The Invention of Wings

by Sue Monk Kidd

Mauma was gone sure as I’m sitting here and I couldn’t do a thing but walk the yard trying to siphon my sorrow. The sorry truth is you can walk your feet to blisters, walk till kingdom-come, and you never will outpace your grief.

I was cut straight from my mauma’s cloth.

I gave her a curtsy from the top step, thinking what Mr. Vesey said one time at church: I have one mind for the master to see. I have another mind for what I know is me.

She was kind to me and she was part of everything that stole my life.

How does one know the voice is God’s? I believed the voice bidding me to go north belonged to him, though perhaps what I really heard that day was my own impulse to freedom. Perhaps it was my own voice. Does it matter?

I feel alone and helpless here—Nina’s words, but I felt them like my own.

“. . . Why would God plant such deep yearnings in us . . . if they only come to nothing?” It was more of a sigh than a question. I was thinking of Charlotte and her longing to be free, but as the words left my mouth, I knew I was thinking of myself, too. I hadn’t really expected Lucretia to respond, but after a moment, she spoke. “God fills us with all sorts of yearnings that go against the grain of the world—but the fact those yearnings often come to nothing, well, I doubt that’s God’s doing.” She cut her eyes at me and smiled. “I think we know that’s men’s doing.” She leaned toward me. “Life is arranged against us, Sarah. And it’s brutally worse for Handful and her mother and sister. We’re all yearning for a wedge of sky, aren’t we? I suspect God plants these yearnings in us so we’ll at least try and change the course of things. We must try, that’s all.” I felt her words tear a hole in the life I’d made. An irreparable hole.

I remembered us, as I always did, on the roof drinking tea, but that was gone and it was all balled-up paper now.

I still have the silver button you rescued after I tossed it out. As I write you now, it sits beside the inkwell, reminding me of the destiny I always believed was inside of me, waiting. How can I explain such a thing? I simply know it the way I know there’s an oak tree inside an acorn. I’ve been filled with a hunger to grow this seed my whole life. I used to think I was supposed to become a lawyer, perhaps because that’s what Father and Thomas did, but it was never that. These days, I feel inspired to become a Quaker minister. Doing so will at least provide me a way to do what I tried to do on my eleventh birthday, that day you were cruelly given to me to own. It will allow me to tell whoever might listen that I can’t accept this, that we can’t accept slavery, it must end. That’s what I was born for—not the ministry, not the law, but abolition. I’ve come to know it only this night, but it has always been the tree in the acorn.

For weeks, I’d resisted writing to Nina, but now it was done, and it seemed a turning point, an abdication of what I’d always been to her: mother, rescuer, exemplar. I didn’t want to be those things anymore. I wanted to be what I was, her fallible sister.

I’d chosen the regret I could live with best, that’s all. I’d chosen the life I belonged to.

“It has come as a great revelation to me,” I wrote her, “that abolition is different from the desire for racial equality. Color prejudice is at the bottom of everything. If it’s not fixed, the plight of the Negro will continue long after abolition.”

As he left, I peered at Sarah Mapps and her mother, the way they grabbed hands and squeezed in relief, and then at Nina, at the small exultation on her face. She was braver than I, she always had been. I cared too much for the opinion of others, she cared not a whit. I was cautious, she was brash. I was a thinker, she was a doer. I kindled fires, she spread them. And right then and ever after, I saw how cunning the Fates had been. Nina was one wing, I was the other.

I stared at the black plank of rafter over my head and felt the truth and logic of that, and it came to me that what I feared most was not speaking. That fear was old and tired. What I feared was the immensity of it all—a female abolition agent traveling the country with a national mandate. I wanted to say, Who am I to do this, a woman? But that voice was not mine. It was Father’s voice. It was Thomas’. It belonged to Israel, to Catherine, and to Mother. It belonged to the church in Charleston and the Quakers in Philadelphia. It would not, if I could help it, belong to me.