Sarah
I was sent to solitary confinement in my new room and ordered to write a
letter of apology to each guest. Mother settled me at the desk with paper,
inkwell, and a letter she’d composed herself, which I was to copy.
“. . . . . . You didn’t punish Hetty, did you?” I asked.
“Do you think me inhuman, Sarah? The girl had an accident. What
could I do?” She shrugged with exasperation. “If the rug cannot be cleaned,
it will have to be thrown out.”
As she walked to the door, I struggled to pry the words from my mouth
before she exited. “. . . . . . Mother, please, let me. . . . . . let me give Hetty
back to you.”
Give Hetty back. As if she was mine after all. As if owning people was
as natural as breathing. For all my resistance about slavery, I breathed that
foul air, too.
“Your guardianship is legal and binding. Hetty is yours, Sarah, there is
nothing to be done about it.”
“. . . . . . But—”
I heard the commotion of her petticoats as she crossed the rug back to
me. She was a woman the winds and tides obeyed, but in that moment, she
was gentle with me. Placing a finger under my chin, she tilted my face to
hers and smiled. “Why must you fight this? I don’t know where you get
these alien ideas. This is our way of life, dear one, make your peace with
it.” She kissed the top of my head. “I expect all eighteen letters by the
morning.”
The room filled with an orange glow that lit the cypress panels, then
melted into dusk and shadows. In my mind, I could see Hetty clearly—the
confused, mortified look on her face, her hair braids cocked in every
direction, the disgraceful lavender ribbons. She was puny in the extreme, a
year younger than I, but she looked all of six years old. Her limbs were
stick and bone. Her elbows, the curves of two fastening pins. The only thing

of any size about her was her eyes, which were colored a strange shade of
gold and floated above her black cheeks like shiny half-moons.
It seemed traitorous to ask forgiveness for something I didn’t feel sorry
for in the least. What I regretted was how pathetic my protest had turned
out. I wanted nothing more than to sit here unyielding through the night, for
days and weeks if need be, but in the end I gave in and wrote the damnable
letters. I knew myself to be an odd girl with my mutinous ideas, ravenous
intellect, and funny looks, and half the time I sputtered like a horse straining
at its bit, qualities in the female sex that were not endearing. I was on my
way to being the family pariah, and I feared the ostracism. I feared it most
of all.
Over and over I wrote:
Dear Madame,
Thank you for the honor and kindness you bestowed upon
me by attending my eleventh birthday tea. I regret that
though I have been well-taught by my parents, my behavior
on this occasion was exceedingly ill-mannered. I humbly beg
your pardon for my rudeness and disrespect.
Your Remorseful Friend,
Sarah Grimké
I climbed the preposterous height to the mattress and had only just
settled when a bird outside my window began to trill. First, a stream of
pelting whistles, then a soft, melancholic song. I felt alone in the world with
my alien ideas.
Sliding from my perch, I stole to the window where I shivered in my
white woolen gown, gazing along East Bay, past the dark rooftops toward
the harbor. With hurricane season behind us, there were close to a hundred
topsails moored out there, shimmering on the water. Plastering my cheek
against the frigid pane, I discovered I had a partial view of the slave
quarters above the carriage house where I knew Hetty to be spending her
last night with her mother. Tomorrow she would take up her duties and
sleep outside my door.
It was then I had a sudden epiphany. I lit a candle from the dwindling
coals in the fire, opened my door, and stepped into the dark, unheated
passageway. Three dark shapes lay on the floor beside the bedroom doors.

I’d never really seen the world beyond the nursery at night and it took a
moment to realize the shapes were slaves, sleeping close by in case a
Grimké rang his bell.
Mother wished to replace the archaic arrangement with one that had
recently been installed in the house of her friend, Mrs. Russell. There,
buttons were pressed that rang in the slaves’ quarters, each with a special
chime. Mother was bent on the innovation, but Father thought it wasteful.
Though we were Anglicans, he had a mild streak of Huguenot frugality.
There would be ostentatious buttons in the Grimké household over his dead
body.
I crept barefooted down the wide mahogany stairs to the first floor
where two more slaves slept, along with Cindie, who sat wide awake with
her back against the wall outside my parents’ chamber. She eyed me warily,
but didn’t ask what I was doing.
I picked my way along the Persian rug that ran the near-length of the
main passage, turned the knob to Father’s library, and stepped inside. An
ornately framed portrait of George Washington was lit with a scrim of
moonlight coming through the front window. For almost a year, Father had
looked the other way as I’d slipped beneath Mr. Washington’s nose to
plunder the library. John, Thomas, and Frederick had total reign over his
vast trove—books of law, geography, philosophy, theology, history, botany,
poetry, and the Greek humanities—while Mary and I were officially
forbidden to read a word of it. Mary didn’t seem to care for books, but I . . .
I dreamed of them in my sleep. I loved them in a way I couldn’t fully
express even to Thomas. He pointed me to certain volumes and drilled me
on Latin declensions. He was the only one who knew my desperation to
acquire a true education, beyond the one I received at the hands of Madame
Ruffin, my tutor and French nemesis.
She was a small, hot-tempered woman who wore a widow’s cap with
strings floating at her cheeks, and when it was cold, a squirrely fur cloak
and tiny fur-lined shoes. She was known to line girls up on the Idle Bench
for the smallest infraction and scream at them until they fainted. I despised
her, and her “polite education for the female mind,” which was composed
of needlework, manners, drawing, basic reading, penmanship, piano, Bible,
French, and enough arithmetic to add two and two. I thought it possible I
might die from tracing teensy flowers on the pages of my art tablet. Once I
wrote in the margin, “If I should die of this horrid exercise, I wish these

