Part 27 (2/2)

Nina's hand tightened on mine, squeezing to the point of pain.

Handful.

4 August.

Dear Sarah.

Mauma pa.s.sed on last month. She fell into a sleep under the oak tree and never roused. She stayed asleep six days before she died in her bed, me beside her and Sky too. Your mauma paid for her to have a pine box.

They put her in the slave burial ground on Pitt Street. Missus let Goodis carry me and Sky over there in the carriage to see her resting place and say goodbye. Sky has turned 22 now and stands tall as a man. When we stood by the grave, I didn't come up to her shoulder. She sang the song the women on the plantation sing when they pound rice to leave on the graves. She said they put rice there to help the dead find their way back to Africa. Sky had a pocketful from the kitchen house and she spread it over mauma while she sang.

What came to me was the old song I made up when I was a girl. Cross the water, cross the sea, let them fishes carry me, carry me home. I sang that, then I took the bra.s.s thimble, the one I loved from the time I was little, and I left it on top of her grave so she'd have that part of me.

Well, I wanted you to know. I guess she's at peace now.

I hope this letter makes it to you. If you write me, take care cause your sister Mary watches everything. The black driver from her plantation named Hector is the butler now and he does her spying.

Your friend.

Handful.

I wrote Sarah's name and address on the front by the light of the candle, copying missus' handwriting as close as I could manage. Missus' pens.h.i.+p had fallen off so bad I could've set down any kind of lettering and pa.s.sed it off for hers. I closed the letter with a drop of wax and pressed it with missus' seal-stamp. I'd stole the stamp from her room-let's say, borrowed it. I planned to take it back before it was missed. The stationery, though, was just plain stolen.

Cross the room, Sky was sleeping, thras.h.i.+ng in the heat. I watched her arms search the spot on the mattress where mauma used to lay, then I blew out the flame and watched the smoke tail away in the dark. Tomorrow I'd slip the letter in the batch going to the post and hope n.o.body took a hard look.

Sky sang out in her sleep, sounded like Gullah, and I thought of the rice she'd sprinkled on mauma's grave, trying to send her spirit to Africa.

Africa. Wherever me and Sky were, that's the only place mauma would be.

Sarah.

I woke each day to a sick, empty feeling. Catherine had given us until the first day of October to pack our things and leave, but we could find no one who'd take in two sisters expelled by the Quakers, and Lucretia's house was packed with children now. The streets had been flooded with hand fliers-they were tacked on light posts and buildings and strewn on the ground-the headline screaming out in the salacious way these street rags did: OUTRAGE: An Abolitionist of the Most Revolting Character is Among You. Below that, Nina's letter to The Liberator was printed in full. Even the lowliest boardinghouses wouldn't open their doors to us.

I'd reached the borders of despair when a letter came with no return name or address on the envelope.

29 September 1835 Dear Misses Grimke, If you are bold enough to sit with us on the Negro pew, perhaps you will find it in yourself to share our home until you find more suitable lodging. My mother and I have nothing to offer but a partially furnished attic, but it has a window and the chimney runs through the middle of it and keeps it warm. It is yours, if you would have it. We ask that you not speak of the arrangement to anyone, including your present landlord Catherine Morris. We await you at 5 Lancaster Row.

Yours in Fellows.h.i.+p, Sarah Mapps Dougla.s.s We departed our old life the next day, leaving no forwarding address and no goodbye, arriving by coach at a tiny brick house in a poor, mostly white neighborhood. There was a crooked wooden fence around the front with a chain on the gate, which necessitated us dragging our trunks to the back door.

The attic was poorly lit and gauzy with cobwebs, and when a fire blazed below, the room filled with stultifying heat and smelled bitter with wood smoke, but we didn't complain. We had a roof. We had each other. We had friends in Sarah Mapps and Grace.

Sarah Mapps was well educated, perhaps more than I, having attended the best Quaker academy for free blacks in the city. She would tell me that even as a child she'd known her only mission in life was to found a school for black children. ”Few understand that kind of emphatic knowing,” she said. ”Most people, including my mother, feel I've sacrificed too much by not marrying and having children, but the pupils, they are my children.” I understood far better than she realized. Like me, she loved books, keeping her precious volumes inside a chest in their small front sitting room. Each evening she read to her mother in her lovely singsong voice-Milton, Byron, Austen-continuing long after Grace had fallen asleep in her chair.

There were hats everywhere in various stages of construction, hanging on tree racks throughout the house, and if not actual hats, then sketches of hats scattered on tables and wedged into the frame of the mirror by the door. Grace made big, wild-feathered creations which she sold to the shops, creations that, as a Quaker, she never could've worn herself. Nina said she was living vicariously, but I think she simply possessed the urgings of an artist.

Our first week in the attic, we cleaned. We swept out the dust and spiders and s.h.i.+ned the window gla.s.s. We polished the two narrow bed frames, the table and chair, and the creaky rocker. Sarah Mapps brought up a hand-braided rug, bright quilts, an extra table, a lantern, and a small bookshelf where we set our books and journals. We tucked evergreen boughs under the eaves to scent the air and hung our clothes on wall hooks. I placed my pewter inkstand on the extra table.

