The Invention of Wings

  I don’t know what woke me. The room was quiet, the light gone.

  Mauma said, “You wake?” Those were the first words she’d said since Tomfry strapped her.

  “I’m awake.”

  “Awright. I gon tell you a story. You listening, Handful?”

  “I’m listening.”

  My eyes had got used to the dark, and I saw the door still propped wide to the hallway, and mauma beside me, frowning. She said, “Your granny-mauma come from Africa when she was a girl. ’Bout same as you now.”

  My heart started to beat hard. It filled up my ears.

  “Soon as she got here, her mauma and daddy was taken from her, and that same night the stars fell out the sky. You think stars don’t fall, but your granny-mauma swore it.”

  Mauma tarried, letting us picture how the sky might’ve looked.

  “She say everything over here sound like jibber jabber to her. The food taste like monkey meat. She ain’t got nothin’ but this little old scrap of quilt her mauma made. In Africa, her mauma was a quilter, best there is. They was Fon people and sewed appliqué, same like I do. They cut out fishes, birds, lions, elephants, every beast they had, and sewed ’em on, but the quilt your granny-mauma brought with her didn’t have no animals on it, just little three-side-shapes, what you call a triangle. Same like I put on my quilts. My mauma say they was blackbird wings.”

  The floor creaked in the hallway and I heard somebody out there breathing high and fast, the way Miss Sarah breathed. I eased up on my elbow and craned my neck, and there she was—her shadow blotted on the hall window. I lowered myself back to the mattress and mauma went on telling her story with Miss Sarah listening in.

  “Your granny-mauma got sold to some man for twenty dollars, and he put her in the fields near Georgetown. They eat boiled black-eye peas in the morning, and if you ain’t done eating in ten minutes time, you don’t get no more that day. Your granny-mauma say she always eat too slow.

  “I never did know my daddy. He was a white man named John Paul, not the massa, but his brother. After I come, we got sold off. Mauma say I be the fair side of brown, and everybody know what that mean.

  “We got bought by a man near Camden. He kept mauma in the fields and I stay out there with her, but nights she teach me everything she knows ’bout quilts. I tore up old pant legs and dress tails and pieced ’em. Mauma say in Africa they sew charms in their quilts. I put pieces of my hair down inside mine. When I got twelve, mauma start braggin’ to the Camden missus, how I could sew anything, and the missus took me to the house to learn from their seamstress. I got better ’n she was in a hurry.”

  She broke off and shifted her legs on the bed. I was afraid that was all she had to say. I never had heard this story. Listening to it was like watching myself sleep, clouds floating, mauma bent over me. I forgot Miss Sarah was out there.

  I waited, and finally she started back telling. “Mauma birthed my brother while I was sewing in the house. She never say who his daddy was. My brother didn’t live out the year.

  “After he die, your granny-mauma found us a spirit tree. It’s just a oak tree, but she call it a Baybob like they have in Africa. She say Fon people keep a spirit tree and it always be a Baybob. Your granny-mauma wrapped the trunk with thread she begged and stole. She took me out there and say, ‘We gon put our spirits in the tree so they safe from harm.’ We kneel on her quilt from Africa, nothing but a shred now, and we give our spirits to the tree. She say our spirits live in the tree with the birds, learning to fly. She told me, ‘If you leave this place, go get your spirit and take it with you.’ We used to gather up leaves and twigs from round the tree and stick ’em in pouches to wear at our necks.”

  Her hand went to her throat like she was feeling for it.

  She said, “Mauma died of a croup one winter. I was sixteen. I could sew anything there was. ’Bout that time the massa got in money-debt and sold off every one of us. I got bought by massa Grimké for his place in Union. Night ’fore I left, I went and got my spirit from the tree and took it with me.

  “I want you to know, your daddy was good as gold. His name was Shanney. He work in massa Grimké’s fields. One day missus say I got to come sew for her in Charleston. I say awright, but bring Shanney, he my husband. She say Shanney a field slave, and maybe I see him sometime when I back for a visit. You was already inside me, and nobody knew. Shanney die from a cut on his leg ’fore you a year old. He never saw your face.”

