The Invention of Wings(18)

            He walked back to his chair behind the chancel. I stared down at Father’s hat, then up at him, stricken, confused, stupefied even, trying to understand what I should think, but his face was a blank, implacable mask.



            After the service, I stood in a small, dingy classroom behind the church while twenty-two slave children raced about in anarchy. Upon entering the dim, airless room, I’d flung open the windows only to set us adrift in tree pollen. I sneezed repeatedly as I rapped the edge of my fan on the desk, trying to install order. Mary sat in the only chair in the room, a dilapidated Windsor, and watched me with an expression perfectly situated between boredom and amusement.

            “Let them play,” she told me. “That’s what I do.”

            I was tempted. Since the reverend’s homily, I had little heart for the lesson.

            A pile of dusty, discarded kneeling cushions were heaped in the back corner, the needlepoint frayed beyond repair. I assumed they were for the children to sit on, as there wasn’t a stick of furniture in the room other than the teacher’s desk and chair. No curriculum leaflets, picture books, slate board, chalk, or adornment for the walls.

            I laid the kneeling cushions in rows on the floor, which started a game of kicking them about like balls. I’d been told to read today’s scripture and elaborate on its meaning, but when I finally succeeded in getting the children perched on the cushions and saw their faces, the whole thing seemed a travesty. If everyone was so keen to Christianize the slaves, why weren’t they taught to read the Bible for themselves?

            I began to sing the alphabet, a new little learning-ditty. A B C D E F G . . . Mary looked up surprised, then sighed and returned to her state of apathy. H I J K L M N O P . . . There had never been hesitation in my voice when I sang. The children’s eyes glittered with attention, Q R S . . . T U V . . . W X . . . Y and Z.

            I cajoled them to sing it in sections after me. Their pronunciations were lacking. Q came out coo, L M as ellem. Oh, but their faces! Such grins. I told myself when I returned next time, I would bring a slate board and write out the letters so they could see them as they sang. I thought then of Hetty. I’d seen the disarrangement of books on my desk and knew she explored them in my absence. How she would love to learn these twenty-six letters!

            After half a dozen rounds, the children sang with gusto, half-shouting. Mary plugged her ears with her fingers, but I sang full-pitch, using my arms like conductor sticks, waving the children on. I did not see Reverend Hall in the doorway.

            “What appalling mischief is going on here?” he said.

            We halted abruptly, leaving me with the dizzy sense the letters still danced chaotically in the air over our heads. My face turned its usual flamboyant colors.

            “. . . . . . . . . We were singing, Reverend Sir.”

            “Which Grimké child are you?” He’d baptized me as a baby, just as he had all my siblings, but one could hardly expect him to keep us straight.

            “She’s Sarah,” Mary said, leaping to her feet. “I had no part in the song.”

            “. . . . . . I’m sorry we were boisterous,” I told him.

            He frowned. “We do not sing in Colored Sunday School, and we most assuredly do not sing the alphabet. Are you aware it is against the law to teach a slave to read?”

            I knew of this law, though vaguely, as if it had been stored in a root cellar in my head and suddenly dug up like some moldy yam. All right, it was the law, but it struck me as shameful. Surely he wouldn’t claim this was God’s will, too.

            He waited for me to answer, and when I didn’t, he said, “Would you put the church in contradiction of the law?”

            The memory of Hetty that day when Mother caned her flashed through my mind, and I raised my chin and glared at him, without answering.