Review:
The Invention of Wings is gripping historical fiction that weaves together
the lives of two “sisters who were the first female abolitionists and among the
earliest major American feminist thinkers…In the late 1830’s, they were
arguably the most famous as well as the most infamous women in America” (Sue Monk Kidd, The
Invention of Wings, Penguin Random House Company, 2014, p.361). Their parents were wealthy slave-owners in South
Carolina. Through their story is woven the horrors of slavery, the call of God
to fight slavery’s evils and the torturous cost and journey of those called to
stand for justice.
Kidd weaves two symbols
through her book – the symbol of water, and the symbol of the blackbird. The
blackbird stood for freedom. No matter how severe the slavery of body and
circumstance was, the slaves in the book sought to have wings and learn how to
fly above the horrors of their abuse (p. 147).
Justifiably a N.Y.Times bestseller.-M.L. Codman-Wilson Ph.D.,
2/7/2014
Excerpts:
Handful: A slave’s perspective of slavery:
For Handful, staying at the
plantation as slaves felt like “having the sky slammed shut” (p. 84). “As her mother had said, ‘I have one mind for the
master to see. I have another mind for what I know is me” (p. 172). “As mauma died, her final words to Handful were, ‘When
you think of me you say, she never did belong to those people. She never did
belong to nobody but herself” (p. 304).
“As Handful reviewed her own life,
‘I thought of the girl who bathed in the master’s copper tub [feeling that she
was worthy of those privileges, it was not a revolt but a baptism (p. 115).] I thought of the women who stole a bullet mold [for
the slave revolt]. I love that girl, that woman” (p. 345).
When Handful was sailing
toward freedom she “thought about Missus and her devotions [that ‘slaves are to
be obedient to their masters’]. We’d been through the Bible and back with that
woman. Now we were Jesus walking on the water…When we left the mouth of the
harbor, the wind swelled and the sails around us flapped, and I heard the
blackbird wings. We rode onto the shining water, onto the far distance” (pp. 358-359).
Sarah: Her journey to becoming an abolitionist:
Sarah’s father had taught her
to read and she read voraciously. She even taught the slave she’d
been given for her 11th birthday to read and write. When it was
discovered that Handful could read, however, Sarah was summoned into Father’s
study and severely reprimanded. He said, “Slaves who read are a threat. They
would be abreast of news that would incite them in a way we could not control.
Yes, it’s unfair to deprive them, but there is a greater good here that must be
protected’…’But Father, its wrong!’ I cried. ‘Don’t mistake me Sarah, I will
protect our way of life. I will not tolerate sedition in this family’” (pp. 67, 68).
Sarah’s punishment was to be denied access to his library and to all books. She
was only allowed books on the prescribed interests and pursuits for women – “the
polite education for the female mind: books on embroidery, manners, drawing,
basic reading, penmanship, the Bible, French and enough arithmetic to add 2 and
2. Increasingly during those classes, longings had seized me, foreign
torrential aches that over ran my heart. I wanted to know things, to become
somebody. Oh, to be a son!” (p. 19).
Father had told her she had
the mind to be the jurist, “but it was impossible because she was a girl.” When
she announced her plans to be a jurist to her family, they derided her. She
replied, ‘Would it not be a great accomplishment if I should be the first?’ At
that, her father’s face turned to annoyance. ‘There will be no first, Sarah,
and if such a preposterous thing did occur, it would be no daughter of mine.
Sarah, stop this nonsense. You shame yourself. You shame us all” (p. 79).
Sarah’s mother added: “Every
girl must have ambition knocked out of her for her own good. You are unusual only
in your determination to fight what is inevitable. You resisted, and so it came
to this, to being broken like a horse” (p.
81).
Sarah’s thoughts to herself
as a result of her parents reprimand: ‘My aspiration to become a jurist had
been laid to rest in the Graveyard of Failed Hopes, an all-female
establishment’” (p. 88).
It was that deep tortured
longing that in her late teens finally got a hold of Sarah when she attended a
lecture by a minister who said, ‘Are you not sick of the frivolous being you’ve
become? Are you not…weary of the ballroom and its gilded toys? Will you not
give up the vanities and gaieties of this life for the sake of your soul?...God
calls you, he bellowed. ‘God, your beloved, begs you to answer.’ The words
ravished me. He’s been God’s mouthpiece. He delivered me to the precipice where
one’s only choice was between paralysis or abandon. With the Reverend praying a
long earnest prayer for our souls, I took my leap. I vowed I would not return
to society, I would not marry…Let them say what they would. I would give myself
to God.” She was 20 (p. 143).
After Sarah’s father died,
she returned to plantation. Handful thought: “You are trapped same as me but
you are trapped by your mind. By the minds of the people around her. She said
to Sarah: “My body might be a slave but not my mind. For you, it’s the other
way around.” So, Sarah returned to the north to advocate for the slaves’
freedom” (pp.
