Sarah
Our caravan of two carriages, two wagons, and seventeen people returned
to Charleston in May on the high crest of spring. Rains had left the city
rinsed and clean, scented with newly flowering myrtle, privet, and Chinese
tallow. The bougainvillea had advanced en masse over garden gates, and the
sky was bright and creamed with thin, swirling clouds. I felt exultant to be
back.
As we lumbered through the back gate into an empty work yard, Tomfry
hurried from the kitchen house at an old man’s trot, calling, “Massa, you
back early.” He had a napkin stuffed at his collar and looked anxious, as if
we’d caught him in the dilatory act of eating.
“Only by a day,” Father said, climbing from the Barouche. “You should
let the others know we’re here.”
I squirmed past everyone, leaving even Nina behind, and broke for the
house where I pillaged the calling cards on the desk, and there it was—the
borrowed paper.
3 May
Burke Williams requests Sarah Grimké’s company on a
(chaperoned) horseback outing at Sullivan’s Island, upon
her return to Charleston.
Yours, most truly.
I let out an exhale, behemoth in nature, and ascended the stairs.
I remember very clearly coming to a full halt on the second-floor
landing and gazing curiously at the door to my room. It alone was shut,
while the others stood open. I walked toward it uncertainly, with a vague
sense of portent. I paused with my hand over the knob for a second and
cocked my ear. Hearing nothing, I turned the knob. It was locked.
I gave the knob a second determined try, and then a third and fourth,
and that’s when I heard the tentative voice inside.

“That you, mauma?”
Handful? The thought of her inside my room with the door locked was
so incongruent I could not immediately answer back.
She called out, “Coming.” Her voice sounded exasperated, reluctant,
breathy. There was the sound of water splashing, a key thrust into the lock.
Click. Click.
She stood in the doorway dripping wet, naked but for a white linen
towel clutched around her waist. Her breasts were two small, purple plums
protruding from her chest. I couldn’t help gazing at her wet, black skin, the
small compact power of her torso. She’d unloosed her braids, and her hair
was a wild corona around her head, shimmering with beaded water.
She stepped backward and her mouth parted. Behind her, the wondrous
copper tub sat in the middle of the room, filled with water. Vapor was lifting
off the surface, turning the air rheumy. The audacity of what she’d done
took my breath. If Mother discovered this, the consequences would be swift
and dire.
I moved quickly inside and closed the door, my instinct even now to
protect her. She made no attempt to cover herself. I glimpsed defiance in
her eyes, in the way she wrested back her chin as if to say, Yes, it’s me,
bathing in your precious tub.
The silence was terrible. If she thought my reserve was due to anger, she
was right. I wanted to shake her. Her boldness seemed like more than a
frolic in the tub, it seemed like an act of rebellion, of usurpation. What had
possessed her? She’d violated not only the privacy of my room and the
intimacy of our tub, she’d breached my trust.
I didn’t recognize how my mother’s voice ranted inside me.
Handful started to speak, and I was terrified of what she would say,
fearful it would be hateful and justifying, yet oddly, I feared an expression
of shame and apology just as much. I stopped her. “Please. Don’t say
anything. At least do that for me, say nothing.”
I turned my back while she dried herself and pulled on her dress. When
I looked again, she was tying a kerchief around her hair. It was pale green,
the same color as the tiny discolored patches on the copper. She bent to mop
the puddles from the floor, and I saw the scarf darkening as it soaked the
dampness.
She said, “You want me to empty the water out now or wait?”
“Let’s do it now. We can’t have Mother wander in and find it.”

With effort, I helped her roll the sloshing tub through the jib door onto
the piazza, close to the rail, hoping the family was inside now and wouldn’t
hear the gush of water. Handful yanked open the vent and it spilled in a
long, silver beak over the side. I seemed to taste it in my mouth, the tang of
minerals.
“I know you’re angry, Sarah, but I didn’t see any harm with me being in
the tub, same as you.”
Not Miss Sarah, but Sarah. I would never again hear her put Miss before
my name.
She had the look of someone who’d declared herself, and seeing it, my
indignation collapsed and her mutinous bath turned into something else
entirely. She’d immersed herself in forbidden privileges, yes, but mostly in
the belief she was worthy of those privileges. What she’d done was not a
revolt, it was a baptism.
I saw then what I hadn’t seen before, that I was very good at despising
slavery in the abstract, in the removed and anonymous masses, but in the
concrete, intimate flesh of the girl beside me, I’d lost the ability to be
repulsed by it. I’d grown comfortable with the particulars of evil. There’s a
frightful muteness that dwells at the center of all unspeakable things, and I
had found my way into it.
As Handful began to shove the vessel back across the piazza, I tried to
speak. “. . . . . . Wait. . . . . . I’ll. . . . . . help . . .”
She turned and looked at me, and we both knew. My tongue would once
again attempt its suicide.