The Invention of Wings

by Sue Monk Kidd

Everything she knew came from living on the scarce side of mercy.

As she walked to the door, I struggled to pry the words from my mouth before she exited. “. . . . . . Mother, please, let me. . . . . . let me give Hetty back to you.” Give Hetty back. As if she was mine after all. As if owning people was as natural as breathing. For all my resistance about slavery, I breathed that foul air, too. “Your guardianship is legal and binding. Hetty is yours, Sarah, there is nothing to be done about it.” “.

This is our way of life, dear one, make your peace with it.”

When I opened my eyes, everything was the same. The room still bore patches of early light, the dress lay like a blue heap of sky on the floor, the silver button was clutched in my palm, but I felt God had heard me.

would rove down the hallway to the front alcove where I could see the water in the harbor float to the ocean and the ocean roll on till it sloshed against the sky. Nothing could hold a glorybound picture to it. First time I saw it, my feet hopped in place and I lifted my hand over my head and danced. That’s when I got true religion. I didn’t know to call it religion back then, didn’t know Amen from what-when, I just knew something came into me that made me feel the water belonged to me. I would say, that’s my water out there.

My only liaisons with Charlotte had been dress fittings, but I’d always detected a keenness in her. Of all the slaves Father owned, she struck me as the most intelligent, and perhaps the most dangerous, which would turn out to be true enough.

I’ll be kind to Hetty,” I said abruptly. The words—remorseful and lordly—came out as if some pustule of guilt had disgorged. Her eyes flashed open, then narrowed into small burrs. They were honey colored, the same as Hetty’s. “. . . . . . I never meant to own her . . . I tried to free her, but . . . I wasn’t allowed.” I couldn’t seem to stop myself. Charlotte slid her hand into her apron pocket, and silence welled unbearably. She’d seen my guilt and she used it with cunning. “That’s awright,” she said. “Cause I know you gon make that up to her one these days.” The letter M clamped on to my tongue with its little jaws. “. . . . . . . . . M-m-make it up?” “I mean, I know you gon hep her any way you can to get free.” “. . . . . . Yes, I’ll try,” I said. “What I need is you swearing to it.” I nodded, hardly understanding that I’d been deftly guided into a covenant. “You keep your word,” she said. “I know you will.” Remembering

I went through the wardrobe, touching the frocks mauma’d made. I nosed through the dressing table drawer, pulling out jewelry, hair ribbons, paper fans, bottles and brushes, and finally, a little box. It glistened dark like my skin when it was wet. I pushed up the latch. Inside was a big silver button. I touched it, then closed the lid the same slow way I’d closed her wardrobe, her drawers, and her books—with my chest filling up. There was so much in the world to be had and not had.

I have knots in my years that I can’t undo, and this is one of the worst—the night I did wrong and mauma got caught.

I was about asleep when she said, “I should’ve sewed that green silk inside a quilt and she never would’ve found it. I ain’t sorry for stealing it, just for getting caught.” “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

You do your rebellions any way you can.

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

He frowned. “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?”

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.

Our experience shapes our understanding of God

Mauma’s legs would walk again same as ever, but she never was the same inside. After that day, it seemed part of her was always back there waiting for the strap to be loosed. It seemed like that’s when she started laying her cold fire of hate.

Some Experiences stay with us more than others . Is it necessarily theo ones that shape us most?

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

And this, “If God did not exist, man would have to invent him.” I didn’t know whether Reverend Hall had invented his God or I’d invented mine, but such ideas tantalized and disturbed me.

At times, they would break into song, their tunes sailing across the yard and slipping into the house. My favorite was a chant that grew rowdier as it went: Bread done broken. Let my Jesus go. Feet be tired. Let my Jesus go. Back be aching. Let my Jesus go. Teeth done fell out. Let my Jesus go. Rump be dragging. Let my Jesus go. 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.

She laid the book down and came where I was standing by the chimney place and put her arms round me. It was hard to know where things stood. 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.

As I went on, my revelations turned grave. “I saw Rosetta being whipped one time,” I told her. “I was four. That was when the trouble with my speech began.” “It seems like you’re talking all right now.” “It comes and goes.” “Was Rosetta hurt bad?” “I think it was very bad.” “What’d she do wrong?” “I don’t know. I didn’t ask—I couldn’t speak afterward, not for weeks.”

First sight of slave beating traumatic

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.”

