Sarah
We arrived at the meetinghouse in the swelter of an August morning with
every intention of going inside and sitting on the Negro pew.
“. . . Are we certain we want to do this?” I asked Nina.
She halted on the browned grass, a harsh amber light falling out of the
cloudless sky onto her face. “But you said the Negro pew was a barrier that
must be broken!”
I had said that, just last night. It had seemed like a stirring idea then, but
now, in the glare of day, it seemed less like breaking a barrier and more like
a perilous lark. So far, the Arch Street members had put up with my antislavery statements the way you abide swarming insects in the outdoors—
you swat and ignore them the best you can—but this was altogether
different. This was an act of rebellion and it probably wouldn’t help my
long struggle to become a Quaker minister. The idea to sit on the Negro
pew had come after reading The Liberator, an anti-slavery paper Nina and I
had been smuggling home in our parcels and, once, folded inside Nina’s
bonnet. It was published by Mr. William Lloyd Garrison, possibly the most
radical abolitionist in the country. I was sure if Catherine found a single
copy in our rooms, she would promptly evict us. We kept them hidden
beneath our mattresses, and I wondered now if we should go home and burn
them.
The truth was none of this was safe. Pro-slavery mobs had been on a
reign of terror all summer, and not in the South, but here in the North.
They’d been tossing abolitionist printing presses into the rivers and burning
down free black and abolitionist homes, nearly fifty of them in Philadelphia
alone. The violence had been a shock to me and Nina—it seemed
geography was no safeguard at all. Being an abolitionist could get you
attacked right on the streets—heckled, flogged, stoned, killed. Some
abolitionists had bounties on their heads, and most everyone had gone into
hiding.
Standing there, seeing the disappointment on Nina’s face, I wished for
Lucretia. I wished she would appear next to me in her white organdy bonnet
with her fearless eyes, but she and James had moved to another Meeting,
finding Arch Street too conservative. I’d thought to follow her until
Catherine made it clear Nina and I would have to seek other lodging, and
there were few, if any, suitable places two spinster sisters could board
together. Sometimes I thought back to that day by the Delaware when I’d
told Lucretia I wouldn’t look back, and I had carried on the best I could, but
there were always compromises to be made, so many little concessions.
“You don’t have cold feet, do you?” Nina was saying. “Tell me you
don’t.”
I heard Israel’s voice cut through the crowd, calling for Becky, and
glancing up, I caught sight of his back disappearing into the meetinghouse.
I stood a moment smelling the heat on the horse saddles, the stink of urine
on the cobblestone.
“. . . I always have cold feet . . . but come on, they won’t stop me.”
She slid her arm through mine, and I could barely keep up with her as
she towed me to the door, her chin raised in that defiant way she’d had
since childhood, and for a second, I saw her at fourteen, sitting on the
yellow settee before Reverend Gadsden with her chin yanked up just like
this, refusing to be confirmed into St. Philip’s.
Soon after Nina had arrived in Philadelphia, the Quakers had made her a
teacher in the Infant School, a job she despised. Our requests for another
assignment had been ignored—I believe they thought there was some pride
to be knocked out of her by diapering babies. The eligible men, including
Jane Bettleman’s son, Edward, trampled over one another to assist her from
the carriage, then loitered close by in case she dropped something they
might retrieve, but she found them all tedious. When she turned thirty last
winter, I began to quietly worry, not that she was becoming another Aunt
Amelia Jane like me—indeed I told her if she got Mrs. Bettleman for a
mother-in-law we would both have to drown ourselves in the river. No, my
worry was that she would find herself forty-three like me, and still burping
Quaker babies.
The Negro pew was in the low-slung spot beneath the stairs that led to
the balcony. As usual, it was guarded by one of the men to ensure no white
person sat on it by accident and no colored person passed beyond it.
Noticing Edward Bettleman was the guard today, I sighed. We were
doomed, it seemed, to make fresh enemies of his family over and over.
