Divided into six parts by date, each part contains unnumbered chapters narrated from a first-person point of view, alternating between Hetty Handful Grimké and Sarah Grimké.

It ends when Sarah helps Handful and her sister, Sky, escape slavery, and Sarah fulfills the promise she made years earlier to Handful’s mother—the promise to help Handful gain freedom.Handful feels a distance growing between Sarah and herself, as Nina and Burke occupy most of her life. The The Invention of Wings quotes below are all either spoken by Charlotte Grimké (Mauma) or refer to Charlotte Grimké (Mauma). Both Sarahs, though, the one in history and the one in my story, carry on an intricate relationship with church and faith that was as conflicted as it was compatible. Left without a home, the sisters go to stay in secret at the house of two black Quaker women and continue writing anti-slavery pamphlets to send South. While in college, I studied Ralph Waldo Emerson’s concept of “the common heart,” a place inside of us where we share an intrinsic unity with all humanity.

In 1818, six more years later, Sarah has given Handful back to her mother (Mary), and Handful takes care of all the sewing for the Grimké family now that Charlotte is gone.Back in the south, the Grimké household has become a horror for the slaves now that Sarah is gone and there is no one to keep Mary in check. As a white woman in South Carolina in the early 1800s, even a privileged one, Sarah’s life was vastly limited.