As they came onto the porch, shaking off the wetness, he bent and kissed my sister’s cheek.
In June we arrived in Amesbury, Massachusetts, for a two-week respite at the clapboard cottage of a Mrs. Whittier. We were soon to begin a crusade of lectures in New England that would last through the fall, but we were ragged with fatigue, in need of fresh, more seasonal clothes, and I had an airy little cough I couldn’t get rid of. Mrs. Whittier was cherry-cheeked and plump, and fed us rich soups, dosed us with cod liver oil, refused all visitors, and forced us to bed before the moon appeared.
It was several days before we discovered she was the mother of John Greenleaf Whittier, Theodore’s close friend. We were sitting in the parlor, having tea, when she began to speak of her son and his long friendship with Theodore, and we understood now why she’d taken us in.
“You must know Theodore well then,” Nina said.
“Teddy? Oh, he’s like a son to me, and a brother to John.” She shook her head. “I suppose you’ve heard of that awful pledge they made.”
“Pledge?” said Nina. “Why, no, we’ve heard nothing of it.”
“Well, I don’t approve. I think it too extreme. A woman my age would like grandchildren, after all. But they’re men of principle, those two, there’s no reasoning with them.”
Nina sat up on the edge of her chair, and I could see the brightness leave her. “What did they pledge?”
“They vowed neither of them would marry until slavery was abolished. Honestly, it will hardly be in their lifetimes!”
That night I was awakened by a knock on my door long after the moon set. Nina stood there with her face like a seawall, grim and braced. “I can’t bear it,” she said and fell against my shoulder.
That summer of 1837, New Englanders came by the thousands to hear us speak, and for the first time men began to appear in the audiences. At first a handful, then fifty, then hundreds. That we spoke publicly to women was bad enough—that we spoke publicly to men turned the Puritan world on its head.
“They’ll be lighting the pyres,” I said to Nina when the men first showed, trying to slough it off. We laughed, but it became not funny at all.
I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence. Was there ever a more galling verse in the Bible? It was preached that summer from every pulpit in New England with the Grimké sisters in mind. The Congregational churches passed a resolution of censure against us, urging a boycott of our lectures, and in its wake, a number of churches and public halls were closed to us. In Pepperell we were forced to deliver our message in a barn with the horses and cows. “As you see, there’s no room at the inn,” Nina told them. “But, still, the wise men have come.”
We tried to be brave and stalwart and dogged, as Theodore had described us in his letter, and we began using portions of our lectures to defend our right to speak. “What we claim for ourselves we claim for every woman!” That was our rally cry in Lowell and Worcester and Duxbury, indeed everywhere we went. You should have seen the women, how they flocked to our side, and some, like the brave ladies of Andover, wrote public letters in our defense. My old friend Lucretia got a message to us all the way from Philadelphia. It contained four words: Press on, my sisters.
Without intending to, we set the country in an uproar. The matter of women having certain rights was new and strange and pilloried, but it was suddenly debated all the way to Ohio. They renamed my sister Devilina. They christened us “female incendiaries.” Somehow we’d lit the fuse.
The last week of August we returned to Mrs. Whittier’s cottage as if from battle. I felt tired and beleaguered, uncertain if I could continue with the fall lectures. The last teaspoon of fight had been scraped out of me. Our final meeting of the summer had ended with dozens of angered men standing on wagons outside the hall, shouting “Devilina!” and hurling rocks as we left. One had hit my mouth, transforming my lower lip into a fat, red sausage. I looked a sight. I wasn’t sure what Mrs. Whittier would say to all this, if she would even give us shelter—we were pariahs now—but when we arrived, she pulled us into her arms and kissed our foreheads.
On the third day of refuge, I returned from a stroll along the banks of the Merrimack to find Nina canting sharply against the window as if she’d fallen asleep, her head pressed to the glass, her eyes closed, her arms dropped by her sides. She looked like a spinning top that had come to rest.
Hearing my footsteps, she turned and pointed to the tea table where the Boston Morning Post lay open. Mrs. Whittier took care to hide the editorials, but Nina had found the paper in the bread box.
August 25
The Misses Grimké have made speeches, written pamphlets, and exhibited themselves in public in unwomanly ways for a while now, but they have not found husbands. Why are all the old hens abolitionists? Because not being able to obtain husbands, they think they may stand some chance for a Negro, if they can only make amalgamation fashionable . . .
I couldn’t finish it.
“If that’s not enough, Theodore will be arriving this afternoon along with Elizur Wright and Mrs. Whittier’s son, John. Their letter came while you were out. Mrs. Whittier is in there making mince pies.”
She hadn’t spoken of Theodore all summer, but she was sick with longing for him, it was plain on her face.
The men arrived at three o’clock. My lip was almost back to its normal size, and I could speak now without sounding as if my mouth was stuffed with food, but it was still sore and I remained quiet, waiting for them to come to their purpose, remembering the way Theodore defended us before—It is supremely ridiculous they should be bullied from this great moment.
Today he was wearing two shades of green that made one wince. He walked to the mantel and picked up a piece of scrimshaw and inspected it. His eyes went to Nina. He said, “There has not been a contribution to the anti-slavery movement more impressive or tireless than that of the Grimké sisters.”
