The Invention of Wings(31)

            “Oh, Miss Sarah, that just it. She ’bout to get her own punishing out back.”



            I have no memory of my feet grazing the stairs.

            “It just one lash,” Binah cried, racing behind me. “One lash, missus say. That be all.”

            I flung open the back door. My eyes swept the yard. Handful’s skinny arms were tied to the porch rail of the kitchen house. Ten paces behind her, Tomfry held a strap and stared at the ground. Charlotte stood in the wheel ruts that cut from the carriage house to the back gate, while the rest of the slaves clustered beneath the oak.

            Tomfry raised his arm. “No!” I screamed. “Nooooo!” He turned toward me, hesitating, and relief filled his face.

            Then I heard Mother’s cane tap the glass on the upstairs window, and Tomfry lifted his tired eyes toward the sound. He nodded and brought the lash down across Handful’s back.





Handful


            Tomfry said he tried not to put much force in it, but the strike flayed open my skin. Miss Sarah made a poultice with Balm of Gilead buds soaked in master Grimké’s rum, and mauma handed the whole flask to me and said, “Here, go on, drink it, too.” I don’t hardly remember the pain.

            The gash healed fast, but Miss Sarah’s hurt got worse and worse. Her voice had gone back to stalling and she pined for her books. That was one wretched girl.

            It’d been Lucy who ran tattling to Miss Mary about my lettering under the tree, and Miss Mary had run tattling to missus. I’d judged Lucy to be stupid, but she was only weak-willed and wanting to get in good with Miss Mary. I never did forgive her, and I don’t know if Miss Sarah forgave her sister, cause what came from all that snitching turned the tide on Miss Sarah’s life. Her studying was over and done.

            My reading lessons were over, too. I had my hundred words, and I figured out a good many more just using my wits. Now and then, I said my ABCs for mauma and read words to her off the picture pages she’d tacked on her wall.



            One day I went to the cellar and mauma was making a baby gown from muslin with lilac bands. She saw my face and said, “That’s right, another Grimké coming. Sometime this winter. Missus ain’t happy ’bout it. I heard her tell massa, that’s it, this the last one.”

            When mauma finished hemming the little gown, she dug in the gunny sack and pulled out a short stack of clean paper, a half full inkwell, and a quill pen, and I knew she’d stole every one of these things. I said, “Why you keep doing this?”

            “I need you to write something. Write, ‘Charlotte Grimké has permission for traveling.’ Under that, put the month, leave off the day, and sign Mary Grimké with some curlicue.”

            “First off, I don’t know how to write Charlotte. I don’t know the word permission either.”

            “Then, write, ‘This slave is allowed for travel.’”

            “What you gonna do with it?”

            She smiled, showing me the gap in her front teeth. “This slave gon travel. But don’t worry, she always coming back.”

            “What you gonna do when a white man stops you and asks to see your pass and it looks like some eleven-year-old wrote it?”

            “Then you best write it like you ain’t some eleven-year-old.”

            “How you plan on getting past the wall?”

            She looked up at the window near the ceiling. It wasn’t big as a hat box. I didn’t see how she could wriggle through it, but she would grease herself with goose fat if that’s what it took. I wrote her pass cause she was bent on hell to have it.