Way of life was more important than moral principles to father and mother

When I’d espoused my anti-slavery views during those dinner table debates, Father beaming and spurring me on, I’d thought he prized my position. I’d thought he shared my position, but it hit me suddenly that I’d been the collared monkey dancing to his master’s accordion. Father had been amusing himself. Or perhaps he’d encouraged my dissenting opinion only because it gave the rest of them a way to sharpen their own opposing views. Perhaps he’d tolerated my notions because the debates had been a pitying oral exercise to help a defective daughter speak? Father crossed his arms over his white shirt and stared at me from beneath the unclipped hedge of his brows. His eyes were clear and brown and empty of compassion, and that’s when I first saw my father as he really was—a man who valued principle over love.

Inside my coat pocket, my fingertips stroked Miss Sarah’s silver button. It felt like a lump of ice. I’d plucked it from the ash can after she cast it off. I felt bad she had to give up her plan, but that didn’t mean you throw out a perfect good button.

Since that day a year past, I’d got myself a friend in Miss Sarah and found how to read and write, but it’d been a heartless road like mauma said, and I didn’t know what would come of us. We might stay here the rest of our lives with the sky slammed shut, but mauma had found the part of herself that refused to bow and scrape, and once you find that, you got trouble breathing on your neck.O

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

I’d vowed to Mother that Nina would become the purpose of my life, and so she was. In her, I had a voice that didn’t stammer and a heart that was unscathed. It’s true I lived a portion of my life through hers, and yes, I blurred the lines of self for both of us, but there was no one who loved Nina more than I did. She became my salvation, and I want to think I became hers. She’d called me Mother from the time she could talk. It came naturally, and I didn’t discourage it, but I did have the good sense to keep her from doing it in front of Mother. From the days Nina was in her crib, I’d proselytized her about the evils of slavery. I’d taught her everything I knew and believed, and though Mother must have had some idea I was molding her in my own image, she had no idea to what extent. With her braid complete, Nina climbed into my lap and began her usual pleading. “Don’t go! Stay with me.”

It seemed to me I did know what it felt to have one’s liberty curtailed, but she blazed up at me. “So we just the same, me and you? That’s why you the one to shit in the pot and I’m the one to empty it?” Her words stunned me, and I turned toward the window to hide my hurt. I heard her breathing in fury before she fled the room, not to return the rest of the day. We hadn’t spoken of it again.

The slaves moved among us with trays of custard and Huguenot tortes, holding doors, taking coats, stoking fires, moving without being seen, and I thought how odd it was that no one ever spoke of them, how the word slavery was not suitable in polite company, but referred to as the peculiar institution.

I’d thought little of Handful during my incarceration at Belmont, but on the day before we left, the fifteen-year-old slave I’d nursed appeared, cured of childbirth fever, but now with boils on her neck. Seeing her, I understood suddenly that it wasn’t only miles that separated Handful and me. It wasn’t any of those things I’d told myself, not my preoccupation with Nina, or Handful’s duties, or the natural course of age. It was some other growing gulf, one that had been there long before I’d left.

the crime of reading,

Hetty, 16 yrs. Lady’s Maid, Seamstress . . . 500.

What must it do to one's soul to have a value placed on you?

said under my breath, Five hundred dollars. Goods and chattel. The words from the leather book came into my head. We were like the gold leaf mirror and the horse saddle. Not full-fledge people. I didn’t believe this, never had believed it a day of my life, but if you listen to white folks long enough, some sad, beat-down part of you starts to wonder.O All that pride about what we were worth left me then. For the first time, I felt the hurt and shame of just being who I was. After a while, I went down to the cellar. When mauma saw my raw eyes, she said, “Ain’t nobody can write down in a book what you worth.”

She had the look of someone who’d declared herself, and seeing it, my indignation collapsed and her mutinous bath turned into something else entirely. 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.

The market was a row of stalls that ran all the way from East Bay to Meeting and had whatever under the sun you wanted.

Out in the streets, I always had the bad feeling of something coming, some meanness gathering.

Mauma’s free black man lived at 20 Bull. It was a white frame single house, had black shudders with the paint flecking off and scruffy bushes round the porch.

The worst troubling thing he told me was how his neighbor down the street—a free black named Mr. Robert Smyth—owned three slaves. Now what you supposed to do with something like that? Mr. Vesey had to take me to the man’s house to meet the slaves before I allowed any truth to it. I didn’t know whether this Mr. Smyth was behaving like white people, or if it just showed something vile about all people.

