The Invention Of Wings Part 4

A cold swell began in my stomach. Strapped her up? Who? Not Hetty, surely.

"What she think would happen if she pilfer like that?" I believed that voice to be Cindie's. "What'd she say for herself?"

Aunt-Sister spoke again. "She won't talk. Handful up there in bed with her, talking for both of 'em."

"Poor Charlotte," said Binah.

Charlotte! They'd strapped her up. What did that mean? Rosetta's melodic keening rose in my memory. I saw them bind her hands. I saw the cowhide split her back and the blood-flowers open and die on her skin.

I don't remember returning to the house, only that I was suddenly in the warming kitchen, ransacking the locked cupboard where Mother kept her curatives. Having unlocked it often to retrieve a bromide for Father, I easily found the key and removed the blue bottle of liniment oil and a jar of sweet balm tea. Into the tea, I dropped two grains of laudanum.

As I stuffed them into a basket, Mother entered the corridor. "What, pray tell, are you doing?"

I threw the question back at her. ". . . . . . What did you do?"

"Young lady, hold your tongue!"

Hold my tongue? I'd held the poor, tortured thing the near whole of my life.

". . . . . . What did you do?" I said again, almost shouting.

She drew her lips tight and yanked the basket from my arm.

An unknown ferocity took me over. I wrenched the basket back from her and strode toward the door.

"You will not set foot from this house!" she ordered. "I forbid it."

I stepped through the back door into the soft gloom, into the terror and thrill of defiance. The sky had gone cobalt. Wind was coursing in hard from the harbor.

Mother followed me, shrieking, "I forbid it." Her words flapped off on the breezes, past the oak branches, over the brick fence.

Behind us, shoes sc.r.a.ped on the kitchen house porch, and turning, we saw Aunt-Sister, Binah, Cindie, all of them shadowed in the billowy dark, looking at us.

Mother stood white-faced on the porch steps.

"I'm going to see about Charlotte." I said. The words slid effortlessly over my lips like a cascade of water, and I knew instantly the nervous affliction in my voice had gone back into hibernation, for that was how it had happened in the past, the debility gradually weakening, until one day I opened my mouth and there was no trace of it.

Mother noticed, too. She said nothing more, and I trod toward the carriage house without looking back.

Handful.

When dark fell, mauma started to shake. Her head lolled and her teeth clattered. It wasn't like Rosetta and her fits, where all her limbs jerked, it was like mauma was cold inside her bones. I didn't know what to do but pat her arms and legs. After a while, she grew still. Her breathing drew heavy, and before I knew it, I drifted off myself.

I started dreaming and in that dream I was sleeping. I slept under an arbor of thick green. It was bent perfect over me. Vines hung round my arms. Scuppernongs fell alongside my face. I was the girl sleeping, but at the same time I could see myself, like I was part of the clouds floating by, and then I looked down and saw the arbor wasn't really an arbor, it was our quilt frame covered in vines and leaves. I went on sleeping, watching myself sleeping, and the clouds went on floating, and I saw inside the thick green again. This time, it was mauma herself inside there.

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 sc.r.a.p of quilt her mauma made. In Africa, her mauma was a quilter, best there is. They was Fon people and sewed applique, 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 ma.s.sa, 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 ma.s.sa got in money-debt and sold off every one of us. I got bought by ma.s.sa Grimke 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 ma.s.sa Grimke'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 n.o.body 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 b.u.mped 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 cla.s.ses 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, Grimke and Grimke. 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 pa.s.sing 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 antic.i.p.ation 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 mola.s.ses 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 coa.r.s.e 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 pa.s.sed 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 appet.i.te 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 Ma.r.s.eillois. 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 n.o.body 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 b.u.t.ton. "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 b.u.t.ton inside. A b.u.t.ton 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."