Sarah Grimké
My eleventh birthday began with Mother promoting me from the nursery.
For a year I’d longed to escape the porcelain dolls, tops, and tiny tea sets
strewn across the floor, the small beds lined up in a row, the whole glut and
bedlam of the place, but now that the day had come, I balked at the
threshold of my new room. It was paneled with darkness and emanated the
smell of my brother—all things smoky and leather. The oak canopy and red
velvet valance of the bedstead was so towering it seemed closer to the
ceiling than the floor. I couldn’t move for dread of living alone in such an
enormous, overweening space.
Drawing a breath, I flung myself across the door sill. That was the
artless way I navigated the hurdles of girlhood. Everyone thought I was a
plucky girl, but in truth, I wasn’t as fearless as everyone assumed. I had the
temperament of a tortoise. Whatever dread, fright, or bump appeared in my
path, I wanted nothing more than to drop in my tracks and hide. If you must
err, do so on the side of audacity. That was the little slogan I’d devised for
myself. For some time now, it had helped me to hurl myself over door sills.
That morning was full of cold, bright wind pouring off the Atlantic and
clouds blowing like windsocks. For a moment, I stood just inside the room
listening to the saber-fronds on the palmettos clatter around the house. The
eaves of the piazza hissed. The porch swing groaned on its chains.
Downstairs in the warming kitchen, Mother had the slaves pulling out
Chinese tureens and Wedgwood cups, preparing for my birthday party. Her
maid Cindie had spent hours wetting and fastening Mother’s wig with paper
and curlers and the sour smell of it baking had nosed all the way up the
stairs.
I watched as Binah, the nursery mauma, tucked my clothes into the
heavy old wardrobe, recalling how she used a fire poke to rock Charles’
cradle, her cowrie shell bracelets rattling along her arms while she terrified
us with tales of the Booga Hag—an old woman who rode about on a broom
and sucked the breath from bad children. I would miss Binah. And sweet

Anna, who slept with her thumb in her mouth. Ben and Henry, who jumped
like banshees until their mattresses erupted with geysers of goose feathers,
and little Eliza, who had a habit of slipping into my bed to hide from the
Booga’s nightly reign of terror.
Of course, I should’ve graduated from the nursery long ago, but I’d
been forced to wait for John to go away to college. Our three-storied house
was one of the grandest in Charleston, but it lacked enough bedrooms,
considering how . . . well, fruitful Mother was. There were ten of us: John,
Thomas, Mary, Frederick, and myself, followed by the nursery dwellers—
Anna, Eliza, Ben, Henry, and baby Charles. I was the middle one, the one
Mother called different and Father called remarkable, the one with the
carroty hair and the freckles, whole constellations of them. My brothers had
once traced Orion, the Dipper, and Ursa Major on my cheeks and forehead
with charcoal, connecting the bright red specks, and I hadn’t minded—I’d
been their whole sky for hours.
Everyone said I was Father’s favorite. I don’t know whether he
preferred me or pitied me, but he was certainly my favorite. He was a judge
on South Carolina’s highest court and at the top of the planter class, the
group Charleston claimed as its elite. He’d fought with General Washington
and been taken prisoner by the British. He was too modest to speak of these
things—for that, he had Mother.
Her name was Mary, and there ends any resemblance to the mother of
our Lord. She was descended from the first families of Charleston, that little
company of Lords that King Charles had sent over to establish the city. She
worked this into conversations so tirelessly we no longer made the time or
effort to roll our eyes. Besides governing the house, a host of children, and
fourteen slaves, she kept up a round of social and religious duties that
would’ve worn out the queens and saints of Europe. When I was being
forgiving, I said that my mother was simply exhausted. I suspected, though,
she was simply mean.
When Binah finished arranging my hair combs and ribbons on the
lavish Hepplewhite atop my new dressing table, she turned to me, and I
must have looked forsaken standing there because she clucked her tongue
against the roof of her mouth and said, “Poor Miss Sarah.”
I did so despise the attachment of Poor to my name. Binah had been
muttering Poor Miss Sarah like an incantation since I was four.

