The Invention of Wings(128)

            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.”