The Invention of Wings

Little missus, or Mary, arrives back in Charleston after the death of her husband to take over the running of the house. Taking after her mother, she is just as mean as she was as a young girl. She runs the house with a familiar and similar lack of charity. For example, she acts thoughtlessly when the kitchen slave Phoebe runs out to greet her return, looking for her sister, Lucy. Lucy died a long time ago, but Mary merely mentions it in passing and goes on giving orders, oblivious to Phoebe’s emotional devastation. Mauma dies, outside by the spirit tree with the story quilt wrapped around her.

Sarah and Nina escalate their defiance against slavery. Acting upon encouragement found in William Lloyd Garrison’s newspaper The Liberator, they occupy the “negro” pew at the Quaker meetinghouse. They are risking their lives by taking overt actions as abolitionists, because pro-slavery mobs have been attacking, even killing, abolitionists all over the North. Some abolitionists have bounties on their heads.

At the Quaker meeting, Sarah and Nina sit in the pew with Sarah Mapps Douglass and her mother, Grace. They are asked to move, and they refuse. Several weeks later, they are confronted by the elders of their church.