Sarah
Israel came to call on me wearing a short, freshly grown Quaker beard. We
were seated side by side on the divan in the Motts’ parlor, and he stroked
the whiskers constantly as he talked about the cost of wholesale wool and
the marvels of the weather. The beard was thick as velvet brush-fringe and
peppered with gray. He looked handsomer, sager, like a new incarnation of
himself.
When I’d returned to Philadelphia after my disastrous attempt to resume
life in Charleston, I’d rented a room in the home of Lucretia Mott,
determined to make some kind of life for myself, and I suppose I’d done
that. Twice weekly, I traveled to Green Hill to tutor Becky, though my old
foe, Catherine, had recently informed me that my little protégée would be
going away to school next year and my tutoring would end at the first of the
summer. If I was to stay useful, I would have to seek out another Quaker
family in need of a teacher, but as yet, I hadn’t made the effort. Catherine
was kinder to me now, though she still drew herself up tight as a bud when
she saw Israel smile at me at Meeting, something he never failed to do. Nor
did he fail in his visits to me, coming twice each month to call on me in the
Motts’ parlor.
I looked at him now and wondered how we’d gotten ourselves stranded
on this endless plateau of friendship. One heard all sorts of rumors about it.
That Israel’s two eldest sons opposed his remarriage, not on general
principle, mind you, but specifically to me. That he’d promised Rebecca on
her deathbed he would love no one but her. That some of the elders had
counseled him against taking a wife for reasons that ranged from his
unreadiness to my unprovenness. I was not, after all, a birthright Quaker. In
Charleston, it was being born into the planter class that mattered, here it
was the Quakers. Some things were the same everywhere. “You’re the most
patient of women,” Israel had told me once. It didn’t strike me as much of a
virtue.
Today, except for the newness of his beard, Israel’s visit gradually
began to seem like all the rest. I twiddled with my napkin as he talked about
merino sheep farms and wool dyes. There was the clink of teacups when the
silence came, children’s voices overhead mingled with racing footsteps on
creaking floors, and then, abruptly, without preface, he announced, “My son
Israel is getting married.”
The way he said it, quiet and apologetic, embarrassed me.
“. . . Israel? . . . Little Israel?”
“He’s not so little now. He’s twenty-two.” He sighed, as if something
had passed him by, and I wondered absurdly if there was a Quaker law
forbidding fathers to marry after their sons. I wondered if the beard was not
so much a new incarnation as a concession.
When it was time to say goodbye, he took my hand and pressed it
against the dark whorls of hair on his cheek. He closed his eyes, and when
he opened them, I felt he was about to say something. I lifted my brows.
But then, releasing my hand, he rose from the divan and whatever errant
thought had wriggled from his heart returned to it, repentant and
undeclared.
He walked uncertainly to the door and let himself out, while I remained
seated, seeing things with terrible clarity: the passivity, the hesitation about
the future. Not Israel’s—mine.
As Lucretia and I sat in the tiny room she called a studio, winter rain
pricked the windowpane, turning to ice. We’d pulled our chairs close to the
hearth where the fire was snapping and popping, zinging like harp strings.
Lucretia was opening a small packet of mail that had arrived in the
afternoon. I was reading a Sir Walter Scott novel banned by the Quakers,
which somehow made it all the more enjoyable, but now, drowsy with heat,
I lowered the book and stared into the flames.
It was my favorite part of the day—after the children were put to bed
and Lucretia’s husband, James, had retired to his study, and it was just the
two of us gathered here in her odd little nook of a room. A studio. It was
comprised of nothing more than two stuffed chairs, a large leafed table, a
fireplace, wall shelves, and a wide window that looked out over a copse of
red mulberries and black oaks behind the house. The room was not for
cooking or sewing or childcare or entertaining. Scattered with papers and
pamphlets, books and correspondence, art palettes and squares of velvet
cloth on which she pinned the bright luna moths she found lifeless in the
garden, this room was just for her.
