The Invention of Wings

by Sue Monk Kidd

There was a time in Africa the people could fly.

First sentence 10/10

“You don’t believe me? Where you think these shoulder blades of yours come from, girl?” Those skinny bones stuck out from my back like nubs. She patted them and said, “This all what left of your wings. They nothing but these flat bones now, but one day you gon get ’em back.”

Magic

We weren’t some special people who lost our magic. We were slave people, and we weren’t going anywhere. It was later I saw what she meant. We could fly all right, but it wasn’t any magic to it.

Oops

was a handful. That’s not how I got my name, though. Handful was my basket name. The master and missus, they did all the proper naming, but a mauma would look on her baby laid in its basket and a name would come to her, something about what her baby looked like, what day of the week it was, what the weather was doing, or just how the world seemed on that day. My mauma’s basket name was Summer, but her proper name was Charlotte. She had a brother whose basket name was Hardtime. People think I make that up, but it’s true as it can be.

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. Missus called out to Tomfry, said keep it down, a lady shouldn’t know where her bacon comes from.

After I got the wash finished, I was left idle and pleased to enjoy sin number three. I followed a path I’d worn in the dirt from looping it ten, twelve times a day. I started at the back of the main house, walked past the kitchen house and the laundry out to the spreading tree.

Love this

The path took me cross the whole map of the world I knew. I hadn’t yet seen the spinning globe in the house that showed the rest of it.

Our three-storied house was one of the grandest in Charleston, but it lacked enough bedrooms, considering how . . . well, fruitful Mother was. There were ten of us: John, Thomas, Mary, Frederick, and myself, followed by the nursery dwellers—Anna, Eliza, Ben, Henry, and baby Charles.

I was the middle one, the one Mother called different and Father called remarkable, the one with the carroty hair and the freckles, whole constellations of them. My brothers had once traced Orion, the Dipper, and Ursa Major on my cheeks and forehead with charcoal, connecting the bright red specks, and I hadn’t minded—I’d been their whole sky for hours.

When Binah finished arranging my hair combs and ribbons on the lavish Hepplewhite atop my new dressing table, she turned to me, and I must have looked forsaken standing there because she clucked her tongue against the roof of her mouth and said, “Poor Miss Sarah.” I did so despise the attachment of Poor to my name. Binah had been muttering Poor Miss Sarah like an incantation since I was four.

“You must promise never to run away again. Promise me.” I want to. I try to. The words are on my tongue—the rounded lumps of them, shining like the marbles beneath the tree. “Sarah!” she demands. Nothing comes. Not a sound. I remained mute for a week. My words seemed sucked into the cleft between my collar bones. I rescued them by degrees, by praying, bullying and wooing. I came to speak again, but with an odd and mercurial form of stammer. I’d never been a fluid speaker, even my first spoken words had possessed a certain belligerent quality, but now there were ugly, halting gaps between my sentences, endless seconds when the words cowered against my lips and people averted their eyes.

Next morning mauma handed me a quilt matched to my length and told me I couldn’t sleep with her anymore. From here on out, I would sleep on the floor in the hall outside Miss Sarah’s bed chamber. Mauma said, “Don’t get off your quilt for nothin’ but Miss Sarah calling. Don’t wander ’bout. Don’t light no candle. Don’t make noise. When Miss Sarah rings the bell, you make haste.” Mauma told me, “It gon be hard from here on, Handful.”

“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!”

For a woman to aspire to be a lawyer—well, possibly, the world would end. But an acorn grew into an oak tree, didn’t it?

When I peered round the door jam into our room, I saw the blankets torn off the bed, the wash basin turned over, and our flannel gunny sack dumped upside down, quilt-fillings everywhere. Aunt-Sister was working the pulley to lower the quilt frame. It had a quilt-top on it with raw edges, bright little threads fluttering. Nobody looked at me standing in the doorway, just mauma whose eyes always went to me. Her lids sank shut and she didn’t open them back. The wheels on the pulley sang and the frame floated down to that squeaky music. There on top of the unfinished quilt was a bolt of bright green cloth.

“How come you took it?” “Cause,” she said. “Cause I could.” Those words stuck with me. Mauma didn’t want that cloth, she just wanted to make some trouble. She couldn’t get free and she couldn’t pop missus on the back of her head with a cane, but she could take her silk. You do your rebellions any way you can.

“Slaves, be obedient to them that are your masters, with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as unto Christ.” Then he made what many, including my mother, would call the most eloquent extemporization on slavery they’d ever heard. “Slaves, I admonish you to be content with your lot, for it is the will of God! Your obedience is mandated by scripture. It is commanded by God through Moses. It is approved by Christ through his apostles, and upheld by the church. Take heed, then, and may God in his mercy grant that you will be humbled this day and return to your masters as faithful servants.”

How do you not scream hearing this

“We do not sing in Colored Sunday School, and we most assuredly do not sing the alphabet. Are you aware it is against the law to teach a slave to read?” I knew of this law, though vaguely, as if it had been stored in a root cellar in my head and suddenly dug up like some moldy yam.

Surely he wouldn’t claim this was God’s will, too. He waited for me to answer, and when I didn’t, he said, “Would you put the church in contradiction of the law?” The memory of Hetty that day when Mother caned her flashed through my mind, and I raised my chin and glared at him, without answering.

Monday, after we got done with devotions, Aunt-Sister took mauma aside. She said missus had a friend who didn’t like floggings and had come up with the one-legged punishment.

Don’t let her fall anymore. That’s the prayer I said. Missus told us God listened to everybody, even a slave got a piece of God’s ear. I carried a picture of God in my head, a white man, bearing a stick like missus or going round dodging slaves the way master Grimké did, acting like he’d sired a world where they don’t exist. I couldn’t see him lifting a finger to help.

