The Invention of Wings(135)

            Over the next year, my letters to Nina were the nearest thing to a diary I’d written since Father’s death. I told her how I practiced saying Wicked Willy Wiggle, of the fear my voice would keep me from realizing my largest hopes. I wrote of the anguish of seeing Israel each week at Meetings, the way he avoided me while his sister, Catherine, warmed to me considerably, a volte-face I couldn’t have imagined when I first returned here.

            I sent Nina sketches I drew of the studio and recounted the talks Lucretia and I had there. I kept her abreast of the livelier petitions that circulated in Philadelphia: to keep free blacks from being turned out of white neighborhoods, to ban the “colored bench” in meetinghouses.

            “It has come as a great revelation to me,” I wrote her, “that abolition is different from the desire for racial equality. Color prejudice is at the bottom of everything. If it’s not fixed, the plight of the Negro will continue long after abolition.”

            In response, Nina wrote, “I wish I might nail your letter onto a public post on Meeting Street!”

            The thought of that was not at all unpleasant to me.

            She wrote of her battles with Mother, the dryness of sitting in the Quaker meetinghouse, and the rampant ostracism she faced in Charleston for doing so. “How long must I remain in this land of slavery?” she wrote.

            Then, on a languid summer day, Lucretia placed a letter in my hands.

            12 August 1829

            Dear Sarah,

            Several days ago, in route to visit one of the sick in our Meeting, I was standing on the corner of Magazine and Archdale when I encountered two boys—they were mere boys!—escorting a terrified slave to the Work House. She was pleading with them to change their minds, and seeing me, she begged more tearfully, “Please missus, help me.” I could do nothing.

            I see now that I can do nothing here. I’m coming to you, Sister. I will quit Charleston and sail to Philadelphia in late October after the storms. We shall be together, and together nothing shall deter us.

            With Abiding Love,

            Nina



            I’d been expecting Nina for over a week, keeping vigil at the window of my new room in Catherine’s house. The November weather had been spiteful, delaying her ship, but yesterday the clouds had broken.

            Today. Surely, today.

            On my lap was a slender compendium on Quaker worship, but I couldn’t concentrate. Closing it, I paced back and forth in the narrow room, an unadorned little cell similar to the one that awaited Nina across the hall. I wondered what she’d think of it.

            It had been hard to leave Lucretia’s, but there was no guest room there for Nina. Israel’s daughter-in-law had taken over Green Hill, allowing Catherine to move back to her small house in the city, and when she’d offered to board the both of us, I’d accepted with relief.

            I went again to the window and peered at the outcroppings of blue overhead and then at the river of elm leaves in the street, brimming yellow, and I felt surprised suddenly at my life. How odd it had turned out, how different than I’d imagined. The daughter of Judge John Grimké—a Southern patriot, a slaveholder, an aristocrat—living in this austere house in the North, unmarried, a Quaker, an abolitionist.

            A coach turned at the end of the street. I froze for a moment, arrested by the clomp clomp of the chestnut horses, the way their high stride made eddies in the leaves, and then I broke into a run.

            When Nina opened the door of the coach and saw me rushing toward her without a shawl, my hair falling in red skeins from its pins, she began to laugh. She wore a black, full-length cloak with a hood, and tossing it back, she looked dark and radiant.