I don’t know how many evenings we’d spent in here talking, or like
tonight, sitting quietly like two solitudes. Lucretia and I had formed a bond
that went beyond friends. And yet I felt the difference between us. I noticed
it at Meetings when I saw her on the Facing bench, the only female minister
among all those men, the way she rose and spoke with such fearless beauty,
and every morning when I went downstairs and there were her children
sticky with oat gruel. I would get a faintly vacuous feeling in the pit of my
stomach, not from envy that she had a profession, or these little ones, or
even James, who was not like other men, but of some unknown species, a
husband who beamed over her profession and made the oat gruel himself.
No, it wasn’t that. It was the belonging I envied. She’d found her belonging.
“Why, this letter is for you,” Lucretia said, thrusting it toward me. It
was Nina’s stationery, but not Nina’s script. The handwriting on the front
was childlike and crude. Miss Sarah Grimké.
Dear Sarah
Mauma’s back. Nina said I could write you myself with
the news. She ran away from the plantation where she’d
been kept all this time. You should see her. She has scars and
a full head of white hair and looks old as Methusal, but she’s
the same inside. I nurse her day and night. She brought my
sister with her named Sky. I know that’s some name. It comes
from mauma and her longings. She always said one day
we’d fly like blackbirds.
Missus stays mad at Nina most all the time. Nina started
some troubles at the presbyterry church where she goes.
Some man came last week to punish her on something she
said. Mauma and Sky are the one bright hope.
It has taken too long to write this. Forgive my mistakes. I
don’t get to read any more and work on my words. One day I
will.
Handful
“I hope it isn’t bad news,” Lucretia said, studying my face, which
must’ve been a confusion of elation and heart-wrench.
I read the letter aloud to her. I hadn’t spoken much about the slaves my
family held, but I had told her about Handful. She reached over and patted
my hand.
We fell quiet as the ice turned back to rain, coming in a dark, drowning
wash on the window. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine the reunion
between Handful and her mother. The sister named Sky. Charlotte’s scars
and white hair.
“. . . Why would God plant such deep yearnings in us . . . if they only
come to nothing?” It was more of a sigh than a question. I was thinking of
Charlotte and her longing to be free, but as the words left my mouth, I knew
I was thinking of myself, too.
I hadn’t really expected Lucretia to respond, but after a moment, she
spoke. “God fills us with all sorts of yearnings that go against the grain of
the world—but the fact those yearnings often come to nothing, well, I doubt
that’s God’s doing.” She cut her eyes at me and smiled. “I think we know
that’s men’s doing.”
She leaned toward me. “Life is arranged against us, Sarah. And it’s
brutally worse for Handful and her mother and sister. We’re all yearning for
a wedge of sky, aren’t we? I suspect God plants these yearnings in us so
we’ll at least try and change the course of things. We must try, that’s all.”
I felt her words tear a hole in the life I’d made. An irreparable hole.
I started to tell her that as a child I’d yearned for the entire firmament.
For a profession completely untried among women. I didn’t want her to
think I’d always been content to be a tutor when I had little passion for it,
but I pushed the confession aside. Even Nina didn’t know about my
aspiration to be a lawyer, how it’d ended in humiliation.
“. . . But you did more than try to become a minister . . . You
accomplished it . . . I’ve often wondered whether one must feel a special
call from God to undertake that.”
Quaker ministers were nothing like the Anglican or Presbyterian clergy
I was used to. They didn’t stand behind a pulpit and preach sermons: they
spoke during the Silence as inspired by God. Anyone could speak, of
course, but the ministers were the most verbal, the ones who offered
messages for worship, the ones whose voices seemed set apart.
She pushed at the messy bun coiled at her neck. “I can’t say the call I
felt was special. I wanted to have a say in things, that’s what it came down
to. I wanted to speak my conscience and to have it matter. Surely, God calls
us all to that.”
