Sarah
Sitting before the mirror in my room, I stared at my face while Handful and
six-year-old Nina wove my ponytail into braids with the aim of looping
them into a circlet at the nape of my neck. Earlier I’d rubbed my face with
salt and lemon-vinegar, which was Mother’s formula for removing ink
spots. It had lightened my freckles, but not erased them, and I reached for
the powder muff to finish them off.
It was February, the height of Charleston’s social season, and all week, a
stream of calling cards and invitations had collected on the waiting desk
beside the front door. From them Mother had chosen the most elegant and
opportune affairs. Tonight, a waltzing party.
I’d entered society two years ago, at sixteen, thrust into the lavish round
of balls, teas, musical salons, horseraces, and picnics, which, according to
Mother, meant the dazzling doors of Charleston had flung open and female
life could begin in earnest. In other words, I could take up the business of
procuring a husband. How highborn and moneyed this husband turned out
to be would depend entirely on the allure of my face, the delicacy of my
physique, the skill of my seamstress, and the charisma of my tête-à-tête.
Notwithstanding my seamstress, I arrived at the glittery entrance like a
lamb to slaughter.
“Look at this mess you’ve gone and made,” Handful said to Nina,
who’d tangled the lock of hair assigned to her into what we commonly
referred to as a rat’s nest. Handful raked the brush through it at no small
expense to my scalp, then divided the strands into three even pieces, and
pronounced two of them to be rabbits and one of them a log. Nina, who’d
gone into a pout at having her braid confiscated, perked up at the prospect
of a game.
“Watch now,” Handful told her. “This rabbit goes under the log, and this
rabbit goes over the log. You make them hop like that all the way down.
See, that’s how you make a plait—hop over, hop under.”
Nina took possession of the rabbits and the log and created a
remarkably passable braid. Handful and I oohed and ahhed as if she’d
carved a Florentine statue.
It was a winter evening like so many others that passed in quiet
predictability: the room flushed with lamplight, a fire nesting on the grate,
an early dark flattening against the windows, while my two companions
fussed over me at the dresser.
My sister and godchild, Angelina—Nina for short—already bore the
oval face and graceful features with which our older sister Mary had been
blessed. Her eyes were brown and her hair and lashes dark as the little stone
box in which I’d once kept my button. My precious Nina was strikingly
beautiful. Better yet, she had a lively intellect and showed signs of being
quite fearless. She believed she could do anything, a condition I took pains
to foster despite the disaster that had come from my own fearless believing.
My aspiration to become a jurist had been laid to rest in the Graveyard
of Failed Hopes, an all-female establishment. The sorrow of it had faded,
but regret remained, and I’d taken to wondering if the Fates might be kinder
to a different girl. Throughout my childhood, a framed sketch of the Three
Fates had hung prominently at the top of the stairs, where they went about
their business of spinning, measuring, and cutting the thread of life, all the
while keeping an eye on my comings and goings. I was convinced of their
personal animosity toward me, but that didn’t mean they would treat my
sister’s thread the same way.
I’d vowed to Mother that Nina would become the purpose of my life,
and so she was. In her, I had a voice that didn’t stammer and a heart that
was unscathed. It’s true I lived a portion of my life through hers, and yes, I
blurred the lines of self for both of us, but there was no one who loved Nina
more than I did. She became my salvation, and I want to think I became
hers.
She’d called me Mother from the time she could talk. It came naturally,
and I didn’t discourage it, but I did have the good sense to keep her from
doing it in front of Mother. From the days Nina was in her crib, I’d
proselytized her about the evils of slavery. I’d taught her everything I knew
and believed, and though Mother must have had some idea I was molding
her in my own image, she had no idea to what extent.
With her braid complete, Nina climbed into my lap and began her usual
pleading. “Don’t go! Stay with me.”
“Oh, I have to, you know that. Binah will tuck you in.” Nina’s lip fluted
out, and I added, “If you don’t whine, I’ll let you pick out the dress I wear.”
She fairly leapt from my knees to the wardrobe, where she chose the
most luxuriant costume I had, a maroon velvet gown with three satin
chevrons down the front, each with an agraffe of chipped diamonds. It was
Handful’s own magnificent creation. At seventeen, she was a prodigy with
the needle, even more so than her mother. She now sewed most of my attire.
