whether the hatch was always there, but I could envision Sarah and Handful climbing through it as girls, an idea that would prompt the scene of their having tea on the roof and telling one another their secrets.
The Historic Charleston Foundation was of great help to me and provided me with a document that contained an inventory and appraisement of all “the goods and chattels” in John Grimké’s Charleston house soon after his death in 1819. While poring over this long and meticulous list, I was stunned to come upon the names, ages, roles, and appraised values of seventeen slaves. They were recorded between the Brussels carpet and eleven yards of cotton and flax. The discovery haunted me, and eventually it found its way into the story with Handful unearthing the inventory in the library and finding hers and Charlotte’s names inscribed on it along with their supposed worth.
All of the enslaved characters in the novel are conjured from my imagination, with the exception of Denmark Vesey’s lieutenants, who were actual figures: Gullah Jack, Monday Gell, Peter Poyas, and Rolla and Ned Bennett. All but Gell were hanged for their roles in the plotted revolt. Vesey himself was a free black carpenter, whose life, plot, arrest, trial, and execution I’ve tried to represent relatively close to historical accounts. I didn’t concoct that odd detail about Vesey winning the lottery with ticket number 1884, then using the payoff to buy both his freedom and a house on Bull Street. Frankly, I wonder if I would’ve had the courage to make such a thing up. In public reports, Vesey was said to have been hanged at Blake’s Lands along with five of his conspirators, but I chose to portray an oral tradition that has persisted among some black citizens of Charleston since the 1820s, which states that Vesey was hanged alone from an oak tree in order to keep his execution shrouded in anonymity. Vesey was said to have kept a number of “wives” around the city and to have fathered a number of children with them, so I took the liberty of making Handful’s mother one of these “wives” and Sky his daughter.
Some historians have doubts about whether Vesey’s planned slave insurrection truly existed or to what extent, but I have followed the opinion that not only was Vesey more than capable of creating such a plot, he attempted it. I wanted this work to acknowledge the many enslaved and free black Americans who fought, plotted, resisted, and died for the sake of freedom. Reading about the protest and escapes of various actual female slaves helped me to shape the characters and stories of Charlotte and Handful.
The story quilt in the novel was inspired by the magnificent quilts of Harriet Powers, an enslaved woman from Georgia who used African appliqué technique to tell stories about biblical events and historical legends. Her two surviving quilts are archived at the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. I made a pilgrimage to Washington to see Powers’ quilt, and after viewing it, it seemed plausible that enslaved women, forbidden to read and write, could have devised subversive ways to voice themselves, to keep their memories alive, and to preserve the heritage of their African traditions. I envisioned Charlotte using cloth and needle as others use paper and pen, creating a visual memoir, attempting to set down the events of her life in a single quilt. One of the most fascinating parts of my research had to be the hours I spent reading about slave quilts and the symbols and imagery in African textiles, which introduced me to the notion of black triangles representing blackbird wings.
If you’re inclined to read further about the historical content in the novel or about Harriet Powers’ quilts, you might want to explore this sampling of very readable books:
The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina: Pioneers for Women’s Rights and Abolition, by Gerda Lerner.
The Feminist Thought of Sarah Grimké, by Gerda Lerner.
Lift Up Thy Voice: The Grimké Family’s Journey from Slaveholders to Civil Rights Leaders, by Mark Perry.
The Politics of Taste in Antebellum Charleston, by Maurie D. McInnis.
Denmark Vesey: The Buried Story of America’s Largest Slave Rebellion and the Man Who Led It, by David Robertson.
Africans in America: America’s Journey Through Slavery, by Charles Johnson, Patricia Smith, and the WGBH Series Research Team.
To Be a Slave, by Julius Lester, with illustrations by Tom Feelings (Newberry Honor book).
Stitching Stars: The Story Quilts of Harriet