Sarah
Charlotte’s disappearance brought a severe and terrible mercy, for not once
throughout the harrowing weeks that followed Burke’s betrayal was I
uncertain which event was tragic and which was merely unfortunate.
Someone—Mother, Father, perhaps Thomas—placed an ad in the
Charleston Mercury.
Disappeared, Female Slave
Mulatto. Wide space between upper front teeth. Occasional limp. Answers to the
name of Charlotte. Wearing red scarf and dark blue dress. A seamstress of skill
and value. Belongs to Judge John Grimké. Large reward for her return.

The appeal brought no response.
Each day I watched from the back window in my room as Handful
walked a repetitive circuit in the work yard. Sometimes she walked the
entirety of the morning. Never varying her path, she started at the back of
the house, moved toward the kitchen house, past the laundry, cut over to the
oak tree, where she touched the trunk as she passed, then back to the house
by way of the stable and carriage house. Upon reaching the porch steps, she
would simply begin again. It was a circumambulation of such precise,
ritualistic grief no one interfered. Even Mother left her to walk a rut of
anguish into the yard.
I didn’t much mourn the loss of Burke or the demise of our wedding. I
felt little heartbreak. Was that not strange? I did cry buckets, but mostly
from the shame of it all.
I didn’t break my seclusion again. Instead, I took refuge in it.
Almost daily I received notes of concern in flowery scripts. I was being
prayed for by everyone imaginable. It was hoped my reputation wouldn’t
suffer too much. Did I know that Burke had vacated the city and was
staying indefinitely with his uncle in Columbia? Wasn’t it a shame that his
mother had taken ill with apoplexy? How was my own mother bearing up? I

was missed at tea, but my absence was commended. I shouldn’t despair, for
surely a young man would come forth who wouldn’t be put off by my
disgrace.
I wrote rants and rebukes in my diary, then tore them out and burned
them along with all the supercilious notes. Gradually, the lava in me
subsided and there remained only a young woman whose life course had
been demolished. Unlike Handful, I had no notion what path to walk.

One month after Charlotte’s disappearance, a frigid wind brought down
most of the leaves on the oak. Handful still walked obsessively each
morning, but only a quick loop or so now. The week before, Mother had put
a stop to her unremitting march and sent her back to her duties. The high
social season with its quota of gowns awaited—all the sewing now fell to
Handful. Charlotte was gone. No one believed she was coming back.
I’d managed to stretch my three weeks of seclusion into four, but on this
day, my reprieve ended. Mother had ordered me back to my duties, as well:
procuring a husband. She’d informed me that a rowboat traversing the
Atlantic might eventually be rescued by a passing ship, but only if the
rowboat bravely set out upon the water—this, her hapless metaphor of my
marital prospects. My sister Mary arrived with similar encouragement. “Lift
your chin, Sarah. Behave as if nothing has happened. Be gay and act
assured. You’ll find a husband, God willing.”
God willing. How strangely that strikes me now.
On the evening my solitude ended, I shoved myself out into the public
domain by attending a lecture at the Second Presbyterian Church delivered
by the Reverend Henry Kollack, a famed preacher. Those were not the
waters Mother had in mind. The Episcopal Church might pass for society,
but certainly not the Presbyterians with their revivalism and shouts for
repentance—but she didn’t object. I was at least rowing, wasn’t I?
Sitting in a pew beside the devout friend who’d invited me, I scarcely
listened at first. Words—sin, moral degradation, retribution—flitted in and
out of my awareness, but at some point during that hour, I became morbidly
engrossed.
The reverend’s eyes found me—I can’t explain it. Nor did he look away
as he spoke. “Are you not sick of the frivolous being you have become? Are

you not mortified at your own folly, weary of the ballroom and its gilded
toys? Will you not give up the vanities and gaieties of this life for the sake
of your soul?”
I felt utterly spoken to, and in the most direct and supernatural way.
How could he know what lay inside me? How did he know what I was only
that moment able to see myself?
“God calls you,” he bellowed. “God, your beloved, begs you to
answer.”
The words ravished me. They seemed to break down some great
artifice. I sat on the pew quietly shaken while Reverend Kollack looked at
me now without focus or interest, and perhaps it had been so all along, but
it didn’t matter. He’d been God’s mouthpiece. He’d delivered me to the
precipice where one’s only choice was between paralysis or abandon.
With the reverend praying a long, earnest prayer for our souls, I took my
leap. I vowed I would not return to society. I would not marry, I would
never marry. Let them say what they would, I would give myself to God.

