The Invention of Wings(125)

            She leaned toward me. “Life is arranged against us, Sarah. And it’s brutally worse for Handful and her mother and sister. We’re all yearning for a wedge of sky, aren’t we? I suspect God plants these yearnings in us so we’ll at least try and change the course of things. We must try, that’s all.”

            I felt her words tear a hole in the life I’d made. An irreparable hole.

            I started to tell her that as a child I’d yearned for the entire firmament. For a profession completely untried among women. I didn’t want her to think I’d always been content to be a tutor when I had little passion for it, but I pushed the confession aside. Even Nina didn’t know about my aspiration to be a lawyer, how it’d ended in humiliation.

            “. . . But you did more than try to become a minister . . . You accomplished it . . . I’ve often wondered whether one must feel a special call from God to undertake that.”

            Quaker ministers were nothing like the Anglican or Presbyterian clergy I was used to. They didn’t stand behind a pulpit and preach sermons: they spoke during the Silence as inspired by God. Anyone could speak, of course, but the ministers were the most verbal, the ones who offered messages for worship, the ones whose voices seemed set apart.

            She pushed at the messy bun coiled at her neck. “I can’t say the call I felt was special. I wanted to have a say in things, that’s what it came down to. I wanted to speak my conscience and to have it matter. Surely, God calls us all to that.”

            “. . . Do you think . . . I could become a Quaker minister?” The words had been tucked inside of me for a long time, perhaps since the moment on the ship when I first met Israel and he told me female ministers actually existed.

            “Sarah Grimké, you’re the most intelligent person I know. Of course you could.”



            Propped in bed, wearing my warmest woolen gown, my hair loosed, I bent over the bed-desk and pewter inkstand I’d recently indulged in buying and tried to answer Handful’s letter.

            19 January 1827

            Dear Handful,

            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.