Part 29 (2/2)

I never had wanted to scream as bad as I did right then. I said, ”Those gruesome things happened to her.”

A dark pink color poured into her cheeks. ”For heaven's sakes then, you would think her whole life was nothing but violence and cruelty. I mean, it doesn't show what she did to warrant her punishments.”

She looked at the quilt again, her eyes darting over the appliques. ”We treated her well here, no one can dispute that. I can't speak for what happened to her when she ran away, she was out of our care then.” Little missus was rubbing her hands now like she was cleaning them at the wash bowl.

The quilt had shamed her. She walked to the door and took one look back at it, and I knew she'd never let it stay in the world. She'd send Hector to get it the minute we were out of the room. He'd burn mauma's story to ash.

Standing there, waiting for little missus' steps to fade, I looked down at the quilt, at the slaves flying in the sky, and I hated being a slave worse than being dead. The hate I felt for it glittered so full of beauty I sank down on the floor before it.

Sky's hair was a bushel basket without her scarf and when she bent over to see about me, the ends of it poked my face and smelled like the bristle-brush. She said, ”You all right?”

I looked up at her. ”We're leaving here.”

She heard me, but she couldn't be sure. She said, ”What you say?”

”We gonna leave here or die trying.”

Sky pulled me to my feet like plucking a flower, and I saw Denmark's face settle into hers, that day he rode to his death sitting on a coffin. I'd always wanted freedom, but there never had been a place to go and no way to get there. That didn't matter anymore. I wanted freedom more than the next breath. We'd leave, riding on our coffins if we had to. That was the way mauma had lived her whole life. She used to say, you got to figure out which end of the needle you're gon be, the one that's fastened to the thread or the end that pierces the cloth.

I lifted the quilt from the frame and folded it up, thinking of the feathers inside it, and inside the feathers, the memory of the sky.

”Here,” I said, laying the quilt in Sky's arms. ”I got to go mend that woman's cape. Put the quilt in the gunny sack and take it to Goodis and tell him to hide it with the horse blankets and don't let anybody near it.”

Mending her cape was not all I did. I took little missus' seal-stamp right off her desk while she was standing in the room and I dropped it in my pocket.

I waited till dark to write my letter.

23 April 1838.

Dear Sarah.

I hope this makes it to you. Me and Sky will be leaving here or die trying. That's how we put it. I don't know how we're doing it, but we've got mauma's money. All we need is a place to come to. I have the address on this letter. I hope I see you again one day.

Your friend.

Handful.

Sarah.

The wedding took place in a house on Spruce Street in Philadelphia on May 14 at two o'clock in the afternoon-a day full of glinting sunlight and pale blue clouds. It was the sort of day that seemed sharply real and not real at all. I remember standing in the dining room watching it unfold as if from a distance, as if I was climbing up from the bottom of sleep, coming up from the cool sheets to a new day, one life ending and another beginning.

Mother had sent a note of congratulation, which we hadn't expected, begging us to send a letter describing the wedding in detail. What will Nina wear? she'd asked. Oh, that I could see her! Naturally, she'd conveyed how relieved she was that Nina had a husband now and she hoped we would both retire from the unnatural life we'd been living, but despite that, her letter was plaintive with the love of an aging mother. She called us her dear daughters and lamented the distance between us. Will I see you again? she wrote. The question haunted me for days.

I gazed at Nina and Theodore standing now before the window about to say their vows, or as Nina had phrased it, whatever words their hearts gave them at the moment, and I thought it just as well Mother was not here. She would've expected Nina to be in ivory lace, perhaps blue linen, carrying roses or lilies, but Nina had dismissed all of that as unoriginal and embarked on a wedding designed to shock the ma.s.ses.

She was wearing a brown dress made from free-labor cotton with a broad white sash and white gloves, and she'd matched up Theodore in a brown coat, a white vest, and beige pantaloons. She clutched a handful of white rhododendrons cut fresh from the backyard, and I noticed she'd tucked a sprig in the b.u.t.ton hole of Theodore's coat. Mother wouldn't have made it past the brown dress, much less the opening prayer, which had been delivered by a Negro minister.

When the Philadelphia newspaper announced the wedding, alluding to the mixed-race guests expected to attend, we'd worried there might be demonstrators-slurs and shouts and rocks whizzing by-but mercifully, no one had showed up but those invited. Sarah Mapps and Grace were here, along with several freed slaves with whom we were acquainted, and we'd timed the wedding to coincide with the Anti-Slavery Convention in the city so that some of the most prominent abolitionists in the country were in the room: Mr. Garrison, Mr. and Mrs. Gerrit Smith, Henry Stanton, the Motts, the Tappans, the Westons, the Chapmans.

It would become known as the abolition wedding.

Nina was speaking now, her face turned up to Theodore's, and I thought suddenly, involuntarily of Israel and a tiny grief came over me. Every time it happened, it was like coming upon an empty room I didn't know was there, and stepping in, I would be pierced by it, by the ghost of the one who'd once filled it up. I didn't stumble into this place much anymore, but when I did, it hollowed out little pieces of my chest.

