She was wearing a brown dress made from free-labor cotton with a broad white sash and white gloves, and she’d matched up Theodore in a brown coat, a white vest, and beige pantaloons. She clutched a handful of white rhododendrons cut fresh from the backyard, and I noticed she’d tucked a sprig in the button hole of Theodore’s coat. Mother wouldn’t have made it past the brown dress, much less the opening prayer, which had been delivered by a Negro minister.
When the Philadelphia newspaper announced the wedding, alluding to the mixed-race guests expected to attend, we’d worried there might be demonstrators—slurs and shouts and rocks whizzing by—but mercifully, no one had showed up but those invited. Sarah Mapps and Grace were here, along with several freed slaves with whom we were acquainted, and we’d timed the wedding to coincide with the Anti-Slavery Convention in the city so that some of the most prominent abolitionists in the country were in the room: Mr. Garrison, Mr. and Mrs. Gerrit Smith, Henry Stanton, the Motts, the Tappans, the Westons, the Chapmans.
It would become known as the abolition wedding.
Nina was speaking now, her face turned up to Theodore’s, and I thought suddenly, involuntarily of Israel and a tiny grief came over me. Every time it happened, it was like coming upon an empty room I didn’t know was there, and stepping in, I would be pierced by it, by the ghost of the one who’d once filled it up. I didn’t stumble into this place much anymore, but when I did, it hollowed out little pieces of my chest.
Gazing at Nina, radiant Nina, I pictured myself in her place, Israel beside me, the two of us saying vows, and the idea of such a thing cured me. It was the truth I always came back to, that I didn’t want Israel anymore, I didn’t want to be married now, and yet the phantom of what might’ve been, the terrible allure of it could still snatch me.
Closing my eyes, I gave my head a shake to clear the remnants of longing away, and when I looked back at the bride and groom, there were dragonflies darting beyond the window, a green tempest, and then it was gone.
Nina promised aloud to love and honor him, carefully omitting the word obey, and Theodore launched into an awkward monologue, deploring the laws that gave control of a wife’s property to the husband and renouncing all claim to Nina’s, and then he coughed self-consciously, as if catching himself, and professed his love.
We’d put the confrontation in Mrs. Whittier’s cottage behind us, not that Theodore ever fully conceded his position, but he’d softened his rhetoric after that day, as any man in love would. The abolition movement had split into two camps just as the men predicted, and Nina and I became even worse pariahs, but it had set the cause of women in motion.
I’d been present when Nina opened the letter containing Theodore’s proposal. It had come late last winter during a long reprieve in Philadelphia with Sarah Mapps and Grace, as we’d prepared for a series of lectures at the Boston Odeon. Reading it, she’d dropped the pages onto her lap and broken into tears. When she read it to me, I cried too, but my tears were a mix of joy and wretchedness and fear. I wanted this marriage for her, I wanted her happiness as much as my own, but where would I go? For days I couldn’t concentrate on the lecture I was trying to write or hide the bereft feeling I carried inside. I couldn’t bear to think of life without her, life alone, but neither did I want to be the burdensome relative living in the back room, getting in the way, and I couldn’t imagine Theodore would want me there.
Then one day Nina came to me, plopping on the footstool beside my chair in Sarah Mapps’ front room. Without a word she opened her Bible and read aloud the passage in which Ruth speaks to Naomi:
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.
Closing the Bible, she said, “We can’t be separated, it isn’t possible. You must come and live with me after I’m married. Theodore asked me to tell you that my wish is also his wish.”
Theodore had bought a small farm in Fort Lee, New Jersey. We would make an odd trinity there, the three of us, but I would still have Nina. We could go on writing and working for abolition and for women, and I would help with the house, and when there were children, I would be auntie. One life ending, another beginning.
In the dining room, the minister was offering a prayer, and for some reason I didn’t close my eyes as I always did, but watched Nina reach for Theodore’s hand. We’d made a plan that I would give the married pair two weeks of privacy and then join them in Fort Lee, but I thought now of Mother and the question in her letter, Will I see you again? It seemed more than the elegiac pondering in an old woman’s heart, and I wondered if I shouldn’t seize the break in our work and go to her.
“What do you know, we are husband and wife,” Nina said when the prayer ended, pronouncing it herself.
The dining table sat out in the garden laid with a white linen cloth strewn with platters of sweets and fresh-picked flowers—foxglove, pink azalea, and feathery fleabane petals. The confectioner had iced the wedding cake with frothed egg whites and darkened the layers with molasses in keeping with Nina’s brown and white theme, and there was a large bowl of sugared raspberry-currant juice where all of the teetotaler abolitionists were lined up, pretending it hadn’t fermented. I’d consumed a sloshing cup of it too quickly and my head was floating about.
I walked among the guests, some forty or fifty of them, searching for Lucretia, for Sarah Mapps and Grace, thinking, a little tipsily, Here are our friends, our people, and thank God no one is speaking today about the cruelties in the world. I came upon Mrs. Whittier’s son John, whom I’d not seen since our head-to-head last August. He was amusing everyone with a poem he’d written that skewered Theodore for breaking his vow not to marry. He compared him to the likes of Benedict Arnold. When he saw me, he greeted me like a sister.
