What joyous news! Charlotte is back! You have a sister!
I lowered the pen and stared at the procession of exclamations. I sounded like a chirping bird. It was my fifth attempt at a beginning.
Strewn about me on the bed were crumpled balls of paper. How happy you must be now, I’d written first, then worried she might think I was implying all her miseries were over now. Next: I was euphoric to receive your news, but what if she didn’t know the word euphoric? I couldn’t write a single line without fear of seeming insensitive or condescending, too removed or too familiar. I remembered us, as I always did, on the roof drinking tea, but that was gone and it was all balled-up paper now.
I picked up the sheet of stationery with the glib exclamations and crushed it in my hands. A smear of ink licked across my palm. Holding my hand aloft from Lucretia’s white eiderdown, I lifted the bed-desk from across my legs and went to the basin. When soap failed to remove the stain, I rummaged in the dresser drawer for the cream of tartar, and there, lying beside the bottle, was the black lava box containing my silver fleur de lis button. I opened it and gazed down at the button. It was darkly silvered, like something pearling up from beneath the water.
The button had been the most constant object in my life. I’d thrown it away that once, but it’d come back to me. I could thank Handful for that.
I returned to the warmth of the bed and placed the button on the bed-desk, watching the lamplight spill over it. I lay back on the pillow, remembering my eleventh birthday party at which Handful had been presented to me, how I’d woken the next day with the overpowering sense I was meant to do something in the world, something large, larger than myself. I brushed my finger across the button. It had always held this knowing for me.
In the room, everything magnified: cinders dropping on the hearth, a tiny scratching at the baseboard, the smell of ink, the etch of the fleur de lis on the button.
I took a clean sheet of stationery.
19 January 1827
Dear Handful,
My heart is full. I try to imagine you with Charlotte and a new sister, and I can’t dream what you must feel. I’m happy for you. At the same time, I’m sad to know of the scars your mother bears, all the horrors she must have lived through. But I won’t focus on that now, only on your togetherness.
Did you know once, when we were girls, Charlotte made me vow that one day I would do whatever I could to help you get free? We were out by the woodpile where the little orphaned barn owl lived. I remember it like yesterday. I confess now, that’s why I taught you to read. I told myself reading was a kind of freedom, the only one I could give. I’m sorry, Handful. I’m sorry I couldn’t keep the vow any better.
I still have the silver button you rescued after I tossed it out. As I write you now, it sits beside the inkwell, reminding me of the destiny I always believed was inside of me, waiting. How can I explain such a thing? I simply know it the way I know there’s an oak tree inside an acorn. I’ve been filled with a hunger to grow this seed my whole life. I used to think I was supposed to become a lawyer, perhaps because that’s what Father and Thomas did, but it was never that. These days, I feel inspired to become a Quaker minister. Doing so will at least provide me a way to do what I tried to do on my eleventh birthday, that day you were cruelly given to me to own. It will allow me to tell whoever might listen that I can’t accept this, that we can’t accept slavery, it must end. That’s what I was born for—not the ministry, not the law, but abolition. I’ve come to know it only this night, but it has always been the tree in the acorn.
Tell your mother I’m glad she has found you again. Greet your sister for me. I’ve failed in many things, even in my love for you, but I think of you as my friend.
Sarah
Handful
That winter mauma sat idle by the fire in the kitchen house. She got a little weight back on her, but sometimes she had spells when she couldn’t keep down her food and we’d be back where we started. Mauma said every time she saw me, I was coming at her with a piece of biscuit.
We had plenty of vacant slave quarters, but the three of us stayed on together in the cellar room. Goodis brought in a little bed from the nursery, and we wedged it beside the big bed and slept three peas in a pod underneath the quilt frame. Sky asked one time what was all that wood nailed on the ceiling, and I said, “You never saw a quilt frame?” and mauma said, “Well, you ain’t never seen a rice field, so yawl even.”
Mauma still wouldn’t talk about what’d happened to her. She’d say, “What’s done’s done.” Most nights, though, she’d wake up and pace the room, and it didn’t seem done at all. I realized the best curing thing for her was a needle, a thread, and a piece of cloth. One day, I told her I needed some help and handed her the mending basket. When I came back, the needle was a hummingbird in her fingers.
The hardest part was finding work for Sky. She couldn’t do the laundry to save her life. I got Sabe to try her in the house cleaning and serving tea with me and Minta, but missus said she didn’t look the part, and put off the guests. After that, she went to work in the kitchen house, but she drove Aunt-Sister crazy with her chatter, stories about rabbits out-tricking foxes and bears. She usually ended up on the porch, singing in Gullah. Ef oona ent kno weh oona da gwuine, oona should kno weh oona dum from. That same song, over and over. If you don’t know where you’re going, you should know where you came from.
One morning on the tail end of winter, the knocker clacked on the front door and in came Mr. Huger, the solicitor, stomping the cold off his feet. He handed me his hat while Sabe went to get missus.
I found Nina in her room, readying for the class she taught at church. I said, “Quick, you need to come see what your mauma’s up to. Mr. Huger’s down there—”
She flew from the room before I could finish off the sentence.