Gazing at Nina, radiant Nina, I pictured myself in her place, Israel beside me, the two of us saying vows, and the idea of such a thing cured me. It was the truth I always came back to, that I didn't want Israel anymore, I didn't want to be married now, and yet the phantom of what might've been, the terrible allure of it could still s.n.a.t.c.h me.

Closing my eyes, I gave my head a shake to clear the remnants of longing away, and when I looked back at the bride and groom, there were dragonflies darting beyond the window, a green tempest, and then it was gone.

Nina promised aloud to love and honor him, carefully omitting the word obey, and Theodore launched into an awkward monologue, deploring the laws that gave control of a wife's property to the husband and renouncing all claim to Nina's, and then he coughed self-consciously, as if catching himself, and professed his love.

We'd put the confrontation in Mrs. Whittier's cottage behind us, not that Theodore ever fully conceded his position, but he'd softened his rhetoric after that day, as any man in love would. The abolition movement had split into two camps just as the men predicted, and Nina and I became even worse pariahs, but it had set the cause of women in motion.

I'd been present when Nina opened the letter containing Theodore's proposal. It had come late last winter during a long reprieve in Philadelphia with Sarah Mapps and Grace, as we'd prepared for a series of lectures at the Boston Odeon. Reading it, she'd dropped the pages onto her lap and broken into tears. When she read it to me, I cried too, but my tears were a mix of joy and wretchedness and fear. I wanted this marriage for her, I wanted her happiness as much as my own, but where would I go? For days I couldn't concentrate on the lecture I was trying to write or hide the bereft feeling I carried inside. I couldn't bear to think of life without her, life alone, but neither did I want to be the burdensome relative living in the back room, getting in the way, and I couldn't imagine Theodore would want me there.

Then one day Nina came to me, plopping on the footstool beside my chair in Sarah Mapps' front room. Without a word she opened her Bible and read aloud the pa.s.sage in which Ruth speaks to Naomi: Entreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy people will be my people, and thy G.o.d my G.o.d. Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried. The Lord do so to me, and more also, if ought but death part thee and me.

Closing the Bible, she said, ”We can't be separated, it isn't possible. You must come and live with me after I'm married. Theodore asked me to tell you that my wish is also his wish.”

Theodore had bought a small farm in Fort Lee, New Jersey. We would make an odd trinity there, the three of us, but I would still have Nina. We could go on writing and working for abolition and for women, and I would help with the house, and when there were children, I would be auntie. One life ending, another beginning.

In the dining room, the minister was offering a prayer, and for some reason I didn't close my eyes as I always did, but watched Nina reach for Theodore's hand. We'd made a plan that I would give the married pair two weeks of privacy and then join them in Fort Lee, but I thought now of Mother and the question in her letter, Will I see you again? It seemed more than the elegiac pondering in an old woman's heart, and I wondered if I shouldn't seize the break in our work and go to her.

”What do you know, we are husband and wife,” Nina said when the prayer ended, p.r.o.nouncing it herself.

The dining table sat out in the garden laid with a white linen cloth strewn with platters of sweets and fresh-picked flowers-foxglove, pink azalea, and feathery fleabane petals. The confectioner had iced the wedding cake with frothed egg whites and darkened the layers with mola.s.ses in keeping with Nina's brown and white theme, and there was a large bowl of sugared raspberry-currant juice where all of the teetotaler abolitionists were lined up, pretending it hadn't fermented. I'd consumed a slos.h.i.+ng cup of it too quickly and my head was floating about.

I walked among the guests, some forty or fifty of them, searching for Lucretia, for Sarah Mapps and Grace, thinking, a little tipsily, Here are our friends, our people, and thank G.o.d no one is speaking today about the cruelties in the world. I came upon Mrs. Whittier's son John, whom I'd not seen since our head-to-head last August. He was amusing everyone with a poem he'd written that skewered Theodore for breaking his vow not to marry. He compared him to the likes of Benedict Arnold. When he saw me, he greeted me like a sister.

Lucretia found me before I could find her. It had been years. Beaming, she pulled me to the edge of the garden beside the blooming rhododendron where we could be alone. ”My dear Sarah, I can scarcely believe what you've managed to accomplis.h.!.+”

A blush crept to my face.

”It's true,” she said. ”You and Angelina are the most famous women in America.”

”. . . The most notorious, you mean.”

She smiled. ”That, too.”

I pictured Lucretia and me in her little studio, talking and talking all those evenings. That fretful young woman I'd been, so stalled, so worried she would never find her purpose. I wished I could go back and tell her it would turn out all right.

Glancing up, I caught sight of Sarah Mapps and Grace across the garden, striding toward us. Nina and I had traveled almost constantly for the past year and a half, and except for our visit last winter, we'd seen little of them. I wrapped my arms around them, along with Lucretia, who'd known them back at Arch Street.

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