Sarah Mapps Douglass and her mother, Grace, sat on the bench in their
Quaker dresses and bonnets. Typically the only Negroes among us, Sarah
Mapps, close in age to Nina, was a teacher in the school for black children
she’d founded, and her mother was a milliner. They were both known for
their abolitionist leanings, but as we stepped toward them, I wondered for
the first time if they would mind what Nina and I were about to do, if it
would implicate them in any way.
As the thought crossed my mind, I hesitated, and seeing me pause, no
doubt worrying again about the temperature of my feet, Nina strode quickly
to the bench and plopped down beside the older woman.
I remember a blur of things happening at once—the exhale of surprise
that left Mrs. Douglass’ lips, Sarah Mapps turning to look at me,
comprehending, Edward Bettleman lunging toward Nina, saying too loudly,
“Not here, you can’t sit here.”
Ignoring him, Nina stared bravely ahead, while I slipped beside Sarah
Mapps. Edward turned to me. “Miss Grimké, this is the Negro pew, you’ll
have to move.”
“. . . We’re comfortable here,” I said, noticing that entire rows of people
nearby were twisting about to see the trouble.
Edward departed, and in the quiet that followed, I heard the women take
up their fans and the men clear their throats, and I hoped the disturbance
would die down now, but across the room on the Elders’ bench, there was a
spate of whispering, and then I saw Edward returning with his father.
The four of us instinctively slid together on the bench.
“I ask you to respect the sanctity and tradition of the meeting and
remove yourselves from the pew,” Mr. Bettleman said.
Mrs. Douglass began to breathe fast, and I was stabbed with fear that
we’d put them in jeopardy. Belatedly, I recalled a free black woman who’d
sat on a white pew at a wedding and had been forced to sweep the city
streets. I gestured toward the two women. “. . . They’re not part of—” I’d
almost said, part of our dissidence, but stopped myself. “. . . They’re not
part of this.”
“That’s not so,” Sarah Mapps said, glancing at her mother, then up at
Mr. Bettleman. “We are fully part of it. We sit here together, do we not?”
She slipped her hands into the folds of her skirt to hide the way they
trembled, and I was filled with love and grief at the sight.
He waited, and we didn’t move. “I’ll ask one final time,” he said. He
looked incredulous, incensed, certain of his righteousness, but he could
hardly remove us forcibly. Could he?
Nina drew herself up, eyes blazing. “We shall not be moved, sir!”
His face reddened. Turning to me, he spoke in a tightly coiled whisper.
“Heed me, Miss Grimké. Rein in your sister, and yourself as well.”
As he left, I peered at Sarah Mapps and her mother, the way they
grabbed hands and squeezed in relief, and then at Nina, at the small
exultation on her face. She was braver than I, she always had been. I cared
too much for the opinion of others, she cared not a whit. I was cautious, she
was brash. I was a thinker, she was a doer. I kindled fires, she spread them.
And right then and ever after, I saw how cunning the Fates had been. Nina
was one wing, I was the other.
Nina and I were summoned from our rooms by Catherine ringing the tea
bell on what we thought was a restful September afternoon. She often rang
the bell when a letter arrived for one of us, a meal was served, or she
needed help with some household task. We plodded downstairs without a
trace of wariness, and there they were, the elders sitting ramrod straight in
the chairs in Catherine’s parlor, a few left to stand along the wall, Israel
among them. Catherine, the only woman, was grandly installed on the
frumpy velvet wingchair. We had stumbled into the Inquisition.
Neither of us had bothered to tuck up our hair. Mine hung in limp red
tassels to my waist, while Nina’s floated about her shoulders, all curls and
corkscrews. It was improper for mixed company, but Catherine didn’t send
us back. She pursed her lips into something sour that passed for a smile and
gestured us into the room.
Three weeks had passed since we’d first sat on the Negro bench and
refused to get up, and except for Mr. Bettleman, no one had said an
admonishing word to us. We’d returned to sit with Sarah Mapps and Grace
the following week and then the next, and no effort had been made to stop
us. I’d been lulled into thinking the elders had acquiesced to what we’d
done. Apparently, I’d been wrong.
We stood side by side waiting for someone to speak. The windowpanes
burned with sunlight, baking the room to a kiln, and I felt a streak of cold
sweat dart between my breasts. I tried to meet Israel’s gaze, but he leaned
back into the shadow from the cornice. Turning then to Catherine, I saw the
newspaper lying on her lap. The Liberator.
