Free The Invention of Wings: With Notes by Sue Monk Kidd

foot. “Someone will see.”
    She was equally exasperated with me. “Don’t you think I got my own foot to rub out letters, if somebody comes along?”
    She conquered her hundredth word on the thirteenth of July.

    We held her celebratory tea the next day on the hipped roof of the house, hoping to catch sight of the Bastille Day festivities. We had a sizeable French population from St. Domingo, a French theatre, and a French finishing school on every corner. A French hair-dresser frizzed and powdered Mother and her friends, regaling them with accounts of the guillotining of Marie Antoinette, which he claimed to have witnessed. Charleston was British to the soles of its feet, but it observed the destruction of the Bastille with as much zeal as our own independence.
    We climbed into the attic with two china cups and a jar of black tea spiked with hyssop and honey. From there, we mounted a ladder that led to a hatch in the roof. Thomas had discovered the secret opening at thirteen and taken me up to wander among the chimneys. Snow spotted us as he drove Mother home from one of her charity missions, and without a word to her, he’d climbed up and retrieved us. I’d not ventured here since.
    Hetty and I nestled into one of the gullies on the south side with our backs against a slope. She claimed never to have drunk from a china cup and gulped quickly, while I sipped slowly and stared at the hard blue pane over our heads. When the populace marched in procession along Broad Street, they were too far away for us to see, but we heard them singing the
Hymne des Marseillois.
The bells of St. Philip’s chimed and there was a salute of thirteen guns.
    Birds had been loitering on the roof, and scatterings of feathers were here and there. Hetty tucked them into her pockets, and something about this created a feeling of tenderness in me. Perhaps I was a little drunk on hyssop and honey, on the novelty of being girls together on the roof. Whatever it was, I began telling Hetty confidences I’d kept only with myself.
    I told her I was accomplished at eavesdropping, that I’d stood outside Charlotte’s room the night she was punished and heard the story she told.
    “I know,” she said. “You not so good at snooping as you think.”
    I spilled every possible secret. My sister Mary despised me. Thomas had been my only friend. I’d been dismissed as an unfit teacher of slave children, but she shouldn’t worry, it was not due to incompetence.
    As I went on, my revelations turned grave. “I saw Rosetta being whipped one time,” I told her. “I was four. That was when the trouble with my speech began.”
    “It seems like you’re talking all right now.”
    “It comes and goes.”
    “Was Rosetta hurt bad?”
    “I think it was very bad.”
    “What’d she do wrong?”
    “I don’t know. I didn’t ask—I couldn’t speak afterward, not for weeks.”
    We turned taciturn, leaning back and gazing at the crenulated clouds. Talk of Rosetta had sobered us more than I’d intended, far too much for a tea celebrating a hundred-word vocabulary.
    Hoping to restore the mood, I said, “I’m going to be a lawyer like my father.” I was surprised to hear myself blurt this out, the crown jewel of secrets, and feeling suddenly exposed, I added, “But you can’t tell anyone.”
    “I don’t have nobody to tell. Just mauma.”
    “Well, you can’t even tell her. Promise me.”
    She nodded.
    Satisfied, I thought of the lava box and my silver button. “Do you know how an object can stand for something entirely different than its purpose?” She looked at me blankly, while I tried to think of a way to explain. “You know my mother’s cane, for instance—how it’s meant to help her walk, but we all know what it stands for.”
    “Whacking heads.” After a pause, she added, “A triangle on a quilt stands for a blackbird wing.”
    “Yes, that’s what I mean. Well, I have a stone box in my dresser with a button inside. A button is meant