The Invention of Wings

by Sue Monk Kidd

Aunt-Sister said Charleston had a case of the grandeurs. Up till I was eight or so, I thought the grandeurs was a shitting sickness.

“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.”

I’d flung myself into the Sea of Voltaire anyway and emerged with nothing more than several aphorisms. “Every man is guilty of all the good he didn’t do.” Such a notion made it virtually impossible to enjoy life! 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.

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.

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

When mauma saw my raw eyes, she said, “Ain’t nobody can write down in a book what you worth.”

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.

All I could hear was breathing—Sarah, Goodis cross the yard, the horses in the stable, the creatures in the brush, the white people on their feather beds, the slaves on their little pallets thin as wafers, everything breathing but me.

I felt shame to think of myself, probing verses in the thirteenth chapter of Corinthians—Though I have all knowledge and all faith, and have not charity, I am nothing.

I have one mind for the master to see. I have another mind for what I know is me.

She was trapped same as me, but she was trapped by her mind, by the minds of the people round her, not by the law. 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.

and while I felt the goodness in what they did, it seemed their lecturing and leaving didn’t come to much when you had this much cruelty to overcome.

“It has come as a great revelation to me,” I wrote her, “that abolition is different from the desire for racial equality. Color prejudice is at the bottom of everything. If it’s not fixed, the plight of the Negro will continue long after abolition.”

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

“The time to assert one’s right is when it’s denied!”

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.

I took a step toward her, my outrage breaking open. “You speak as if God was white and Southern! As if we somehow owned his image. You speak like a fool. The Negro is not some other kind of creature than we are. Whiteness is not sacred, Mary! It can’t go on defining everything.”

The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina: Pioneers for Women’s Rights and Abolition, by Gerda Lerner. The Feminist Thought of Sarah Grimké, by Gerda Lerner. Lift Up Thy Voice: The Grimké Family’s Journey from Slaveholders to Civil Rights Leaders, by Mark Perry. The Politics of Taste in Antebellum Charleston, by Maurie D. McInnis. Denmark Vesey: The Buried Story of America’s Largest Slave Rebellion and the Man Who Led It, by David Robertson.

Africans in America: America’s Journey Through Slavery, by Charles Johnson, Patricia Smith, and the WGBH Series Research Team. To Be a Slave, by Julius Lester, with illustrations by Tom Feelings (Newberry Honor book). Stitching Stars: The Story Quilts of Harriet Powers, by Mary Lyons (ALA Notable Book for Children). Signs & Symbols: African Images in African American Quilts, by Maude Southwell Wahlman.

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.”

I suppose, for me, the scene represents the inevitable confrontation with the trauma of slavery, one that’s all the more necessary because we have 246 years of slavery embedded in our history, and we can still hardly bear to look at it.

Handful says to Sarah, “My body might be a slave, but not my mind. For you, it’s the other way round.” Handful is conveying a truth she knows only too well herself, that one’s mind can become a cage, too.

theologian Nelle Morton’s words, that women “hear one another into speech,”

the theologian Mary Daly, who said, “Only women hearing each other can create a counterworld to the prevailing reality.”

As writer Isak Dinesen put it, “All sorrows can be borne if we put them in a story or tell a story about them.”

Empathy—taking another’s experience and making it one’s own—is one of the most mysterious and noble transactions a human can have. It’s the real power of fiction. While in college, I studied Ralph Waldo Emerson’s concept of “the common heart,” a place inside of us where we share an intrinsic unity with all humanity. The idea has remained with me all these years. As a writer, I believe in it. The hope that this story would help us find a portal into that place is the most I could hope.