The Invention of Wings

by Sue Monk Kidd

Walking back to the house, I felt the noose of that strange and intimate exchange pull into a knot.

I remembered the way one remembers the sun, the moon, and the stars hanging in the sky.

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

how the word slavery was not suitable in polite company, but referred to as the peculiar institution.

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

The next morning, I couldn’t get out of bed. I tried very hard, but it was as if something in me had dropped anchor. I rolled my face into the pillow. I no longer cared. During the days that followed, Handful

brought me trays of food, which I barely touched. I had no hunger for anything except sleep, and it eluded me. Some nights I wandered onto the piazza and stared over the rail at the garden, imagining myself falling.

When spring came and my state of mind didn’t improve, Dr. Geddings arrived. Mother seemed genuinely afraid for me. She visited my room with handfuls of drooping jonquils and spoke sweetly, saying I should come for a stroll

I sat in my room at midday with my eyes closed and my fingers laced in my lap, listening for the Voice the Quakers seemed so sure was inside of us.

I asked him pointedly what the Inner Voice sounded like. How will I recognize it? “I cannot tell you,” he wrote. “But when you hear it, you will know.”

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?

In September, before summer left us, I was fathoms deep on the mattress in my room when the sound of crying broke into my slumber and I came swimming up from a dark blue sleep.

It was April and half the heat from hell had already showed up in Charleston.

If you don’t know where you’re going, you should know where you came from.

Entreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy people will be my people, and thy God my God. Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried. The Lord do so to me, and more also, if ought but death part thee and me.

For a moment I felt the quiet hungering thing that comes inside when you return to the place of your origins, and then the ache of mis-belonging.