Read Online The Invention of Wings: A Novel by Sue Monk Kidd - Free Book Online Page B

skin. They rubbed themselves with lard and molasses to draw out the itch and trailed its
eau de cologne
through the house.
    Hetty dug at an inflamed mosquito bite on her forearm and frowned at the book pages as if they were some kind of irresolvable code. I wanted her to listen to the exploits of the knight and Sancho Panza, but she interrupted me repeatedly, placing her finger on some word or other, asking, “What does that one say?” and I would have to break off the story to tell her. She’d done the same thing recently as we read
The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York,
and I wondered if, perhaps, she was merely bored with the antics of men, from the shipwrecked to the chivalrous.
    As I sent my voice into dramatic lilts and accents, trying to lure her back into the tale, the room grew dark, tinctured with an approaching storm. Wind blew through the open window, coming thick with the smell of rain and oleander, swirling the veils of the mosquito net. I stopped reading, as thunder broke and rain splatted across the sill.
    Hetty and I leapt up in unison and drew down the pane, and there, swooping low in the yellow gloom, was the young owl that Charlotte and Hetty had fed faithfully through the spring. It had grown out of its fledgling ways, but it had not vacated its residence in the woodpile.
    I watched it fly straight toward us, arcing across George Street and gliding over the work yard wall, its comical barn owl face strikingly visible. As the bird disappeared, Hetty went to light the lamp, but I was fixed there. What came to me was the day at the woodpile when Charlotte first showed me the bird, and I remembered the oath I’d made to help Hetty become free, a promise impossible to fulfill and one that continued to cause me no end of guilt, but it suddenly rang clear in me for the first time: Charlotte said I should help Hetty get free
any way I could.
    Turning, I watched her carry the lantern to my dressing table, light swilling about her feet. When she set it down, I said, “Hetty, shall I teach you to read?”

    Equipped with an elementary primer, two blue-back spellers, a slate board, and lump of chalk, we began daily lessons in my room. Not only did I lock the door, I screened the keyhole. Our tutorials went on throughout the morning for two or more hours. When we ended them, I wrapped the materials in a swath of coarse cloth, known as Negro cloth, and tucked the bundle beneath my bed.
    I’d never taught anyone to read, but I’d been tutored in copious amounts of Latin by Thomas and subjected to enough of Madame to devise a reasonable scheme. As it turned out, Hetty had a knack. Within a week, she could write and recite the alphabet. Within two, she was sounding out words in the spellers. I’ll never forget the moment when she made the magical connection in her mind and the letters and sounds passed from nonsense into meaning. After that, she read through the primer with growing proficiency.
    By page forty, she had a vocabulary of eighty-six words. I recorded and numbered each one she mastered on a sheaf of paper. “When you reach a hundred words,” I promised her, “we’ll celebrate with a tea.”
    She began to decipher words on apothecary labels and food jars. “How do you spell
Hetty
?” she wanted to know. “How do you spell
water
?” Her appetite to learn was voracious.
    Once, I glimpsed her in the work yard writing in the dirt with a stick and I raced into the yard to stop her. She’d scrawled W-A-T-E-R with exact penmanship for the entire world to see.
    “What are you doing?” I said, rubbing the letters away with my 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