Book Review: The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd

“History is not just facts and events. It is also a pain in the heart and we repeat history until we are able to make another’s pain in the heart our own.” — Julius Lester, American academic

In 2007, American author Sue Monk Kidd (best known for The Secret Life of Bees) was on the lookout for two sisters to write her next book on, when she happened upon Sarah and Angelina Grimké, two abolitionist sisters who lived in 19^th century Charleston, South Carolina — incidentally, the same city she was living in at the time.

The discovery led to the writing of the utterly powerful historical 
novel, The Invention of Wings — a richly imagined account of the lives of the two Grimkés who worked tirelessly for the abolition of slavery — published in 2014, but more than able to take the reader all the way back to when “whiteness defined 
everything”.

The novel begins with Sarah, the little girl with far too many ideas that went against the grain of the elite planter class she was born into. Her father is a respected high court judge, a guardian of the slave-suppressing law; her mother is a severe woman who runs the household — and its attendant slaves — with an iron hand.

On her 11^th birthday, Sarah is presented with her ‘very own slave’, Hetty ‘Handful’ — a ‘gift’ she tries turning down, to no avail. But it marks the beginning of a lasting bond between the two and the uphill struggle of one to free the other.

The narrative flows like a rushing stream between Sarah and Handful — first one then the other, just a few pages at a time — but the pace never lets up. Divided into six sections (marking out different periods of their lives), readers watch as the years fly, as Sarah gets caught for teaching Handful to read (an illegal bid to give her ‘some kind of freedom’), as her dreams to become the first female jurist get cruelly crushed and she is forbidden from study, and as ambition gives way to despair.

The turning point is when the last Grimké child, Angelina, is born. Though thirteen years her junior, Sarah begs — and obtains—permission to be her sister’s godmother.

Together, the sisters take on their family, church and society, find purpose in their more liberal-minded neighbours up North (where the anti-slavery movement had already gained ground) and, eventually, go from city to city, giving lectures alongside renowned abolitionist orator Theodore Weld, speaking out against slavery first, then combining it with the cause of women 
empowerment and shaking up every narrow mind from Philadelphia to Charleston.

If history is about making another’s pain your own, be prepared: Sue Monk Kidd is going to make your heart hurt. You’ll feel for the Grimké sisters, gritting their teeth against convention and bearing one sacrifice after another, as much as you will for the unceasing inhumanities borne by Handful and her kind.

Character development is incredible, the writing intoxicating. Kidd’s aphorisms, for example — the way she describes Sarah’s stammer (“She turned and looked at me, and we both knew. My tongue would once again attempt its suicide”) or her broken heart (“I watched the birds fill the sky… and when the air was still again, I watched the empty place where they had been”) — are words you want to let wash over you, again and again.

Her humour is nonchalant, unpretentious and catches you right off guard (“Auntie-Sister slapped me into yesterday”; “It was April and half the heat from hell had already showed up in Charleston”).

The Invention of Wings is thoroughly researched; it’s something else altogether when you’re reading of historical figures, pioneers who were the force of the abolitionist movement and whose lives were dedicated to upending the barbarian laws of the day: people like Denmark Vesey, Lucretia Mott, Sarah Mapps Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Elizur Wright and many more. The author admits she has taken a few liberties with facts in her account, but she sets the record straight about each one in her Note at the end of the book.

More than anything else, there are words in this book that will leave a fire burning in you long after the last page has been turned. “Why would God plant such deep yearnings in us… if they only come to nothing?” despairs Sarah, at one point. To which, Lucretia Mott quietly responds, “I suspect [it’s] so we’ll at least try and change the course of things. We must try, that’s all.”

Why else, indeed? It’s how wings are born.

karen@khaleejtimes.com