Sarah
I’d never been inclined to keep a diary until I met Burke Williams. I thought
by writing down my feelings, I would seize control over them, perhaps even
curb what Reverend Hall called “the paroxysms of carnality.”
For what it’s worth, charting one’s passion in a small daybook kept
hidden in a hatbox inside a wardrobe does not subdue passion in the least.
20 February 1811
I had imagined romantic love to be a condition of sweet
utopia, not an affliction! To think, a few weeks ago, I thought
my starved mind would be my worst hardship. Now my heart
has its own ordeal. Mr. Williams, you torment me. It’s as if
I’ve contracted a tropical fever. I cannot say whether I wish
to be cured.
My diary overflowed with this sort of purple outburst.
3 March
Mr. Williams, why do you not call? It’s unfair that I must
wait for you to act. Why must I, as a female, be at your
disposal? Why can’t I send a calling note to you? Who made
up these unjust rules? Men, that’s who. God devised women
to be the minions. Well, I quite resent it!
9 March
A month has passed, and I see now what transpired between
Mr. Williams and my naïve self on the balcony was a farce.
He has toyed with me shamelessly. I knew it even then! He is
a fickle-hearted cad, and I would no sooner speak to him
now than I would speak to the devil.
When I was not engaged in aerating my feelings, or caring for little
Nina, or fending off Mother’s attempts to draw me into my dutiful female
tasks, I was foraging among the invitations and calling cards left on the
desk by the front door. When Nina napped in the afternoon, I had Handful
wheel the copper bathtub into my room and fill it with buckets of blistering
water from the laundry.
This copper tub was a modern wonder imported from France by way of
Virginia, and it was the talk of Charleston. It sat on noisy little wheels and
traveled room to room like a portable dipping cart. You sat in it. You did not
stand over a basin and pat water on yourself—no, you were quite
immersed! To top it off, one side of the tub possessed a vent that could be
opened to release the used water. Mother instructed the slaves to trundle the
tub onto the piazza near the rail and discharge the bathwater over the side.
The waterfalls splattering into the garden alerted neighbors the hygienic
Grimkés had been bathing again.
When a note with scratchy penmanship arrived at the house shortly
before noon on the ides of March, I swooped upon it before Mother.
15 March
Burke Williams compliments Sarah Grimké, requesting the
pleasure of her company tomorrow night. If he can serve her
in any way in the meantime, he would be honored.
P.S. Please excuse the
borrowed paper.
I stood still for several moments, then placed the note back on the pile,
thinking, Why should anyone care if the paper is borrowed, and then the
stupefaction wore off. Caught in a sudden swell of elation, I ascended the
stairs to my room, where I danced about like some tipsy bird. I’d forgotten
Handful and Nina were there. They’d spread the doll tea set on the floor
beneath the window, and when I turned, I saw them staring at me, holding
tiny cups of pretend-tea in the air.
“You must’ve heard from that boy,” Handful said. She was the only one
who knew of his existence.
“What boy?” Nina asked, and I was forced to tell her about Mr.
Williams, too. At this moment Mother would be dispatching an acceptance
while singing Glory be to God in the Highest. She would be so jubilant with
allelujahs, it would not occur to her to wonder at his credentials.
“Will you get married like Thomas?” Nina asked. His wedding was two
and a half months away and a reference point for everything.
“I do believe I will,” I told her, and the idea seemed altogether
plausible. I would not be a pressed flower in a book after all.
We’d expected Mr. Williams at 8:00 P.M., but at ten past, he was still absent.
Mother’s neck was splotched red with patches of insult, and Father, who’d
joined Mother and me in the drawing room, held his watch in his hand. The
three of us sat as if waiting for a funeral procession to pass. I feared he
wouldn’t appear at all, and if he did, that our visit would be cut short. By
custom, the slave’s curfew—9:00 in the winter, 10:00 in the summer—
cleared gentlemen callers from the drawing rooms. When the City Guard
beat drums to summon the slaves off the streets, the suitors would rise on
cue.
