I read through this long and detailed list, I was shocked to come upon the names of seventeen slaves. They were inserted between a Brussels staircase carpet and eleven yards of cotton and flax. I read their names, their ages, the roles they performed—coachman, cook, waiting maid, washer, house servant, seamstress, etc.—and I read what they were supposedly worth. One slave, Diana, thirty-six, was listed as “useless” and valued at $1. There were four children included, ages eight, six, four, and three months. The eight-year-old was named Ben, the same as my grandson. Their mother was Bess, age thirty. Together the five of them had been valued at $1,500.
The moment hit me close to the bone, in part because of how real and close these human beings suddenly seemed, but also because of the sheer banality and acceptability of listing them as possessions among the carpets and cloth. Here was not just our human capacity for cruelty, but also our ability to render it invisible. How do such things happen? How do we grow comfortable with the particulars of evil? How are we able to normalize it? How does evil gather when no one is looking? Discovering the seventeen names on the ledger was when I understood how dangerous it is to separate ourselves from our history, even when it’s unspeakably painful.
Of course, the inventory found its way into the novel with Handful unearthing it in the library and finding her and her mother’s names and appraised values. I suppose, for me, the scene represents the inevitable confrontation with the trauma of slavery, one that’s all the more necessary because we have 246 years of slavery embedded in our history, and we can still hardly bear to look at it.
5. The Invention of Wings is about several simultaneous struggles for freedom. How did you develop the movements toward freedom in Handful’s and Sarah’s characters?
Handful and Sarah are both imprisoned in their own particular way. As a white woman in South Carolina in the early 1800s, even a privileged one, Sarah had a life that was vastly limited. Women had few rights, not to property or even to their own children. Essentially, they were the property of their husbands, and their purpose in life was to marry, have children, and live their lives within the domestic sphere. And yet their lack of freedom could not compare to the horrific subjugation of enslaved women whose entire lives were determined by their owners and whose suffering was infinitely worse. I felt like the primary thing I had to do was never lose sight of that.
As for how I developed Handful’s and Sarah’s individual quests for freedom, I’m reminded of a certain looming moment in the story when Handful says to Sarah, “My body might be a slave, but not my mind. For you, it’s the other way round.” Handful is conveying a truth she knows only too well herself, that one’s mind can become a cage, too. Finding their freedom had to do with liberating themselves internally, discovering a sense of self, and the boldness to express that self. There’s a scene in which Handful willfully takes a bath in the Grimkés’ majestic copper bathtub. I can’t tell you how much pleasure I derived from writing this scene. Handful’s bath is tinged with defiance, but it becomes a baptism into her own worth. Observing her in the aftermath of it, Sarah says, “She had the look of someone who’d declared herself.” Handful has begun to understand that even though her body is trapped in slavery, her mind is her own. The question then became how to emancipate herself physically. What needed to transpire inside of her to bring her to the crucial moment of risking everything? I felt that the moment occurs near the end of the story, when little missus disparages the story portrayed in Charlotte’s quilt and Handful fears she may burn it. I saw this moment as a kind of watershed in which all the accumulated sorrows and deprivations of Handful’s life, and even of her mother’s life, come together, causing her to want freedom more than the next breath. “To leave or die trying.”
Sarah was steeped in family and cultural expectations for women, which crashed over and over against her ravenous intellect and hunger for an education, her passion for a vocation, her indomitable moral compass, and her courage—qualities that came to be reflected in her silver fleur-de -is button, an object she would lose and refind, figuratively, many