know where you come from.
I told her, “We know where we’re going now.”
“Yeah,” she said.
“We’ll be ready when the steamer leaves Thursday eight days from now.”
She picked up her apron draped on the rocker and dug in the pocket, pulling out two little bottles like the kind Aunt-Sister used for tinctures. “I boiled us some white oleander tea.”
A quiver ran from my neck to my fingers. White oleander was the most deadly plant in the world. A bush had caught fire on Hasell Street and a man dropped dead just breathing the smoke. The brown liquid in Sky’s bottle would curl us on the floor retching till the last breath, but it wouldn’t take long.
“We leaving or die trying,” Sky said.
Sarah
I arrived in Charleston during a thunderstorm. As the steamer groaned into the harbor, lightning tore rifts in the sky and rain pelted sideways, and still, I stepped out beneath the roof of the upper deck so I could watch the city come into view. I hadn’t seen it in sixteen years.
We churned past Fort Sumter at the harbor’s mouth, which didn’t look much further along in its construction than when I’d sailed away. The peninsula loomed up like an old mirage rising from the water, the white houses on the Battery blurred in the gray rain. For a moment I felt the quiet hungering thing that comes inside when you return to the place of your origins, and then the ache of mis-belonging. It was beautiful, this place, and it was savage. It swallowed you and made you a part of itself, or if you proved too inassimilable, it spit you out like the pit of a plum.
I’d left here of my own will, and yet it seemed the city had banished me in much the same way I’d banished it. Seeing it now after so long, seeing the marsh grass pitching wildly around the edges of the city, the rooftops hunkered together with their ship watches and widow walks, and behind them, the steeples of St. Philip’s and St. Michael’s lifted like dark fingers, I was not sorry for loving Charleston or for leaving it. Geography had made me who I was.
Wind swept my bonnet off the back of my head, the sash catching at my neck, and turning to grab it, I saw the menacing couple through the window of the salon. Traveling home after socializing in Newport, they’d recognized me shortly after we’d left New York. I’d tried to keep aloof from everyone, but the woman had stared at me with unrelenting curiosity. “You’re the Grimké daughter, aren’t you?” she said. “The one who—” Her husband took her arm and steered her away before she could finish. She’d meant to say the one who betrayed us.
They glared at me now, at my wet skirt and fluttering bonnet, and I felt certain the man would report my arrival to the authorities as soon as we landed. Perhaps returning had been a terrible mistake after all. I moved away from them to the bow of the boat as a crack of thunder broke overhead, becoming lost in the noise of the engine. Charleston would forgive its own many things, but not betrayal.
I found Handful within an hour of my arrival. She was sewing in the upstairs alcove, of all places. When she saw me standing there, she leapt up, stumbling a little with her infirm leg, dropping the slave shirt on the floor along with the needle and thread. I reached to catch her as she righted herself and found myself embracing her, feeling her embrace me back.
“I got your letter,” I told her, softly, in case there were listening ears somewhere.
She shook her head. “But you didn’t come back cause of that, cause of me.”
“Of course I did,” I said. I picked up the shirt and we sat down on the cushioned window seat.
She was wearing her customary red scarf and seemed barely changed. Her eyes were still large as bowls, the golden color darkened somewhat, and she was tiny as ever. Not frail or insubstantial, but distilled, concentrated.
There was a cane propped between us with a fanciful carving of a rabbit on the handle. Moving it to the side, she said, “You didn’t come to try and stop us, did you?”
“It’s dangerous, Handful . . . I’m afraid for you.”
“Well, that may be, but I’m more scared of bowing and scraping to your mauma and your sister the rest of my days.”
Speaking barely above a