As Handful stretched on tiptoe to retrieve the dress, I noticed how
undeveloped she was—her body lithe and skinny as a boy’s. She didn’t
reach five feet and never would. But as small as she was, it was still her
eyes that drew attention. I’d once heard a friend of Thomas’ refer to her as
the pretty, yellow-eyed Negress.
We weren’t as close as we’d been as girls. Perhaps it was due to my
absorption with Nina, or to Handful’s extra duties as the apprentice
seamstress, or maybe we’d simply reached an age when our paths naturally
began to diverge. But we were friends, I told myself.
As she passed the fireplace with the dress in her arms, I noticed the
frown that seemed permanently etched in her features, as if by narrowing
her enormous eyes she felt less of the world could reach her. It seemed
she’d begun to feel the boundaries of her life more keenly, that she’d
arrived at some moment of reckoning. The past week, Mother had denied
her a pass to the market for some minor, forgettable reason, and she’d taken
it hard. Her market excursions were the acme of her days, and trying to
commiserate, I’d said, “I’m sorry, Handful, I know how you must feel.”
It seemed to me I did know what it felt to have one’s liberty curtailed,
but she blazed up at me. “So we just the same, me and you? That’s why you
the one to shit in the pot and I’m the one to empty it?”
Her words stunned me, and I turned toward the window to hide my hurt.
I heard her breathing in fury before she fled the room, not to return the rest
of the day. We hadn’t spoken of it again.
She helped me now step into the gown and slide it over my corset,
which I’d laced as loosely as possible. I was of average build, and didn’t
think it necessary to obstruct my breathing. After fastening me in, Handful
pinned a black mantilla of poult-de-soie to the crown of my head and Nina
handed me my black lace fan. Flicking it open, I swanned about the room
for them.
Mother entered at the moment I pirouetted, trampling on my hemline
and pitching forward—the picture of grace. “I hope you can refrain from
this kind of clumsiness at Mrs. Alston’s,” she said.
She stood, buttressed by her cane. At forty-six, her shoulders were
already rounding into an old lady’s stoop. She’d been warning me of the
travail of spinsterhood for a year now, elaborating on the sad, maiden life of
her aunt Amelia Jane. She likened her to a shriveled flower pressed between
the pages of a forgotten book, as if this might scare some poise and beauty
into me. I feared that Mother was about to embark again on her aunt’s
desiccated existence, but she asked, “Didn’t you wear this gown only two
nights ago?”
“I did, but—” I looked at my baby sister perched on the dresser stool,
and gave her a smile. “Nina chose it.”
“It’s imprudent to wear it again so soon.” Mother seemed to be speaking
solely to herself, and I took the opportunity to ignore her.
Her gaze fell on Angelina, her last child. She made a summoning
gesture, her hand scooping at the air for several seconds before she spoke.
“Come along, I will see you to the nursery.”
Nina didn’t move. Her eyes turned to me, as if I were the higher
authority and might override the command. It was not lost on Mother.
“Angelina! I said come. Now!”
If I’d been a thorn in Mother’s side, Angelina would be the whole briar
patch. She shook her head, as well as her shoulders. Her entire frame
oscillated defiantly on the stool, and knowing very well what she was
doing, she announced, “I want to stay here with Mother!”
I braced for Mother’s outburst, but it didn’t come. She pushed her
fingers into her temples, moved them in a circle, and made a sound that was
part groan, part sigh, part accusation. “I’ve been seized by a malicious
headache,” she said. “Hetty, fetch Cindie to my chamber.”
With a roll of her eyes, Handful obeyed, and Mother departed after her,
the dull tap of her cane receding along the corridor.
I knelt before Nina, sinking down into my skirt, which billowed out in
such a way I must have appeared like a stamen in some monstrous red
bloom. “How often have I told you? You mustn’t call me Mother unless
we’re alone.”
Nina’s chin trembled visibly. “But you’re my mother.” I let her cry into
the velvet of my dress. “You are, you are, you are.”
The upstairs drawing room in Mrs. Alston’s house on King Street was lit to
an excessive brightness by a crystal chandelier that blazed like a small
inferno from the ceiling. Beneath it, a sea of people danced the schottische,
their laughter drowning out the violins.
