The Invention of Wings(157)

            I peeked inside the parcel. It was still the grandest dress I’d ever made—black velvet stitched with hundreds of black glass beads. Some of them had come loose and were scatter-rolling in the linen folds. The veil on the bonnet had two spider tears that would have to be fixed, plus I’d forgot the gloves were fingerless mitts. I’d have to sew fingers on them. I whisked everything into the bed sheets, bundled it up, and tied a topknot. Leaving it outside the door, I hurried into little missus’ room.

            Her funeral outfit was stored nearly the same way in her bureau but with cedar chips instead of camphor. I didn’t know how we’d air out all these rowdy smells. When I got her dress, hat, and gloves rolled tight in the sheets, I threw both of the bed bundles over my back and went down the stairs with my cane, straight to the cellar room.

            That night after me and Sky had dragged the bed over to block the door, she tried on missus’ black velvet dress and stood there with the buttons undone. Thick-waist as missus was, I’d still have to let the bodice out for Sky, add six inches to the length and two to the sleeves. She was her daddy’s girl, all right.

            Little missus was normal size, but there was enough room inside her dress for two of me.

            The only thing we didn’t have was shoes, proper shoes. What we had was slave shoes and that would have to do.

            I started to work that night. Sky fetched threads and shears for me and watched every stitch. She sang the Gullah song she liked best, If you don’t know where you’re going, you should know where you come from.

            I told her, “We know where we’re going now.”

            “Yeah,” she said.

            “We’ll be ready when the steamer leaves Thursday eight days from now.”

            She picked up her apron draped on the rocker and dug in the pocket, pulling out two little bottles like the kind Aunt-Sister used for tinctures. “I boiled us some white oleander tea.”

            A quiver ran from my neck to my fingers. White oleander was the most deadly plant in the world. A bush had caught fire on Hasell Street and a man dropped dead just breathing the smoke. The brown liquid in Sky’s bottle would curl us on the floor retching till the last breath, but it wouldn’t take long.

            “We leaving or die trying,” Sky said.





Sarah


            I arrived in Charleston during a thunderstorm. As the steamer groaned into the harbor, lightning tore rifts in the sky and rain pelted sideways, and still, I stepped out beneath the roof of the upper deck so I could watch the city come into view. I hadn’t seen it in sixteen years.

            We churned past Fort Sumter at the harbor’s mouth, which didn’t look much further along in its construction than when I’d sailed away. The peninsula loomed up like an old mirage rising from the water, the white houses on the Battery blurred in the gray rain. For a moment I felt the quiet hungering thing that comes inside when you return to the place of your origins, and then the ache of mis-belonging. It was beautiful, this place, and it was savage. It swallowed you and made you a part of itself, or if you proved too inassimilable, it spit you out like the pit of a plum.

            I’d left here of my own will, and yet it seemed the city had banished me in much the same way I’d banished it. Seeing it now after so long, seeing the marsh grass pitching wildly around the edges of the city, the rooftops hunkered together with their ship watches and widow walks, and behind them, the steeples of St. Philip’s and St. Michael’s lifted like dark fingers, I was not sorry for loving Charleston or for leaving it. Geography had made me who I was.

            Wind swept my bonnet off the back of my head, the sash catching at my neck, and turning to grab it, I saw the menacing couple through the window of the salon. Traveling home after socializing in Newport, they’d recognized me shortly after we’d left New York. I’d tried to keep aloof from everyone, but the woman had stared at me with unrelenting curiosity. “You’re the Grimké daughter, aren’t you?” she said. “The one who—” Her husband took her arm and steered her away before she could finish. She’d meant to say the one who betrayed us.