The Invention of Wings: With Notes Read Online Free PDF Page A

down with the house. Tomfry had Prince and Eli toting buckets from the cistern. Some neighbor men had showed up with more buckets. Folks feared a fire worse than the devil. They kept a slave sitting all day up in the steeple on St. Michael’s, watching the rooftops for fire, and I worried he’d see all this smoke, ring the church bell, and the whole brigade show up.
    I ran to mauma who was bunched with the rest of ’em. The stuff they thought worth saving was heaped in piles by their feet. China bowls, tea caddies, record books, clothes, portraits, Bibles, brooches, and pearls. Even a marble bust was sitting out there. Missus had her gold-tip cane in one hand and a silver cigar holder in the other.
    Miss Sarah was trying to cut through the frantics to tell Tomfry and the men there wasn’t a fire to throw their water on, but by the time she dragged the words out of her mouth, the men had gone back to hauling water.
    When it got worked out what’d happened, missus went into a fury. “Hetty, you incompetent fool!”
    Nobody moved, not even the neighbor men. Mauma moved over and tucked me behind her, but missus jerked me out front. She brought the gold-tip cane down on the back of my head, worst blow I ever got. It drove me to my knees.
    Mauma screamed. So did Miss Sarah. But missus, she raised her arm like she’d go at me again. I can’t describe proper what came next. The work yard, the people in it, the walls shutting us in, all that fell away. The ground rolled out from under me and the sky billowed off like a tent caught in the wind. I was in a space to myself, somewhere time can’t cross. A voice called steady inmy head,
Get up from there. Get up from there and look her in the face. Dare her to strike you. Dare her.
    I got on my feet and poked my face at her. My eyes said,
Hit me, I dare you
.
    Missus let her arm drop and stepped back.
    Then the yard was round me again and I reached up and felt my head. A lump was there the size of a quail egg. Mauma reached over and touched it with her fingertip.
    The rest of that God-forsook day every woman and girl slave was made to drag clothes, linens, rugs, and curtains from every room upstairs out to the piazza for airing-out. Everyone but mauma and Binah showered me with looks of despising. Miss Sarah came up there wanting to help and started hauling with the rest of us. Every time I turned round, she was looking at me like she’d never seen me before in her life.

Sarah
    I took meals alone in my room for three full days as a protest against owning Hetty, though I don’t think anyone much noticed. On the fourth day, I swallowed my pride and arrived in the dining room for breakfast. Mother and I hadn’t spoken of the doomed manumission document. I suspected she was the one who’d torn it into two even pieces and deposited them outside my room, thereby having the Last Word without uttering a syllable.
    At the age of eleven, I owned a slave I couldn’t free. O
    The meal, the largest of the day, had long been under way—Father, Thomas, and Frederick had already left in pursuit of school and work, while Mother, Mary, Anna, and Eliza remained.
    “You are late, my dear,” Mother said. Not without a note of sympathy.
    Phoebe, who assisted Aunt-Sister and looked slightly older than myself, appeared at my elbow, emanating the fresh odors of the kitchen house—sweat, coal, smoke, and an acrid fishiness. Typically, she stood by the table and swished the fly brush, but today she slid a plate before me heaped with sausages, grit cake, salted shrimp, brown bread, and tapioca jelly.
    Attempting to lower a quivery cup of tea beside my plate, Phoebe deposited it on top my spoon, causing the contents to slosh onto the cloth. “Oh missus, I sorry,” she cried, whirling toward Mother.
    Mother blew out her breath as if all the mistakes of all the Negroes in the world rested personally upon her shoulders. “Where is Aunt-Sister? Why, for heaven’s sake, are you serving?”
    “She