I got the smelling salts and brought her round, but not before missus heard the uproar.
Later on that night in my cellar room, I heard a tap and opened the door to find Nina with her eyes puffed out.
“Did Mother punish you?” she asked. “I have to know.”
Since master Grimké died, missus hit Minta with the gold-tip cane so much you never saw her without black bruises on her brown arms. It was no wonder she went to the carriage house with Sabe to get salved. She struck me and Phoebe with the cane, too, and had even taken to swiping Aunt-Sister, which I never thought I’d live to see. Aunt-Sister didn’t take it laying down. I heard her tell missus, “Binah and the ones you sold, they the lucky ones.”
Nina was saying, “I tried to tell her that I asked you to take off your shoe, that you didn’t just volunteer—”
I stuck out my arm and showed her the welt.
“The cane?” Nina asked.
“One strike, but a good one. What’d she do to you?”
“Mostly, a lot of scolding. The girls won’t be coming back for any more meetings.”
“No, I didn’t think so,” I said. She looked so dismal I added, “Well, you tried.”
Her eyes watered up and I handed her my clean head scarf. Taking it, she sank down in the rocker and buried her face in it. I didn’t know how much more her eyes could take, whether she was crying over her failure with the Female Prayer Society, or Sarah leaving, or the shortfalls of people.
When she was all cried out, she went back to her room, and I lit a candle and sat in the wavy light, picturing the quilt on Denmark’s bed, and inside it, the hidden pocket, and inside that, the scroll of paper with all the names. People ready to lay their lives down to get free. The day I came up with the scheme of hiding the list, Susan didn’t have a single quilt in the house—she used plain wool blankets. I made a new quilt from scratch—red squares and black triangles, me and mauma’s favorite, the blackbirds flying away.
Denmark believed nothing would change without blood spilled. Plopped in the rocker now, I thought about Nina, her lecturing to five spoilt white girls, and Sarah being so upset with the way her world was, she had to leave it, 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.
The retribution was coming and we’d bring it ourselves. Blood was the way. It was the only way, wasn’t it? I was glad now Sarah was far away from danger, and I would have to keep Nina safe. I said to myself, Let not your heart be troubled. Neither let it be afraid.
Sarah
I snapped open the crisp white table cloth, unfurling it upward, watching it turn into a small ovoid cloud before it sank onto the pine needles.
“This isn’t the cloth we use for picnics,” Catherine said, crossing her arms over her chest.
Her criticisms of me were similar to her prayers—sacred, daily, and unsmiling. I was careful now. I taught the children, but I tried not to appear mothering. I deferred to Catherine in all household matters—if she put salt in the cake, she put salt in the cake. And Israel—I didn’t so much as look at him when she was in the room.
“. . . I’m sorry,” I told her. “. . . I thought you said to get the white cloth.”
“It will have to be bleached and clear starched. Let’s pray there’s no pine sap on the ground.”
God, no pine sap. Please.
It was the first day of April, which also happened to be Becky’s seventh birthday and the first day all year one could actually call warm. After my first winter in the North, I had an entirely new appreciation for heat. I’d never seen snow before arriving here, and when it’d come, the Pennsylvania sky split open like a vast goose down comforter and the entire world turned to feathers. The first time it happened, I slipped outside and wandered about catching flakes in my hands and on my tongue, letting them settle into my hair, which I’d left long and flowing down my back. Returning to the house, I spotted Israel and several of the children watching me from the window, looking quite astonished. My enchantment turned to slush about the same time the snow did. We seemed stuck in a perpetual twilight. Color bled from the world, recasting the landscape into gradations of black and white, and no matter how ruthlessly the fireplaces roared, cold formed on my Charleston bones like hoarfrost.