He rapped on the front door at a quarter past the appointed hour. When
Tomfry ushered him into the room, I lifted my fan—an extravagant nosegay
of hen feathers—and my parents rose with cool civility and offered him the
Duncan Phyfe chair that flanked the right side of the fireplace. I’d been
relegated to the chair on the left, which meant we were separated by the fire
screen and forced to crane our necks for a glimpse of one another. A pity—
he looked more handsome than I remembered. His face had bronzed with
sun and his hair was longer, curling behind his ears. Detecting the scent of
lime-soap drifting from his direction, my insides convulsed involuntarily—
a full-blown paroxysm of carnality.
After the excuses and the trivialities, Father got right to the point. “Tell
us, Mr. Williams, what is it that your father does?”
“Sir, my father owns the silver shop on Queen Street. It was founded by
my great-grandfather and is the largest silver shop in the South.”
He spoke with unconcealed pride, but the stiff silence that had preceded
his arrival descended again. A Grimké daughter would marry a son of the
planter class who would study law, medicine, religion, or architecture in
order to occupy himself until he inherited.
“A shop, you say?” Mother asked, giving herself time to absorb the
blow.
“That’s correct, madame.”
She turned to Father. “A silver shop, John.”
Father nodded, and I read his thought: Merchant. It rose in the air above
his forehead like a dark condensation.
“We’ve frequented the shop often,” I said, beaming as if those occasions
had been the highlight of my life.
Mother came to my aid. “Indeed we have. It’s a lovely shop, John.”
Mr. Williams slid forward in his chair and addressed Father. “Sir, my
grandfather’s wish was to provide our city with a silver shop that would live
up to the one your own grandfather, John Paul Grimké, owned. I believe it
was on the corner of Queen and Meeting, wasn’t it? My grandfather thought
him to be the greatest silversmith in the country, greater than Mr. Revere.”
Oh, the adroitness of this man! I twisted in my chair the better to see
him. In the guise of a compliment, he’d let it be known he was not the only
one in the room descended from the merchant class. Of course, the
difference was that John Paul Grimké had parlayed the success of his shop
into cotton ventures and large land holdings in the low country. He’d been
ambitious and prudent, and toiled his way into Charleston aristocracy.
Nevertheless, Mr. Williams had landed his punch.
Father eyed him steadily and spoke two words. “I see.”
I think he did see, too. In that moment, he saw Mr. Williams quite well.
Tomfry served Hyson tea and biscuits, and the conversation turned back
to trivialities, an interlude cut short when the curfew drums began. Mr.
Williams rose, and I felt a sudden deflation. To my wonder, Mother
entreated him to visit again, and I saw one of Father’s luxuriant eyebrows
lift.
“May I see him to the door?” I asked.
“Of course, dear, but Tomfry will accompany you.”
We trailed Tomfry from the room, but once past the door, Mr. Williams
stopped and placed his hand on my arm. “You look enchanting,” he
whispered, drawing his face close to mine. “It would ease my regret in
leaving, if you favored me with a lock of your hair.”
“My hair?”
“As a token of your affection.”
I lifted the hen feathers to cover the heat in my face.
He pressed a white handkerchief into my hand. “Fold the lock inside my
kerchief, then toss it over the fence to George Street. I’ll be there, waiting.”
With that titillating directive, he gave me a grin, such a grin, and strode
toward the door, where Tomfry waited uncomfortably.
Returning to the drawing room to face my parents’ evaluations, I halted
outside the door, realizing they were speaking about me.
“John, we must face reason. He may be her only chance.”
“You think our daughter so poor a marriage prospect she can draw no
better than that?”
“His family is not poor. They are reasonably well-to-do.”
“But Mary, it is a mercantile family.”
“The man is a suitor, and he is likely the best she can do.”
I fled to my room, chagrined, but too preoccupied with my clandestine
mission to be wounded. Having lit the lamps and turned down the bed,
Handful was bent over my desk, frowning and picking her way through the
poem Leonidas, which was an almost unreadable ode to men and their wars.
As always, she wore a pouch about her neck filled with bark, leaves, acorns,
and other gleanings from the oak in the work yard.
“Quickly,” I blurted. “Take the shears from my dresser and cut off a
lock of my hair.”
She squinted at me without moving a muscle. “Why do you wanna do
something like that?”
