than their brothers.
I wasn’t against them learning natural history, however, and after a particularly grueling lesson on longitudes and latitudes, I opened John James Audubon’s Birds of America, a massive brown leather folio, weighing at least as much as Becky. Turning to the ruffed grouse, which was common in the woods nearby, I said, “Who can mimic its call?”
There we were, a flock of ruffed grouses at the open window, trilling and whistling, when Catherine entered the classroom and demanded to know what sort of lesson I was conducting. She’d heard our chirping as she gathered the last cucumbers in the garden. “That was quite a bit of disturbance,” she said, the vegetable basket swinging on her arm, sifting crumbs of soil onto her ash-colored dress. Becky, ever alert to her aunt’s annoyance, spoke be
fore I could push out my words. “We were calling the ruffed grouse.”
“Were you? I see.” She looked at me. “It seemed unduly loud. Perhaps more quietly next time.”
I smiled at her and she cocked her head and stepped closer, so close her dress hem brushed mine. Her eyes magnified behind the thickset lens of her glasses as she concentrated on the locket at my throat.
“What is the meaning of this?” she said.
“. . . The meaning of what?”
“Take it off!”
Becky wedged herself between us. “Auntie. Auntie.”
Catherine ignored her. “Your intentions have been more than clear to me, Sarah, but I had not thought you would be so bold as to wear Rebecca’s locket!”
“. . . Rebecca? . . . You mean, it belonged to . . .” My voice deserted me, my words adhering like barnacles at the back of my throat.
“Israel’s wife,” she said, finishing my sentence.
“Auntie?” Becky’s upturned face, drowning in the waves of our gray-green skirts, made her look like a castaway. “I gave it to her.”
“You did what? Well, I don’t care who gave it to her, she shouldn’t have taken it.” She thrust out her palm, shoving it inches from my chin. I could hear air rasping in and out of her nostrils.
“. . . . . . But I didn’t . . . know.”
“Give me the locket, please.”
“No,” Becky cried, sinking onto the rug.
I stepped back, unclasping the necklace, and placed it in Catherine’s hand. As I bent to scoop Becky from the floor, her aunt pulled the child gently by her arm and maneuvered both girls from the room.
I walked calmly, slowly out the door and down the escarpment toward the pond. Before stepping into the thicket of trees, I looked back at the house. The light was still citrus and bright, but Israel would be home soon, and Catherine would be waiting for him with the locket.
Cloaked in the cedars, I pressed one hand to my stomach and one to my mouth and stood there several seconds, as if squeezing myself together. Then I straightened and followed the path to the water.
I heard the pond before I saw it—the frogs deep in their hum, the violin whir of insects. On impulse, I walked along the edge until I reached the rowboat. Sunk in the mud, it took all my strength to flip it over. I lifted out the oar and inspected the bottom for holes and rotted wood. Seeing none, I gathered up my skirt, climbed in, and paddled to the middle of the pond, an untouchable place, far from everything. I tried to think what I would say to him, worried my voice would slink off again and leave me.
I remained there a long while, lapping on the surface. Vapor curled on the water, dragonflies pricked the air, and I thought it all beautiful. I hoped Israel wouldn’t send me away. I hoped the Inner Voice would not show up now, saying, Go south.
“Sarah!”
I jerked, causing the boat to tilt, and reached for the sides to steady it.
“What are you doing?” Israel called. He stood on the bank in his knee britches with the glinting buckles, hatless. He shaded his eyes and motioned me in with his hand.
I pulled the paddle through the water, banging the wood against the hull and made an inept, zigzag path to shore.
We sat on the bench while I did my best to explain that I’d thought the locket belonged to his daughter Rebecca, not his wife Rebecca. I told him about the evening Becky brought it to me, and while my voice clenched and spluttered, it didn’t fail me altogether.
“. . . I would never try to take your wife’s place.”
“No,” he said. “No one could.”
“. . . I doubt Catherine would believe me, though . . . She’s very angry.”
“She’s protective, that’s all. Our mother died young and Catherine took care of me. She never married, and Rebecca, the children, and I were her only family. Your presence, I’m afraid, has flustered her. I don’t think she really understands why I asked you here.”
“. . . I don’t think I understand it either, Israel . . . Why am I here?”
“You told me yourself—God told you to leave and come north.”
“. . . But he didn’t say, ‘Go to Philadelphia, go to Israel’s house.’”
He placed his hand on my arm, squeezing a little. “Do you remember the last words my Rebecca said to you on the ship? She said, ‘If you come north again, you must stay with us.’ I think she brought you here. For me, for the children. I think God brought you here.”
I looked away from him toward the pond blotched with pollen and silt, the water bronzing in the shrinking light. When I looked back, he pulled me to him and held me against his chest, and I felt it was me he held, not his Rebecca.
