Sarah
On Easter, we Grimkés 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 passed 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 class
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 class, 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 pass 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 Cumberland 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 Grimkés 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 clustered 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.
Parishioners 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 God! Your obedience is
mandated by scripture. It is commanded by God through Moses. It is
approved by Christ through his apostles, and upheld by the church. Take
heed, then, and may God 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 classroom 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 amusement.
“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 cushions were heaped in the back
corner, the needlepoint frayed beyond repair. I assumed 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 cushions in rows on the floor, which started a game
of kicking them about like balls. 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 cushions 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 pronunciations 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 Grimké 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
assuredly 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
God’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.
