Little missus started scrambling to get her shoes on. She and missus were always bragging on the mayor. Mr. Robert Hayne walked on Charleston water. He was what they called a nullifier.
“I’m afraid this isn’t a social call, Mrs. Grimké. I’m here on official business regarding your daughters, Sarah and Angelina.”
Little missus went still. She edged back to the doorway, one shoe on, one shoe off, and I eased over there, too.
“I regret to inform you that Sarah and Angelina are no longer welcome in the city. You should inform them if they return for a visit, they’ll be arrested and imprisoned until another steamer can return them to the North. It’s for their own welfare as much as the city’s—Charleston is so enraged against them now they would undoubtedly meet with violence if they showed their faces.”
It fell silent. The old bones of the house creaked round us.
“Do you understand, madame?” the mayor said.
“I understand perfectly, now you should understand me. My daughters may hold unholy opinions, but they will not be treated with this sort of insult and indignity.”
The front door banged, the cane tapped, then missus was standing in the doorway with her lip trembling.
The measure tape slipped from my fingers. It curled on the floor by my foot. I wasn’t likely to see Sarah ever again.
Sarah
Seated on the platform, I watched the faces in the audience grow more rapt as Nina spoke, the air crackling about their heads as if something was effervescing in it. It was our inaugural lecture, and we weren’t tucked away in a parlor somewhere before twenty ladies with embroidery hoops on their laps like the Anti-Slavery Society had first envisioned. We were here in a majestic hall in New York with carved balconies and red velvet chairs filled to overflowing.
All week the newspapers had railed against the unwholesome novelty of two sisters holding forth like Fanny Wrights. The streets had been papered with handbills admonishing women to stay home, and even the Anti-Slavery Society had grown nervous about moving the lecture to a public hall. They’d come close to canceling the whole thing and sending us back to the parlor.
It was Theodore Weld who’d stood and castigated the Society for their cowardice. They called him the Lion of the Tribe of Abolition, and for good reason—he could be quite forceful when he needed to. “I defend these ladies’ right to speak against slavery anywhere and everywhere. It’s supremely ridiculous for you to bully them from this great moment!”
He had saved us.
Nina swept back and forth across the stage, lifting her hands and sending her voice soaring into the balconies. “We stand before you as Southern women, here to speak the terrible truth about slavery . . .” She’d splurged on a stylish, deep blue dress that set off her hair, and I couldn’t help wondering what Mr. Weld would think if he could see her.
Even though he’d led the training sessions for Nina and me and the thirty-eight other agents, schooling us in the skills of oration, he’d never seemed sure how to advise the two of us. Should we stand motionless and speak softly as people expected of a woman or gesture and project like a man? “I leave it to you,” he’d told us.
He’d taken what he called a brotherly interest in us, visiting us often at our lodgings. It was really Nina he’d taken an interest in, of course, and I doubted it was brotherly. She wouldn’t admit it, but she was drawn to him, too. Before arriving in New York, I’d pictured Mr. Weld as a stern old man, but as it turned out, he was a young man, and as kindly as he was stern. Thirty-three and unmarried, he was strikingly handsome, with thick brown curling hair and biting blue eyes, and he was color-blind to the point he wore all sorts of funny, mismatched shades. We thought it endearing. I was fairly sure, however, it wasn’t any of these qualities that attracted Nina. I suspected it was that saving speech of his. It was those five words, I leave it to you.