From the opening pages of this engaging novel, Sue Monk Kidd grabs the reader’s attention with her compelling portrait of a slave-owning family in Charleston, S.C.
The well-told story begins with the white parents giving their daughter Sarah her own slave as a present on her 11th birthday. Rebellious Sarah wants nothing to do with slavery, but the parents insist. The 10-year-old slave girl, named Handful, is directed to sleep on the floor outside Sarah’s bedroom to be available if Sarah needs anything during the night. Sarah soon vows that her goal will be to win Handful’s freedom.
The novel is based on the true story of two sisters, Sarah and Angelina Grimke, who grew up in Charleston and later gained fame in the abolition movement.
I do not want to give away too much of the plot, except to say that The Invention of Wings offers moving insights into the brutal reality of human slavery in the years 1803 to 1838. As with the Holocaust, one is moved to ask: How could it happen?
The story is told in alternating short chapters in the voices of Handful and Sarah, who in her words “knew myself to be an odd girl with my mutinous ideas, ravenous intellect and funny looks.”
Kidd weaves in history, religion, politics and examples of the savagery of slavery. Slaves are lashed, tortured and sometimes hanged for various infractions. One owner uses a hammer to knock out a slave woman’s teeth. The back of one slave looks like alligator skin after repeated whippings.
Sarah decides to share her love of books by teaching Handful to read, which was illegal. When Sarah’s father finds out, he is outraged. “There are sad truths in our world,” he tells his daughter, “and one is that slaves who read are a threat.”
Kidd gained recognition for her well-received previous novels The Secret Life of Bees and The Mermaid Chair. The title of this new book is based on African folklore about people learning to fly like blackbirds. Slaves sew into quilts images of slaves and blackbirds flying, which becomes a metaphor for those who dream of freedom.
Kidd’s evocative writing shines. Sarah describes a letter from her mother in which “her small, tight scrawl was thick with fury and ink.” Handful reflects on the weather, “It was April and half the heat from hell had already showed up in Charleston.”
Slave misbehavior leads to swift punishment, including lashings and whacks with a gold-tipped cane on the head and arms. Some slaves maintain their sanity by engaging in minor acts of sabotage. When Handful’s mother sews dresses for Mrs. Grimke, she leaves the buttons so loose that they fall off in public.
Kidd seamlessly splices into the story claims by white ministers that the Bible sanctioned slavery, causing some slaves to wonder if there is a white God and a black God. Many of the scenes about plantation owners’ brutality will sound familiar to those who saw the movie 12 Years a Slave, which is also based on a true story.
The Grimke sisters became abolition activists, as well as crusaders for the equal treatment of women. As a girl, Sarah dreamed of becoming a lawyer, but her family laughed at the seemingly absurd idea that a woman could enter this male-only profession.
Kidd was drawn to the Grimke sisters’ story because they had lived in Charleston, where the author grew up. Kidd told an interviewer that she wanted to write about the origins of racial issues that loomed large in her native South in the 1950s and ’60s.
The Invention of Wings reminds us that although slavery finally was abolished a century and a half ago, pernicious racism based on skin color survived.
The Invention of Wings, by Sue Monk Kidd; Viking, 373 pp., $27.95
Bill Williams is a freelance writer in West Hartford, Conn., and a former editorial writer for The Hartford Courant. He is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and can be reached at billwaw@comcast.net.