  Mauma stopped talking. She was done. She went to sleep then and left the story bent perfect over me.

  Next morning when I eased out of bed headed for the privy, I bumped into a basket sitting by the door. Inside it was a big bottle of liniment and some medicine-tea.

  That day I went back to tending Miss Sarah. I slipped into her room while she was reading one of her books. She was shy to bring up what happened to mauma, so I said, “We got your basket.”

  Her face eased. “Tell your mother I’m sorry for her treatment, and I hope she’ll feel better soon,” and it wasn’t any toil in her words.

  “That mean a lot to us,” I said.

  She laid the book down and came where I was standing by the chimney place and put her arms round me. It was hard to know where things stood. People say love gets fouled by a difference big as ours. I didn’t know for sure whether Miss Sarah’s feelings came from love or guilt. I didn’t know whether mine came from love or a need to be safe. She loved me and pitied me. And I loved her and used her. It never was a simple thing. That day, our hearts were pure as they ever would get.

  Sarah

  Spring turned to summer, and when Madame Ruffin suspended classes until the fall, I asked Thomas to expand our private lessons on the piazza.

  “I’m afraid we have to stop them altogether,” he said. “I have my own studies to consider. Father has ordered me to undertake a systematic study of his law books in preparation for Yale.”

  “I could help you!” I cried.

  “Sarah, Sarah, quite contra-rah.” It was the phrase he used when his refusal was foregone and final.

  He had no idea the extent I’d enmeshed him in my plans. There was a string of barrister firms on Broad Street, from the Exchange to St. Michael’s, and I pictured the two of us partnered in one of them with a signboard out front, Grimké and Grimké. Of course, there would be an out-and-out skirmish with the rank and file, but with Thomas at my side and Father at my back, nothing would prevent it.

  I bore down on Father’s law books every afternoon myself.

  In the mornings, I read aloud to Hetty in my room with the door bolted. When the air cooked to unbearable degrees, we escaped to the piazza, and there, sitting side by side in the swing, we sang songs that Hetty composed, most of them about traveling across water by boat or whale. Her legs swung back and forth like little batons. Sometimes we sat before the windows in the second-floor alcove and played Lace the String. Hetty always seemed to have a stash of red thread in her dress pocket and we spent hours passing it through our upstretched fingers, creating intricate, bloodshot mazes in the air.

  Such occupations are what girls do together, but it was the first occasion for either of us, and we carried them out as covertly as possible to avoid Mother putting an end to them. We were crossing a dangerous line, Hetty and I.

  One morning while Charleston turned miserably on the brazier of summer, Hetty and I lay flat on our stomachs on the rug in my room while I read aloud from Don Quixote. The week before, Mother had ordered the mosquito nettings out of storage and affixed above the beds in anticipation of the bloodsucking season, but having no such protection, the slaves were already scratching and clawing at their skin. They rubbed themselves with lard and molasses to draw out the itch and trailed its eau de cologne through the house.

  Hetty dug at an inflamed mosquito bite on her forearm and frowned at the book pages as if they were some kind of irresolvable
code. I wanted her to listen to the exploits of the knight and Sancho Panza, but she interrupted me repeatedly, placing her finger on some word or other, asking, “What does that one say?” and I would have to break off the story to tell her. She’d done the same thing recently as we read The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, and I wondered if, perhaps, she was merely bored with the antics of men, from the shipwrecked to the chivalrous.

  As I sent my voice into dramatic lilts and accents, trying to lure her back into the tale, the room grew dark, tinctured with an approaching storm. Wind blew through the open window, coming thick with the smell of rain and oleander, swirling the veils of the mosquito net. I stopped reading, as thunder broke and rain splatted across the sill.