I dawdled outside the closed drawing room doors, but I couldn’t make out much they were saying—just passing words. Pension . . . Bank . . . Cotton crash . . . Sacrifice. The clock bonged ten times. The sound filled the house, turning it heavy, and when it stopped, I heard missus say the word sky. Maybe she was talking about the blue roof that hung over the world but I knew it was my sister.
I flattened my ear to the door. Let Sabe find me and chase me off, I couldn’t care.
“She’s thirteen years old, without any perceivable domestic skills, but she’s strong.” That was missus talking.
Mr. Huger mumbled about going rates, selling in the spring when the planting started on the plantations.
“You can’t separate Sky from her mother,” Nina cried. “It’s inhuman!”
“I don’t care for it either,” missus said. “But we must face reality.”
My breath clutched at my ribs like grabbing hands. I closed my eyes, tired of the sorry world.
When I found mauma in the kitchen house, she was alone with the mending basket. I sank beside her. “Missus plans to sell Sky in the spring. We got to find a way for her to earn her keep.”
“Sell?” She looked at me with stun, then pinched her eyes. “We ain’t come this far so she can sell my girl. That’s for damn sure.”
“There must be something in the world Sky’s good at doing.” The way I said it, like my sister was slow in the head, caused mauma to flare at me.
“Don’t you talk like that! Your sister has the smart of Denmark in her.” She shook her head. “He’s her daddy, but I guess you figure that.”
“Yeah, I figured.” It seemed like the time to finally tell her. “Denmark, he—”
“There ain’t a slave living who don’t know what happen to him. We heard it all the way to Beaufort.”
I didn’t tell her I’d watched him dangle on the tree, but I told her everything else. I started with the church where we’d sung Jericho. I told her about the Work House, falling off the treadmill and crippling my foot. I told her the way Denmark took me in and called me d
aughter. “I stole a bullet mold for that man,” I said.
She pushed her fingers hard against her eyelids, trying to keep them from spilling over. When she opened them, there was a map in her eyes of broken red lines.
“Sky ask me one time who her daddy is,” she said. “I told her he was a free black in Charleston, but he’s dead. That’s all she know.”
“How come you don’t tell her?”
“Sky’s got a child’s way of talking out of turn. The minute you tell her ’bout Denmark, she’ll tell half the world. That ain’t gon help her.”
“She needs to know about him.”
“What she need is to keep from getting sold. The thing she know best is the rice fields. Put her to work in the yard.”
Sky took the ornament garden and brought it back to its glory. It came natural to her—how deep to bury the jonquil bulbs, when to cut back the roses, how to trim the hedges to match the drawings in a book Nina showed her. When Sky planted the vegetables, she shoveled horse shit from the stable and mixed it in the dirt. She dug straight furrows for the seeds and covered them with her bare foot like she’d done with the rice. She sang Gullah songs to the plants when she hoed. When the beetles came, she picked them off with her fingers.
Wouldn’t you know, the crookneck squash came up the size of drinking gourds. The heads on the peonies were big pink soup bowls. Even missus came out special to see them. As soon as the jonquils came up and turned the air choking sweet, she threw a garden tea for her friends that left them suffering with envy.
Summer came, and Sky was still with us.
“Where you keep the scrap cloth?” mauma said. She was rummaging through the lacquer sewing table in the corner of the cellar room. There was a basket on the floor beside her feet heaped with spindles of thread, needle bags, pins, shears, and a measure tape.
“Scrap cloth? The same place it always was. In the patch bag.”
She reached for it. “You got some red and brown cotton in here?”
“Always got red and brown cotton.”
I followed her to the spirit tree, where the crows hid up in the branches. She sat on Aunt-Sister’s old fish-scaling stool with her back against the trunk and went to work. She cut a red square, then took the shears to the brown cloth and clipped the shape of a wagon.
I said, “Is that the wagon the Guard hauled you off in the day you disappeared?”
She smiled.
She was picking up with the rest of her story. She wouldn’t say what happened to her with words. She would tell it in the cloth.
Sarah
When autumn came, Lucretia and I attended the women’s meeting at Arch Street where we found ourselves standing in a crowded vestibule beside Jane Bettleman, who glared pointedly at the fleur de lis button I’d sewed at the throat of my gray dress. Granted, the button was ornate and expensive, and it was large, the size of a brooch. I’d freshly polished the silver, so there in the bright-lit atrium, it was shining like a small sun.
Reaching up, I touched the engraved lily, then turned to Lucretia and whispered, “My button has offended Mrs. Bettleman.”
She whispered back, “Since you keep Mr. Bettleman upset a great amount of the time, it seems only fair you should do the same for his wife.”
I suppressed a smile.
Arguably the most powerful figure at Arch Street, Samuel Bettleman criticized Lucretia and me on a weekly basis. During the past few months, the two of us had spoken out frequently in Meetings on the anti-slavery cause, and afterward he would descend on us, calling our messages divisive. None of our members favored slavery, of course, but many were aloof to the cause, and they differed, too, on how quickly emancipation should be accomplished. Even Israel was a gradualist, believing slavery should be dismantled slowly over time. 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!”
