The Invention of Wings

by Sue Monk Kidd

We didn’t expect to feel in the mood this year, but on Jonkonnu day, here came Tomfry in the yard, wearing his shaggy outfit, and we made a lot of clatter and forgot our troubles for a minute.

Isn't that the function of holidays ?They turn our attention away from today and towards the past,

The axe didn’t fall on Goodis either, and I felt surprise over the relief this caused me. But there was no God in any of it.

answer to the spreading cancer?” “It may be a poor answer, Sarah, but I can imagine no other.” “. . . Must our imaginations be so feeble as that, Thomas? If the Union dies, as our old president says, it will be from lack of imagination . . . It will be from Southern hubris, and our love of wealth, and the brutality of our hearts!”

My body might be a slave, but not my mind. For you, it’s the other way round. I’d dismissed the words—what could she know of it? But I saw now how exact they were. My mind had been shackled.

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?

I took up residence in a garret room on the third floor, following months of correspondence with Israel and endless skirmishes with Mother. My tactic had been to convince her the whole thing was God’s idea. She was a devout woman. If anything could trump her social obsessions, it was piety, but when I told her about the Inner Voice, she was horrified. In her mind, I’d gone the way of the lunatic female saints who’d gotten themselves boiled in oil and burned at the stake.

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. The window was hinged open, and for a moment I heard nothing but the crickets in their percussion. Then it came again, a kind of whimpering. I

he pulled me to him and held me against his chest, and I felt it was me he held, not his Rebecca.

Let not your heart be troubled. Neither let it be afraid. You believe in God, believe also in me.”

didn’t like the garb either, but it was at least made from wool, free of slave labor. We Quakers boycotted Southern cotton. We Quakers—how strange that sounded to me.

How important community is in helping us uphold ideals.

Everything about her seemed unchanged, except she appeared more dilapidated around the edges. The skin of her neck folded turtle-like onto her collar and the hair at her forehead was fraying like an edge of cloth.

But there were more slaves living in Charleston than whites, why shouldn’t they conceive a plot to free themselves? It would have to be elaborate and bold in order to succeed. And it couldn’t help but be violent.

I want no further talk of it.

As if silence will make the revolt go away .

chevaux-de-frise

They say in extreme moments time will slow, returning to its unmoving core, and standing there, it seemed as if everything stopped. Within the stillness, I felt the old, irrepressible ache to know what my point in the world might be. I felt the longing more solemnly than anything I’d ever felt, even more than my old innate loneliness. What came to me was the fleur de lis button in the box and the lost girl who’d put it there, how I’d twice carried it from Charleston to Philadelphia and back, carried it like a sad, decaying hope.

I hated to ask him the question, but I needed to know. “What happened to the plans?” He shook his head. “The thing I worried about was the house slaves who can’t tell where they end and their owners begin. We got betrayed, that’s what happened. One of them betrayed us, and the Guard put spies out there.”

The last time she’d seen the quilt, it was a jumble-pile of squares. Some of the color had died out from them, but her story was all there, put together in one piece. “You got every square in the right place,” she said. “I don’t know how you did that.” “I went by the order of what happened to you is all.”

We’re all yearning for a wedge of sky, aren’t we? I suspect God plants these yearnings in us so we’ll at least try and change the course of things. We must try, that’s all.”

But what most rankled Mr. Bettleman and others in the meeting was that women spoke about it. “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!”

I want to tell you I’m strong and resolute, but in truth, I feel afraid and alone and uncertain. I feel as if he has died, and I suppose in some way it’s true. I’m left with nothing but this strange beating in my heart that tells me I’m meant to do something in this world. I cannot apologize for it, or for loving this small beating as much as him.

Reverend McDowell agrees with me in spirit, but when I pressed him to preach publicly what he says to me in private, he refused. “Pray and wait,” he told me. “Pray and act,” I snapped. “Pray and speak!” How could I marry someone who displays such cowardice? I have no choice now but to leave his church. I’ve decided to follow in your steps and become a Quaker. I shudder to think of the gruesome dresses and the barren meetinghouse, but my course is set. Fine riddance to Israel! Be consoled in knowing the world depends upon the small beating in your heart. Yours, Nina

Fine riddance to Israel, she’d written, but it wasn’t fine. I feared I would love him the rest of my life, that I would always wonder what it would’ve been like to spend my life with him at Green Hill. I longed for it in that excruciating way one has of romanticizing the life she didn’t choose. But sitting here now, I knew if I’d accepted Israel’s proposal, I would’ve regretted that, too. I’d chosen the regret I could live with best, that’s all. I’d chosen the life I belonged to.

