1830, Charleston, South Carolina. In The Invention of Wings, at her eleventh birthday party, Sarah Grimke receives Hetty or “Handful,” a Black slave about her age, as a birthday present. Her memory imprinted with the horror of witnessing a slave being flogged, Sarah declines ownership. When her refusal fails, she writes a “certificate of manumission” to free Handful. But her certificate is destroyed by her father. Torn between her hatred of slavery and her inability to disengage from the institution, Sarah is compelled to accept Handful as her serving maid. Inevitably, the lives of the two girls become interconnected. A friendship forms between them, but uneasily. Their different identities create a gulf between them; Handful remains property listed on a household inventory, “right after the water trough, the wheelbarrow, the claw hammer and the bushel of flint corn.” By contrast, Sarah, as she notes herself, “for all my resistance about slavery, I breathed that foul air, too.” 

Spanning 35 years, Sarah and Handful’s interwoven narratives in the novel juxtaposes the oppression each faces. Sarah studies Voltaire, reads Latin, and dreams of becoming the first female jurist in America. However, little by little, she is compelled to relinquish her dream after her mother tells her that “every girl must have ambition knocked out of her for her own good” and her father reprimands her that she would be “a disgrace to her family” if she became a jurist.

Meanwhile, Handful tries to gain literacy. She secretly traces words on the dirt and then wipes them away with her toe. Unfortunately, negligence caused Handful to fail to property erase her tracings. Like other slave owners, the Grimkes fear that a literate slave would be dangerous. Thus, they forever barred Handful from reading or writing. Handful feels that her right to insert her voice is usurped. But she does not give up trying to find herself. She observes her mother Charlotte’s way to articulate her voice. Seeking voice, Charlotte takes on small acts of rebellion to articulate her opposition to the belief of the inherent inferiority of slaves. She steals a bright green cloth from mistress Grimke, although she did not have any use for it. Even when this behavior rendered her flogging so severe that she was knocked unconscious, she remains adamant in her belief that she absolutely needed to steal that cloth. “You do your rebellions anyway you can,” observes Handful. Charlotte also sews her story of oppression and silence on a “story quilt” that depicts the experiences of three generations of her family, all as slaves. Like her stealings, the quilt grants Charlotte a voice in a society that indoctrinates the idea of God’s expectation for docility, compliance, and silence in slaves. Stitch by stitch, a more hopeful future is sewn. 

Defying their oppressive circumstances, both Sarah and Handful take flight toward the end of the novel. Sarah overtly, Handful covertly. Sarah becomes the “most famous and infamous woman in America.” Echoing the experiences of the historical figure, Sarah Grimke, the Sarah in the novel converts to Quakerism, becomes an outspoken abolitionist and women’s rights activist, and authors pamphlets arguing against the institution of slavery. Her work, American Slavery as It Is, a “testimony of a thousand witnesses” influences Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which is published 13 years later. Meanwhile, Handful, risking death, secretly assists Denmark Vesey in his plot to free the Black people of Charleston. 

Ultimately, The Invention of Wings is remarkable for combining two important discussions -- feminism and anti-racism. In a world living in the repercussions of slavery and the “cult of domesticity,” The Invention of Wings is a resonant, illuminating novel. It is a story about finding the voice to articulate ineffable pain. Handful's "slave tongue" dialect is filled with defiance and a desire for freedom, and Sarah, grappling with a speech impediment, "pull[s] words up from her throat like she [is] raising water from a well." The paths the two characters pursue to find their voice are difficult, but it is only when they find the voices to articulate the pain of being silenced that they pave the way for freedom.