The Invention of Wings(137)
I got to my feet. “Go back to sleep now.”
“No, I’m coming. I be on up there in a while.”
Her eyes glowed like the paper lanterns we used to set out for the garden parties.
I stood in the dining room, facing the window, stuffing big crystal horns with fruit, everything in the larder that wasn’t rotten, when I spotted mauma shuffling toward the spirit tree at the back of the yard. She had the story quilt clutched round her shoulders.
My hands came still—the way she slid one foot, rested, then slid the other one. When she reached the tree, she steadied her hand on the trunk and lowered herself to the ground. My heart started to beat strange.
I didn’t look to see if little missus was near, I hurried out the back door. Fast as I could, fast as the earth would pass beneath me.
“Mauma?”
She lifted her face. The light had gone from her eyes. There was only the black wick now.
I eased down beside her. “Mauma?”
“It’s all right. I come to get my spirit to take with me.” Her voice sounded far off inside her. “I’m tired, Handful.”
I tried not to be scared. “I’ll take care of you. Don’t worry, we’ll get you some rest.”
She smiled the saddest smile, letting me know she’d get her rest, but not the kind I hoped. I took hold of her hands. They were ice cold. Little bird bones.
She said it again. “I’m tired.”
She wanted me to tell her it was all right, to get her spirit and go on, but I couldn’t say it. I told her, “Course, you’re tired. You worked hard your whole life. That’s all you did was work.”
“Don’t you remember me for that. Don’t you remember I’m a slave and work hard. When you think of me, you say, she never did belong to those people. She never belong to nobody but herself.”O
She closed her eyes. “You remember that.”
“I will, mauma.”
I pulled the quilt round her shoulders. High in the limbs, the crows cawed. The doves moaned. The wind bent down to lift her to the sky.O
Sarah
We arrived at the meetinghouse in the swelter of an August morning with every intention of going inside and sitting on the Negro pew.
“. . . Are we certain we want to do this?” I asked Nina.
She halted on the browned grass, a harsh amber light falling out of the cloudless sky onto her face. “But you said the Negro pew was a barrier that must be broken!”
I had said that, just last night. It had seemed like a stirring idea then, but now, in the glare of day, it seemed less like breaking a barrier and more like a perilous lark. So far, the Arch Street members had put up with my anti-slavery statements the way you abide swarming insects in the outdoors—you swat and ignore them the best you can—but this was altogether different. This was an act of rebellion and it probably wouldn’t help my long struggle to become a Quaker minister. The idea to sit on the Negro pew had come after reading The Liberator, an anti-slavery paper Nina and I had been smuggling home in our parcels and, once, folded inside Nina’s bonnet. It was published by Mr. William Lloyd Garrison, possibly the most radical abolitionist in the country. I was sure if Catherine found a single copy in our rooms, she would promptly evict us. We kept them hidden beneath our mattresses, and I wondered now if we should go home and burn them.
The truth was none of this was safe. Pro-slavery mobs had been on a reign of terror all summer, and not in the South, but here in the North. They’d been tossing abolitionist printing presses into the rivers and burning down free black and abolitionist homes, nearly fifty of them in Philadelphia alone. The violence had been a shock to me and Nina—it seemed geography was no safeguard at all. Being an abolitionist could get you attacked right on the streets—heckled, flogged, stoned, killed. Some abolitionists had bounties on their heads, and most everyone had gone into hiding.