My dance program was bare except for Thomas, who’d written in his
name for two sets of the quadrille. He’d been admitted to the bar the year
before and opened a practice with Mr. Langdon Cheves, a man I couldn’t
help but feel had taken my place, just as I’d taken Mother’s. Thomas had
written to me from Yale, remorseful for ridiculing my ambition on the night
of his farewell, but he wouldn’t budge from his position. We’d made peace,
nevertheless, and in many ways he was still a demi-god to me. I looked
about the room for him, knowing he would be attached to Sally Drayton,
whom he was soon to marry. At their engagement party, Father had declared
that a marriage between a Grimké and a Drayton would bring forth “a new
Charleston dynasty.” It had irked Mary, who’d entered into a suitable
engagement, herself, but one without any regal connotations.
Madame Ruffin had suggested I use my fan to advantage, concealing
my “strong jaw and ruddy cheeks,” and I did so obsessively out of selfconsciousness. Positioning the fan over the lower half of my face, I peered
over its scalloped edge. I knew many of the young women from Madame
Ruffin’s classes, St. Philip’s, or the previous social season, but I couldn’t
claim a friendship with any of them. They were polite enough to me, but I
was never allowed into the warmth of their secrets and gossip. I think my
stammer made them uneasy. That, and the awkwardness I seemed to feel in
their presence. They were wearing a new style of head-turban the size of
settee cushions made from heavy brocades and studded with pins, pearls,
and little palettes on which the face of our new president, Mr. Madison, was
painted, and their poor heads appeared to wobble on their necks. I thought
they looked silly, but the beaux swarmed about them.
Night after night, I endured these grand affairs alone, revolted by what
objets d’art we were and contemptuous of how hollow society had turned
out to be, and yet inexplicably, I was filled with a yearning to be one of
them.
The slaves moved among us with trays of custard and Huguenot tortes,
holding doors, taking coats, stoking fires, moving without being seen, and I
thought how odd it was that no one ever spoke of them, how the word
slavery was not suitable in polite company, but referred to as the peculiar
institution.
Turning abruptly to leave the room, I plowed headlong into a male slave
carrying a crystal pitcher of Dragoon punch. It created a magnificent
explosion of tea, whiskey, rum, cherries, orange slices, lemon wedges, and
shards of glass. They spilled across the rug, onto the slave’s frock coat, the
front of my skirt, and the trousers of a tall young man who was passing by
at the moment of the collision.
In those first seconds of shock, the young man held my gaze, and I
reflexively lifted my hand to my chin as if to cover it with my fan, then
realized I’d dropped my fan in the commotion. He smiled at me as sound
rushed back into the room, gasps and thin cries of alarm. His composure
calmed me, and I smiled back, noticing he had a tiny polyp of orange pulp
on his cheek.
Mrs. Alston appeared in a swishing, silver-gray dress, her head bare
except for a small jeweled headband across her curling bangs. With aplomb,
she inquired if anyone had suffered injury. She dismissed the petrified slave
with her hand and summoned another to clean the wreckage, all the while
laughing softly to put everyone at ease.
Before I could make an apology, the young man spoke loudly,
addressing the room. “I beg your forgiveness. I fear I am an awkward lout.”
“But it was not you—” I began.
He cut me off. “The fault is completely mine.”
“I insist you think no more of it,” Mrs. Alston said. “Come, both of you,
and we’ll get you dried off.” She escorted us to her own chamber and left us
in the care of her maid, who dabbed at my dress with a towel. The young
man waited, and without thinking, I reached out and brushed the pulp from
his cheek. It was overtly forward of me, but I wouldn’t consider that until
later.
“We make a drowned pair,” he said. “May I introduce myself? I’m
Burke Williams.”
“Sarah Grimké.”
The only gentleman who’d ever shown interest in me was an
unattractive fellow with a bulging forehead and raisin eyes. A member of
the Jockey Club, he’d escorted me about the New Market Course at the
culmination of Race Week last year, and afterward deposited me in the
ladies’ stand to watch the horses on my own. I never saw him again.
Mr. Williams took the towel and blotted his pants, then asked if I would
like some air. I nodded, dazed that he’d asked. His hair was blond, mottled
with brown, something like the light sands on the beach at Sullivan’s Island,
his eyes were greenish, his chin broad, and his cheeks faintly chiseled. I
became aware of myself staring at him as we strolled toward the balcony
off the drawing room, behaving like a fool of a girl, which, of course, I was.
He was aware of it. I saw a smile pull about his mouth, and I silently
berated myself for my transparency, for losing my precious fan, for slipping
into the solitary darkness of the balcony with a stranger. What was I doing?