flowers to adorn my coffin.” Madame Ruffin was not amused. I was made
to stand on the Idle Bench, where she ranted at my insolence, and where I
forced myself not to faint.
Increasingly, during those classes, longings had seized me, foreign,
torrential aches that overran my heart. I wanted to know things, to become
someone. Oh, to be a son! I adored Father because he treated me almost as
if I were a son, allowing me to slip in and out of his library.
On that night, the coals in the library’s fireplace lay cold and the smell
of cigar smoke still pooled in the air. Without effort, I located Father’s
South Carolina Justice of the Peace and Public Laws, which he himself had
authored. I’d thumbed through it enough to know somewhere in the pages
was a copy of a legal manumission document.
Upon finding it, I took paper and quill from Father’s desk and copied it:
I hereby certify that on this day, 26 November 1803, in the
city of Charleston, in the state of South Carolina, I set free
from slavery, Hetty Grimké, and bestow this certificate of
manumission upon her.
Sarah Moore Grimké
What could Father do but make Hetty’s freedom as legal and binding as
her ownership? I was following a code of law he’d fashioned himself! I left
my handiwork atop the backgammon box on his desk.
In the corridor, I heard the tingle of Mother’s bell, summoning Cindie,
and I broke into a run back upstairs that blew out the flame on my candle.
My room had turned even colder and the little bird had ceased its song. I
crept beneath the stack-pile of quilts and blankets, but couldn’t sleep for
excitement. I imagined the thanksgiving Hetty and Charlotte would heap on
me. I imagined Father’s pride when he discovered the document, and
Mother’s annoyance. Legal and binding, indeed! Finally, overcome with
fatigue and satisfaction, I drifted to sleep.
When I woke, the bluish tint of the Delft tiles around the hearth
gleamed with light. I sat up into the quietness. My ecstatic burst of the night
before had drained away, leaving me calm and clear. I couldn’t have
explained then how the oak tree lives inside the acorn or how I suddenly
realized that in the same enigmatic way something lived inside of me—the
woman I would become—but it seemed I knew at once who she was.

It had been there all along as I’d scoured Father’s books and constructed
my arguments during our dinner table debates. Only the past week, Father
had orchestrated a discussion between Thomas and me on the topic of
exotic fossilized creatures. Thomas argued that if these strange animals
were truly extinct, it implied poor planning on God’s part, threatening the
ideal of God’s perfection, therefore, such creatures must still be alive in
remote places on earth. I argued that even God should be allowed to change
his mind. “Why should God’s perfection be based on having an unchanging
nature?” I asked. “Isn’t flexibility more perfect than stasis?”
Father slapped his hand on the table. “If Sarah was a boy, she would be
the greatest jurist in South Carolina!”
At the time, I’d been awed by his words, but it wasn’t until now, waking
up in my new room, that I saw their true meaning. The comprehension of
my destiny came in a rush. I would become a jurist.
Naturally, I knew there were no female lawyers. For a woman, nothing
existed but the domestic sphere and those tiny flowers etched on the pages
of my art book. For a woman to aspire to be a lawyer—well, possibly, the
world would end. But an acorn grew into an oak tree, didn’t it?
I told myself the affliction in my voice wouldn’t stop me, it would
compel me. It would make me strong, for I would have to be strong.
I had a history of enacting small private rituals. The first time I took a
book from Father’s library, I’d penned the date and title—February 25,
1803, Lady of the Lake—on a sliver of paper that I wedged into a tortoiseshell hair clip and wore about surreptitiously. Now, with dawn gathering in
bright tufts across the bed, I wanted to consecrate what was surely my
greatest realization.
I went to the armoire and took down the blue dress Charlotte had sewed
for the disastrous birthday party. Where the collar met, she’d stitched a
large silver button with an engraved fleur de lis. Using the hawk bill letter
opener John had left behind, I sawed it off. Squeezing it in my palm, I
prayed, Please, God, let this seed you planted in me bear fruit.
When I opened my eyes, everything was the same. The room still bore
patches of early light, the dress lay like a blue heap of sky on the floor, the
silver button was clutched in my palm, but I felt God had heard me.
The sterling button took on everything that transpired that night—the
revulsion of owning Hetty, the relief of signing her manumission, but

mostly the bliss of recognizing that innate seed in myself, the one my father
had already seen. A jurist.
I tucked the button inside a small box made of Italian lava rock, which
I’d received one Christmastime, then hid it at the back of my dressing
drawer.
Voices came from the corridor mingled with the clink-clank of trays and
pitchers. The sound of slaves in their servitude. The world waking.
I dressed hurriedly, wondering if Hetty was already outside my door. As
I opened it, my heart picked up its pace, but Hetty wasn’t there. The
manumission document I’d written lay on the floor. It was torn in two.