I had The Invention of Wings sitting in my Amazon “Save for Later” for a while. I was looking for a book that would actually make me feel something...make me think, and this definitely fit the bill…and then I noticed it was on sale, so I grabbed it.
Do you have stacks of unread books waiting for you? I prefer my bookshelves to be filled with books I’ve actually read. That way, if a friend wanders over, looks at the covers and asks about one, I can hopefully remember enough to tell them why I kept it, and maybe, if it’s a book they’d love, I’m ready to let them permanently check it out of my library.
When The Invention of Wings arrived…I dove right in.
I spent the better part of Sunday turning pages. At one point, I looked at the clock and, gasp…it was 11:30 PM. I couldn’t believe how late it had gotten.
All day at work on Monday, I was anxious to get home so I could pick it up again.
But man…this book was hard to read.
It is based on a great deal of historical truth, something Kidd addresses in the Author’s Note at the end. Knowing that made some of the story even harder to absorb.
The story is told through the voices of two women whose lives could not have been more different.
Sarah Grimké was born into a wealthy Charleston family in the early 1800s. She was educated, intelligent, deeply questioning of the world around her, and increasingly unwilling to accept the limitations placed on her simply because she was a woman.
Handful, whose given name is Hetty, is the young, enslaved woman assigned to Sarah as a personal maid when Sarah is just eleven years old. Handful grows up enslaved in the Grimké household, separated from the freedom and ownership of her own life that Sarah struggles to find in an entirely different way.
And that contrast is what made this book so powerful for me.
What does it even mean to live a life when the rules were written to tell you that your voice doesn’t matter?
Sarah was born into a world where being a woman fundamentally restricted what she could do with her intellect, her convictions, her education, her work, and ultimately, her voice.
And Handful was confronting an even more brutal system. She was denied not simply a woman’s independence, but her fundamental personhood under slavery.
My reaction?
What is this life?
It feels like a gut punch to put those two experiences beside each other.
What’s fascinating about women’s history is that there wasn’t one moment when women suddenly “got rights.”
It was thousands upon thousands of women pushing against tiny and enormous barriers simultaneously.
Some wrote.
Some marched.
Some organized.
Some taught.
Some ran businesses.
Some went to court.
Some raised money.
Some refused to be quiet.
Some simply insisted that their daughters should have opportunities they didn’t have.
And some probably went home at night thinking:
Am I actually accomplishing anything?
Because Sarah and Handful don’t simply represent two women struggling for freedom.
They reveal how power stacks upon power.
A white woman in the early 1800s could be restricted because she was a woman.
A Black enslaved woman could be restricted because she was a woman and because she was enslaved and Black.
Those weren’t two separate inconveniences. They fundamentally changed what freedom could even mean.
That’s why Handful’s story felt almost unbearable to me.
You’re watching someone try to claim ownership of herself in a society that legally and socially insists she belongs to somebody else.
And yet she keeps reaching for herself.
It made me think about what we do with whatever position we’ve earned.
Maybe we use it to make things slightly easier for the people coming behind us.
We advocate for the person who doesn’t have the authority yet.
We mentor the younger woman who thinks she’s supposed to stay quiet.
We say something when something isn’t right.
That’s having a voice.
Sarah had a voice. She had passion. She had courage.
I loved this passage describing the life she ultimately created for herself:
“How odd it had turned out, how different than I imagined. The daughter of Judge John Grimké, a Southern patriot, a slaveholder, an aristocrat—living in this house in the North, unmarried, a Quaker, and abolitionist.”
Women have earned a place in this world because of women like Sarah.
And then there is Handful.
I loved when Mauma says to Handful as she lies dying:
“Don’t you remember me for that. Don’t you remember I’m a slave and work hard. When you think of me, you say, she never belong to those people. She never belong to nobody but herself.”
She closed her eyes.
“You remember that.”
I will.
And maybe that is what this book ultimately left with me.
The importance of remembering the women who came before us…not only for what they endured, but for the ways they refused to let the world define who they were.
And then asking ourselves what we will do with the voice they helped make possible.
May God Grant You Courage,
Mel
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