The Invention of Wings(8)

            Mother wished to replace the archaic arrangement with one that had recently been installed in the house of her friend, Mrs. Russell. There, buttons were pressed that rang in the slaves’ quarters, each with a special chime. Mother was bent on the innovation, but Father thought it wasteful. Though we were Anglicans, he had a mild streak of Huguenot frugality. There would be ostentatious buttons in the Grimké household over his dead body.

            I crept barefooted down the wide mahogany stairs to the first floor where two more slaves slept, along with Cindie, who sat wide awake with her back against the wall outside my parents’ chamber. She eyed me warily, but didn’t ask what I was doing.

            I picked my way along the Persian rug that ran the near-length of the main passage, turned the knob to Father’s library, and stepped inside. An ornately framed portrait of George Washington was lit with a scrim of moonlight coming through the front window. For almost a year, Father had looked the other way as I’d slipped beneath Mr. Washington’s nose to plunder the library. John, Thomas, and Frederick had total reign over his vast trove—books of law, geography, philosophy, theology, history, botany, poetry, and the Greek humanities—while Mary and I were officially forbidden to read a word of it. Mary didn’t seem to care for books, but I . . . I dreamed of them in my sleep. I loved them in a way I couldn’t fully express even to Thomas. He pointed me to certain volumes and drilled me on Latin declensions. He was the only one who knew my desperation to acquire a true education, beyond the one I received at the hands of Madame Ruffin, my tutor and French nemesis.

            She was a small, hot-tempered woman who wore a widow’s cap with strings floating at her cheeks, and when it was cold, a squirrely fur cloak and tiny fur-lined shoes. She was known to line girls up on the Idle Bench for the smallest infraction and scream at them until they fainted. I despised her, and her “polite education for the female mind,” which was composed of needlework, manners, drawing, basic reading, penmanship, piano, Bible, French, and enough arithmetic to add two and two. I thought it possible I might die from tracing teensy flowers on the pages of my art tablet. Once I wrote in the margin, “If I should die of this horrid exercise, I wish these flowers to adorn my coffin.” Madame Ruffin was not amused. I was made to stand on the Idle Bench, where she ranted at my insolence, and where I forced myself not to faint.

            Increasingly, during those classes, longings had seized me, foreign, torrential aches that overran my heart. I wanted to know things, to become someone. Oh, to be a son! I adored Father because he treated me almost as if I were a son, allowing me to slip in and out of his library.

            On that night, the coals in the library’s fireplace lay cold and the smell of cigar smoke still pooled in the air. Without effort, I located Father’s South Carolina Justice of the Peace and Public Laws, which he himself had authored. I’d thumbed through it enough to know somewhere in the pages was a copy of a legal manumission document.

            Upon finding it, I took paper and quill from Father’s desk and copied it:



            I hereby certify that on this day, 26 November 1803, in the city of Charleston, in the state of South Carolina, I set free from slavery, Hetty Grimké, and bestow this certificate of manumission upon her.

            Sarah Moore Grimké

            What could Father do but make Hetty’s freedom as legal and binding as her ownership? I was following a code of law he’d fashioned himself! I left my handiwork atop the backgammon box on his desk.

            In the corridor, I heard the tingle of Mother’s bell, summoning Cindie, and I broke into a run back upstairs that blew out the flame on my candle.

            My room had turned even colder and the little bird had ceased its song. I crept beneath the stack-pile of quilts and blankets, but couldn’t sleep for excitement. I imagined the thanksgiving Hetty and Charlotte would heap on me. I imagined Father’s pride when he discovered the document, and Mother’s annoyance. Legal and binding, indeed! Finally, overcome with fatigue and satisfaction, I drifted to sleep.