“Hear, hear,” said dear Mrs. Whittier, but I saw her son lower his eyes, and I knew then why they had come.
“We commend you for it,” Theodore went on. “And yet by encouraging men to join your audiences, you’ve mired us in a controversy that has taken the attention away from abolition. We’ve come, hoping to convince you—”
Nina interrupted him. “Hoping to convince us to behave like good lapdogs and wait content beneath the table for whatever crumbs you toss to us? Is that what you hope?” Her rebuke was so swift and scathing I wondered if it was in reaction to his marriage pledge as much as anything.
“Angelina, please, just hear us out,” he said. “We’re on your side, at heart we are. I of all people support your right to speak. It’s downright senseless to keep men away from your meetings.”
“. . . Then why do you quibble?” I asked.
“Because we sent you out there on behalf of abolition, not women.”
He glanced at John, whose heavy brows and lean face made me feel the two could’ve been actual brothers, not just figurative ones.
“He only means to say the slave is of greater urgency,” John added. “I support the cause of women, too, but surely you can’t lose sight of the slave because of a selfish crusade against some paltry grievance of your own?”
“Paltry?” Nina cried. “Is our right to speak paltry?”
“In comparison to the cause of abolition? Yes, I say it is.”
Mrs. Whittier drew up in her chair. “Really, John! As a woman, I didn’t think I had a grievance until you began speaking!”
“Why must it be one or the other?” Nina asked. “Sarah and I haven’t ceased to work for abolition. We’re speaking for slaves and women both. Don’t you see, we could do a hundred times more for the slave, if we weren’t so fettered?” She turned to Theodore, casting on him the most beautiful, imploring look. “Can’t you stand side by side with me? With us?”
He drew
a long breath and his face gave him away—it was twisted with love and distress—but he’d come on a mission, and as Mrs. Whittier had said, he was a man of principle, right or wrong. “Angelina, I think of you as my friend, the dearest of friends, and it tortures me to go against you, but now is the time to stand with the slave. The time will come for us to take up the woman question, but not yet.”
“The time to assert one’s right is when it’s denied!”
“I’m sorry,” he told her.
Outside, the wind swirled up, churning the leaves in the birch. The sound and smell of it loomed through the open window, and I had a sudden fleeting memory of playing beneath the oak in the work yard back home, forming words with my brother’s marbles, Sarah Go, and then the slave woman is dragged from the cow house and whipped. I don’t scream or make a sound. I say nothing at all.
The older Mr. Wright had begun his piece, coming to the crux of it. “It saddens me, but your agitation for women harms our cause. It threatens to split the abolition movement in two. I can’t believe you want that. We’re only asking you to confine your audiences to women and refrain from further talk about women’s reform.”
Hushing up the Grimké sisters—would it never stop? I looked at Mr. Wright, sitting there rubbing his arthritic fingers, and then at John and Theodore—these good men who wished to quash us, gently, of course, benignly, for the good of abolition, for our own good, for their good, for the greater good. It was all so familiar. Theirs was only a different kind of muzzle.
I’d spoken but once since they’d gotten here, and it seemed to me now I’d spent my entire life trying to coax back the voice that left me that long-ago day under the tree. Nina, clearly furious, had stopped arguing. She looked at me, beseeching me to say something. I lifted my fingers to my mouth and touched the last bit of swollenness on my lip, feeling the uprush of indignation that had sustained me through the summer, and, I suppose, my whole life, but this time, it formed into hard round words. “How can you ask us to go back to our parlors?” I said, rising to my feet. “To turn our backs on ourselves and on our own sex? We don’t wish the movement to split, of course we don’t—it saddens me to think of it—but we can do little for the slave as long as we’re under the feet of men. Do what you have to do, censure us, withdraw your support, we’ll press on anyway. Now, sirs, kindly take your feet off our necks.”
That night I began writing my second pamphlet, Letters on the Equality of the Sexes, working into the hours before dawn. The first line had arranged itself in my head while I’d sat listening to the men try and dissuade us: Whatsoever it is morally right for a man to do, it is morally right for a woman to do. She is clothed by her Maker with the same rights, the same duties.
Handful
It was springtime when all the heavy cleaning and airing-out was going on in the house and every night me and Sky would come back to the cellar room after being with the bristle-brush all day, and fall on the bed, and the first thing I’d see was the quilt frame, the one true roof over my head. I’d think about everything hidden up there—mauma’s story quilt, the money, Sarah’s booklet, her letter telling me about the promise she’d made to get me free—and I’d fall asleep glad they were safe over my head.
Then one Sunday morning, I rolled the frame down. Sky watched me without a word while I ran my hand over the red quilt with the black triangles, feeling the money sewed inside. I peeled the muslin cloth from round Sarah’s booklet and gazed on it, then wrapped it back. Next, I spread the story quilt cross the frame and we stood there, looking down at the history of mauma. I laid my palm on the second square—the woman in the field and the slaves flying in the air over her head. All that hope in the wind.
