The Invention of Wings(16)
I have knots in my years that I can’t undo, and this is one of the worst—the night I did wrong and mauma got caught.
I could’ve showed myself. I could’ve given the rightful account, said it was me, but what I did was ball up silent on the stair steps.
Missus said, “Are you the pilferer, Charlotte? Have you come back for more? Is this how you do it, slipping in at night?”
Missus roused Cindie and told her to fetch Aunt-Sister and light two lamps, they were going to search mauma’s room.
“Yessum, yessum,” said Cindie. Pleased as a planter punch.
Master Grimké groaned like he’d stepped in a dog pile, all this nasty business with women and slaves. He took his light and went back to bed.
I followed after mauma and them from a distance, saying words a ten-year-old shouldn’t know, but I’d learned plenty of cuss at the stables listening to Sabe sing to the horses. God damney, god damney, day and night. God damney, god damney, all them whites. I was working myself up to tell missus what’d happened. I left my place beside Miss Sarah’s door and sneaked out to my old room. Mauma brought me back to the house.
When I peered round the door jam into our room, I saw the blankets torn off the bed, the wash basin turned over, and our flannel gunny sack dumped upside down, quilt-fillings everywhere. Aunt-Sister was working the pulley to lower the quilt frame. It had a quilt-top on it with raw edges, bright little threads fluttering.
Nobody looked at me standing in the doorway, just mauma whose eyes always went to me. Her lids sank shut and she didn’t open them back.
The wheels on the pulley sang and the frame floated down to that squeaky music. There on top of the unfinished quilt was a bolt of bright green cloth.
I looked at the cloth and thought how pretty. Lamplight catching on every wrinkle. Me, Aunt-Sister, and missus stared at it like it was something we’d dreamed.
Missus gave us an earful then about how hard it was for her to visit discipline on a slave she’d trusted, but what choice did she have?
She told mauma, “I will delay your punishment until Monday—tomorrow is Easter and I do not want it marred by this. I will not send you off for punishment, and you should be grateful for that, but I assure you your penalty will match your crime.”
She hadn’t said Work House, she’d said off, but we knew what off meant. Least mauma wasn’t going there.
When missus finally turned to me, she didn’t ask what was I doing out here or send me back to Miss Sarah’s floorboards. She said, “You may stay with your mother until her punishment on Monday. I wish her to have some consolation until then. I am not an unfeeling woman.”
Long into that night, I slobbered out my sorrow and guilt to mauma. She rubbed my shoulders and told me she wasn’t mad. She said I never should’ve snuck out of the house, but she wasn’t mad.
I was about asleep when she said, “I should’ve sewed that green silk inside a quilt and she never would’ve found it. I ain’t sorry for stealing it, just for getting caught.”
“How come you took it?”
“Cause,” she said. “Cause I could.”
Those words stuck with me. Mauma didn’t want that cloth, she just wanted to make some trouble. She couldn’t get free and she couldn’t pop missus on the back of her head with a cane, but she could take her silk. You do your rebellions any way you can.
Sarah
On Easter, we Grimkés rode to St. Philip’s Episcopal Church beneath the Pride of India trees that lined both sides of Meeting Street. I’d asked for a spot in the open-air Sulky with Father, but Thomas and Frederick snared the privilege, while I was stuck in the carriage with Mother and the heat. The air oozed through slits that passed for windows, blowing in thinly peeled wisps. I pressed my face against the opening and watched the splendor of Charleston sweep by: bright single houses with their capacious verandas, flower boxes bulging on row houses, clipped jungles of tropical foliage—oleander, hibiscus, bougainvillea.