Part 3 (1/2)

Those words stuck with me. Mauma didn't want that cloth, she just wanted to make some trouble. She couldn't get free and she couldn't pop missus on the back of her head with a cane, but she could take her silk. You do your rebellions any way you can.

Sarah.

On Easter, we Grimkes rode to St. Philip's Episcopal Church beneath the Pride of India trees that lined both sides of Meeting Street. I'd asked for a spot in the open-air Sulky with Father, but Thomas and Frederick snared the privilege, while I was stuck in the carriage with Mother and the heat. The air oozed through slits that pa.s.sed for windows, blowing in thinly peeled wisps. I pressed my face against the opening and watched the splendor of Charleston sweep by: bright single houses with their capacious verandas, flower boxes bulging on row houses, clipped jungles of tropical foliage-oleander, hibiscus, bougainvillea.

”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 cla.s.s 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 cla.s.s, 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 pa.s.s 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 c.u.mberland 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 Grimkes 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 cl.u.s.tered 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. Paris.h.i.+oners 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 G.o.d! Your obedience is mandated by scripture. It is commanded by G.o.d through Moses. It is approved by Christ through his apostles, and upheld by the church. Take heed, then, and may G.o.d in his mercy grant that you will be humbled this day and return to your masters as faithful servants.”

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 cla.s.sroom 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 amus.e.m.e.nt.

”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 cus.h.i.+ons were heaped in the back corner, the needlepoint frayed beyond repair. I a.s.sumed 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 cus.h.i.+ons in rows on the floor, which started a game of kicking them about like b.a.l.l.s. 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 cus.h.i.+ons 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 p.r.o.nunciations 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 Grimke 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 a.s.suredly 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 G.o.d'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.

Handful.

What came next was a fast, bitter wind.

Monday, after we got done with devotions, Aunt-Sister took mauma aside. She said missus had a friend who didn't like floggings and had come up with the one-legged punishment. Aunt-Sister went to a lot of trouble to draw us a picture of it. She said they wind a leather tie round the slave's ankle, then pull that foot up behind him and hitch the tie round his neck. If he lets his ankle drop, the tie chokes his throat.

We knew what she was telling us. Mauma sat down on the kitchen house steps and laid her head flat against her knees.

Tomfry was the one who came to strap her up. I could see he didn't want any part of it, but he wasn't saying so. Missus said, ”One hour, Tomfry. That will do.” Then she went inside to her window perch.

He led mauma to the middle of the yard near the garden where tiny shoots had just broke through the dirt. All us were out there huddled under the spreading tree, except Snow who was off with the carriage. Rosetta started wailing. Eli patted her arm, trying to ease her. Lucy and Phoebe were arguing over a piece of cold ham left from breakfast, and Aunt-Sister went over there and smacked them both cross their faces.

Tomfry turned mauma so she was facing the tree with her back to the house. She didn't fight. She stood there limp as the moss on the branches. The scent of low tide coming from the harbor was everywhere, a rotted smell.

Tomfry told mauma, ”Hold on to me,” and she rested her hand on his shoulder while he bound her ankle with what looked like an old leather belt. He pulled it up behind her so she was standing on one leg, then he wound the other end of the strap round her throat and buckled it.

Mauma saw me hanging on to Binah, my lips and chin trembling, and she said, ”You ain't got to watch. Close your eyes.”

I couldn't do it, though.

After he got her trussed up, Tomfry moved off so she couldn't grab on to him, and she took a hard spill. Split the skin over her brow. When she hit the ground, the strap yanked tight and mauma started choking. She threw back her head and gulped for air. I ran to help her, but the tat-tat, tat-tat of missus' cane landed on the window, and Tomfry pulled me away and got mauma to her feet.

I closed my eyes then, but what I saw in the dark was worse as the real thing. I cracked my eyes and watched her trying to keep her leg from dropping down and cutting off her air, fighting to stay upright. She set her eyes on top of the oak tree. Her standing leg quivered. Blood from her head-cut ran down her cheek. It clung to her jaw like rain on the roof eave.