My stomach caught.
Holding one corner between her thumb and forefinger, she lifted the
paper as if it were a dead mouse she’d found in a trap and held by the tip of
its tail. “A letter on the front page of the most notorious anti-slavery paper
in the country has come to our attention.” She adjusted her glasses—the
lenses were thick as the bottom of a bottle. “Allow me to read aloud. 30
August, 1835, Respected Friend—”
Nina gasped. “Oh Sarah, I didn’t know it would be published.”
I squinted at her frantic eyes, trying to comprehend what she was
saying. As it dawned on me, I tried to speak, yet nothing came but a spew of
air. I had to strip the words like wallpaper. “. . . . . . You . . . wrote to . . . Mr.
Garrison?”
A chair scraped on the floor, and I saw Mr. Bettleman stride toward us.
“You want us to believe that you, the daughter of a slaveholding family,
penned a letter to an agitator like William Lloyd Garrison, thinking he
wouldn’t publish it? It’s exactly the sort of inflammatory material he
spreads.”
She was not remorseful, she was defiant. “Yes, perhaps I did think he
would publish it!” she said. Then to me, “People are risking their lives for
the cause of the slave, and we do nothing but sit on the Negro pew! I did
what I had to do.”
It did feel, all of a sudden, that what she’d done was inevitable. Our
lives would never go back to the way they’d been, she’d seen to it, and I
both wanted to pull her into my arms and thank her, and to shake her.
Their faces were all the same, grim and accusing, frowning through the
glaze of light, all but Israel’s. He stared at the floor as if he wished to be
anywhere but here.
As Catherine resumed reading, Nina fixed her eyes on the far wall, on
some high, removed place above their heads. The letter was long and
eloquent, and yes, highly flammable.
“If persecution is the means by which we will accomplish emancipation,
then I say, let it come, for it is my deep, solemn, deliberate conviction that
this is a cause worth dying for. Angelina Grimké.” Catherine folded the
paper and laid it on the floor.
News of her letter would reach Charleston, of course. Mother, Thomas,
the entire family would read it with outrage and disgrace. She would never
go home again—I wondered if she’d thought of that, how those words
slammed shut whatever door was left there.
Just then Israel spoke from the back of the room, and I closed my eyes
at the gentleness in his voice, the sudden kindness. “You are both our
sisters. We love you as Christ loves you. We’ve come here only to bring you
back into good standing with your Quaker brethren. You may still return to
us in full repentance, as the prodigal son returned to his father—”
“You must recant the letter or be expelled,” Mr. Bettleman said, terse
and plain.
Expelled. The word hung like a small blade, almost visible in the
brightness. This could not happen. I’d spent thirteen years with the Quakers,
six pursuing the ministry, the only profession left to me. I’d given up
everything for it, marriage, Israel, children.
I hastened to speak before Nina. I knew what she would say and then
the blade would fall. “. . . Please, I know you’re a merciful people.”
“Try and understand, Sarah, we looked the other way while you sat on
the Negro pew,” Catherine said. “But it’s gone too far now.” She laced her
fingers beneath her chin and her knuckles shone white. “And you have to
consider, too, where you’ll go if you don’t recant. I care for you both, but
naturally you couldn’t stay here.”
Panic arched into my throat. “. . . Is it so wrong to write a letter? . . . Is it
so wrong to put feet to our prayers?”
“Matters like this—they aren’t the work of a woman’s life,” Israel said,
stepping from the shadowed place along the wall. “Surely you’re not blind
to that.” His voice was mired in hurt and frustration, the same tone he’d had
when I turned down his proposal, and I knew he was speaking about more
than the letter. “We have no choice. What you’ve done by declaring
yourself in this manner is outside the bounds of Quakerism.”
I reached for Nina’s hand. It felt clammy and hot. I looked at Israel,
only Israel. “. . . We cannot recant the letter. I only wish I’d signed it, too.”
Nina’s hand tightened on mine, squeezing to the point of pain.
