she found them all tedious. When she turned thirty last winter, I began to quietly worry, not that she was becoming another Aunt Amelia Jane like me—indeed I told her if she got Mrs. Bettleman for a mother-in-law we would both have to drown ourselves in the river. No, my worry was that she would find herself forty-three like me, and still burping Quaker babies.
The Negro pew was in the low-slung spot beneath the stairs that led to the balcony. As usual, it was guarded by one of the men to ensure no white person sat on it by accident and no colored person passed beyond it. Noticing Edward Bettleman was the guard today, I sighed. We were doomed, it seemed, to make fresh enemies of his family over and over.
Sarah Mapps Douglass and her mother, Grace, sat on the bench in their Quaker dresses and bonnets. Typically the only Negroes among us, Sarah Mapps, close in age to Nina, was a teacher in the school for black children she’d founded, and her mother was a milliner. They were both known for their abolitionist leanings, but as we stepped toward them, I wondered for the first time if they would mind what Nina and I were about to do, if it would implicate them in any way.
As the thought crossed my mind, I hesitated, and seeing me pause, no doubt worrying again about the temperature of my feet, Nina strode quickly to the bench and plopped down beside the older woman.
I remember a blur of things happening at once—the exhale of surprise that left Mrs. Douglass’ lips, Sarah Mapps turning to look at me, comprehending, Edward Bettleman lunging toward Nina, saying too loudly, “Not here, you can’t sit here.”
Ignoring him, Nina stared bravely ahead, while I slipped beside Sarah Mapps. Edward turned to me. “Miss Grimké, this is the Negro pew, you’ll have to move.”
“. . . We’re comfortable here,” I said, noticing that entire rows of people nearby were twisting about to see the trouble.
Edward departed, and in the quiet that followed, I heard the women take up their fans and the men clear their throats, and I hoped the disturbance would die down now, but across the room on the Elders’ bench, there was a spate of whispering, and then I saw Edward returning with his father.
The four of us instinctively slid together on the bench.
“I ask you to respect the sanctity and tradition of the meeting and remove yourselves from the pew,” Mr. Bettleman said.
Mrs. Douglass began to breathe fast, and I was stabbed with fear that we’d put them in jeopardy. Belatedly, I recalled a free black woman who’d sat on a white pew at a wedding and had been forced to sweep the city streets. I gestured toward the two women. “. . . They’re not part of—” I’d almost said, part of our dissidence, but stopped myself. “. . . They’re not part of this.”
“That’s not so,” Sarah Mapps said, glancing at her mother, then up at Mr. Bettleman. “We are fully part of it. We sit here together, do we not?”
She slipped her hands into the folds of her skirt to hide the way they trembled, and I was filled with love and grief at the sight.
He waited, and we didn’t move. “I’ll ask one final time,” he said. He looked incredulous, incensed, certain of his righteousness, but he could hardly remove us forcibly. Could he?
Nina drew herself up, eyes blazing. “We shall not be moved, sir!”
His face reddened. Turning to me, he spoke in a tightly coiled whisper. “Heed me, Miss Grimké. Rein in your sister, and yourself as well.”
As he left, I peered at Sarah Mapps and her mother, the way they grabbed hands and squeezed in relief, and then at Nina, at the small exultation on her face. She was braver than I, she always had been. I cared too much for the opinion of others, she cared not a whit. I was cautious, she was brash. I was a thinker, she was a doer. I kindled fires, she spread them. And right then and ever after, I saw how cunning the Fates had been. Nina was one wing, I was the other.O
Nina and I were summoned from our rooms by Catherine ringing the tea bell on what we thought was a restful September afternoon. She often rang the bell when a letter arrived for one of us, a meal was served, or she needed help with some household task.