He walked uncertainly to the door and let himself out, while I remained seated, seeing things with terrible clarity: the passivity, the hesitation about the future. Not Israel’s—mine.
As Lucretia and I sat in the tiny room she called a studio, winter rain pricked the windowpane, turning to ice. We’d pulled our chairs close to the hearth where the fire was snapping and popping, zinging like harp strings. Lucretia was opening a small packet of mail that had arrived in the afternoon. I was reading a Sir Walter Scott novel banned by the Quakers, which somehow made it all the more enjoyable, but now, drowsy with heat, I lowered the book and stared into the flames.
It was my favorite part of the day—after the children were put to bed and Lucretia’s husband, James, had retired to his study, and it was just the two of us gathered here in her odd little nook of a room. A studio. It was comprised of nothing more than two stuffed chairs, a large leafed table, a fireplace, wall shelves, and a wide window that looked out over a copse of red mulberries and black oaks behind the house. The room was not for cooking or sewing or childcare or entertaining. Scattered with papers and pamphlets, books and correspondence, art palettes and squares of velvet cloth on which she pinned the bright luna moths she found lifeless in the garden, this room was just for her.
I don’t know how many evenings we’d spent in here talking, or like tonight, sitting quietly like two solitudes. Lucretia and I had formed a bond that went beyond friends. And yet I felt the difference between us. I noticed it at Meetings when I saw her on the Facing bench, the only female minister among all those men, the way she rose and spoke with such fearless beauty, and every morning when I went downstairs and there were her children sticky with oat gruel. I would get a faintly vacuous feeling in the pit of my stomach, not from envy that she had a profession, or these little ones, or even James, who was not like other men, but of some unknown species, a husband who beamed over her profession and made the oat gruel himself. No, it wasn’t that. It was the belonging I envied. She’d found her belonging.
“Why, this letter is for you,” Lucretia said, thrusting it toward me. It was Nina’s stationery, but not Nina’s script. The handwriting on the front was childlike and crude. Miss Sarah Grimké.
Dear Sarah
Mauma’s back. Nina said I could write you myself with the news. She ran away from the plantation where she’d been kept all this time. You should see her. She has scars and a full head of white hair and looks old as Methusal, but she’s the same inside. I nurse her day and night. She brought my sister with her named Sky. I know that’s some name. It comes from mauma and her longings. She always said one day we’d fly like blackbirds.
Missus stays mad at Nina most all the time. Nina started some troubles at the presbyterry church where she goes. Some man came last week to punish her on something she said. Mauma and Sky are the one bright hope.
It has taken too long to write this. Forgive my mistakes. I don’t get to read any more and work on my words. One day I will.
Handful
“I hope it isn’t bad news,” Lucretia said, studying my face, which must’ve been a confusion of elation and heart-wrench.
I read the letter aloud to her. I hadn’t spoken much about the slaves my family held, but I had told her about Handful. She reached over and patted my hand.
We fell quiet as the ice turned back to rain, coming in a dark, drowning wash on the window. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine the reunion between Handful and her mother. The sister named Sky. Charlotte’s scars and white hair.
“. . . Why would God plant such deep yearnings in us . . . if they only come to nothing?” It was more of a sigh than a question. I was thinking of Charlotte and her longing to be free, but as the words left my mouth, I knew I was thinking of myself, too.
I hadn’t really expected Lucretia to respond, but after a moment, she spoke. “God fills us with all sorts of yearnings that go against the grain of the world—but the fact those yearnings often come to nothing, well, I doubt that’s God’s doing.” She cut her eyes at me and smiled. “I think we know that’s men’s doing.”