God as a white male literally ew

“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.

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.”

Mauma say in Africa they sew charms in their quilts. I put pieces of my hair down inside mine.

“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.”

’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.

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?”

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.

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.

Traa dump tho?

“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.”

Once mauma got the place fixed like a palace, she asked Aunt-Sister could they all come give a prayer for her “poor sorry room.” One evening here came the lot of them all too glad to see how poor and sorry it was. Mauma offered each of them a coffee bean. She let them look to their hearts’ content, then showed them how the door locked with an iron slide bolt, how she had her own privy pot under the bed, which it fell to me to empty, considering how cripple she was. She made a lot over the wooden cane missus had given her for getting round. When Aunt-Sister left mauma’s party, she spit on the floor outside the door, and Cindie came behind her and did the same thing. Best thing was, I could get to the new room without leaving the house.

Mauma loved that lock on her door. If she was in her room, you could be sure it was latched, and if she was sleeping, I had to pound my knuckles sore till she roused.

When she thought I was sleeping, she got up and paced the room, humming a quiet sound through her lips. Those nights, something dark and heedless was loose in her.

A little air might fuss round mauma’s window, but it was like a smelter in there most of the time.

Ok hot

Every year the men got two brown shirts and two white, two pants, two vests. Women got three dresses, four aprons, and a head scarf.

the quilt frame and pieced everything together. I hemmed on the homespun backing myself, and we filled the inside with all the batting and feathers we had. I cut a plug of my hair and plug of mauma’s and put them inside for charms.

Everybody with an ear could hear missus shout at mauma for her laziness, and mauma cry out, “Oh, missus, pray for me, I wants to do better.”

When she saw the tea trays Aunt-Sister left in the warming kitchen for Cindie to take up, she would drop whatever bit of nastiness she could into the teapot. Dirt off the floor, lint off the rug, spit from her mouth. I told Miss Sarah, stay clear of the tea trays.

It came in the night while I was in bed with mauma. The wind screamed and threw limbs against the house. So many palm trees rattled in the dark, mauma and I had to shout to hear each other. We sat in the bed and watched the rain pitch against the high window and pour in round the edges. Floodwater washed under the door. I sang my songs loud as I could to take my mind from it.

Beneath the branches, the ground was a wet slate of clay. Taking a stick, I wrote BABY BOY BLUE BLOW YOUR HORN HETTY, digging the letters deep in the starchy mud, pleased at my penmanship. When Aunt-Sister called me to the kitchen house, I smeared over the words with the toe of my shoe.

Looking from the window, we saw Lucy, Miss Mary’s waiting maid, under the tree and the sail still caught in the branches. We saw Miss Mary lead missus cross the yard right to where Lucy stood looking at the ground, and a hot feeling came up from my stomach and spread over my chest.

slaves who read are a threat. They would be abreast of news that would incite them in ways we could not control. Yes, it’s unfair to deprive them, but there’s a greater good here that must be protected.” “. . . . . . . . . But Father, it’s wrong!” I cried. “Are you so impudent as to challenge me even now? When you left the document on my desk freeing your slave girl, I should have brought you to your senses then and there, but I cosseted you. I thought by tearing the fool thing in two and returning it to you, you would understand we Grimkés do not subvert the institutions and laws by which we live, even if we don’t agree with them.” I felt confused and very stupid. Father had torn up my manumission paper. Father.

You couldnt trust anyone

and that’s when I first saw my father as he really was—a man who valued principle over love.

Tomfry raised his arm. “No!” I screamed. “Nooooo!” He turned toward me, hesitating, and relief filled his face. Then I heard Mother’s cane tap the glass on the upstairs window, and Tomfry lifted his tired eyes toward the sound. He nodded and brought the lash down across Handful’s back.

Hes trouble

Tomfry said he tried not to put much force in it, but the strike flayed open my skin. Miss Sarah made a poultice with Balm of Gilead buds soaked in master Grimké’s rum, and mauma handed the whole flask to me and said, “Here, go on, drink it, too.” I don’t hardly remember the pain. The gash healed fast, but Miss Sarah’s hurt got worse and worse. Her voice had gone back to stalling and she pined for her books. That was one wretched girl.

It’d been Lucy who ran tattling to Miss Mary about my lettering under the tree, and Miss Mary had run tattling to missus. I’d judged Lucy to be stupid, but she was only weak-willed and wanting to get in good with Miss Mary.

Arent they kind of all

Mauma burned so many candles working in the dark, she took to swiping them from whatever room she happened on. Her eyes grew down to squints and the skin round them wrinkled like drawing a straight stitch. She was tired and frayed but she seemed better off inside.

News of a missing slave flies like brush fire. When I heard the news, my heart dropped to my knees. Missus used her bell and gathered everybody in the yard, up near the back door. She laid her hands on top of her big pregnant belly and said, “If you know Charlotte’s whereabouts, you are duty bound to tell me.” Not a peep from anybody. Missus cast her eyes on me. “Hetty? Where is your mother?” I shrugged and acted stumped. “I don’t know, missus. Wish I did know.”

Mother ordered me to snap from my inwardness and misery, and I did try, but my despair only grew. Mother summoned our physician, Dr. Geddings, who after much probing decided I suffered from severe melancholy. I listened at the door as he told Mother he’d never witnessed a case in someone so young, that this kind of lunacy occurred in women after childbirth or at the withdrawal of a woman’s menses. He declared me a high-strung, temperamental girl with predilections to hysteria, as evidenced by my speech.

and most tantalizing, what the abolition of slavery in the Northern states, most recently in New Jersey, boded for the South. Abolition by law? I’d never heard of it and craned to get every snippet. Did those in the North, then, believe God to be sided against slavery?