The Invention of Wings

“Everything she knew came from living on the scarce side of mercy.”

Handful Grimké emphasizes that it was through defiance, pain, and tragedy that her mother gained her wisdom. Mauma tells Handful an inspiring story about rediscovering one’s wings and learning to fly again, which foreshadows Handful’s eventual journey toward freedom.

“A slave was supposed to be like the Holy Ghost—don’t see it, don’t hear it, but it’s always hovering round on ready.”

Handful describes Missus’ beliefs and expectations for the family’s slaves. This statement also alludes to Missus’ use of religion to justify slavery and her dominion over her slaves.

“If you must err, do so on the side of audacity.”

Sarah describes a “slogan” that keeps her going in life. She is not as brave as people believe, but she gathers inward courage by telling herself to be brave. This motto gets Sarah in a lot of trouble, but it also helps her achieve great things. Statements like this one are typical of Sarah and define her character. She forces herself to do what she believes is right, no matter the personal cost.

“Back then, Miss Sarah pulled words from her throat like she was raising water from a well.”

Handful describes Sarah’s speech impediment. Though at times she can speak more fluently than others, at times of great emotion or upset, Sarah frequently loses her voice. This literal loss of voice symbolizes Sarah’s inability to be heard in her family or her society; Sarah has no power. She cannot free Handful, and she cannot choose her own path in life.

“I knew myself to be an odd girl with mutinous ideas, ravenous intellect, and funny looks, and half the time I sputtered like a horse straining at its bit, qualities in the female sex that were not endearing. I was on my way to being the family pariah, and I feared the ostracism. I feared it most of all.”

Sarah describes herself here. She knows that her ideas, including her hatred of slavery and her attempts to refuse Handful’s ownership, make her different from the other members of her family. She doesn’t know how to reconcile her need to be loved and included in her family with her beliefs that slavery and their way of life is wrong. Furthermore, she wants to study and become a lawyer, at a time when no women have occupations other than wife and mother.

“At the age of eleven, I owned a slave I couldn’t free.”

Sarah’s attempts to free Handful end in defeat. This central personal frustration fuels Sarah’s later work as an abolitionist, adding another dimension to her hatred of slavery.

“You do your rebellions any way you can.”

Mauma, or Charlotte, here explains why she stole the green silk cloth, and she performs many other rebellious acts. She encourages Handful to hold on to a sense of inner rebellion and outward compliance. Mauma teaches Handful to fight her circumstances mentally, when physical freedom is not possible. Through her mother, Handful learns that she can be mentally free, though she is physically imprisoned.

“It was hard to know where things stood. People say love gets fouled by a difference big as ours. I didn’t know for sure whether Miss Sarah’s feelings came from love or guilt. I didn’t know whether mine came from love or a need to be safe. She loved me and pitied me. And I loved her and used her. It never was a simple thing. That day, our hearts were pure as they ever would get.”

Handful describes her relationship with Sarah. It’s clear to Handful that Sarah wants her to be free and that she hates slavery. The two girls have a close relationship and clearly like one another. Handful attempts to answer the question of whether it’s possible for them to love one another and be friends. As the novel continues, the women’s friendship and love for each other grow but remain no less complicated.

“You think there’s no detriment in a slave learning to read? There are sad truths in our world, and one is that slaves who read are a threat. They would be abreast of news that would incite them in ways we could not control.”

Sarah’s father explains why her teaching Handful to read is a serious transgression. Not only has Sarah done something illegal; she has done something dangerous, according to her father. Judge Grimké’s warning about the danger of literacy is proven true. Ultimately, literacy helps Handful gain her freedom. For example, she reads Sarah’s pamphlet denouncing slavery, and she writes the letter that brings Sarah back to Charleston to help her escape.

“I saw then what I hadn’t seen before, that I was very good at despising slavery in the abstract, in the removed and anonymous masses, but in the concrete, intimate flesh of the girl beside me, I’d lost the ability to be repulsed by it. I’d grown comfortable with the particulars of evil. There’s a frightful muteness that swells at the center of all unspeakable things, and I had found my way into it.”

Sarah realizes her own hypocrisy, and the terrible realization of her own complicity with slavery and the social system it engenders. Her honest and forthright appraisal of her own behavior is characteristic of Sarah and marks her apart in this novel. Even Handful, though extremely observant and insightful, is not as self-aware as Sarah is. This level of self-analysis is unique to Sarah. Significantly, she uses words that reflect her own affliction—muteness—to describe the insidious nature of the acceptance or blindness that comes from familiarity, even the familiarity with evil things.

“I didn’t know how to be in the world without her.”

When Charlotte suddenly disappears, Handful is grief-stricken. Though Handful and Sarah are not as close as they were years before, their relationship continues to grow and evolve, particularly as Sarah attempts to comfort Handful when her mother is gone.

“I have one mind for the master to see. I have another mind for what I know is me.”

Handful repeats one of Denmark Vesey’s sayings, which echoes Mauma’s advice to cultivate a sense of inner rebellion while maintaining outward compliance. After the workhouse, Handful hides her secret rebellion and hatred. Though Handful’s body is enslaved, her thoughts are not.

“I was sorry for her. Sarah had jimmied herself into my heart, but at the same time, I hated the eggshell color of her face, the helpless way she looked at me all the time. She was kind to me and she was part of everything that stole my life.”