  Hetty and I leapt up in unison and drew down the pane, and there, swooping low in the yellow gloom, was the young owl that Charlotte and Hetty had fed faithfully through the spring. It had grown out of its fledgling ways, but it had not vacated its residence in the woodpile.

  I watched it fly straight toward us, arcing across George Street and gliding over the work yard wall, its comical barn owl face strikingly visible. As the bird disappeared, Hetty went to light the lamp, but I was fixed there. What came to me was the day at the woodpile when Charlotte first showed me the bird, and I remembered the oath I’d made to help Hetty become free, a promise impossible to fulfill and one that continued to cause me no end of guilt, but it suddenly rang clear in me for the first time: Charlotte said I should help Hetty get free any way I could.

  Turning, I watched her carry the lantern to my dressing table, light swilling about her feet. When she set it down, I said, “Hetty, shall I teach you to read?”

  Equipped with an elementary primer, two blue-back spellers, a slate board, and lump of chalk, we began daily lessons in my room. Not only did I lock the door, I screened the keyhole. Our tutorials went on throughout the morning for two or more hours. When we ended them, I wrapped the materials in a swath of coarse cloth, known as Negro cloth, and tucked the bundle beneath my bed.

  I’d never taught anyone to read, but I’d been tutored in copious amounts of Latin by Thomas and subjected to enough of Madame to devise a reasonable scheme. As it turned out, Hetty had a knack. Within a week, she could write and recite the alphabet. Within two, she was sounding out words in the spellers. I’ll never forget the moment when she made the magical connection in her mind and the letters and sounds passed from nonsense into meaning. After that, she read through the primer with growing proficiency.

  By page forty, she had a vocabulary of eighty-six words. I recorded and numbered each one she mastered on a sheaf of paper. “When you reach a hundred words,” I promised her, “we’ll celebrate with a tea.”

  She began to decipher words on apothecary labels and food jars. “How do you spell Hetty?” she wanted to know. “How do you spell water?” Her appetite to learn was voracious.

  Once, I glimpsed her in the work yard writing in the dirt with a stick and I raced into the yard to stop her. She’d scrawled W-A-T-E-R with exact penmanship for the entire world to see.

  “What are you doing?” I said, rubbing the letters away with my foot. “Someone will see.”

  She was equally exasperated with me. “Don’t you think I got my own foot to rub out letters, if somebody comes along?”

  She conquered her hundredth word on the thirteenth of July.

  We held her celebratory tea the next day on the hipped roof of the house, hoping to catch sight of the Bastille Day festivities. We had a sizeable French population from St. Domingo, a French theatre, and a French finishing school on every corner. A French hair-dresser frizzed and powdered Mother and her friends, regaling them with accounts of the guillotining of Marie Antoinette, which he claimed to have witnessed. Charleston was British to the soles of its feet, but it observed the destruction of the Bastille with as much zeal as our own independence.

  We climbed into the attic with two china cups and a jar of black tea spiked with hyssop and honey. From there, we mounted a ladder that led to a hatch in the roof. Thomas had discovered the secret opening at thirteen and taken me up to wander among the chimneys. Snow spotted us as he drove Mother home from one of her charity missions, and without a word to her, he’d climbed up and retrieved us. I’d not ventured here since.

  Hetty and I nestled into one of the gullies on the south side with our backs against a slope. She claimed never to have drunk from a china cup and gulped quickly, while I sipped slowly and stared at the hard blue pane over our heads. When the populace marched in procession along Broad Street, they were too far away for us to see, but we heard them singing the Hymne des Marseillois. The bells of St. Philip’s chimed and there was a salute of thirteen guns.

  Birds had been loitering on the roof, and scatterings of feathers were here and there. Hetty tucked them into her pockets, and something about this created a feeling of tenderness in me. Perhaps I was a little drunk on hyssop and honey, on the novelty of being girls together on the roof. Whatever it was, I began telling Hetty confidences I’d kept only with myself.

  I told her I was accomplished at eavesdropping, that I’d stood outside Charlotte’s room the night she was punished and heard the story she told.

