Sarah
13 April 1828
Dearest Nina,
Last month, Israel proposed marriage, declaring himself
at long last. You’ll be surprised to learn I turned him down.
He didn’t want me to go on with my plans for the ministry, at
least not as his wife. How could I choose someone who
would force me to give up my own small reach for meaning?
I chose myself, and without consolation.
You should have seen him. He couldn’t accept that a
faded-looking woman in middle age would choose aloneness
over him. Respectable, handsome Israel. When I delivered
my answer, he asked if I felt ill, if I was myself. He explained
the gravity of my mistake. He said I should reconsider. He
insisted I speak with the elders. As if those men could ever
know my heart.
People at Arch Street can’t conceive of my refusal any
more than Israel. They think I’m selfish and misguided. Am
I, Nina? Am I a fool? As the weeks pass without his visits,
and I feel inconsolable, I fear I’ve made the worst mistake of
my life.
I want to tell you I’m strong and resolute, but in truth, I
feel afraid and alone and uncertain. I feel as if he has died,
and I suppose in some way it’s true. I’m left with nothing but
this strange beating in my heart that tells me I’m meant to
do something in this world. I cannot apologize for it, or for
loving this small beating as much as him.
I think of you and your Reverend McDowell with hope
and blessings.
Pray for your loving sister,
Sarah
I laid down the pen and sealed the letter. It was late, the Mott house
asleep, the candle a nub, the night impervious on the window. For weeks,
I’d resisted writing to Nina, but now it was done, and it seemed a turning
point, an abdication of what I’d always been to her: mother, rescuer,
exemplar. I didn’t want to be those things anymore. I wanted to be what I
was, her fallible sister.
When Lucretia handed me Nina’s letter, I was in the kitchen making
biscuits the way Aunt-Sister made them, with wheat flour, butter, cold
water, and a spoonful of sugar. I wasn’t inclined toward baking, but I did try
to be of help now and then. I opened the letter, standing over the bowl of
flour.
1 June 1828
Dearest Sister,
Take Heart. Marriage is overvalued.
My own news, though not as dire as yours, is similar.
Some weeks ago, I went before a meeting at church and
requested the elders give up their slaves and publicly
denounce slavery. It was not well-received. Everyone,
including Mother, our brother Thomas, and even Reverend
McDowell, behaved as if I’d committed a crime. I asked
them to give up a sin, not Christ and the Bible!
Reverend McDowell agrees with me in spirit, but when I
pressed him to preach publicly what he says to me in private,
he refused. “Pray and wait,” he told me. “Pray and act,” I
snapped. “Pray and speak!”
How could I marry someone who displays such
cowardice?
I have no choice now but to leave his church. I’ve
decided to follow in your steps and become a Quaker. I
shudder to think of the gruesome dresses and the barren
meetinghouse, but my course is set.
Fine riddance to Israel! Be consoled in knowing the
world depends upon the small beating in your heart.
Yours,
Nina
When I finished reading, I pulled a chair from the pine table and sat.
Motes of flour-dust were drifting in the air. It seemed an odd convergence
that Nina and I would both taste this pain only weeks apart. Fine riddance
to Israel, she’d written, but it wasn’t fine. I feared I would love him the rest
of my life, that I would always wonder what it would’ve been like to spend
my life with him at Green Hill. I longed for it in that excruciating way one
has of romanticizing the life she didn’t choose. But sitting here now, I knew
if I’d accepted Israel’s proposal, I would’ve regretted that, too. I’d chosen
the regret I could live with best, that’s all. I’d chosen the life I belonged to.
I’d struggled for nearly two years to be acknowledged as a minister, without
success, and I bore down now on my efforts, performing charitable work at
the children’s asylum in order to win over the Quaker women and spending
so many evenings reading texts on Quaker thought and worship I smelled
perpetually of paraffin. The crucial factor, though, was my utterances in
Meeting, which were completely dismal. My nervousness about speaking
always made my stammer worse, and Mr. Bettleman complained loudly
about my “incoherent mumblings.” It was said that rhetorical polish wasn’t
required for the ministry, but the fact was all the ministers on the Facing
bench were appallingly eloquent.
I sought out the doctor who’d provided my spectacles, in hope, finally,
of a cure, but he terrified me with talk of operations in which the root of
one’s tongue was sliced and the excess tissue removed. I left, vowing I
would never return. That night, unable to sleep, I sat in the kitchen with
warm milk and nutmeg, repeating Wicked Willy Wiggle over and over, the
little tongue exercise Nina had once insisted I do when she was a child.