Two weeks later, on my twentieth birthday, I entered the drawing room,
where the family had gathered to offer me well wishes, accompanied by
Nina, who clung to my hand. Seeing that I’d chosen to wear one of my
simpler dresses and no jewelry, Mary smiled at me sadly as if I wore the
costume of a nun. I gathered Mother had confided my religious conversion
to my sisters, perhaps to my father and brothers, as well.
Aunt-Sister had baked my favored dessert, a two-tiered election cake,
filled with currants and sugar. Such cakes were molded on a board with
yeast and left to rise, if they so elected, and this one had done so with
majesty. Nina pranced about it impatiently until Mother signaled AuntSister to cut the slices.
Father was seated with my brothers, who were engaged in a debate of
some sort. Edging to the fringes, I determined that Thomas had evoked their
wrath by promoting a program known as colonization. From what I could
gather, the term had little to do with the British occupation of the last
century and everything to do with the slaves.
“. . . What’s this concept?” I asked, and they turned to me as if a
housefly had pried through a slat in the shutters and was buzzing wantonly

about.
“It’s a new and advanced idea,” Thomas answered. “Despite what any
of you believe, it will soon expand into a national movement. Mark my
words.”
“But what is it?” I said.
“It proposes we free the slaves and send them back to Africa.”
Nothing had prepared me for so radical a scheme. “. . . Why, that’s
preposterous!”
My reaction took them by surprise. Even Henry and Charles, now
thirteen and twelve, gaped at me. “Christ preserve us,” said John. “Sarah is
against it!”
He assumed I’d outgrown my rebellions and become like the rest of
them—a guardian of slavery. I couldn’t fault him for it. When was the last
time any of them had heard me speak out against the peculiar institution?
I’d been wandering about in the enchantments of romance, afflicted with
the worst female curse on earth, the need to mold myself to expectations.
John was laughing. A fire raged on the grate and Father’s face was
bright and sweating. He wiped at it and joined the mirth.
“Yes, I am against colonization,” I began. There was no falter now in
my throat. I forced myself to keep on. “I’m against it, but not for the reason
you think. We should free the slaves, but they should remain here. As
equals.”
An odd intermezzo ensued during which no one spoke. There’d been
mounting talk from certain clergy and pious women about treating slaves
with Christian sympathy, and now and then some rare soul would speak of
freeing the slaves altogether. But equality, ludicrous!
By law, a slave was three-fifths of a person. It came to me that what I’d
just suggested would seem paramount to proclaiming vegetables equal to
animals, animals equal to humans, women equal to men, men equal to
angels. I was upending the order of creation. Strangest of all, it was the first
time thoughts of equality had entered my head, and I could only attribute it
to God, with whom I’d lately taken up and who was proving to be more
insurrectionary than law-abiding.
“My goodness, did you learn this from the Presbyterians?” Father
asked. “Are they saying slaves should live among us as equals?” The
question was sarcastic, meant for my brothers and for the moment itself, yet
I answered him.

“No, Father, I’m saying it.”
As I spoke, a rush of pictures spilled through my mind, all of them
Handful. She was tiny, wearing the lavender bow on her neck. She was
filling the house with smoke. She was learning to read. She was sipping tea
on the roof. I saw her taking her lash. Wrapping the oak with stolen thread.
Bathing in the copper tub. Sewing works of pure art. Walking bereaved
circles. I saw everything as it was.