The Invention of Wings(143)
Turning toward the window, she seemed to study the willow, and when she looked back, I saw the glint in her eyes. “We could write a pamphlet!”
She rose, stepping into the quadrangle of light that lay on the floor from the window. “Mr. Garrison printed my letter, perhaps he would print our pamphlet, too, and send it to all the cities in the South. But let’s not address it to the slaveholders. They’ll never listen to us.”
“. . . Who then?”
“We’ll write to the Southern clergy and to the women. We’ll set the preachers upon them, and their wives and mothers and daughters!”
I wrote in bed on my lap desk, wrapped in a woolen shawl, while Nina bent over the small table in her old, fur-lined bonnet. The entire attic ached with cold and the scratch-scratch of our pens and the whippoorwills already calling to each other in the gathering dark.
All winter the chimney had steeped the attic with heat and Nina would throw open the window to let in the icy air. We wrote sweltering or we wrote shivering, but rarely in between. Our pamphlets were nearly finished—mine, An Epistle to the Clergy of the Southern States, and Nina’s, An Appeal to the Christian Women of the South. She’d taken the women, and I the clergy, which I found ironic considering I’d done so poorly with men and she so well. She insisted it would’ve been more ironic the other way around—her writing about God when she’d done so poorly with him.
We’d set down every argument the South made for slavery and refuted them all. I didn’t stutter on the page. It was an ecstasy to write without hesitation, to write everything hidden inside of me, to write with the sort of audacity I wouldn’t have found in person.O I sometimes thought of Father as I wrote and the brutal confession he’d made at the end. Do you think I don’t abhor slavery? Do you think I don’t know it was greed that kept me from following my conscience? But it was mostly Charlotte who haunted my pages.
Below us in the kitchen, I heard Sarah Mapps and Grace feeding wood into the stove, an ornery old Rumford that coughed up clouds of smut. Soon we smelled vegetables boiling—onions, parsnips, beet tops—and we gathered our day’s work and descended the ladder.
Sarah Mapps turned from the stove as we entered, sheaves of smoke floating about her head. “Do you have new pages for us?” she asked, and her mother, who was pounding dough, stopped to hear our answer.
“Sarah has brought down the last of hers,” Nina said. “She wrote the final sentence today, and I expect to complete mine tomorrow!”
Sarah Mapps clapped her hands the way she might’ve done for the children in her class. Our habit was to gather in the sitting room after the meal, where Nina and I read our latest passages aloud to them. Grace sometimes grew so distressed at our eyewitness accounts of slavery she would interrupt us with all sorts of outbursts—Such an abomination! Can’t they see we are persons? There but for the grace of God. Finally, Sarah Mapps would fetch the millinery basket so her mother could distract herself by jabbing a needle into one of the hats she was making.
“A letter came for you today, Nina,” Grace said, wiping dough from her hands and digging it from her apron.
Few people knew of our whereabouts: Mother and Thomas in Charleston, and I’d sent the address to Handful as well, though I’d not heard back from her. Among the Quakers, we’d informed no one but Lucretia, afraid that Sarah Mapps and Grace would suffer for consorting with us. The handwriting on the letter, however, belonged to none of them.
I gazed over Nina’s shoulder as she tore open the paper.
“It’s from Mr. Garrison!” Nina cried. I’d forgotten—Nina had written him some weeks ago, describing our literary undertaking, and he’d responded with enthusiasm, asking us to submit our work when it was finished. I couldn’t imagine what he might want.