Sarah
I woke each day to a sick, empty feeling. Catherine had given us until the
first day of October to pack our things and leave, but we could find no one
who’d take in two sisters expelled by the Quakers, and Lucretia’s house was
packed with children now. The streets had been flooded with hand fliers—
they were tacked on light posts and buildings and strewn on the ground—
the headline screaming out in the salacious way these street rags did:
OUTRAGE: An Abolitionist of the Most Revolting Character is Among You.
Below that, Nina’s letter to The Liberator was printed in full. Even the
lowliest boardinghouses wouldn’t open their doors to us.
I’d reached the borders of despair when a letter came with no return
name or address on the envelope.
29 September 1835
Dear Misses Grimké,
If you are bold enough to sit with us on the Negro pew,
perhaps you will find it in yourself to share our home until
you find more suitable lodging. My mother and I have
nothing to offer but a partially furnished attic, but it has a
window and the chimney runs through the middle of it and
keeps it warm. It is yours, if you would have it. We ask that
you not speak of the arrangement to anyone, including your
present landlord Catherine Morris. We await you at 5
Lancaster Row.
Yours in Fellowship,
Sarah Mapps Douglass
We departed our old life the next day, leaving no forwarding address
and no goodbye, arriving by coach at a tiny brick house in a poor, mostly
white neighborhood. There was a crooked wooden fence around the front
with a chain on the gate, which necessitated us dragging our trunks to the
back door.
The attic was poorly lit and gauzy with cobwebs, and when a fire blazed
below, the room filled with stultifying heat and smelled bitter with wood
smoke, but we didn’t complain. We had a roof. We had each other. We had
friends in Sarah Mapps and Grace.
Sarah Mapps was well educated, perhaps more than I, having attended
the best Quaker academy for free blacks in the city. She would tell me that
even as a child she’d known her only mission in life was to found a school
for black children. “Few understand that kind of emphatic knowing,” she
said. “Most people, including my mother, feel I’ve sacrificed too much by
not marrying and having children, but the pupils, they are my children.” I
understood far better than she realized. Like me, she loved books, keeping
her precious volumes inside a chest in their small front sitting room. Each
evening she read to her mother in her lovely singsong voice—Milton,
Byron, Austen—continuing long after Grace had fallen asleep in her chair.
There were hats everywhere in various stages of construction, hanging
on tree racks throughout the house, and if not actual hats, then sketches of
hats scattered on tables and wedged into the frame of the mirror by the door.
Grace made big, wild-feathered creations which she sold to the shops,
creations that, as a Quaker, she never could’ve worn herself. Nina said she
was living vicariously, but I think she simply possessed the urgings of an
artist.
Our first week in the attic, we cleaned. We swept out the dust and
spiders and shined the window glass. We polished the two narrow bed
frames, the table and chair, and the creaky rocker. Sarah Mapps brought up
a hand-braided rug, bright quilts, an extra table, a lantern, and a small
bookshelf where we set our books and journals. We tucked evergreen
boughs under the eaves to scent the air and hung our clothes on wall hooks.
I placed my pewter inkstand on the extra table.
By the second week we were bored. Sarah Mapps had said we should be
careful to conceal our comings and goings, that the neighbors would not
tolerate racial mixing, but slipping out one day, we were spotted by a group
of ruffian boys, who pelted us with pebbles and slurs. Amalgamators.
Amalgamators. The next day the front of the house was egged.
The third week we became hermits.
When November arrived, I began to pace the oval rug as I reread books and
old letters, holding them as I walked, trying not to disappear into the
melancholic place I’d visited since childhood. I felt as if I was fighting to
hold my ground, that if I stepped off the rug, I would fall into my old abyss.