It’s my earliest memory: arranging my brother’s marbles into words. It is
summer, and I am beneath the oak that stands in the back corner of the work
yard. Thomas, ten, whom I love above all the others, has taught me nine
words: SARAH, GIRL, BOY, GO, STOP, JUMP, RUN, UP, DOWN. He has
written them on a parchment and given me a pouch of forty-eight glass
marbles with which to spell them out, enough to shape two words at a time.
I arrange the marbles in the dirt, copying Thomas’ inked words. Sarah Go.
Boy Run. Girl Jump. I work as fast as I can. Binah will come soon looking
for me.
It’s Mother, however, who descends the back steps into the yard. Binah
and the other house slaves are clumped behind her, moving with cautious,
synchronized steps as if they’re a single creature, a centipede crossing an
unprotected space. I sense the shadow that hovers over them in the air, some
devouring dread, and I crawl back into the green-black gloom of the tree.
The slaves stare at Mother’s back, which is straight and without give.
She turns and admonishes them. “You are lagging. Quickly now, let us be
done with this.”
As she speaks, an older slave, Rosetta, is dragged from the cow house,
dragged by a man, a yard slave. She fights, clawing at his face. Mother
watches, impassive.
He ties Rosetta’s hands to the corner column of the kitchen house porch.
She looks over her shoulder and begs. Missus, please. Missus. Missus.
Please. She begs even as the man lashes her with his whip.
Her dress is cotton, a pale yellow color. I stare transfixed as the back of
it sprouts blood, blooms of red that open like petals. I cannot reconcile the
savagery of the blows with the mellifluous way she keens or the beauty of
the roses coiling along the trellis of her spine. Someone counts the lashes—
is it Mother? Six, seven.
The scourging continues, but Rosetta stops wailing and sinks against the
porch rail. Nine, ten. My eyes look away. They follow a black ant traveling
the far reaches beneath the tree—the mountainous roots and forested
mosses, the endless perils—and in my head I say the words I fashioned
earlier. Boy Run. Girl Jump. Sarah Go.
Thirteen. Fourteen . . . I bolt from the shadows, past the man who now
coils his whip, job well done, past Rosetta hanging by her hands in a heap.

As I bound up the back steps into the house, Mother calls to me, and Binah
reaches to scoop me up, but I escape them, thrashing along the main
passage, out the front door, where I break blindly for the wharves.
I don’t remember the rest with clarity, only that I find myself wandering
across the gangplank of a sailing vessel, sobbing, stumbling over a turban
of rope. A kind man with a beard and a dark cap asks what I want. I plead
with him, Sarah Go.
Binah chases me, though I’m unaware of her until she pulls me into her
arms and coos, “Poor Miss Sarah, poor Miss Sarah.” Like a decree, a
proclamation, a prophecy.
When I arrive home, I am a muss of snot, tears, yard dirt, and harbor
filth. Mother holds me against her, rears back and gives me an incensed
shake, then clasps me again. “You must promise never to run away again.
Promise me.”
I want to. I try to. The words are on my tongue—the rounded lumps of
them, shining like the marbles beneath the tree.
“Sarah!” she demands.
Nothing comes. Not a sound.
I remained mute for a week. My words seemed sucked into the cleft
between my collar bones. I rescued them by degrees, by praying, bullying
and wooing. I came to speak again, but with an odd and mercurial form of
stammer. I’d never been a fluid speaker, even my first spoken words had
possessed a certain belligerent quality, but now there were ugly, halting
gaps between my sentences, endless seconds when the words cowered
against my lips and people averted their eyes. Eventually, these horrid
pauses began to come and go according to their own mysterious whims.
They might plague me for weeks and then remain away months, only to
return again as abruptly as they left.

The day I moved from the nursery to commence a life of maturity in John’s
staid old room, I wasn’t thinking of the cruelty that had taken place in the
work yard when I was four or of the thin filaments that had kept me
tethered to my voice ever since. Those concerns were the farthest thing
from my mind. My speech impediment had been absent for some time now
—four months and six days. I’d almost imagined myself cured.

So when Mother swept into the room all of a sudden—me, in a
paroxysm of adjustment to my surroundings, and Binah, tucking my
possessions here and there—and asked if my new quarters were to my
liking, I was stunned by my inability to answer her. The door slammed in
my throat, and the silence hung there. Mother looked at me and sighed.
When she left, I willed my eyes to remain dry and turned away from
Binah. I couldn’t bear to hear one more Poor Miss Sarah.