The Invention of Wings(144)

            21 March 1836

            Dear Miss Grimké,

            I have enclosed a letter to you from Elizur Wright in New York. Not knowing how to reach you, he entrusted the letter to me to forward. I think you will find it of utmost importance.

            I pray the monographs you and your sister are writing will reach me soon and that you will both rise to the moment that is now upon you.

            God Grant You Courage,

            William Lloyd Garrison

            Nina looked up, her eyes searching mine, and they were filled with a kind of wonder. With a deep breath, she read the accompanying letter aloud.

            2 March 1836

            Dear Miss Grimké,

            I write on behalf of the American Anti-Slavery Society, which is soon to commission and send forth forty abolition agents to speak at gatherings across the free states, winning converts to our cause and rousing support. After reading your eloquent letter to The Liberator and observing the outcry and awe it has elicited, the Executive Committee is unanimous in its belief that your insight into the evils of slavery in the South and your impassioned voice will be an invaluable asset.

            We invite you to join us in this great moral endeavor, and your sister, Sarah, as well, as we have learned of her sacrifice and staunch abolitionist views. We believe you may be more amenable to the mission if she accompanies you. If the two of you would consent to be our only female agents, we would have you speak to women in private parlors in New York.

            We would expect you the sixteenth of next September for two months of rigorous agent training under the direction of Theodore Weld, the great abolitionist orator. Your circuit of lectures will commence in December.

            We ask for your prayerful deliberation and your reply.

            Yours Most Sincerely,

            Elizur Wright

Secretary, AASS

            The four of us stared at one another for a moment with blank, astonished expressions, and then Nina threw her arms around me. “Sarah, it’s all we could’ve hoped and more.”

            I could only stand there immobile while she clasped me. Sarah Mapps scooped a handful of flour from the bowl and tossed it over us like petals at a wedding, and their laughter rose into the steamy air.

            “Think of it, we’re to be trained by Theodore Weld,” Nina said. He was the man who’d “abolitionized” Ohio. He was said to be demanding, fiercely principled, and uncompromising.

            I muddled through the meal and the reading, and when we slipped into bed, I was glad for the dark. I lay still and hoped Nina would think me asleep, but her voice came from her bed, two arm-lengths away. “I won’t go to New York without you.”

            “. . . I-I didn’t say I wouldn’t go. Of course, I’ll go.”

            “You’ve been so quiet, I don’t know what to think.”

            “. . . I’m overjoyed. I am, Nina . . . It’s just . . . I’ll have to speak. To speak in the most public way . . . among strangers . . . I’ll have to use the voice in my throat, not the one on the page.”

            All evening, I’d pictured how it would be, the moment when the words clotted on my tongue and the women in New York shifted in their chairs and stared at their laps.

            “You stood in Meetings and spoke,” Nina said. “You didn’t let your stutter stop you from trying to become a minister.”

            I stared at the black plank of rafter over my head and felt the truth and logic of that, and it came to me that what I feared most was not speaking. That fear was old and tired. What I feared was the immensity of it all—a female abolition agent traveling the country with a national mandate. I wanted to say, Who am I to do this, a woman? But that voice was not mine. It was Father’s voice. It was Thomas’. It belonged to Israel, to Catherine, and to Mother. It belonged to the church in Charleston and the Quakers in Philadelphia. It would not, if I could help it, belong to me.