Lucretia found me before I could find her. It had been years. Beaming, she pulled me to the edge of the garden beside the blooming rhododendron where we could be alone. “My dear Sarah, I can scarcely believe what you’ve managed to accomplish!”
A blush crept to my face.
“It’s true,” she said. “You and Angelina are the most famous women in America.”
“. . . The most notorious, you mean.”
She smiled. “That, too.”
I pictured Lucretia and me in her little studio, talking and talking all those evenings. That fretful young woman I’d been, so stalled, so worried she would never find her purpose. I wished I could go back and tell her it would turn out all right.
Glancing up, I caught sight of Sarah Mapps and Grace across the garden, striding toward us. Nina and I had traveled almost constantly for the past year and a half, and except for our visit last winter, we’d seen little of them. I wrapped my arms around them, along with Lucretia, who’d known them back at Arch Street.
When Sarah Mapps pulled a letter from her purse and handed it to me, I recognized Handful’s writing immediately, though it bore my sister Mary’s seal. Unable to wait, I ripped it open and read Handful’s brief message with a sinking feeling. There were reports of runaways beginning to find their way across the Ohio River from Kentucky, or to Philadelphia and New York from Maryland, but rarely from that far south. We’re leaving here or die trying.
“What’s the matter?” Lucretia said. “You look shaken.”
I read them the letter, then folded it back, my hands trembling visibly. “. . . They’ll be caught. Or killed,” I said.
Sarah Mapps frowned. “They must know what they’re attempting. They’re not children.”
She’d never been to Charleston. She had no idea of the laws and edicts that controlled every moment of a slave’s life, of the City Guard, the curfew, the passes, the searches, the night watch, the vigilante c
ommittees, the slave catchers, the Work House, the impossibility, the sheer brutality.
“They’re coming to us,” Grace said, as if it had just sunk in.
“And we’ll welcome them,” Sarah Mapps added. “They can live in your old room in the attic. They can help out at the school.”
“They’ll never make it this far,” I said.
It occurred to me that Handful and Sky might already have left, and I opened up the letter again to look at the date: 23 April.
“It was written only three weeks ago,” I said more to myself than to them. “. . . I doubt they’ve left by now. There may still be time for me to do something.”
“But what could you possibly do?” Lucretia asked.
“I don’t know if I can do anything, but I can’t sit here on my hands . . . I’m going back to Charleston. I can at least try and convince my mother to sell them to me so I can set them free.”
I’d asked before, but this time I would beg her in person.
She had called me her dear daughter.
Handful
Upstairs in the alcove, I peered out the window at the harbor, remembering when I was ten years old seeing the water for the first time, how tireless and far it traveled, making up that little song, prancing round, and now I was coming on forty-five and my feet didn’t dance anymore. They just wanted to be gone from here. Little missus hadn’t let me out since the whipping, but every free chance I slipped up here. Sometimes like today, I brought my hand sewing and spent the morning on the window seat with the needle. Little missus didn’t care as long as I did my work, kept my tongue, bobbed my head, said yessum, yessum, yessum.
Today, it was hot, the sun eyeing straight in. I opened the window and the wind blew stiff, dredging up the smell of mudflats. From my perch, I could see the steamboat landing down on East Bay. I’d learned plenty watching the world come and go from that dock. A steamer came most every week day. I’d watch the snag boat ply ahead of it, clearing the way, then I’d hear the paddle on the steamer roar and the tug boats huff and the dock slaves holler back and forth, making haste to grab the ropes and put down the plank.
When it was time for it to leave again, I’d watch the carriages pull up at the whitewash building with the Steamship Company sign, and people would go inside and wait for a spell. Down on the landing, the slaves would unload trunks and goods and bags of mail onto the ship. When ten o’clock came, the passengers crossed the street and the slaves helped the ladies over the gangplank. The boat never left till the Guard showed up. Always two of them, sometimes three, they passed through the ship—first deck, second deck, pilot house, bottom to top. One time they opened every humpback trunk before it went onboard. That’s when I knew they were searching for stowaways, for slaves.
The Thursday boat went all the way to New York, and then you got on another one going to Philadelphia—I’d learned that from reading the Charleston Post and Courier, which I’d swiped from the drawing room. It printed all the schedules, said the tickets cost fifty-five dollars.
Today, the steamboat landing was empty, but I wasn’t up here in the alcove to watch the boat, I was up here to figure a way to get on it. All these weeks I’d been patient. Careful. Yessum, yessum. Now I sat here with the palmettos clacking in the wind and thought of the girl who bathed in a copper tub. I thought of the woman who stole a bullet mold. I loved that girl, that woman.
I went over everything I’d seen out there on the harbor, everything I knew. I sat with my hands still, my eyes closed, my mind flying with the gulls, the world tilting like a birdwing.
When I stood up, every one of my limbs was shaking.
The next week when Hector was handing out duties for the day, he told Minta, go strip the bedding in the house and take it out to the laundry house. I thought quick and said, “Oh, I’ll do that, poor Minta’s back is hurting her.” She looked at me curious, but didn’t argue. You take a rest whatever way you can get it.