8 October 1828
My Dear Sarah,
I am to be publicly expelled from Third Presbyterian
Church. It seems they do not take well to my attending
Quaker meetings these past few months. Mother is appalled.
She insists my downfall began when I refused confirmation
into St. Philip’s. According to her, I was a twelve-year-old
marionette whose strings you pulled, and now I’m a grown
marionette of twenty-four whose strings you’re manipulating
all the way from Philadelphia. How skilled you are! Mother
also felt compelled to add that I’m an unmarried marionette,
thanks to my pride and my opinionated tongue.
Yesterday, Reverend McDowell visited, informing me I
must return to “the fold of God’s elect” or be summoned
before the church session to stand trial for broken vows and
neglect of worship. Have you ever? I spoke as calmly as I
could: “Deliver your document citing me to appear in your
court, and I’ll come and defend myself.” Then I offered him
tea. As Mother says, I’m proud, proud even of my pride. But
when he departed, I fled to my room and gave way to tears. I
am on trial!
Mother says I must give up my Quaker foolishness and
return to the Presbyterians or bring public scandal upon the
Grimkés. Well, we’ve endured them before, haven’t we?
Father’s impeachment, that despicable Burke Williams, and
your aweing “desertion” to the North. It’s my turn now.
I remain firm. Your Sister,
Nina
Over the next year, my letters to Nina were the nearest thing to a diary I’d
written since Father’s death. I told her how I practiced saying Wicked Willy
Wiggle, of the fear my voice would keep me from realizing my largest
hopes. I wrote of the anguish of seeing Israel each week at Meetings, the
way he avoided me while his sister, Catherine, warmed to me considerably,
a volte-face I couldn’t have imagined when I first returned here.
I sent Nina sketches I drew of the studio and recounted the talks
Lucretia and I had there. I kept her abreast of the livelier petitions that
circulated in Philadelphia: to keep free blacks from being turned out of
white neighborhoods, to ban the “colored bench” in meetinghouses.
“It has come as a great revelation to me,” I wrote her, “that abolition is
different from the desire for racial equality. Color prejudice is at the bottom
of everything. If it’s not fixed, the plight of the Negro will continue long
after abolition.”
In response, Nina wrote, “I wish I might nail your letter onto a public
post on Meeting Street!”
The thought of that was not at all unpleasant to me.
She wrote of her battles with Mother, the dryness of sitting in the
Quaker meetinghouse, and the rampant ostracism she faced in Charleston
for doing so. “How long must I remain in this land of slavery?” she wrote.
Then, on a languid summer day, Lucretia placed a letter in my hands.
12 August 1829
Dear Sarah,
Several days ago, in route to visit one of the sick in our
Meeting, I was standing on the corner of Magazine and
Archdale when I encountered two boys—they were mere
boys!—escorting a terrified slave to the Work House. She
was pleading with them to change their minds, and seeing
me, she begged more tearfully, “Please missus, help me.” I
could do nothing.
I see now that I can do nothing here. I’m coming to you,
Sister. I will quit Charleston and sail to Philadelphia in late
October after the storms. We shall be together, and together
nothing shall deter us.
With Abiding Love,
Nina
I’d been expecting Nina for over a week, keeping vigil at the window of my
new room in Catherine’s house. The November weather had been spiteful,
delaying her ship, but yesterday the clouds had broken.
Today. Surely, today.
On my lap was a slender compendium on Quaker worship, but I
couldn’t concentrate. Closing it, I paced back and forth in the narrow room,
an unadorned little cell similar to the one that awaited Nina across the hall. I
wondered what she’d think of it.
It had been hard to leave Lucretia’s, but there was no guest room there
for Nina. Israel’s daughter-in-law had taken over Green Hill, allowing
Catherine to move back to her small house in the city, and when she’d
offered to board the both of us, I’d accepted with relief.
I went again to the window and peered at the outcroppings of blue
overhead and then at the river of elm leaves in the street, brimming yellow,
and I felt surprised suddenly at my life. How odd it had turned out, how
different than I’d imagined. The daughter of Judge John Grimké—a
Southern patriot, a slaveholder, an aristocrat—living in this austere house in
the North, unmarried, a Quaker, an abolitionist.
A coach turned at the end of the street. I froze for a moment, arrested by
the clomp clomp of the chestnut horses, the way their high stride made
eddies in the leaves, and then I broke into a run.
When Nina opened the door of the coach and saw me rushing toward
her without a shawl, my hair falling in red skeins from its pins, she began to
laugh. She wore a black, full-length cloak with a hood, and tossing it back,
she looked dark and radiant.
“Sister!” she cried and stepped off the carriage rung into my arms.
PART SIX
July 1835–June 1838
