I had no idea what I was getting in for when I innocently picked up The Invention of Wings (2014, Penguin Books, New York) in an airport bookstore. I needed something to entertain me on a couple more flights. I’d just finished a rather under-whelming anthology of mysteries. As I quickly scanned the bookshelves in an airport store, I looked briefly and unsuccessfully for a John Irving novel that had been recommended. When I saw a book by Sue Monk Kidd, the author of The secret Life of Bees (which I vaguely remembered reading and enjoying), I opted to try this newer one.
But this story is far heavier than The Secret Life of Bees, partly because it includes considerable faithfulness to actual events. Sue Monk Kidd takes her inspiration from the lives of Sarah and Angelina Grimke, two sisters from Charleston, South Carolina, who are best known for their involvement in the abolition and feminism movements of the mid 1800s in the US. Kidd adds a mostly fictional slave girl who is about the same age as Sarah and who is given to Sarah for her 11th birthday. The book is divided into six, two to three year segments, beginning in 1803, when the girls are children, and ending in 1838, when they are middle aged. It alternates between portrayals of events (many real) from the perspective of the elite southerner, Sarah, and mostly imagined ones in the life of her slave, Hetty.
Kidd’s character development is exquisite, bringing the reader fully into the lives of these two women—so fully that I found myself in tears repeatedly. She also brings several second-rung characters fully to life (Sarah’s sister, ‘Nina’, Hetty’s mulatto mother, Charlotte, and others). The device of separating the flow into six distinct segments allows the story on the one hand to portray a sense of history, as broader events in American society unfold; and on the other, to take the reader along the progression of these women’s lives. Stories told by Hetty’s mother, Charlotte, about her own mother and her Fon tribal background, even bring the reader back into their past. Kidd weaves a complex story that is sufficiently gripping that I read it from one day to the next.
As I child, I was horrified by slavery (like the protagonists in this book), and I remember learning about and admiring the anti-slavery book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Sojourner Truth’s rousing refrain “Ain’t I a woman?”. I grew to adulthood in the 1960s when we were confronted (as we are again today) with the racial inequities that continue to plague our society (not to mention the gender inequities that came again to the fore in the 1970s). I remember on my first trip to Zimbabwe in 2002, seeing a black woman picking cotton in a cotton field with a turban wrapped around her hair. The image I’d learned in my childhood of slavery was of just such a woman. I didn’t know if she picked her own cotton or that of someone else, but the image, and the sorrow and pain that went with it, was powerful enough to move me to tears. I couldn’t watch.
And that is how powerful Kidd’s book is, as well. She brings it all to life, from the guilt and internal conflict that thinking southerners felt to the cruelty of those who thought only of their trade and their comfortable way of life to the pains the slaves suffered whether by having a child or spouse sold out of their lives or being beaten or tortured for minor (or major) failings. One passage sticks in mind: Hetty says to Sarah “My body might be a slave, but not my mind. For you, it’s the other way round.”
The way that concerns about slavery and women’s rights came together was never so clear in my mind. The women who began speaking out publicly (against ideas of proper decorum) were responding to their own consciences, which forced them to speak up and speak out against slavery. But their behaviour was maligned, they were treated as pariahs, and they became aware of how their own voices and thoughts, even as white women, were muted. They realized that they too were shackled. Similarly today, people who try to address ethnic and gender inequities together are criticized for diluting the efforts to right ethnic injustices. In the Grimke’s day, even male abolitionists maligned them, saying the sisters’ efforts to link slaves’ and women’s rights were divisive, splitting the country when slavery was ‘the real problem’—forgetting perhaps that half the slaves were women.
These issues are beautifully and powerfully captured in this book. It’s a novel, but its spirit rings true.