the horse blankets and don’t let anybody near it.”
Mending her cape was not all I did. I took little missus’ seal-stamp right off her desk while she was standing in the room and I dropped it in my pocket.
I waited till dark to write my letter.
23 April 1838
Dear Sarah
I hope this makes it to you. Me and Sky will be leaving here or die trying. That’s how we put it. I don’t know how we’re doing it, but we’ve got mauma’s money. All we need is a place to come to. I have the address on this letter. I hope I see you again one day.
Your friend
Handful
Sarah
The wedding took place in a house on Spruce Street in Philadelphia on May 14 at two o’clock in the afternoon—a day full of glinting sunlight and pale blue clouds. It was the sort of day that seemed sharply real and not real at all. I remember standing in the dining room watching it unfold as if from a distance, as if I was climbing up from the bottom of sleep, coming up from the cool sheets to a new day, one life ending and another beginning.
Mother had sent a note of congratulation, which we hadn’t expected, begging us to send a letter describing the wedding in detail. What will Nina wear? she’d asked. Oh, that I could see her! Naturally, she’d conveyed how relieved she was that Nina had a husband now and she hoped we would both retire from the unnatural life we’d been living, but despite that, her letter was plaintive with the love of an aging mother. She called us her dear daughters and lamented the distance between us. Will I see you again? she wrote. The question haunted me for days.
I gazed at Nina and Theodore standing now before the window about to say their vows, or as Nina had phrased it, whatever words their hearts gave them at the moment, and I thought it just as well Mother was not here. She would’ve expected Nina to be in ivory lace, perhaps blue linen, carrying roses or lilies, but Nina had dismissed all of that as unoriginal and embarked on a wedding designed to shock the masses.
She was wearing a brown dress made from free-labor cotton with a broad white sash and white gloves, and she’d matched up Theodore in a brown coat, a white vest, and beige pantaloons. She clutched a handful of white rhododendrons cut fresh from the backyard, and I noticed she’d tucked a sprig in the button hole of Theodore’s coat. Mother wouldn’t have made it past the brown dress, much less the opening prayer, which had been delivered by a Negro minister.
When the Philadelphia newspaper announced the wedding, alluding to the mixed-race guests expected to attend, we’d worried there might be demonstrators—slurs and shouts and rocks whizzing by—but mercifully, no one had showed up but those invited. Sarah Mapps and Grace were here, along with several freed slaves with whom we were acquainted, and we’d timed the wedding to coincide with the Anti-Slavery Convention in the city so that some of the most prominent abolitionists in the country were in the room: Mr. Garrison, Mr. and Mrs. Gerrit Smith, Henry Stanton, the Motts, the Tappans, the Westons, the Chapmans.
It would become known as the abolition wedding.
Nina was speaking now, her face turned up to Theodore’s, and I thought suddenly, involuntarily of Israel and a tiny grief came over me. Every time it happened, it was like coming upon an empty room I didn’t know was there, and stepping in, I would be pierced by it, by the ghost of the one who’d once filled it up. I didn’t stumble into this place much anymore, but when I did, it hollowed out little pieces of my chest.
Gazing at Nina, radiant Nina, I pictured myself in her place, Israel beside me, the two of us saying vows, and the idea of such a thing cured me. It was the truth I always came back to, that I didn’t want Israel anymore, I didn’t want to be married now, and yet the phantom of what might’ve been, the terrible allure of it could still snatch me.
Closing my eyes, I gave my head a shake to clear the remnants of longing away, and when I looked back at the bride and groom, there were dragonflies darting beyond the window, a green tempest, and then it was gone.
Nina promised aloud to love and honor him, carefully omitting the