  “I know,” she said. “You not so good at snooping as you think.”

  I spilled every possible secret. My sister Mary despised me. Thomas had been my only friend. I’d been dismissed as an unfit teacher of slave children, but she shouldn’t worry, it was not due to incompetence.

  As I went on, my revelations turned grave. “I saw Rosetta being whipped one time,” I told her. “I was four. That was when the trouble with my speech began.”

  “It seems like you’re talking all right now.”

  “It comes and goes.”

  “Was Rosetta hurt bad?”

  “I think it was very bad.”

  “What’d she do wrong?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t ask—I couldn’t speak afterward, not for weeks.”

  We turned taciturn, leaning back and gazing at the crenulated clouds. Talk of Rosetta had sobered us more than I’d intended, far too much for a tea celebrating a hundred-word vocabulary.

  Hoping to restore the mood, I said, “I’m going to be a lawyer like my father.” I was surprised to hear myself blurt this out, the crown jewel of secrets, and feeling suddenly exposed, I added, “But you can’t tell anyone.”

  “I don’t have nobody to tell. Just mauma.”

  “Well, you can’t even tell her. Promise me.”

  She nodded.

  Satisfied, I thought of the lava box and my silver button. “Do you know how an object can stand for something entirely different than its purpose?” She looked at me blankly, while I tried to think of a way to explain. “You know my mother’s cane, for instance—how it’s meant to help her walk, but we all know what it stands for.”

  “Whacking heads.” After a pause, she added, “A triangle on a quilt stands for a blackbird wing.”

  “Yes, that’s what I mean. Well, I have a stone box in my dresser with a button inside. A button is meant for fastening clothes, but this one is beautiful, just plain uncommon, so I decided to let it stand for my desire to be a lawyer.”

  “I know about the button. I didn’t touch it, I just opened the box and looked at it.”

  “I don’t mind if you hold it,” I told her.

  “I have a thimble and it stands for pushing a needle and keeping my fingertip from turning sore, but I could let that stand for something else.”

  When I asked her what, she said, “I don’t know, ’cept I wanna sew like mauma.”

  Hetty got into the spirit. She retold the entire story I’d overheard her mother tell that night about her grandmother coming from Africa, appliquéing quilts with the triangles. When Hetty talked about the spirit tree, her voice took on a reverential tone.

&n
bsp; Before we went back down the hatch, Hetty said, “I took a spool of thread from your room. It was laying in your drawer no use to anybody. I’m sorry, I can bring it back.”

  “Oh. Well, go ahead and keep it, but please Hetty, don’t steal anymore, even little things. You could land in terrible trouble.”

  As we descended the ladder, she said, “My real name is Handful.”

  Handful

  Mauma came down with a limp. When she was in her room or in the kitchen house for meals, she didn’t have any trouble, but the minute she stepped in the yard, she dragged her leg like it was a dead log. Aunt-Sister and them watched her go lame and shook their heads. They didn’t like that kind of trick and didn’t mind saying it. Mauma told them, “After you get your one-legged punishment, you can say all you want. Till then, you best shut up.”

  After that, they stayed clear of her. Stopped talking if she showed up, started back when she left. Mauma said it was a hateful shun.

  Her eyes burned with anger all the time now. Sometimes she turned her blackened stare on me. Sometimes she turned it to cleverness. One day I found her at the foot of the stairs, explaining to missus she had a hard time climbing up to do her sewing, and for that matter, a hard time climbing the carriage house steps to her room. She said, “But I gon make out somehow, don’t worry.” Then while missus and me watched, she pulled on the bannister and dragged herself to the top, calling on Jesus the whole way.

  Next we know, missus had Prince clear out a big room in the cellar, on the side of the house that backed up to the work yard wall. He moved mauma’s bed in there and all her stuff. Took the quilt frame down from her old ceiling and nailed it on the new one. Missus said mauma would do all the sewing in her room from here out and had Prince bring down the lacquer sewing table.