200-201).
In the Quaker meeting house
was a female minister who shared Sarah’s yearnings for freedom, equality and
justice for the slaves. Sarah asked her, ‘Why would God plant such deep
yearnings in us…if they only come to nothing?” The minister answered, ‘God
fills us with all sorts of yearnings that go against the grain of the world –
but the fact that those yearnings often come to nothing, well, I doubt that’s
God’s doings.’ She looked at me and smiled. ‘I think we know that’s men’s
doings.’ She leaned toward me, ‘Life is arranged against us Sarah, and it’s
brutally worse for Handful and her mother and sister. We are all yearning for a
wedge of sky aren’t we? I suspect God plants those yearnings in us so we will
at least try and change the course of things. We must try. That is all.’ I felt
her words tear a hole in the life I’d made. An irreparable hole” (p. 275).
Sarah fell in love with
another abolitionist named Israel who eventually proposed to her. But he wanted
her only to be “a wonderful wife and the best of mothers…It was his way of
telling me I could not have him and myself both”(p. 288). In
her letter explaining this to Nina she says, ‘people think I’m selfish and
misguided. Am I Nina? I want to tell you I’m strong and resolute. But in truth
I feel afraid and alone and uncertain. I feel as if Israel has died, and I
suppose in some way it’s true. I’m left with nothing but the strong beating in
my heart that tells me I’m meant to do something in this world. I can’t
apologize for it, or for loving this small beating as much as him” (p. 293).
Though her sister Nina was
engaged, when she asked her fiancé to preach publically for the freedom of
slaves, he refused. She wrote Nina:” ‘Pray and wait’ he told me. ‘Pray and act’
I snapped. ‘Pray and speak!’ I have no choice now but to leave his church and
follow your steps and become a Quaker. Fine riddance to Israel. Be consoled in
knowing the world depends upon the small beating in your heart.’ Sitting with
Nina’s letter Sarah realized, I longed for Israel and our life together in that
excruciating way one has of romanticizing the live she didn’t choose. But
sitting here now, I knew if I had accepted Israel’s proposal I would have
regretted that too. I had chosen the regret I could live with best, that’s all.
I’d chosen the life I belonged to” (pp. 294-295).
As Sarah and Nina began actively
opposing slavery, they wrote pamphlets. Sarah found, ‘It was an ecstasy to
write without hesitation. To write everything hidden inside of me. To write with
a sort of audacity I wouldn’t have found in person” (p. 317). “They
were then invited as the only female agents to be part of the American
Anti-slavery Society, and join the speaking circuit across the free states.
Sarah thought in her head, ‘Who am I to do this? A woman? [and a women with a
stammer]. But that voice was not mine. It was Father’s. It was Thomas’ (her
brother). It belonged to Israel (a suitor) to Catherine (his sister) and to
Mother. It belonged to Charleston and the Quaker church in Philadelphia. It
would not, if I could help it, belong to me” (pp. 319-320).
For Sarah and Nina, to be
outspoken abolitionists was actually very dangerous. Geography was no safeguard
at all. “Pro-slavery movements in the north had been tossing abolitionist printing
presses into the rivers and burning down free black and abolitionist homes.
Nearly 50 of them in Philadelphia alone…Being an abolitionist could get you
attacked right on the street – heckled, flogged, stoned, killed. Some
abolitionists had bounties on their heads – most had gone into hiding.” Yet
Sarah and Nina chose the defiant gesture at the Quaker meeting house of sitting
in the Negro pew (with an educated Negro woman and her child). In the
confrontation with the white men who demanded that they move, “Nina drew
herself up, eye’s blazing: ‘we shall not be moved sir.’ They stayed. ‘Nina was
always braver than I, she always had been. I care too much for the opinions of
others. She cared not a bit. I was a thinker, she was a doer. I kindled fires,
she spread them. And right then, and ever after, I saw…Nina was one wing, I was
the other’” (pp.
305-308).
In the north, they faced the
double danger of being women speaking in a public lecture hall to women who
were admonished in handbills posted throughout each town to stay home. (p. 326). “By
1837, when they were speaking to thousands, men started attending their
lectures. This turned the Puritan world on its head. The sisters began to
advocate, as well, for the right of women to speak. ‘We set the country in an
uproar’…The matter of women having certain rights was new and strange’…they
became pariahs. Even the lead men in the American Anti-Slavery society urged
them to stop speaking about women’s rights. They refused. Sarah’s retort was, ‘We
can do little for the slave as long as we are under the feet of men. Do what
you have to: censure us, withdraw your support, we’ll press on anyway. Now
sirs, kindly take your feet off our necks” (pp. 331, 334).