The Invention of Wings(17)
“Sarah, I trust you’re prepared to give your first lesson,” Mother said. I’d recently become a new teacher in the Colored Sunday School, a class taught by girls, thirteen years and older, but Mother had prodded Reverend Hall to make an exception, and for once her overbearing nature had yielded something that wasn’t altogether repugnant.
I turned to her, feeling the burn of privet in my nostrils. “. . . Yes . . . I studied v-very hard.”
Mary mocked me, protruding her eyes in a grotesque way, mouthing, “. . . V-v-very hard,” which caused Ben to snicker.
She was a menace, my sister. Lately, the pauses in my speech had diminished and I refused to let her faze me. I was about to do something useful for a change, and even if I hemmed and hawed my way through the entire class, so be it. At the moment, I was more concerned I had to teach it paired with Mary.
As the carriage neared the market, the noise mounted and the sidewalks began to overflow with Negroes and mulattoes. Sunday was the slaves’ only day off, and they thronged the thoroughfares—most were walking to their masters’ churches, required to show up and sit in the balconies—but even on regular days, the slaves dominated the streets, doing their owners’ bidding, shopping the market, delivering messages and invitations for teas and dinner parties. Some were hired out and trekked back and forth to work. Naturally, they nicked a little time to fraternize. You could see them gathered at street corners, wharves, and grog shops. The Charleston Mercury railed against the “unsupervised swarms” and called for regulations, but as Father said, as long as a slave possessed a pass or a work badge, his presence was perfectly legitimate.
Snow had been apprehended once. Instead of waiting by the carriage while we were in church, he’d driven it about the city with no one inside—a kind of pleasure ride. He’d been taken to the Guard House near St. Michael’s. Father was furious, not at Snow, but at the City Guard. He stormed down to the mayor’s court and paid the fine, keeping Snow from the Work House.
A glut of carriages on Cumberland Street prevented us from drawing closer to the church. The onslaught of people who attended services only on Eastertide incensed Mother, who saw to it the Grimkés were in their pew every dull, common Sunday of the year. Snow’s gravelly voice filtered to us from the driver’s seat. “Missus, yawls has to walk from here,” and Sabe swung open the door and lifted us down, one by one.
Our father was already striding ahead, not a tall man, but he looked imposing in his gray coat, top hat, and cravat of silk surah. He had an angular face with a long nose and profuse brows that curled about the ledge of his forehead, but what made him handsome in my mind was his hair, a wild concoction of dark, auburn waves. Thomas had inherited the rich brown-red color, as had Anna and little Charles, but it had come to me in the feeble shade of persimmons and my brows and lashes were so pale they seemed to have been skipped over altogether.
The seating arrangement inside St. Philip’s was a veritable blueprint of Charleston status, the elite vying to rent pews down front, the less affluent in the back, while the pointblank poor clustered on free benches along the sides. Our pew, which Father rented for three hundred dollars a year, was a mere three rows from the altar.
I sat beside Father, cradling his hat upside down on my lap, catching a waft of the lemon oil he used to domesticate his locks. Overhead, in the upper galleries, the slaves began their babble and laughter. It was a perennial problem, this noise. They found boldness in the balcony the way they found it on the streets, from their numbers. Recently, their racket had escalated to such a degree that monitors had been placed in the balconies as deterrents. Despite them, the rumblings grew. Then, thwack. A cry. Parishioners swung about, glaring upward.
By the time Reverend Hall mounted the pulpit, a full-scale hubbub had broken out at the rafters. A shoe sailed over the balcony and plummeted down. A heavy boot. It landed on a lady midway back, toppling her hat and concussing her head.
As the shaken lady and her family left the sanctuary, Reverend Hall pointed his finger toward the far left balcony and moved it in a slow circle clockwise. When all was silent, he quoted a scripture from Ephesians, reciting from memory. “Slaves, be obedient to them that are your masters, with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as unto Christ.” Then he made what many, including my mother, would call the most eloquent extemporization on slavery they’d ever heard. “Slaves, I admonish you to be content with your lot, for it is the will of God! Your obedience is mandated by scripture. It is commanded by God through Moses. It is approved by Christ through his apostles, and upheld by the church. Take heed, then, and may God in his mercy grant that you will be humbled this day and return to your masters as faithful servants.”