Sarah’s voice in my novel to feel authentic and carry some of the vernacular of the time, but I knew I had to bring some modern sensibility to it. I rewrote her first chapters over and over before I felt like I’d found her voice. Finding it was all about loosening it. I realized I had to tap in to Sarah’s inner life and set her free to speak from that timeless lace as well as from the time in which she lived. I needed to let her veer off script. I had to find Sarah in my imagination and in history. Doing so brought her alive for me.
3. What was the process of writing the novel like for you? How did you go about your research? You’ve commented that you went further out on the writing limb with this novel than you’ve been before. What did you mean?
It took four years to write The Invention of Wings—three and a half years of writing, following six months of research. I’m not the fastest writer on the block. I spent a lot of protracted time sitting at the computer screen just contemplating the story, letting my imagination browse, trying to connect little dots, allowing ideas and revelations to come to me. Plus, I was constantly stopping to look up something in a book—what sort of mourning dress did women wear in 1819? What book titles would be on a library shelf in 1804? What were the emancipation laws in South Carolina? When I wasn’t ruminating or scouring books, I was writing, and then rewriting as I went, rarely moving to the next chapter until I felt I’d rendered the last one as close as possible to the final draft. I would easily spend an entire day tinkering with the prose on a single page.
The way into the early nineteenth century, of course, is through an awful lot of research. My husband joked I spent more time in the nineteenth century than I did in the twenty-first. My aim was to create a world for the reader to enter, one as richly textured, tangible, and authentic as I could make it. I read and read, filling up five big notebooks with details and ideas. I drew maps of the interior of the Grimké house and the work yard and etched a loose outline of the thirty-five-year span of the story on large sheets of paper, one for each of the book’s six parts. I hung them in my study, using them to map the flow of events. I also made lots of field trips, visiting libraries, museums, historical societies, and historic houses, all of which I might have enjoyed a little too much because I finally had to make myself stop reading, mapping, and traipsing about and start writing.
It’s hard to articulate why it seemed this book took me further out on a limb. Maybe because the story had to accommodate such a sweeping amount of time. Maybe because it had two different narrators whose stories needed to be a match for one another, whose voices had to be distinct, and whose journeys had to be synchronized. I was challenged, as I’ve already mentioned, by writing from the complicated intersection of imagination and history, and quite honestly, it was unnerving to take on something as big as slavery. Most daunting, though, was the notion of writing from the mind, heart, and persona of an enslaved person. I wanted to create Handful in a way that was convincing and respectful. It might have been safer to write her character from a third-person perspective, and I did actually start off that way, but I hadn’t written two pages before her first-person voice broke in, and that was that. I’m forever plastering quotes and evocations about my study. One that I kept on my desk as I wrote this novel simply said: Be fearless on the page. I often paused to read it. It caused me to at least try.
4. For us, one of the pivotal moments in the story comes when Handful reads the ledger on which she and her mother are listed and appraised as part of the Grimké family’s property. What does that moment in the novel mean to you?
During my research, I came upon a thesis about the Grimkés’ Charleston house that included a transcript of a legally executed inventory and appraisal of all the goods and chattels in the house at the time of Sarah’s father’s death in 1819. As