Sarah
Seated on the platform, I watched the faces in the audience grow more rapt
as Nina spoke, the air crackling about their heads as if something was
effervescing in it. It was our inaugural lecture, and we weren’t tucked away
in a parlor somewhere before twenty ladies with embroidery hoops on their
laps like the Anti-Slavery Society had first envisioned. We were here in a
majestic hall in New York with carved balconies and red velvet chairs filled
to overflowing.
All week the newspapers had railed against the unwholesome novelty of
two sisters holding forth like Fanny Wrights. The streets had been papered
with handbills admonishing women to stay home, and even the AntiSlavery Society had grown nervous about moving the lecture to a public
hall. They’d come close to canceling the whole thing and sending us back to
the parlor.
It was Theodore Weld who’d stood and castigated the Society for their
cowardice. They called him the Lion of the Tribe of Abolition, and for good
reason—he could be quite forceful when he needed to. “I defend these
ladies’ right to speak against slavery anywhere and everywhere. It’s
supremely ridiculous for you to bully them from this great moment!”
He had saved us.
Nina swept back and forth across the stage, lifting her hands and
sending her voice soaring into the balconies. “We stand before you as
Southern women, here to speak the terrible truth about slavery . . .” She’d
splurged on a stylish, deep blue dress that set off her hair, and I couldn’t
help wondering what Mr. Weld would think if he could see her.
Even though he’d led the training sessions for Nina and me and the
thirty-eight other agents, schooling us in the skills of oration, he’d never
seemed sure how to advise the two of us. Should we stand motionless and
speak softly as people expected of a woman or gesture and project like a
man? “I leave it to you,” he’d told us.
He’d taken what he called a brotherly interest in us, visiting us often at
our lodgings. It was really Nina he’d taken an interest in, of course, and I
doubted it was brotherly. She wouldn’t admit it, but she was drawn to him,
too. Before arriving in New York, I’d pictured Mr. Weld as a stern old man,
but as it turned out, he was a young man, and as kindly as he was stern.
Thirty-three and unmarried, he was strikingly handsome, with thick brown
curling hair and biting blue eyes, and he was color-blind to the point he
wore all sorts of funny, mismatched shades. We thought it endearing. I was
fairly sure, however, it wasn’t any of these qualities that attracted Nina. I
suspected it was that saving speech of his. It was those five words, I leave it
to you.
“The female slaves are our sisters,” Nina exclaimed and stretched her
arms from her sides as if we were encompassed by a great host of them.
“We must not abandon them.” It was the final line of her speech, and it was
followed by a thunderclap in the hall, the women coming to their feet.
As the handclapping went on, heat washed up the sides of my neck.
Now it was my turn. Having listened to me practice my speech, the Society
men had decided Nina would go first and I would follow, fearing if the
order was reversed, few would persevere through my talk to hear her.
Getting to my feet, I wondered if the words I planned to say were already
retreating
When I stepped to the lectern, my legs felt squishy as a sponge. For a
moment, I held on to the sides of the podium, overwhelmed by the
realization that I, of all people, was standing here. I was gazing at a sea of
waiting faces, and it occurred to me that after my tall, dazzling sister, I
must’ve been a sight. Perhaps I was even a shock. I was short, middle-aged,
and plain, with a tiny pair of spectacles on the end of my nose, and I still
wore my old Quaker clothes. I was comfortable in them now. I’m who I am.
The thought made me smile, and everywhere I looked, the women smiled
back, and I imagined they understood what I was thinking.
I opened my mouth and the words fell out. I spoke for several minutes
before I looked at Nina as if to say, I’m not stammering! She nodded, her
eyes wide and brimming.
As a child, my stutter had come and gone mysteriously just like this, but
it had been with me for so long now I’d thought it permanent. I talked on
and on. I spoke quietly about the evils of slavery that I’d seen with my own
eyes. I told them about Handful and her mother and her sister. I spared them
nothing.
Finally, I peered over my glasses and took them in for a moment. “We
won’t be silent anymore. We women will declare ourselves for the slave,
and we won’t be silent until they’re free.”