We didn’t hear little missus outside the door. The lock mauma used to have on the door was long gone, and little missus, she didn’t knock. She flounced on in. “I’m going to St. Philip’s, and I need my claret cape. You were supposed to mend it for me.” Her eyes wandered past me to the quilt frame. “What’s all this?”
I stepped to block her view. “That’s right, I forgot about your cape.” I was trying to fan the moth from the flame, but she brushed past me to see the pinks, reds, oranges, purples, and blacks on the quilt. Mauma and her colors.
“I’ll be straight over to mend the cape,” I said and took the rope off the hook to hike the frame up before she figured out what she was looking at.
She put up her hand. “Hold on. You’re in an awful big hurry to hide this from me.”
I fastened the rope back, the high-flutter coming in my chest. Sky started humming a thin nervous tune. I started to put my finger to my lip, but ever since she had that muzzle in her mouth, I couldn’t bear to hush her. We looked back and forth to each other while little missus squinted from one square to the next like she was reading a book. Everything done to mauma—there it was. The one-legged punishment, the whippings, the branding, the hammering. Mauma’s body laid on the quilt frame in pieces.
The muslin cloth with Sarah’s booklet inside was in plain sight, and beside it, the quilt with the money inside. You could see the shape of the bundles laying in the batting. I wanted to tuck everything from view, but I didn’t move.
When she turned to me, the morning glare fell over her face and the black in her eyes pulled into knots. She said, “Who made this?”
“Mauma did. Charlotte.”
“Well, it’s gruesome!”
I never had wanted to scream as bad as I did right then. I said, “Those gruesome things happened to her.”
A dark pink color poured into her cheeks. “For heaven’s sakes then, you would think her whole life was nothing but violence and cruelty. I mean, it doesn’t show what she did to warrant her punishments.”
She looked at the quilt again, her eyes darting over the appliqués. “We treated her well here, no one can dispute that. I can’t speak for what happened to her when she ran away, she was out of our care then.” Little missus was rubbing her hands now like she was cleaning them at the wash bowl.
The quilt had shamed her. She walked to the door and took one look back at it, and I knew she’d never let it stay in the world. She’d send Hector to get it the minute we were out of the room. He’d burn mauma’s story to ash.
Standing there, waiting for little missus’ steps to fade, I looked down at the quilt, at the slaves flying in the sky, and I hated being a slave worse than being dead. The hate I felt for it glittered so full of beauty I sank down on the floor before it.
Sky’s hair was a bushel basket without her scarf and when she bent over to see about me, the ends of it poked my face and smelled like the bristle-brush. She said, “You all right?”
I looked up at her. “We’re leaving here.”
She heard me, but she couldn’t be sure. She said, “What you say?”
“We gonna leave here or die trying.”
Sky pulled me to my feet like plucking a flower, and I saw Denmark’s face settle into hers, that day he rode to his death sitting on a coffin. I’d always wanted freedom, but there never had been a place to go and no way to get there. That didn’t matter anymore. I wanted freedom more than the next breath. We’d leave, riding on our coffins if we had to. That was the way mauma had lived her whole life. She used to say, you got to figure out which end of the needle you’re gon be, the one that’s fastened to the thread or the end that pierces the cloth.
I lifted the quilt from the frame and folded it up, thinking of the feathers inside it, and inside the feathers, the memory of the sky.
“Here,” I said, laying the quilt in Sky’s arms. “I got to go mend that woman’s cape. Put the quilt in the gunny sack and take it to Goodis and tell him to hide it with the horse blankets and don’t let anybody near it.”
Mending her cape was not all I did. I took little missus’ seal-stamp right off her desk while she was standing in the room and I dropped it in my pocket.
I w
aited till dark to write my letter.
23 April 1838
Dear Sarah
I hope this makes it to you. Me and Sky will be leaving here or die trying. That’s how we put it. I don’t know how we’re doing it, but we’ve got mauma’s money. All we need is a place to come to. I have the address on this letter. I hope I see you again one day.
Your friend
Handful
Sarah
The wedding took place in a house on Spruce Street in Philadelphia on May 14 at two o’clock in the afternoon—a day full of glinting sunlight and pale blue clouds. It was the sort of day that seemed sharply real and not real at all. I remember standing in the dining room watching it unfold as if from a distance, as if I was climbing up from the bottom of sleep, coming up from the cool sheets to a new day, one life ending and another beginning.
Mother had sent a note of congratulation, which we hadn’t expected, begging us to send a letter describing the wedding in detail. What will Nina wear? she’d asked. Oh, that I could see her! Naturally, she’d conveyed how relieved she was that Nina had a husband now and she hoped we would both retire from the unnatural life we’d been living, but despite that, her letter was plaintive with the love of an aging mother. She called us her dear daughters and lamented the distance between us. Will I see you again? she wrote. The question haunted me for days.
I gazed at Nina and Theodore standing now before the window about to say their vows, or as Nina had phrased it, whatever words their hearts gave them at the moment, and I thought it just as well Mother was not here. She would’ve expected Nina to be in ivory lace, perhaps blue linen, carrying roses or lilies, but Nina had dismissed all of that as unoriginal and embarked on a wedding designed to shock the masses.