In the alcove that day, a picture had sprung in my head—dresses. I saw the black dresses the missuses had worn to mourn their husbands. I saw their spoon bonnets with the thick black veils and their black gloves. These things came to me clear as the bright of day.
When I got to missus’ room, I tugged off the bed linens, listening for footsteps on the stairs, for a cane poking its way, then I opened the last drawer of her linen press. I’d folded away missus’ mourning dress, her bonnet and gloves my own self all those years back. I’d packed them in linen with camphor gum to keep out the moth eggs and laid them in the bottom drawer. Reaching back there, I worried they were long gone, that what warded off the moths had drawn the rats, but then my fingers brushed against the linen.
I peeked inside the parcel. It was still the grandest dress I’d ever made—black velvet stitched with hundreds of black glass beads. Some of them had come loose and were scatter-rolling in the linen folds. The veil on the bonnet had two spider tears that would have to be fixed, plus I’d forgot the gloves were fingerless mitts. I’d have to sew fingers on them. I whisked everything into the bed sheets, bundled it up, and tied a topknot. Leaving it outside the door, I hurried into little missus’ room.
Her funeral outfit was stored nearly the same way in her bureau but with cedar chips instead of camphor. I didn’t know how we’d air out all these rowdy smells. When I got her dress, hat, and gloves rolled tight in the sheets, I threw both of the bed bundles over my back and went down the stairs with my cane, straight to the cellar room.
That night after me and Sky had dragged the bed over to block the door, she tried on missus’ black velvet dress and stood there with the buttons undone. Thick-waist as missus was, I’d still have to let the bodice out for Sky, add six inches to the length and two to the sleeves. She was her daddy’s girl, all right.
Little missus was normal size, but there was enough room inside her dress for two of me.
The only thing we didn’t have was shoes, proper shoes. What we had was slave shoes and that would have to do.
I started to work that night. Sky fetched threads and shears for me and watched every stitch. She sang the Gullah song she liked best, If you don’t know where you’re going, you should know where you come from.
I told her, “We know where we’re going now.”
“Yeah,” she said.
“We’ll be ready when the steamer leaves Thursday eight days from now.”
She picked up her apron draped on the rocker and dug in the pocket, pulling out two little bottles like the kind Aunt-Sister used for tinctures. “I boiled us some white oleander tea.”
A quiver ran from my neck to my fingers. White oleander was the most deadly plant in the world. A bush had caught fire on Hasell Street and a man dropped dead just breathing the smoke. The brown liquid in Sky’s bottle would curl us on the floor retching till the last breath, but it wouldn’t take long.
“We leaving or die trying,” Sky said.
Sarah
I arrived in Charleston during a thunderstorm. As the steamer groaned into the harbor, lightning tore rifts in the sky and rain pelted sideways, and still, I stepped out beneath the roof of the upper deck so I could watch the city come into view. I hadn’t seen it in sixteen years.
We churned past Fort Sumter at the harbor’s mouth, which didn’t look much further along in its construction than when I’d sailed away. The peninsula loomed up like an old mirage rising from the water, the white houses on the Battery blurred in the gray rain. 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. It was beautiful, this place, and it was savage. It swallowed you and made you a part of itself, or if you proved too inassimilable, it spit you out like the pit of a plum.
I’d left here of my own will, and yet it seemed the city had banished me in much the same way I’d banished it. Seeing it now after so long, seeing the marsh grass pitc
hing wildly around the edges of the city, the rooftops hunkered together with their ship watches and widow walks, and behind them, the steeples of St. Philip’s and St. Michael’s lifted like dark fingers, I was not sorry for loving Charleston or for leaving it. Geography had made me who I was.
Wind swept my bonnet off the back of my head, the sash catching at my neck, and turning to grab it, I saw the menacing couple through the window of the salon. Traveling home after socializing in Newport, they’d recognized me shortly after we’d left New York. I’d tried to keep aloof from everyone, but the woman had stared at me with unrelenting curiosity. “You’re the Grimké daughter, aren’t you?” she said. “The one who—” Her husband took her arm and steered her away before she could finish. She’d meant to say the one who betrayed us.
They glared at me now, at my wet skirt and fluttering bonnet, and I felt certain the man would report my arrival to the authorities as soon as we landed. Perhaps returning had been a terrible mistake after all. I moved away from them to the bow of the boat as a crack of thunder broke overhead, becoming lost in the noise of the engine. Charleston would forgive its own many things, but not betrayal.
I found Handful within an hour of my arrival. She was sewing in the upstairs alcove, of all places. When she saw me standing there, she leapt up, stumbling a little with her infirm leg, dropping the slave shirt on the floor along with the needle and thread. I reached to catch her as she righted herself and found myself embracing her, feeling her embrace me back.
“I got your letter,” I told her, softly, in case there were listening ears somewhere.
She shook her head. “But you didn’t come back cause of that, cause of me.”
“Of course I did,” I said. I picked up the shirt and we sat down on the cushioned window seat.