She gave me courage, Lucretia did.
“Miss Grimké, Mrs. Mott, how are thee?” a voice said. Mrs. Bettleman was at my elbow, her eyes flickering over my extravagant button.
Before we could return the greeting, she said, “That’s an unusually decorative item at your collar.”
“. . . I trust you like it?”
I think she expected me to be apologetic. She rolled up her pale white lips, bringing to mind the fluted edges of a calla lily. “Well, it certainly matches this new personality of yours. You’ve been very outspoken in Meetings lately.”
“. . . I only try to speak as God would prompt me,” I said, which was far more pious than true.
“It is curious, though, that God prompts you to speak against slavery so much of the time. I hope you’ll receive what I’m about to say for your own edification, but to many of us it appears you’ve become overly absorbed by the cause.”
Undaunted even by Lucretia, who took a step closer to my side, Mrs. Bettleman continued. “There are those of us who believe the time for action has not yet come.”
Anger seared through me. “. . . You, who know nothing of slavery . . . nothing at all, you presume to say the time has not come?”
My voice sailed across the vestibule, causing the women to cease their conversations and turn in our direction. Mrs. Bettleman caught her breath—but I wasn’t finished. “If you were a slave toiling in the fields in Carolina . . . I suspect you would think the time had fully come.”
She turned on her heel and strode away, leaving Lucretia and me the object of shocked, silent stares.
“I need to find some air,” I said calmly, and we walked from the meetinghouse onto the street. We kept walking past the simple brick houses and charcoal vendors and fruit peddlers, all the way to Camden Ferry Slip. We strolled past the ferry house onto the quay, which brimmed with passengers arriving from New Jersey. At the far end of the dock, a flock of white gulls stood on the weathered planks, facing the wind. We stopped short of them and stared at the Delaware River, holding on to our bonnets.
Looking down, I saw that my hands were shaking. Lucretia saw it, too. She said, “You won’t look over your shoulder, will you?” She was referring to the altercation, to the terrible inclination we women sometimes had to scurry back to safety.
“No,” I told her. “I won’t look back.”
16 February 1828
Dear Beloved Sister,
You are the first and only to know: I’ve lost my heart to Reverend William McDowell of Third Presbyterian Church. He’s referred to in Charleston as the “young, handsome, minister from New Jersey.” He’s barely past thirty, and his face is like that of Apollo in the little painting that used to hang in your room. He came here from Morristown when his health forced him to seek a milder climate. Oh, Sister, he has the strongest reservations about slavery!
Last summer, he enlisted me to teach the children in Sabbath School, a job I happily do each week. I once remarked on the evil of slavery during class and received a cautionary visit from Dr. McIntire, the Superintendent, and you should’ve seen the way William came to my defense. Afterward, he advised me that when it comes to slavery, we must pray and wait. I’m no good at either.
He calls on me weekly, during which we have discussions about theology and church and the state of the world. He never departs without taking my hand and praying. I open my eyes and watch as he creases his brow and makes his eloquent pleas. If God has the slightest notion of how it feels to be enamored, he’ll forgive me.
I don’t yet know William’s intentions toward me, but I believe he reciprocates my own. Be happy for me.
Yours,
Nina
When Nina’s letter arrived, I carried it to the bench beneath a red elm in the Motts’ tiny backyard. It was
a warm day for March. The crocuses were breaking through the winter crust and the grasshoppers and birds were out making a rapturous commotion.
After tucking a small quilt over my knees, I arranged my new spectacles onto the end of my nose. Lately, words had begun to transform themselves into blurred squiggles. I thought I’d ruined my eyes from excessive reading—I’d been unrelenting in my studies for the ministry over the past year—but the physician I’d consulted ascribed the problem to middle age. I slit the letter, thinking, Nina, if you could see me now with my old-lady lap throw and my spectacles, you would think me seventy instead of half that.
I read about her Reverend McDowell with what I imagined to be a mother’s satisfaction and worries. I wondered if he was worthy of her. I wondered what Mother thought of him, and if I would return to Charleston for the wedding. I wondered what kind of clergy wife Nina would make and if the Reverend had any idea what sort of Pandora’s box he was about to open.
It will always be a quirk of fate that Israel arrived at this particular moment. I was folding the letter into my pocket when I looked up and saw him coming toward me without his coat or hat. It was the middle of the afternoon.
He’d never mentioned the episode with Jane Bettleman. He undoubtedly knew of it. Everyone at Arch Street knew of it. It had divided the members into those who thought I was haughty and brazen and those who thought I merely impassioned and precipitate. I assumed he was among the latter.
As he took a seat beside me, his knee pressed against my leg and a tiny heat moved across my chest. He still had his beard. It was well-clipped, but longer with more silver. I hadn’t seen him in weeks except at Meeting. There’d been no explanation for his absence. I’d told myself it was the inevitable way of things.
I removed my glasses. “. . . Israel . . . this is unexpected.”
There was an exigency about him. I felt it like a disturbance in the air.
“I’ve wanted to speak to you for some time, but I’ve resisted. I worried how you might receive what I have to say.”