What True Freedom Means to Sarah Grimke

Invention of Wings

In The Invention of Wings, Sarah Grimke and Handful are both ultimately striving for freedom, though their paths to that goal are quite different. Sarah, the daughter of a wealthy plantation owner, feels imprisoned by the expectations put upon her as a young lady of Charleston society. In contrast, Handful is a slave who is literally shackled and forced to work long hours in often horrendous conditions. Despite their different circumstances, both women eventually come to see that they need to take action to gain their freedom. For Sarah, this means defying social conventions by learning to read and becoming an abolitionist. For Handful, it involves plotting a daring escape from the plantation. In the end, both women succeed in achieving their goal of freedom, though it comes at a great cost. The point is that freedom is a quality that is developed over time; it takes root in the soul and grows like a seed does into a tree. Both girls see freedom grow within them, just in different ways.

Freedom is not really a static condition. It is more like a process or a dynamic condition. There are degrees of freedom in other words, and one’s freedom can change like the wind or the tide. It all depends on what one is doing with oneself, because as Kidd shows, freedom is very much a spiritual quality. Nothing symbolizes this spiritual aspect of freedom in the book like the feathers that Handful’s mother Charlotte uses for stuffing comforters. One feather that is collected is lost and it “fluttered off on the sea wind. It flitted to the top of the high brick wall that enclosed the yard, snagging in the creeping fig” (Kidd 31). This symbolizes the spirit that rises up, that seeks to soar and be free, but it has to get past the creeping fig—which symbolizes the constraints that society places on people.

Another symbol of freedom is the triangle on the quilts, which represents the wing of the blackbird. “The shape she loved was a triangle,” Kidd writes (5). And again Kidd states that “a triangle on a quilt stands for a blackbird wing” (59). In both cases, freedom is symbolized by flight. There is another symbol of freedom, though, and it is the symbol of the library, which Sarah uses to advance her own knowledge and to help Handful learn to read. In the library, freedom is associated with knowledge and knowledge is associated with power. Sarah learns forbidden knowledge in the library and passes it on to Handful. Kidd describes Sarah’s entrance into library like it is a clandestine romance: “Sarah slipping down the staircase to her father’s library as the slaves lay asleep on the floor outside the bedroom doors” (Kidd 367). The girls are not really free in a conventional sense, but they are free because they have spirits that are willing to soar.

Power and flight underline the spiritual quality of freedom. The more power one has, the more freedom one possesses. For instance, Sarah’s father has a great deal of power as a man, landowner and slave owner. He has the ability to command, and he has control over others. He is not really bound by anything since the law of the land is in his favor. Yet he is not really free because his spirit is constrained by the fear of losing power. Fear constrains power and diminishes freedom. His daughter is not really free, as she grows up under his roof and must observe his commands—but she finds a way to be free to taking command of her own life, her own path, and her own journey. She too starts to grow the seed of freedom within her own spirit.

The idea of freedom is implied in the idea of flight: the more one’s soul can soar above the daily suffering and fly against it, the more freedom one possesses, too. The feathers, the birds, the learning—it is all what constitutes freedom. If one develops those wings whether in the heart or the mind or the spirit, one possesses freedom. The more they are developed, the freer one becomes. Handful may be a slave, but she is free in the sense that her spirit is not bound by chains. Sarah may be free in the social sense, but she is still a woman who has to struggle against social conventions to try to abolish slavery. Neither one is necessarily truly free nor truly a slave. They are both working on possessing freedom more and more fully throughout the story in their own ways.