Handful
I smelled the corn fritters half a block from Denmark Vesey’s house, the fry-oil in the air, the sweet corn fuss coming down the street. For two years, I’d been sneaking off to 20 Bull every time I found a hole in the week to squeeze through. Sabe was a shiftless lackey of a butler and didn’t watch us the way Tomfry had—we could thank missus for that much.
I’d tell Sabe we were out of thread, beeswax, buttons, or rat droppings, and he’d send me willy-nilly to the market. The rest of the time he didn’t care where I was. The only thought in his head was for slurping down master Grimké’s brandies and whiskeys in the cellar and messing round with Minta. They were always in the empty room over the carriage house doing just what you think they’re doing. Me, Aunt-Sister, Phoebe, and Goodis would hear them all the way from the kitchen house porch and Goodis would cock his eyebrow at me. Everybody knew he’d been sweet on me since the day he got here. He’d made the rabbit cane special for me, and he would give me the last yam off his plate. Once when Sabe yelled at me for going missing, Goodis stuck a fist in his face and Sabe backed right down. I never had a man touch me, never had wanted one, but sometimes when I was listening to Sabe and Minta up in the carriage house, Goodis didn’t seem so bad.
With Sarah gone, the whole place had gone to hell’s dredges. With the last of the boys in college, there wasn’t anybody left in the house but missus and Nina and us six slaves to keep it going. Missus stewed all the time about money. She had the lump sum master Grimké left, but she said it was a trifle of what she needed. Paint was flecking off the house and she’d sold the extra horse. She didn’t eat bird nest pudding anymore, and in the slave dining room, we lived on rice and more rice.
The day I smelled the fritters, it was two days before Christmas—I remember there was a cold pinch in the air and palm wreaths tacked on the doors of the piazzas, woven fancy like hair braids. This time Sabe had sent me to carry a note from missus to the solicitor’s office. Don’t think I didn’t read it before I handed it over.
Dear Mr. Huger,
I find that my allowance is inadequate to meet the demands of living well. I request that you alert my sons as to my needs. As you know, they are in possession of properties that could be sold in order to augment my care. Such a proposal would suit better coming from a man of your influence, who was a loyal friend to their father.
Yours Truly,
Mary Grimké
I had a jar of sorghum in my pocket that I’d swiped from the larder. I liked to bring Denmark a little something, and this would hit the spot with the fritters. He had a habit of telling whoever was hanging round his place that I was his daughter. He didn’t say I was like a daughter, but claimed out and out I was his. Susan grumbled about it, but she was good to me, too.
I found her in her kitchen house, shoveling the corn cakes from the skillet to the plate. She said, “Where you been? We haven’t seen you in over a week.”
“You can’t do with me and you can’t do without me.”
She laughed. “I can do with you all right. The one I can’t do with and do without is in his workshop.”
“Denmark? What’s he done now?”
She snorted. “You mean
beside keep women all over the city?”
It struck me best to sidestep this since mauma had been one of them. “Yeah, beside that.”
A smile dipped cross her lips. She handed me the plate. “Here, take this to him. He’s in a mood, is all. It’s about that Monday Gell. He lost something that set Denmark off. Some sort of list. I thought Denmark was gonna kill the man.”
I headed back toward the workshop knowing Monday had lost the roll of draftees he’d been collecting for Denmark out on the Bulkley farm.
For a long time now, Denmark and his lieutenants had been recruiting slaves, writing down their names in what he called the Book. Last I heard, there were more than two thousand pledged to take up arms when the time came. Denmark had let me sit there and listen while he talked about raising an army and getting us free, and the men got used to me being in there. They knew I’d keep it quiet.
Denmark didn’t like the wind to blow unless he told it which way to go. He’d come up with the exact words he wanted Gullah Jack and them to say when they wooed the recruits. One day, he had me pretend like I was the slave he was courting.
“Have you heard the news?” he said to me.
“What news?” I answered. Like he told me to say.
“We’re gonna be free.”
“Free? Who says?”
“Come with me, and I’ll show you.”
That was the way he wanted it said. Then, if a slave in the city was curious enough, the lieutenant was supposed to bring him to 20 Bull to meet Denmark. If the slaves were on the plantations, Denmark would go to them and hold a secret meeting.
I’d been at the house when one of those curious slaves had showed up, and it was something I’d take to my grave. Denmark had sailed up from his chair like Elijah in his chariot. “The Lord has spoken to me,” he cried out. “He said, set my people free. When your name is written in the Book, you’re one of us and you’re one of God’s, and we’ll take our freedom when God says. Let not your heart be troubled. Neither let it be afraid. You believe in God, believe also in me.”