Handful reports her ambivalent feelings for Sarah. Their relationship cannot help but be influenced by their roles in life, though they care for and about each one another. Here Handful reveals the complications of their friendship from her point of view.

“To remain silent in the face of evil is itself a form of evil.”

Israel Morris challenges Sarah’s tolerance of her family, because they own slaves. As a Quaker, Israel holds slavery to be an abomination. Sarah’s thoughts mature toward slavery through Israel’s influence, and Quakerism offers her a focus for her repudiation of it.

“Beyond the window, the sky loomed large, filled with broken light, and I remembered suddenly that day last winter in the drawing room when Handful cleaned the chandelier, the allegation she’d leveled at me: My body might be a slave, but not my mind. For you, it’s the other way round. I’d dismissed the words—what could she know if it? But I saw now how exact they were. My mind had been shackled.”

Sarah makes another life-altering decision, guided by Handful’s insight. She decides to use her inheritance to go north to live on her own. She frees her mind from its prison.

“The truth was Sky would tell more tales than mauma ever knew. Before the week was out, she’d tell me how mauma set loose mischief on the plantation every chance she got. The more they whipped mauma, the more holes she’d cut in the rice sacks. She broke things, stole things, hid things. Buried the threshing sickles in the woods, chopped down fences, one time set fire to the overseer’s privy house.”

Handful reports on Mauma’s continued insurgency against slavery, during her 14 years away on another plantation. Mauma’s example and life story encourage and support Handful’s own rebellion against slavery.

“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 just try, that’s all.”

Lucretia Mott clarifies Sarah’s purpose in life. She helps Sarah realize that she has to keep trying to fulfill her yearnings, no matter what the cost and no matter if she fails. At this moment, Sarah realizes that she needs to strive for more and to do more, and she recognizes that she was born to undertake the abolition of slavery.

“I’d chosen the regret I could live with best, that’s all. I’d chosen the life I belonged to.”

Sarah explains her refusal to marry Israel Morris. She realizes now that many life choices contain mixed blessings and regrets. However, she chooses the course that brings the least regret. Kidd is saying that at times, the best a person can do is to simply choose a life path based on what she knows she will come to regret the least.

“She said it again, ‘I'm tired.’

She wanted me to tell her it was all right, to get her spirit and go on, but I couldn't say it. I told her, ‘Course you're tired. You worked hard your whole life. That's all you did was work.’

‘Don't you remember me for that. Don't you remember I'm a slave and work hard. When you think of me, you say, she never belong to those people. She never belong to nobody but herself.’

She closed her eyes. ‘You remember that.’

‘I will, mauma.’”

Mauma’s dying words are of defiance and the refusal to allow her bondage to define who she is. Handful takes courage from her mother’s example and her words. She does not let her role as a slave define her identity.

“Last week Sky made up a rhyme and sang it in the garden. Little missus Mary, mean as a snake. Little missus Mary, hit her with a rake […] Sky couldn’t get the song off her tongue. She’d ended up with the muzzle latched on her mouth. It was used for when a slave stole food, but it worked just as good for a slave mouthing off. It took four men to hold Sky down, work the prongs inside her mouth, and clamp the contraption at the back of her head. She screamed so loud I bit the side of my cheek till blood seeped and the copper taste filled my mouth.”

Handful recounts a hideous punishment meted out by little missus for Sky insulting her. The horrific cruelty of such a punishment is obvious. The novel contains many examples of these punishments, including Charlotte’s “one-legged” punishment, and Handful’s time in the workhouse.

“I let my eyelids fall shut on the world. What was it for anyway? What was any of this for?

The first strike came straight from the fire, a burning poker under my skin. I heard the cotton on my dress rip and felt the skin split. It knocked the legs from me.

I cried out to wake God from his slumber.

The words in Sarah’s book came fresh to me. A person under God.

In my head, I saw the steamboat. I saw the paddle turning.”

Handful describes the whipping she receives for coming home late, without the whiskey she was supposed to buy. Little missus doesn’t know it, but Handful traded the whiskey for Sarah’s pamphlet against slavery. Handful takes hope from the words in this pamphlet, and envisions the paddle wheel as a symbol of her escape from slavery.

“Hushing up of 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.”

Sarah explains here the insidious nature of the sexism she, Nina, and all women confront every day. Even these men, who generally support women’s rights, fail to understand the subtle yet powerful way they assert male privilege to silence women’s voices. Having struggled, literally, to have a voice, Sarah finds it impossible to muzzle herself. The muzzle reference clearly ties into the muzzles used as slave punishment, as with Sky’s incident with little missus. Equating her bondage under sexism with the image of a slave punishment highlights the cruelty of both women’s and slaves’ positions in 19th-century society.

“‘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.’”

Sarah’s bravery shines through here, as she confronts the men of the Anti-Slavery Society who have asked her and Nina to stop speaking to groups containing men and to stop advocating for women’s rights. Sarah is recovering from being hit in the mouth by a protestor’s rock at a recent speech, and they have been threatened and reviled in newspapers across the country. Not only is her mouth damaged, but she is constantly worried that her speech impediment will return, stealing her voice. Sarah’s struggles give her insight and empathy into the position of the slaves. How can she advocate for one and not the other? How can she turn her back on women and bow to pressure to stifle her voice, which is exactly the issue she is speaking out against?