I turned then and walked back to my chair while the women rose and
filled the hall with their applause.
We spoke before large gatherings in New York City for weeks before
holding a campaign in New Jersey, and then traveling on to towns along the
Hudson. The women came in throngs, proliferating like the loaves and
fishes in the Bible. In a church in Poughkeepsie, the crowd was so great the
balcony cracked and the church had to be evacuated, forcing us to deliver
our speeches outside in the frost and gloom of February, and not one
woman left. In every town we visited, we encouraged the women to form
their own anti-slavery societies, and we set them collecting signatures on
petitions. My stutter came and went, though it kindly stayed away for most
of my speeches.
We became modestly famous and extravagantly infamous. Throughout
that winter and spring, news of our exploits was carried by practically every
newspaper in the country. The anti-slavery papers published our speeches,
and tens of thousands of our pamphlets were in print. Even our former
president, John Quincy Adams, agreed to meet with us, promising he would
deliver the petitions the women were collecting to Congress. In a few cities
in the South, we were hung in effigy right along with Mr. Garrison, and our
mother had sent word we could no longer set foot in Charleston without
fear of imprisonment.
Mr. Weld was our lifeline. He wrote us joint letters, praising our efforts.
He called us brave and stalwart and dogged. Now and then, he added a
postscript for Nina alone. Angelina, it’s widely said you keep your
audiences in thrall. As director of your training, I wish I could take credit,
but it’s all you.
On a balmy afternoon in April, he appeared without prior notice at
Gerrit Smith’s country house in Peterboro, New York, where Nina and I
were spending several days during our latest round of lectures. He’d come,
he said, to discuss Society finances with Mr. Smith, the organization’s
largest benefactor, but one could hardly miss the coincidence. Each
morning, he and Nina took a walk along the lane that led through the
orchards. He’d invited me as well, but I’d taken one look at Nina’s face and
declined. He accompanied us to our afternoon lectures, waiting outside the
halls, and in the evenings, the three of us sat with Mr. and Mrs. Smith in the
parlor, as we debated strategies for our cause and recounted our adventures.
When Mrs. Smith suggested it was time for the women to say good night,
Theodore and Nina would glance at one another reluctant to part, and he
would say, “Well then. You must get your rest,” and Nina would leave the
room with painful slowness.
The day he departed, I watched from the window as the two of them
returned from their walk. It had started to rain while they were out, one of
those sudden downbursts during which the sun goes right on shining, and he
was holding his coat over their heads, making a little tent for them. They
walked without the least bit of hurry. I could see they were laughing.
As they came onto the porch, shaking off the wetness, he bent and
kissed my sister’s cheek.
In June we arrived in Amesbury, Massachusetts, for a two-week respite at
the clapboard cottage of a Mrs. Whittier. We were soon to begin a crusade
of lectures in New England that would last through the fall, but we were
ragged with fatigue, in need of fresh, more seasonal clothes, and I had an
airy little cough I couldn’t get rid of. Mrs. Whittier was cherry-cheeked and
plump, and fed us rich soups, dosed us with cod liver oil, refused all
visitors, and forced us to bed before the moon appeared.
It was several days before we discovered she was the mother of John
Greenleaf Whittier, Theodore’s close friend. We were sitting in the parlor,
having tea, when she began to speak of her son and his long friendship with
Theodore, and we understood now why she’d taken us in.
“You must know Theodore well then,” Nina said.
“Teddy? Oh, he’s like a son to me, and a brother to John.” She shook
her head. “I suppose you’ve heard of that awful pledge they made.”
“Pledge?” said Nina. “Why, no, we’ve heard nothing of it.”
“Well, I don’t approve. I think it too extreme. A woman my age would
like grandchildren, after all. But they’re men of principle, those two, there’s
no reasoning with them.”
Nina sat up on the edge of her chair, and I could see the brightness leave
her. “What did they pledge?”
“They vowed neither of them would marry until slavery was abolished.
Honestly, it will hardly be in their lifetimes!”
That night I was awakened by a knock on my door long after the moon
set. Nina stood there with her face like a seawall, grim and braced. “I can’t
bear it,” she said and fell against my shoulder.
