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.”
She looked confused. “You’re not leaving as planned?”
“No, I would like to stay a while. Only a while.”
I told myself it was because I wanted to grieve in private. Really, was
that so implausible?
Mrs. Todd was the wife of a struggling law clerk and she clasped my
hand. “You’re welcome to stay as long as you wish.”
I wrote a solicitous letter to Mother, explaining the unexplainable:
Father had died and I wasn’t coming home straight away. I need to grieve
alone.

Mother’s letter in response arrived in September. Her small, tight scrawl
was thick with fury and ink. My behavior was shameful, selfish, cruel.
“How could you abandon me in my darkest hour?” she wrote.
I burned her letter in the fireplace, but her words left contusions of guilt.
There was truth in what she’d written. I was selfish. I’d abandoned my
mother. Nina, as well. I anguished over it, but I didn’t pack my trunk.
I spent my days as a malingerer. I slept whenever I was tired, often in
the middle of the day. Mrs. Todd gave up on my presence at appointed
meals and reserved my food in the kitchen. I would take it to my room at
odd hours, then wash my own dishes. There were few books to read, but I
wrote in a little journal I’d bought, mostly about Father’s last days, and I
practiced my scripture verses with a set of Bible flash cards. I walked up
and down the streets beneath the sycamores as they turned blonde, then
bronze, venturing further and further each day—to Washington Square,
Philosophical Hall, Old St. Mary’s, and once, quite by accident, The Man
Full of Trouble Tavern where I heard shouting and crockery breaking.
One Sunday when the air was crisp and razor-cut with light, I walked
ankle-deep in fallen leaves all the way to Arch Street, where I came upon a
Quaker meetinghouse of such size I paused to stare. In Charleston, we had
one teeny Friends House, something of a dilapidation, to which, it was said,
no one came but two cantankerous old men. As I stood there, people began
to stream from the central door, the women and girls clad in dismal,
excoriated dresses that made us Presbyterians seem almost flamboyant.
Even the children wore drab coats and grave little faces. I observed them
against the red bricks, the steeple-less roof, the plain shuttered windows,
and I felt repelled. I’d heard they sat in silence, waiting for someone to utter
his most inward intimacies with God out loud for everyone to hear. It
sounded terrifying to me.
Notwithstanding the Quakers, those days were very much like the
moments I’d floated in the ocean at Long Branch beneath the white flag. A
vitality inhabited those weeks, almost like a second heart beating in my
chest. I’d found I could manage quite well on my own. Had it not been for
Father’s death, I might have been happy.
When November arrived, however, I knew I couldn’t remain any longer.
Winter was coming. The sea would become treacherous. I packed my trunk.

The ship was a cutter, which gave me hope of reaching Charleston in ten
days. I’d booked first-class passage, but my stateroom was dark and
cramped with nothing but a wallmere closet and a two-foot berth. As often
as possible, I hazarded above deck to feel the cold, bracing winds, huddling
with the other passengers on the lee side.
On the third morning, I woke near dawn and dressed quickly, not
bothering to braid my hair. The stale, suffocating room felt like a sepulcher,
and I surfaced above deck with my carrot hair flying, expecting to be alone,
yet there was another already at the rail. Pulling up the hood of my cloak, I
sought a spot away from him.
A tiny, white ball of moon was still in the sky, clinging to the last bit of
night. Below it a thin line of blue light ran the length of the horizon. I
watched it grow.
“How are thee?” a man’s voice said, using the formal Quaker greeting
I’d often heard in Philadelphia.
As I turned to him, strands of my hair slipped from the hood and
whipped wildly about my face. “. . . I’m fine, sir.”
He had a dramatic cleft in his chin and piercing brown eyes over which
his brows slanted upward like the slopes of a tiny hill. He wore simple
breeches with silver knee buckles, a dark coat, and a three-cornered hat. A
lock of hair, dark as coal, tossed on his forehead. I guessed him to be some
years older than I, perhaps ten or more. I’d seen him on deck before, and on
the first night, in the ship’s dining quarters with his wife and eight children,
six boys, two girls. I’d thought then how tired she looked.
“My name is Israel Morris,” he said.
Later, I would wonder if the Fates had placed me there, if they’d been
the ones who’d kept me lingering in Philadelphia for three months until this
particular ship sailed, though of course, we Presbyterians believed it was
God who arranged propitious encounters like these, not mythological
women with spindles, threads, and shears.
The mainsails were snapping and wheezing, making a great racket. I
told him my name, and then we stood for a moment, gazing at the rising
brightness, at the seabirds suddenly making soaring arcs in the sky. He told
me his wife, Rebecca, was quarantined in their cabin tending their youngest
two, who’d become sick with dysentery. He was a broker, a commission
merchant, and though he was modest, I could tell he’d been prosperous at it.

