The Invention of Wings

by Sue Monk Kidd

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.

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

She’d immersed herself in forbidden privileges, yes, but mostly in the belief she was worthy of those privileges. What she’d done was not a revolt, it was a baptism. 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.

At the African church, Mr. Vesey used to say, Be careful, you can get enslaved twice, once in your body and once in your mind. I tried to tell her that. I said, “My body might be a slave, but not my mind. For you, it’s the other way round.” She blinked at me and the tears came again, shining like cut-glass.

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.

In writing The Invention of Wings, I was inspired by the words of Professor Julius Lester, which I kept propped on my desk: “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.”