That summer of 1837, New Englanders came by the thousands to hear us
speak, and for the first time men began to appear in the audiences. At first a
handful, then fifty, then hundreds. That we spoke publicly to women was
bad enough—that we spoke publicly to men turned the Puritan world on its
head.
“They’ll be lighting the pyres,” I said to Nina when the men first
showed, trying to slough it off. We laughed, but it became not funny at all.
I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but
to be in silence. Was there ever a more galling verse in the Bible? It was
preached that summer from every pulpit in New England with the Grimké
sisters in mind. The Congregational churches passed a resolution of censure
against us, urging a boycott of our lectures, and in its wake, a number of
churches and public halls were closed to us. In Pepperell we were forced to
deliver our message in a barn with the horses and cows. “As you see,
there’s no room at the inn,” Nina told them. “But, still, the wise men have
come.”
We tried to be brave and stalwart and dogged, as Theodore had
described us in his letter, and we began using portions of our lectures to
defend our right to speak. “What we claim for ourselves we claim for every
woman!” That was our rally cry in Lowell and Worcester and Duxbury,
indeed everywhere we went. You should have seen the women, how they
flocked to our side, and some, like the brave ladies of Andover, wrote
public letters in our defense. My old friend Lucretia got a message to us all
the way from Philadelphia. It contained four words: Press on, my sisters.
Without intending to, we set the country in an uproar. The matter of
women having certain rights was new and strange and pilloried, but it was
suddenly debated all the way to Ohio. They renamed my sister Devilina.
They christened us “female incendiaries.” Somehow we’d lit the fuse.
The last week of August we returned to Mrs. Whittier’s cottage as if
from battle. I felt tired and beleaguered, uncertain if I could continue with
the fall lectures. The last teaspoon of fight had been scraped out of me. Our
final meeting of the summer had ended with dozens of angered men
standing on wagons outside the hall, shouting “Devilina!” and hurling rocks
as we left. One had hit my mouth, transforming my lower lip into a fat, red
sausage. I looked a sight. I wasn’t sure what Mrs. Whittier would say to all
this, if she would even give us shelter—we were pariahs now—but when
we arrived, she pulled us into her arms and kissed our foreheads.
On the third day of refuge, I returned from a stroll along the banks of
the Merrimack to find Nina canting sharply against the window as if she’d
fallen asleep, her head pressed to the glass, her eyes closed, her arms
dropped by her sides. She looked like a spinning top that had come to rest.
Hearing my footsteps, she turned and pointed to the tea table where the
Boston Morning Post lay open. Mrs. Whittier took care to hide the
editorials, but Nina had found the paper in the bread box.
August 25
The Misses Grimké have made speeches, written pamphlets, and exhibited
themselves in public in unwomanly ways for a while now, but they have not
found husbands. Why are all the old hens abolitionists? Because not being able
to obtain husbands, they think they may stand some chance for a Negro, if they
can only make amalgamation fashionable . . .
I couldn’t finish it.
“If that’s not enough, Theodore will be arriving this afternoon along
with Elizur Wright and Mrs. Whittier’s son, John. Their letter came while
you were out. Mrs. Whittier is in there making mince pies.”
She hadn’t spoken of Theodore all summer, but she was sick with
longing for him, it was plain on her face.
The men arrived at three o’clock. My lip was almost back to its normal size,
and I could speak now without sounding as if my mouth was stuffed with
food, but it was still sore and I remained quiet, waiting for them to come to
their purpose, remembering the way Theodore defended us before—It is
supremely ridiculous they should be bullied from this great moment.
Today he was wearing two shades of green that made one wince. He
walked to the mantel and picked up a piece of scrimshaw and inspected it.
His eyes went to Nina. He said, “There has not been a contribution to the
anti-slavery movement more impressive or tireless than that of the Grimké
sisters.”
“Hear, hear,” said dear Mrs. Whittier, but I saw her son lower his eyes,
and I knew then why they had come.