The night was cold. We stood by the railing, which had been festooned
with pine wreaths, and stared at the figures moving past the windows inside
the room. The music whirred behind the panes. I felt very far away from
everything. The sea wind rose and I began to shiver. My stammer had been
in hibernation for almost a year, but last winter it had showed up on the eve
of my coming out and remained throughout my first season, turning it into a
perdition. I shook now as much from fear of its return as from the frigid air.
“You’re chilled,” he said, removing his coat and draping it about me in
gentlemanly fashion. “How is it we’ve not been introduced until now?”
Williams. I didn’t recognize his family name. Charleston’s social
pyramid was ruthlessly defended by the aristocratic planters at the top—the
Middletons, Pinckneys, Heywards, Draytons, Smiths, Manigaults, Russells,
Alstons, Grimkés, and so on. Below them dwelled the mercantile class,
wherein a little social mobility was sometimes possible, and it occurred to
me that Mr. Williams was from this secondary tier, having slipped into
society through an opportune crevice, or perhaps he was a visitor to the city.
“Are you visiting here?” I asked.
“Not at all, my family’s home is on Vanderhorst. But I can read your
thoughts. You’re trying to place my family. Williams, Williams, wherefore
art thou Williams?” He laughed. “If you’re like the others, you’re worried
I’m an artisan or a laborer, or worse, an aspirer.”
I caught my breath. “Oh, I didn’t mean—I’m not concerned with that
sort of thing.”
“It’s all in jest—I can see you’re not like the others. Unless, of course,
you’re off-put to learn my family runs the silversmith shop on Queen Street.
I’ll inherit it one day.”
“I’m not off-put, I’m not at all,” I said, then added, “I’ve been in your
shop.”
I didn’t say that shopping for silver irked me no end, as did most
everything I was forced to do as a wife-in-training. Oh, the days Mother had
forced me to hand Nina over to Binah and sit with Mary, doing handwork
samplers, hoop after hoop of white-on-white, cross stitch, and crewel, and if
not handwork, then painting, and if not painting, then visitations, and if not
visitations, then shopping in the somber shops of silversmiths, where my
mother and sister swooned over a sterling nutmeg grater, or some such.
I’d fallen silent, uneasy with where our conversation had led, and I
turned toward the garden, looking down into the faded black shadows. The
pear trees were bare, their limbs spread open like the viscera of a parasol.
Stretching into the darkness beyond, the single houses, double houses, and
villas were lined up in cramped, neat rows which ran toward the tip of the
peninsula.
“I see I’ve offended you,” he said. “I intended to be charming, but I’ve
been mocking instead. It’s because my station is an awkward topic for me.
I’m ill at ease with it.”
I turned back to him, astonished that he’d been so free with his
thoughts. I hadn’t known a young man to display this kind of vulnerability.
“I’m not offended. I’m—charmed like you said.”
“I thank you, then.”
“No, I should be the one to thank you. The clumsiness in the drawing
room—that was mine. And you—”
“I could claim I was trying to be gallant, but in truth, I wanted to
impress you. I’d been watching you. I was about to introduce myself when
you whirled about and it rained punch.”
I laughed, more startled than amused. Young men did not watch me.
“You created a brilliant spectacle,” he was saying. “Don’t you think?”
Regrettably, we were veering into the hazards of flirting. I’d always
been feeble at it.
“Yes. I-I try.”
“And do you create these spectacles often?” he asked.
“I try.”
“You’ve succeeded well. The ladies on the dance floor recoiled with
such shock I thought a turban might sail off and injure someone.”
“Ah, but—the injury would’ve been laid at your feet, not mine. I mean,
it was you who claimed responsibility for the whole thing.” Where had that
come from?
He bowed, conceding.
“We should return to the party,” I told him, peeling his coat from my
shoulders, wanting to end the banter on a high note, but worried, too, we
might be missed.
“If you insist, but I would rather not share you. You’re the loveliest lady
I’ve met this season.”
His words seemed gratuitous, and for an instant, I didn’t quite trust
them. But why couldn’t I be lovely to him? Perhaps the Fates at the top of
the stairs had changed their minds. Perhaps he’d looked past my plainness
and glimpsed something deeper. Or, perhaps I was not as plain as I thought.
“May I call on you?” he asked.
“You want to call on me?”
He reached for my hand and pulled it to his lips. He kissed it, not
removing his eyes from mine, pressing the heat and smoothness of his lips
onto my skin. His face seemed strangely concentrated, and I felt the warmth
from his mouth move up my arm into my chest.