By the second week we were bored. Sarah Mapps had said we should be careful to conceal our comings and goings, that the neighbors would not tolerate racial mixing, but slipping out one day, we were spotted by a group of ruffian boys, who pelted us with pebbles and slurs. Amalgamators. Amalgamators. The next day the front of the house was egged.

The third week we became hermits.

When November arrived, I began to pace the oval rug as I reread books and old letters, holding them as I walked, trying not to disappear into the melancholic place I'd visited since childhood. I felt as if I was fighting to hold my ground, that if I stepped off the rug, I would fall into my old abyss.

Before we'd left Catherine's, a letter had arrived from Handful telling us of Charlotte's death. Every time I read it-so many times Nina had threatened to hide it from me-I thought of the promise I'd made to help Handful get free. It had plagued me my whole life, and now that Charlotte was gone, instead of releasing me, her death had somehow made the obligation more binding. I told myself I'd tried-I had tried. How many times had I written Mother begging to purchase Handful in order to free her? She'd not even acknowledged my requests.

Then one morning while my sister used the last of our paints to capture the bare willow outside the window and I walked my trenchant path on the rug, I suddenly stopped and gazed at the pewter inkstand. I stared at it for whole minutes. Everything was in shambles, and there was the inkstand.

”. . . Nina! Do you remember how Mother would make us sit for hours and write apologies? Well, I'm going to write one . . . a true apology for the anti-slavery cause. You could write, too . . . We both could.”

She stared at me, while everything I felt and knew offered itself up at once. ”. . . It's the South that must be reached,” I said. ”. . . We're Southerners . . . we know the slaveholders, you and I . . . We can speak to them . . . not lecture them, but appeal to them.”

Turning toward the window, she seemed to study the willow, and when she looked back, I saw the glint in her eyes. ”We could write a pamphlet!”

She rose, stepping into the quadrangle of light that lay on the floor from the window. ”Mr. Garrison printed my letter, perhaps he would print our pamphlet, too, and send it to all the cities in the South. But let's not address it to the slaveholders. They'll never listen to us.”

”. . . Who then?”

”We'll write to the Southern clergy and to the women. We'll set the preachers upon them, and their wives and mothers and daughters!”

I wrote in bed on my lap desk, wrapped in a woolen shawl, while Nina bent over the small table in her old, fur-lined bonnet. The entire attic ached with cold and the scratch-scratch of our pens and the whippoorwills already calling to each other in the gathering dark.

All winter the chimney had steeped the attic with heat and Nina would throw open the window to let in the icy air. We wrote sweltering or we wrote s.h.i.+vering, but rarely in between. Our pamphlets were nearly finished-mine, An Epistle to the Clergy of the Southern States, and Nina's, An Appeal to the Christian Women of the South. She'd taken the women, and I the clergy, which I found ironic considering I'd done so poorly with men and she so well. She insisted it would've been more ironic the other way around-her writing about G.o.d when she'd done so poorly with him.

We'd set down every argument the South made for slavery and refuted them all. I didn't stutter on the page. It was an ecstasy to write without hesitation, to write everything hidden inside of me, to write with the sort of audacity I wouldn't have found in person. I sometimes thought of Father as I wrote and the brutal confession he'd made at the end. Do you think I don't abhor slavery? Do you think I don't know it was greed that kept me from following my conscience? But it was mostly Charlotte who haunted my pages.

Below us in the kitchen, I heard Sarah Mapps and Grace feeding wood into the stove, an ornery old Rumford that coughed up clouds of s.m.u.t. Soon we smelled vegetables boiling-onions, parsnips, beet tops-and we gathered our day's work and descended the ladder.

Sarah Mapps turned from the stove as we entered, sheaves of smoke floating about her head. ”Do you have new pages for us?” she asked, and her mother, who was pounding dough, stopped to hear our answer.

”Sarah has brought down the last of hers,” Nina said. ”She wrote the final sentence today, and I expect to complete mine tomorrow!”

Sarah Mapps clapped her hands the way she might've done for the children in her cla.s.s. Our habit was to gather in the sitting room after the meal, where Nina and I read our latest pa.s.sages aloud to them. Grace sometimes grew so distressed at our eyewitness accounts of slavery she would interrupt us with all sorts of outbursts-Such an abomination! Can't they see we are persons? There but for the grace of G.o.d. Finally, Sarah Mapps would fetch the millinery basket so her mother could distract herself by jabbing a needle into one of the hats she was making.

”A letter came for you today, Nina,” Grace said, wiping dough from her hands and digging it from her ap.r.o.n.

Few people knew of our whereabouts: Mother and Thomas in Charleston, and I'd sent the address to Handful as well, though I'd not heard back from her. Among the Quakers, we'd informed no one but Lucretia, afraid that Sarah Mapps and Grace would suffer for consorting with us. The handwriting on the letter, however, belonged to none of them.

I gazed over Nina's shoulder as she tore open the paper.

”It's from Mr. Garrison!” Nina cried. I'd forgotten-Nina had written him some weeks ago, describing our literary undertaking, and he'd responded with enthusiasm, asking us to submit our work when it was finished. I couldn't imagine what he might want.

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