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 did belong to those people. She never belong to nobody but herself.”O
She closed her eyes. “You remember that.”
“I will, mauma.”
I pulled the quilt round her shoulders. High in the limbs, the crows cawed. The doves moaned. The wind bent down to lift her to the sky.O
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 anti-slavery 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