The two of us had a clash the first day we met. Like I said, I’d eased off down the street to let them know I didn’t have a need to see their urges. The street was busy, everybody from free blacks to the mayor and the governor lived on it, and when a white woman came along, walking in my path, I did the common thing you do—I stepped to the side to let her pass. It was the law, you were supposed to give way on the street, but here came Denmark Vesey charging down to where I stood with fury blowing from his nostrils, and mauma looking panic right behind him. He yanked me by the arm, yelled, “Is this the sort of person you want to be? The kind that steps aside? The kind that grovels in the street?” I wanted to say, Get your hand off me, you don’t know nothing about me, I bathe in a copper tub, and you’re standing here and stink to heaven. The air round my head turned thick and my throat tightened on it. I managed to say, “Let me go.” Behind

Someone had wronged Father? I drew as close to the door as I dared, but I could make little sense of the discussion. They spoke of an outrage, but didn’t name it. They vowed a defense, but against what? Through the gap in the door, I watched them move to the desk, where they closed ranks around a document. They pointed at various passages, jabbing it with their fingers, debating in low, purposeful tones. The sight of them roused my ravenous old hunger to take my place in the world, too, to have my part matter. How many years had elapsed since I threw away the silver button? I moved from the door, suddenly flush with anger. I was sorry for Father. He’d been wronged in some way, but here they all were ready to move heaven and earth to right it, and their wives, their mother, their sisters had no rights, not even to their own children. We couldn’t vote or testify in a court, or make a will—of course we couldn’t, we owned nothing to leave behind! Why didn’t the Grimké men assemble in our defense?

By law, a slave was three-fifths of a person. It came to me that what I’d just suggested would seem paramount to proclaiming vegetables equal to animals, animals equal to humans, women equal to men, men equal to angels. I was upending the order of creation. Strangest of all, it was the first time thoughts of equality had entered my head, and I could only attribute it to God, with whom I’d lately taken up and who was proving to be more insurrectionary than law-abiding.

Come December, I stopped all that. I halted in my track by the woodpile where we used to feed the little owl way back then, and I said out loud, “Damn you for saving yourself. How come you left me with nothing but to love you and hate you, and that’s gonna kill me, and you know it is.”

Now that she was gone, they loved her a lot better.

and I felt the ache for them to know the real woman mauma was, not just the cunning one, but the one smelted from iron, the one who paced the nights and prayed to my granny-mauma. Mauma had yearned more in a day than they felt in a year. She’d worked herself to the bone and courted danger, searching for something better. I wanted them to know that woman. That was the one who wouldn’t leave me.

Nina spoke for the first time. “Pardon me, Reverend Sir, but the threat of hell will not move me.”

Then she said, “Sadly, these things become necessary at times, and you do seem to have profited. As for your foot . . . well, I regret the accident, but look at you. You’re getting about fine.” “Yessum.” 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.

her. I listened and thought to myself, White folks think you care about everything in the world that happens to them, every time they stub their toe.

I knew what was coming and I wanted to spare him. To spare me. “It doesn’t matter now.” “You’ve always had a strong, separate mind, perhaps even a radical mind, and I was harsh with you at times. You must forgive me.” I couldn’t imagine what it cost him to say these words. “I do,” I said. “And you must forgive me.” “Forgive you for what, Sarah? For following your conscience? Do you think I don’t abhor slavery as you do? Do you think I don’t know it was greed that kept me from following my conscience as you have? The plantation, the house, our entire way of life depended on the slaves.” His face contorted and he clutched at his side a moment before going on. “Or should I forgive you for wanting to give natural expression to your intellect? You were smarter than even Thomas or John, but you’re female, another cruelty I was helpless to change.” “Father, please. I have no resentment of you.” It wasn’t completely true, but I said it.

He laughed and asked about my family, about our life in Charleston. When I told him about the house on East Bay and the plantation in the upcountry, his lively expression died away. “You own slaves then?” “. . . My family does, yes. But I, myself, don’t condone it.” “Yet you cast your lot with those who do?” I bristled. “. . . They are my family, sir. What would you have me do?” He gazed at me with kindness and pity. “To remain silent in the face of evil is itself a form of evil.”

Then he read something that made the hairs on my arms raise. “She shall receive any six of my Negroes whom she shall choose, and the rest she will sell or disperse among my children, as she determines.”

The world was a bashed-in place and she couldn’t fix it.