Before we’d left Catherine’s, a letter had arrived from Handful telling
us of Charlotte’s death. Every time I read it—so many times Nina had
threatened to hide it from me—I thought of the promise I’d made to help
Handful get free. It had plagued me my whole life, and now that Charlotte
was gone, instead of releasing me, her death had somehow made the
obligation more binding. I told myself I’d tried—I had tried. How many
times had I written Mother begging to purchase Handful in order to free
her? She’d not even acknowledged my requests.
Then one morning while my sister used the last of our paints to capture
the bare willow outside the window and I walked my trenchant path on the
rug, I suddenly stopped and gazed at the pewter inkstand. I stared at it for
whole minutes. Everything was in shambles, and there was the inkstand.
“. . . Nina! Do you remember how Mother would make us sit for hours
and write apologies? Well, I’m going to write one . . . a true apology for the
anti-slavery cause. You could write, too . . . We both could.”
She stared at me, while everything I felt and knew offered itself up at
once. “. . . It’s the South that must be reached,” I said. “. . . We’re
Southerners . . . we know the slaveholders, you and I . . . We can speak to
them . . . not lecture them, but appeal to them.”
Turning toward the window, she seemed to study the willow, and when
she looked back, I saw the glint in her eyes. “We could write a pamphlet!”
She rose, stepping into the quadrangle of light that lay on the floor from
the window. “Mr. Garrison printed my letter, perhaps he would print our
pamphlet, too, and send it to all the cities in the South. But let’s not address
it to the slaveholders. They’ll never listen to us.”
“. . . Who then?”
“We’ll write to the Southern clergy and to the women. We’ll set the
preachers upon them, and their wives and mothers and daughters!”
I wrote in bed on my lap desk, wrapped in a woolen shawl, while Nina bent
over the small table in her old, fur-lined bonnet. The entire attic ached with
cold and the scratch-scratch of our pens and the whippoorwills already
calling to each other in the gathering dark.
All winter the chimney had steeped the attic with heat and Nina would
throw open the window to let in the icy air. We wrote sweltering or we
wrote shivering, but rarely in between. Our pamphlets were nearly finished
—mine, An Epistle to the Clergy of the Southern States, and Nina’s, An
Appeal to the Christian Women of the South. She’d taken the women, and I
the clergy, which I found ironic considering I’d done so poorly with men
and she so well. She insisted it would’ve been more ironic the other way
around—her writing about God when she’d done so poorly with him.
We’d set down every argument the South made for slavery and refuted
them all. I didn’t stutter on the page. It was an ecstasy to write without
hesitation, to write everything hidden inside of me, to write with the sort of
audacity I wouldn’t have found in person. I sometimes thought of Father as
I wrote and the brutal confession he’d made at the end. Do you think I don’t
abhor slavery? Do you think I don’t know it was greed that kept me from
following my conscience? But it was mostly Charlotte who haunted my
pages.
Below us in the kitchen, I heard Sarah Mapps and Grace feeding wood
into the stove, an ornery old Rumford that coughed up clouds of smut. Soon
we smelled vegetables boiling—onions, parsnips, beet tops—and we
gathered our day’s work and descended the ladder.
Sarah Mapps turned from the stove as we entered, sheaves of smoke
floating about her head. “Do you have new pages for us?” she asked, and
her mother, who was pounding dough, stopped to hear our answer.
“Sarah has brought down the last of hers,” Nina said. “She wrote the
final sentence today, and I expect to complete mine tomorrow!”
Sarah Mapps clapped her hands the way she might’ve done for the
children in her class. Our habit was to gather in the sitting room after the
meal, where Nina and I read our latest passages aloud to them. Grace
sometimes grew so distressed at our eyewitness accounts of slavery she
would interrupt us with all sorts of outbursts—Such an abomination! Can’t
they see we are persons? There but for the grace of God. Finally, Sarah
Mapps would fetch the millinery basket so her mother could distract herself
by jabbing a needle into one of the hats she was making.
“A letter came for you today, Nina,” Grace said, wiping dough from her
hands and digging it from her apron.