“. . . Do you think . . . I could become a Quaker minister?” The words
had been tucked inside of me for a long time, perhaps since the moment on
the ship when I first met Israel and he told me female ministers actually
existed.
“Sarah Grimké, you’re the most intelligent person I know. Of course
you could.”
Propped in bed, wearing my warmest woolen gown, my hair loosed, I bent
over the bed-desk and pewter inkstand I’d recently indulged in buying and
tried to answer Handful’s letter.
19 January 1827
Dear Handful,
What joyous news! Charlotte is back! You have a sister!
I lowered the pen and stared at the procession of exclamations. I
sounded like a chirping bird. It was my fifth attempt at a beginning.
Strewn about me on the bed were crumpled balls of paper. How happy
you must be now, I’d written first, then worried she might think I was
implying all her miseries were over now. Next: I was euphoric to receive
your news, but what if she didn’t know the word euphoric? I couldn’t write
a single line without fear of seeming insensitive or condescending, too
removed or too familiar. I remembered us, as I always did, on the roof
drinking tea, but that was gone and it was all balled-up paper now.
I picked up the sheet of stationery with the glib exclamations and
crushed it in my hands. A smear of ink licked across my palm. Holding my
hand aloft from Lucretia’s white eiderdown, I lifted the bed-desk from
across my legs and went to the basin. When soap failed to remove the stain,
I rummaged in the dresser drawer for the cream of tartar, and there, lying
beside the bottle, was the black lava box containing my silver fleur de lis
button. I opened it and gazed down at the button. It was darkly silvered, like
something pearling up from beneath the water.
The button had been the most constant object in my life. I’d thrown it
away that once, but it’d come back to me. I could thank Handful for that.
I returned to the warmth of the bed and placed the button on the beddesk, watching the lamplight spill over it. I lay back on the pillow,
remembering my eleventh birthday party at which Handful had been
presented to me, how I’d woken the next day with the overpowering sense I
was meant to do something in the world, something large, larger than
myself. I brushed my finger across the button. It had always held this
knowing for me.
In the room, everything magnified: cinders dropping on the hearth, a
tiny scratching at the baseboard, the smell of ink, the etch of the fleur de lis
on the button.
I took a clean sheet of stationery.
19 January 1827
Dear Handful,
My heart is full. I try to imagine you with Charlotte and a
new sister, and I can’t dream what you must feel. I’m happy
for you. At the same time, I’m sad to know of the scars your
mother bears, all the horrors she must have lived through.
But I won’t focus on that now, only on your togetherness.
Did you know once, when we were girls, Charlotte made
me vow that one day I would do whatever I could to help you
get free? We were out by the woodpile where the little
orphaned barn owl lived. I remember it like yesterday. I
confess now, that’s why I taught you to read. I told myself
reading was a kind of freedom, the only one I could give. I’m
sorry, Handful. I’m sorry I couldn’t keep the vow any better.
I still have the silver button you rescued after I tossed it
out. As I write you now, it sits beside the inkwell, reminding
me of the destiny I always believed was inside of me,
waiting. How can I explain such a thing? I simply know it
the way I know there’s an oak tree inside an acorn. I’ve been
filled with a hunger to grow this seed my whole life. I used to
think I was supposed to become a lawyer, perhaps because
that’s what Father and Thomas did, but it was never that.
These days, I feel inspired to become a Quaker minister.
Doing so will at least provide me a way to do what I tried to
do on my eleventh birthday, that day you were cruelly given
to me to own. It will allow me to tell whoever might listen
that I can’t accept this, that we can’t accept slavery, it must
end. That’s what I was born for—not the ministry, not the
law, but abolition. I’ve come to know it only this night, but it
has always been the tree in the acorn.
Tell your mother I’m glad she has found you again. Greet
your sister for me. I’ve failed in many things, even in my
love for you, but I think of you as my friend.
Sarah