“Just do it!” I was a wreck of impatience, but seeing how my tone
miffed her, I explained the reason.
She cut a whorl as long as my finger and watched me secret it inside the
handkerchief. She followed me downstairs to the ornamental garden where
I glimpsed him through the palisade fence, a shadowed figure, leaning
against the stuccoed brick wall of the Dupré house across the street.
“That him?” Handful asked.
I shushed her, afraid he would hear, and then I flung the amorous bundle
over the fence. It landed in the crushed shell that powdered the street.
The next day Father announced we would depart immediately for Belmont.
Because of Thomas’ upcoming nuptials, it’d previously been decided Father
would journey to the upcountry plantation alone this spring, and now
suddenly the entire family was thrown into a frenzied mass exodus. Did he
think no one understood it had everything to do with the unsuitable son of a
silversmith?
I penned a hurried letter, which I left for Tomfry to post.
17 March
Dear Mr. Williams,
I am sorry to inform you that my family will leave
Charleston in the morning. I will not return until the middle
of May. Leaving in such an impromptu manner prevents me
saying farewell in person, which I much regret. I hope I
might welcome you again to our home on East Bay as soon
as I return to civilization. I trust you found your
handkerchief and its contents, and keep them close.
With Affectionate Regards, I
am
Sarah Grimké
The seven weeks of my separation from Mr. Williams were a cruel
agony. I busied myself with the establishment of a slave infirmary on the
plantation, installing it in a corner of the weaving house. It had once been a
sickbay, years before, but had fallen into dereliction, and Peggy, the slave
who did the weaving, had taken to storing her carded wool on the
infirmary’s old cot. Nina helped me scrub the corner and assemble an
apothecary of medicine, salves, and herbs that I begged or blended myself
in the kitchen house. It didn’t take long for the sick and ailing to show up,
so many the overseer complained to Father that my healing enterprise
interfered with field production. I expected Father to shut our doors, but he
left me to it, though not without instructing me on the numberless ways the
slaves would abuse my efforts.
It was Mother who nearly ended the operation. Upon discovering I’d
spent the night in the infirmary in order to care for a fifteen-year-old with
childbirth fever, she shut the infirmary for two days, before finally
relenting. “Your behavior is woefully intemperate,” she said, and then
treading too closely to the truth, added, “I suspect it’s not compassion that
drives you as much as the need to distract your mind from Mr. Williams.”
My afternoons were frittered away with needlework and teas or painting
landscapes with Mary while Nina played at my feet, all of which took place
in a stuffy parlor with poorly lit windows draped in velvet swags the color
of Father’s port. My one respite was striking out alone on a high-spirited
black stallion named Hiram. The horse had been given to me when I was
fourteen, and since he didn’t fall into the category of slave, slave owner, or
handsome beau, I was left to love him without complication. Whenever I
could steal away from the parlor, Hiram and I galloped at splendiferous
speeds into a landscape erupting with the same intractable wildness I felt
inside. The skies were bright cerulean, teeming with ferocious winds,
spilling mallards and fat wood drakes from the clouds. Up and down the
lanes, the fences were lit with yellow jasmine, its musk a sweet, choking
smoke. I rode with the same drunk sensuality with which I had reclined in
the copper tub, riding till the light smeared, returning with the falling dark.
Mother allowed me to write to Mr. Williams only once. Anything more,
she insisted was woefully intemperate. I received no letter in return. Mary
heard nothing from her intended either and claimed the mail to be atrocious,
therefore I didn’t overly fret, but quietly and daily I wondered whether Mr.
W. and his grin would be there when I returned. I placed my hope in the
bewitching properties contained in the lock of my red hair. This wasn’t so
different than Handful placing her faith in the bark and acorns she wore
around her neck, but I wouldn’t have admitted it.
I’d thought little of Handful during my incarceration at Belmont, but on
the day before we left, the fifteen-year-old slave I’d nursed appeared, cured
of childbirth fever, but now with boils on her neck. Seeing her, I understood
suddenly that it wasn’t only miles that separated Handful and me. It wasn’t
any of those things I’d told myself, not my preoccupation with Nina, or
Handful’s duties, or the natural course of age. It was some other growing
gulf, one that had been there long before I’d left.
