The Invention of Wings(86)
I nodded again, and he put his arm round me to stop the shaking.
Turning to Gullah Jack and the rest of them, he said, “This is the daughter of my wife and the sister of my child. She’s family, and that means you don’t lay a hand on her.”
He told the men to go on back to his workshop. We waited while they scraped the chairs back and eased from the room.
So, he counted mauma one of his wives. I’m family.
He pulled a chair for me. “Here, sit down. What’re you doing here?”
“I came to find out the truth of what happened to mauma. I know you know.”
“Some things are better not to know,” he said.
“Well, that’s not what the Bible preaches. It says if you know the truth, it’ll set you free.”
He circled the table. “All right, then.” He closed the window so the truth would stay in the room and not float out for the world to hear.
“The day Charlotte got in trouble with the Guard, she came here. I was in the workshop and when I looked up, there she was. They’d chased her all the way to the rice mill pond, where she hid inside a sack in the millhouse. She had rice hulls all over her dress. I kept her here till dark, then I took her to the Neck, where the policing is light. I took her there to hide.”
The Neck was just north of the city and had lots of tenement houses for free blacks and slaves whose owners let them “live out.” Negro huts, they called them. I tried to picture one, picture mauma in it.
“I knew a free black there who had a room, and he took her in. She said when the Guard stopped searching for her, she’d go back to the Grimkés and throw herself on their mercy.” He’d been pacing, but now he sat down next to me and finished up the truth quick as he could. “One night she went out to the privy in Radcliff Alley and there was a white man there, a slave poacher named Robert Martin. He was waiting for her.”
A noise filled my head, a wailing sound so loud I couldn’t hear. “A poacher, what’s a poacher?”
“Somebody that steals slaves. They’re worse than scum. We all knew this man—he had a wagon-trade in these parts. First, regular goods, then he started buying slaves, then he started stealing slaves. He hunted for them in the Neck. He’d keep his ear to the ground and go after the runaways. More than one person saw him take Charlotte.”
“He took her? He sold her off somewhere?”
I was on my feet, screaming over the noise in my skull. “Why didn’t you look for her?”
He took me by the shoulders and gave me a shake. His eyes were sparking like flint. He said, “Gullah Jack and I looked for two days. We looked everywhere, but she was gone.”
Sarah
I made the laborious journey back to Philadelphia, where I found lodging at the same house on Society Hill where Father and I had boarded earlier, expecting to stay only until the ship sailed, but on the appointed morning—my trunk packed and the carriage waiting—something strange and unknown inside of me balked.
Mrs. Todd, who rented the room to me, tapped at my door. “Miss Grimké, the carriage—it’s waiting. May I send the driver to collect the trunk?”
I didn’t answer immediately, but stood at the window and stared out at the leafy vine on the picket fence, at the cobble street lined with sycamore trees, the light falling in quiet, mottled patterns, and beneath my breath I whispered, “No.”
I turned to her, untying my bonnet. It was black with a small ruffle suitable for mourning. I’d purchased it on High Street the day before, maneuvering alone in the shops with no one to please but myself, then come back to this simple room where there were no servants or slaves, no immoderate furniture or filigree or gold leaf, no one summoning me to tea with visitors I didn’t care for, no expectations of any kind, just this little room where I took care of everything myself, even spreading my own bed and seeing to my laundry. I turned to Mrs. Todd. “. . . I would like to keep the room a bit longer, if I may.”