The Invention of Wings

by Sue Monk Kidd

Noise was on her list of slave sins, which we knew by heart. Number one: stealing. Number two: disobedience. Number three: laziness. Number four: noise. A slave was supposed to be like the Holy Ghost—don’t see it, don’t hear it, but it’s always hovering round on ready.

Mary didn’t seem to care for books, but I . . . I dreamed of them in my sleep. I loved them in a way I couldn’t fully express even to Thomas. He pointed me to certain volumes and drilled me on Latin declensions. He was the only one who knew my desperation to acquire a true education,

wanted to know things, to become someone. Oh, to be a son! I adored Father because he treated me almost as if I were a son, allowing me to slip in and out of his library.

“Why should God’s perfection be based on having an unchanging nature?” I asked. “Isn’t flexibility more perfect than stasis?”

Father slapped his hand on the table. “If Sarah was a boy, she would be the greatest jurist in South Carolina!”

At the time, I’d been awed by his words, but it wasn’t until now, waking up in my new room, that I saw their true meaning. The comprehension of my destin...

For a woman, nothing existed but the domestic sphere and those tiny flowers etched on the pages of my art book. For a woman to aspire to be a law...

If everyone was so keen to Christianize the slaves, why weren’t they taught to read the Bible for themselves?

“Every man is guilty of all the good he didn’t do.”

~ Voltaire

“You should be the lawyer. Father said you would be the greatest in South Carolina, do you remember?”

I looked at Thomas and felt confirmed in my destiny. I had an ally. A true, unbending ally.

Their laughter would ring out abruptly, a sound Mother welcomed. “Our slaves are happy,” she would boast. It never occurred to her their gaiety wasn’t contentment, but survival.

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.

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.

“Hetty, shall I teach you to read?”

“Your father believes you are an anomalous girl with your craving for books and your aspirations, but he’s wrong.”

“The truth,” she said, “is that every girl must have ambition knocked out of her for her own good. You are unusual only in your determination to fight what is inevitable. You resisted and so it came to this, to being broken like a horse.”

There’s no pain on earth that doesn’t crave a benevolent witness.

My aspiration to become a jurist had been laid to rest in the Graveyard of Failed Hopes, an all-female establishment.

I saw then what I hadn’t seen before, that I was very good at despising slavery in the abstract, in the removed and anonymous masses, but in the concrete, intimate flesh of the girl beside me, I’d lost the ability to be repulsed by it. I’d grown comfortable with the particulars of evil. There’s a frightful muteness that dwells at the center of all unspeakable things, and I had found my way into it.

By law, a slave was three-fifths of a person.

The sorry truth is you can walk your feet to blisters, walk till kingdom-come, and you never will outpace your grief.

have one mind for the master to see. I have another mind for what I know is me.

thalassotherapy.

Sea air.

God’s way is narrow and the cost is great. I remind you of the scripture: “He that finds his life shall lose it, and he that loses his life shall find it.” Do not fear to lose what needs to be lost.

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 m...

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’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...

“As long as we talk about being good helpmates to our husbands, it’s well and good,” Lucretia had told me once, “but the moment we veer into social matters, or God forbid, politics, they want to silence us like children!”

She gave me courage, Lucretia did.

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

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 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.

“History is not just facts and events. History is also a pain in the heart and we repeat history until we are able to make another’s pain in the heart our own.”