“We commend you for it,” Theodore went on. “And yet by encouraging
men to join your audiences, you’ve mired us in a controversy that has taken
the attention away from abolition. We’ve come, hoping to convince you—”
Nina interrupted him. “Hoping to convince us to behave like good
lapdogs and wait content beneath the table for whatever crumbs you toss to
us? Is that what you hope?” Her rebuke was so swift and scathing I
wondered if it was in reaction to his marriage pledge as much as anything.
“Angelina, please, just hear us out,” he said. “We’re on your side, at
heart we are. I of all people support your right to speak. It’s downright
senseless to keep men away from your meetings.”
“. . . Then why do you quibble?” I asked.
“Because we sent you out there on behalf of abolition, not women.”
He glanced at John, whose heavy brows and lean face made me feel the
two could’ve been actual brothers, not just figurative ones.
“He only means to say the slave is of greater urgency,” John added. “I
support the cause of women, too, but surely you can’t lose sight of the slave
because of a selfish crusade against some paltry grievance of your own?”
“Paltry?” Nina cried. “Is our right to speak paltry?”
“In comparison to the cause of abolition? Yes, I say it is.”
Mrs. Whittier drew up in her chair. “Really, John! As a woman, I didn’t
think I had a grievance until you began speaking!”
“Why must it be one or the other?” Nina asked. “Sarah and I haven’t
ceased to work for abolition. We’re speaking for slaves and women both.
Don’t you see, we could do a hundred times more for the slave, if we
weren’t so fettered?” She turned to Theodore, casting on him the most
beautiful, imploring look. “Can’t you stand side by side with me? With us?”
He drew a long breath and his face gave him away—it was twisted with
love and distress—but he’d come on a mission, and as Mrs. Whittier had
said, he was a man of principle, right or wrong. “Angelina, I think of you as
my friend, the dearest of friends, and it tortures me to go against you, but
now is the time to stand with the slave. The time will come for us to take up
the woman question, but not yet.”
“The time to assert one’s right is when it’s denied!”
“I’m sorry,” he told her.
Outside, the wind swirled up, churning the leaves in the birch. The
sound and smell of it loomed through the open window, and I had a sudden
fleeting memory of playing beneath the oak in the work yard back home,
forming words with my brother’s marbles, Sarah Go, and then the slave
woman is dragged from the cow house and whipped. I don’t scream or
make a sound. I say nothing at all.
The older Mr. Wright had begun his piece, coming to the crux of it. “It
saddens me, but your agitation for women harms our cause. It threatens to
split the abolition movement in two. I can’t believe you want that. We’re
only asking you to confine your audiences to women and refrain from
further talk about women’s reform.”
Hushing up the Grimké sisters—would it never stop? I looked at Mr.
Wright, sitting there rubbing his arthritic fingers, and then at John and
Theodore—these good men who wished to quash us, gently, of course,
benignly, for the good of abolition, for our own good, for their good, for the
greater good. It was all so familiar. Theirs was only a different kind of
muzzle.
I’d spoken but once since they’d gotten here, and it seemed to me now
I’d spent my entire life trying to coax back the voice that left me that longago day under the tree. Nina, clearly furious, had stopped arguing. She
looked at me, beseeching me to say something. I lifted my fingers to my
mouth and touched the last bit of swollenness on my lip, feeling the uprush
of indignation that had sustained me through the summer, and, I suppose,
my whole life, but this time, it formed into hard round words. “How can
you ask us to go back to our parlors?” I said, rising to my feet. “To turn our
backs on ourselves and on our own sex? We don’t wish the movement to
split, of course we don’t—it saddens me to think of it—but we can do little
for the slave as long as we’re under the feet of men. Do what you have to
do, censure us, withdraw your support, we’ll press on anyway. Now, sirs,
kindly take your feet off our necks.”
That night I began writing my second pamphlet, Letters on the Equality of
the Sexes, working into the hours before dawn. The first line had arranged
itself in my head while I’d sat listening to the men try and dissuade us:
Whatsoever it is morally right for a man to do, it is morally right for a
woman to do. She is clothed by her Maker with the same rights, the same
duties.
