The Invention of Wings(151)
“Paltry?” Nina cried. “Is our right to speak paltry?”
“In comparison to the cause of abolition? Yes, I say it is.”
Mrs. Whittier drew up in her chair. “Really, John! As a woman, I didn’t think I had a grievance until you began speaking!”
“Why must it be one or the other?” Nina asked. “Sarah and I haven’t ceased to work for abolition. We’re speaking for slaves and women both. Don’t you see, we could do a hundred times more for the slave, if we weren’t so fettered?” She turned to Theodore, casting on him the most beautiful, imploring look. “Can’t you stand side by side with me? With us?”
He drew a long breath and his face gave him away—it was twisted with love and distress—but he’d come on a mission, and as Mrs. Whittier had said, he was a man of principle, right or wrong. “Angelina, I think of you as my friend, the dearest of friends, and it tortures me to go against you, but now is the time to stand with the slave. The time will come for us to take up the woman question, but not yet.”
“The time to assert one’s right is when it’s denied!”
“I’m sorry,” he told her.
Outside, the wind swirled up, churning the leaves in the birch. The sound and smell of it loomed through the open window, and I had a sudden fleeting memory of playing beneath the oak in the work yard back home, forming words with my brother’s marbles, Sarah Go, and then the slave woman is dragged from the cow house and whipped. I don’t scream or make a sound. I say nothing at all.
The older Mr. Wright had begun his piece, coming to the crux of it. “It saddens me, but your agitation for women harms our cause. It threatens to split the abolition movement in two. I can’t believe you want that. We’re only asking you to confine your audiences to women and refrain from further talk about women’s reform.”
Hushing up the Grimké sisters—would it never stop? I looked at Mr. Wright, sitting there rubbing his arthritic fingers, and then at John and Theodore—these good men who wished to quash us, gently, of course, benignly, for the good of abolition, for our own good, for their good, for the greater good. It was all so familiar. Theirs was only a different kind of muzzle.
I’d spoken but once since they’d gotten here, and it seemed to me now I’d spent my entire life trying to coax back the voice that left me that long-ago day under the tree. Nina, clearly furious, had stopped arguing. She looked at me, beseeching me to say something. I lifted my fingers to my mouth and touched the last bit of swollenness on my lip, feeling the uprush of indignation that had sustained me through the summer, and, I suppose, my whole life, but this time, it formed into hard round words. “How can you ask us to go back to our parlors?” I said, rising to my feet. “To turn our backs on ourselves and on our own sex? We don’t wish the movement to split, of course we don’t—it saddens me to think of it—but we can do little for the slave as long as we’re under the feet of men. Do what you have to do, censure us, withdraw your support, we’ll press on anyway. Now, sirs, kindly take your feet off our necks.”
That night I began writing my second pamphlet, Letters on the Equality of the Sexes, working into the hours before dawn. The first line had arranged itself in my head while I’d sat listening to the men try and dissuade us: Whatsoever it is morally right for a man to do, it is morally right for a woman to do. She is clothed by her Maker with the same rights, the same duties.
Handful
It was springtime when all the heavy cleaning and airing-out was going on in the house and every night me and Sky would come back to the cellar room after being with the bristle-brush all day, and fall on the bed, and the first thing I’d see was the quilt frame, the one true roof over my head. I’d think about everything hidden up there—mauma’s story quilt, the money, Sarah’s booklet, her letter telling me about the promise she’d made to get me free—and I’d fall asleep glad they were safe over my head.