In turn, I told him about the sojourn I’d made with my father and his
unexpected death. The words slid fluidly off my tongue, with only an
occasional stammer. I could only attribute it to the sweep and flow of water
around us.
“Please, accept my sympathies,” he said. “It must have been difficult,
caring for your father alone. Could your husband not travel with you?”
“My husband? Oh, Mr. Morris, I’m not married.”
His face flushed.
Wanting to ease the moment, I said, “I assure you, it’s not a matter that
concerns me much.”
He laughed and asked about my family, about our life in Charleston.
When I told him about the house on East Bay and the plantation in the
upcountry, his lively expression died away. “You own slaves then?”
“. . . My family does, yes. But I, myself, don’t condone it.”
“Yet you cast your lot with those who do?”
I bristled. “. . . They are my family, sir. What would you have me do?”
He gazed at me with kindness and pity. “To remain silent in the face of
evil is itself a form of evil.”
I turned from him toward the glassy water. What kind of man would
speak like this? A Southern gentleman would as soon swallow his tongue.
“Forgive my bluntness,” he said. “I’m a Quaker. We believe slavery to
be an abomination. It’s an important part of our faith.”
“. . . I happen to be Presbyterian, and while we don’t have an antislavery doctrine like you, it’s an important part of my faith, as well.”
“Of course. My apologies. I’m afraid there’s a zealot in me I’m at a loss
to control.” He pulled at the rim of his hat and smiled. “I must see about
breakfast for my family. I hope we might speak again, Miss Grimké. Good
day.”
I thought of nothing but him for the next two days. He disturbed nearly
every waking minute, and even my sleep. I was drawn to him in a deeper
way than I’d been to Burke, and that’s what frightened me. I was drawn to
his brutal conscience, to his repulsive Quakerism, to the force of his ideas,
the force of him. He was married, and for that I was grateful. For that, I was
safe.
He approached me in the dining room on the sixth day of the voyage.
The ship was scudding before a gale and we’d been banned from above
deck. “May I join you?” he asked.

“. . . If you like.” Heat flared in my chest. I felt it travel to my cheeks,
turning them to crabapples. “. . . Are your children recovered? And your
wife? Has she stayed well?”
“The sickness is making its way through all of the children now, but
they’re recovering thanks to Rebecca. We couldn’t manage a single day
without her. She is—” He broke off, but when I went on gazing at him
expectantly, he finished his sentence. “The perfect mother.”
Without his hat, he looked younger. Thatches and sprigs of black hair
waved in random directions. He had tired smudges beneath his eyes, and I
imagined they were from helping his wife nurse the children, but he pulled
a worn leather book from his vest, saying he’d stayed up late in the night,
reading. “It’s the journal of John Woolman. He’s a great defender of our
faith.”
As the conversation turned once again to Quakerism, he opened the
book and read fragments to me, attempting to educate me about their
beliefs. “Everyone is of equal worth,” he said. “Our ministers are female as
well as male.”
“Female?” I asked so many questions about this oddity, he became
amused.
“Should I assume that female worth, like abolition, is also part of your
personal faith?” he said.
“. . . I’ve long wished for a vocation of my own.”
“You’re a rare woman.”
“Some would say I’m not so much rare, as radical.”
He smiled and his brows lifted on his forehead, their odd tilt deepening.
“Is it possible a Quaker lurks beneath that Presbyterian skin of yours?”
“Not at all,” I told him. But later, in private, I wasn’t sure. To condemn
slavery was one thing—that I could do in my own individual heart—but
female ministers!
Throughout the few remaining days on ship, we continued our talks in
the wind-pounded world above deck, as well as the dining quarters, where it
smelled of boiled rice and cigars. We discussed not only the Quakers, but
theology, philosophy, and the politics of emancipation. He was of the mind
that abolition should be gradual. I argued it should be immediate. He’d
found an intellectual companion in me, but I couldn’t completely
understand why he’d befriended me.

The last night aboard, Israel asked if I would come and meet his family
in the dining room. His wife, Rebecca, held their youngest on her lap, a
crying tot no more than three, whose red face bounced like a woodpecker
against her shoulder. She was one of those slight, gossamer women, whose
body seemed spun from air. Her hair was light as straw, drawn back and
middle-parted with wisps falling about her face.
She patted the child’s back. “Israel speaks highly of you. He says
you’ve been kind enough to listen as he explained our faith. I hope he didn’t
tire you. He can be unrelenting.” She smiled at me in a conspiratorial way.
I didn’t want her to be so pretty and charming. “. . . Well, he was
certainly thorough,” I said, and her laughter gurgled up. I looked at Israel.
He was beaming at her.
“If you return to the North, you must come and stay with us,” Rebecca
said, then she herded the children to their cabin.
Israel lingered a moment longer, pulling out John Woolman’s journal.
“Please accept it.”
“But it’s your own copy. I couldn’t possibly take it.”
“It would please me greatly—I’ll get another when I return to
Philadelphia. I only ask that after you read it, you write to me of your
impressions.” He opened the book and showed me a piece of paper on
which he’d written his address.
That night, after I blew out the wick, I lay awake, thinking of the book
tucked in my trunk and the address secreted inside. After you read it, write
to me. The water moved beneath me, rushing toward Charleston into the
swaying dark.