Few people knew of our whereabouts: Mother and Thomas in
Charleston, and I’d sent the address to Handful as well, though I’d not
heard back from her. Among the Quakers, we’d informed no one but
Lucretia, afraid that Sarah Mapps and Grace would suffer for consorting
with us. The handwriting on the letter, however, belonged to none of them.
I gazed over Nina’s shoulder as she tore open the paper.
“It’s from Mr. Garrison!” Nina cried. I’d forgotten—Nina had written
him some weeks ago, describing our literary undertaking, and he’d
responded with enthusiasm, asking us to submit our work when it was
finished. I couldn’t imagine what he might want.
21 March 1836
Dear Miss Grimké,
I have enclosed a letter to you from Elizur Wright in New
York. Not knowing how to reach you, he entrusted the letter
to me to forward. I think you will find it of utmost
importance.
I pray the monographs you and your sister are writing
will reach me soon and that you will both rise to the moment
that is now upon you.
God Grant You Courage,
William Lloyd Garrison
Nina looked up, her eyes searching mine, and they were filled with a
kind of wonder. With a deep breath, she read the accompanying letter aloud.
2 March 1836
Dear Miss Grimké,
I write on behalf of the American Anti-Slavery Society,
which is soon to commission and send forth forty abolition
agents to speak at gatherings across the free states, winning
converts to our cause and rousing support. After reading
your eloquent letter to The Liberator and observing the
outcry and awe it has elicited, the Executive Committee is
unanimous in its belief that your insight into the evils of
slavery in the South and your impassioned voice will be an
invaluable asset.
We invite you to join us in this great moral endeavor, and
your sister, Sarah, as well, as we have learned of her
sacrifice and staunch abolitionist views. We believe you may
be more amenable to the mission if she accompanies you. If
the two of you would consent to be our only female agents,
we would have you speak to women in private parlors in
New York.
We would expect you the sixteenth of next September for
two months of rigorous agent training under the direction of
Theodore Weld, the great abolitionist orator. Your circuit of
lectures will commence in December.
We ask for your prayerful deliberation and your reply.
Yours Most Sincerely,
Elizur Wright
Secretary, AASS
The four of us stared at one another for a moment with blank,
astonished expressions, and then Nina threw her arms around me. “Sarah,
it’s all we could’ve hoped and more.”
I could only stand there immobile while she clasped me. Sarah Mapps
scooped a handful of flour from the bowl and tossed it over us like petals at
a wedding, and their laughter rose into the steamy air.
“Think of it, we’re to be trained by Theodore Weld,” Nina said. He was
the man who’d “abolitionized” Ohio. He was said to be demanding, fiercely
principled, and uncompromising.
I muddled through the meal and the reading, and when we slipped into
bed, I was glad for the dark. I lay still and hoped Nina would think me
asleep, but her voice came from her bed, two arm-lengths away. “I won’t go
to New York without you.”
“. . . I-I didn’t say I wouldn’t go. Of course, I’ll go.”
“You’ve been so quiet, I don’t know what to think.”
“. . . I’m overjoyed. I am, Nina . . . It’s just . . . I’ll have to speak. To
speak in the most public way . . . among strangers . . . I’ll have to use the
voice in my throat, not the one on the page.”
All evening, I’d pictured how it would be, the moment when the words
clotted on my tongue and the women in New York shifted in their chairs
and stared at their laps.
“You stood in Meetings and spoke,” Nina said. “You didn’t let your
stutter stop you from trying to become a minister.”
I stared at the black plank of rafter over my head and felt the truth and
logic of that, and it came to me that what I feared most was not speaking.
That fear was old and tired. What I feared was the immensity of it all—a
female abolition agent traveling the country with a national mandate. I
wanted to say, Who am I to do this, a woman? But that voice was not mine.
It was Father’s voice. It was Thomas’. It belonged to Israel, to Catherine,
and to Mother. It belonged to the church in Charleston and the Quakers in
Philadelphia. It would not, if I could help it, belong to me.