“Don’t you remember me for that. Don’t you remember I’m a slave and work hard. When you think of me, you say, she never did belong to those people. She never belong to nobody but herself.”

Nina drew herself up, eyes blazing. “We shall not be moved, sir!” His face reddened. Turning to me, he spoke in a tightly coiled whisper. “Heed me, Miss Grimké. Rein in your sister, and yourself as well.” As he left, I peered at Sarah Mapps and her mother, the way they grabbed hands and squeezed in relief, and then at Nina, at the small exultation on her face. 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.O

we were spotted by a group of ruffian boys, who pelted us with pebbles and slurs. Amalgamators. Amalgamators.

“We’ll write to the Southern clergy and to the women. We’ll set the preachers upon them, and their wives and mothers and daughters!”

It was an ecstasy to write without hesitation, to write everything hidden inside of me, to write with the sort of audacity I wouldn’t have found in person.O I sometimes thought of Father as I wrote and the brutal confession he’d made at the end. Do you think I don’t abhor slavery? Do you think I don’t know it was greed that kept me from following my conscience? But it was mostly Charlotte who haunted my pages.

I stared at the black plank of rafter over my head and felt the truth and logic of that, and it came to me that what I feared most was not speaking. That fear was old and tired. What I feared was the immensity of it all—a female abolition agent traveling the country with a national mandate. I wanted to say, Who am I to do this, a woman? But that voice was not mine. It was Father’s voice. It was Thomas’. It belonged to Israel, to Catherine, and to Mother. It belonged to the church in Charleston and the Quakers in Philadelphia. It would not, if I could help it, belong to me.

We became modestly famous and extravagantly infamous.

“What we claim for ourselves we claim for every woman!” That was our rally cry in Lowell and Worcester and Duxbury, indeed everywhere we went.

“There has not been a contribution to the anti-slavery movement more impressive or tireless than that of the Grimké sisters.” “Hear, hear,” said dear Mrs. Whittier, but I saw her son lower his eyes, and I knew then why they had come. “We commend you for it,” Theodore went on. “And yet by encouraging men to join your audiences, you’ve mired us in a controversy that has taken the attention away from abolition. We’ve come, hoping to convince you—” Nina interrupted him. “Hoping to convince us to behave like good lapdogs and wait content beneath the table for whatever crumbs you toss to us? Is that what you hope?” Her rebuke was so swift and scathing I wondered if it was in reaction to his marriage pledge as much as anything. “Angelina,

“Because we sent you out there on behalf of abolition, not women.”

“He only means to say the slave is of greater urgency,” John added. “I support the cause of women, too, but surely you can’t lose sight of the slave because of a selfish crusade against some paltry grievance of your own?” “Paltry?” Nina cried. “Is our right to speak paltry?” “In comparison to the cause of abolition? Yes, I say it is.”

“Why must it be one or the other?” Nina asked.

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.

Standing there, waiting for little missus’ steps to fade, I looked down at the quilt, at the slaves flying in the sky, and I hated being a slave worse than being dead.

I’d always wanted freedom, but there never had been a place to go and no way to get there. That didn’t matter anymore. I wanted freedom more than the next breath.

They were ladies of piety and gentility, who moved in the elite circles of society, and yet few nineteenth-century women ever “misbehaved” so thoroughly.

.Good trouble

My aim was not to write a thinly fictionalized account of Sarah Grimké’s history, but a thickly imagined story inspired by her life.

The most expansive and notable way that I’ve diverged from Sarah’s record is through her imaginary relationship with the fictional character of Hetty Handful.

Sarah and Angelina defied the men, and indeed as historian Gerda Lerner pointed out, they were the ones who attached the cause of women’s rights to the cause of abolition, creating what some saw as a dangerous split and others as a brilliant alliance. Either way, their refusal to desist played a vibrant part in propelling the cause of women into American life.

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.”