The Invention of Wings: the title itself hints at birds holding symbolic weight in the novel. In the first four parts, birds, black birds specifically, represent a freedom that slavery took from people (3). In fact Handful's mother tells her daughter that her shoulder blades are "'all what left
of your wings...but one day you gon get 'em back'" (3).
Then the reader sees the birds' wings then portrayed as black triangles on Mauma's quilts (52). They represented the image of the slaves again regaining their wings, and returning to the freedoms Africa had held for them. They could have inspired hope for one's future on their story quilts, and showing what the artisan wanted to happen.
But then in part 5, the reader is presented with their first image of a dead bird.
Art Credit to Jack-Chan
of your wings...but one day you gon get 'em back'" (3).
Then the reader sees the birds' wings then portrayed as black triangles on Mauma's quilts (52). They represented the image of the slaves again regaining their wings, and returning to the freedoms Africa had held for them. They could have inspired hope for one's future on their story quilts, and showing what the artisan wanted to happen.
But then in part 5, the reader is presented with their first image of a dead bird.
Art Credit to Jack-Chan
"[S]even crows were on the ground circling round the dead bird...cry[ing]
like a mourning chant...My granny mauma [said], '[T]hat's what birds do, they
stop flying and hunting food and swoop down to tend their dead. They march round
it and cry. They do this so everything know: once this bird lived and now it's
gone'" (236).
The birds stop doing anything for themselves for their personal survival in order to support a member of their community. Similarly, this could be connected to the freedom of being independent was stripped of blacks when they were taken by force to America and sold into slavery. Slaves, like Handful or Charlotte, protest in every way they can to reassert the power they once had, and remind their masters of what the whites had encroached on.
After the Denmark's plans for a slave revolt have been discovered by Charleston authorities, Handful notes the quilt which house the list of slaves willing to join the cause: "The black triangles were laid out perfect on the red squares, but they looked sad to me now. Like a bird funeral" (256). This is Handful's acknowledgement that this fate that her mother and her had once planned out for themselves, putting the triangles into their personal stories, is out of reach. Dead. Rather, people will just talk about what might have happened, and can only continue to cry out for freedom. But similar to a dead bird, who will never fly again, freedom for the slaves appears impossibly out of reach.
After the Denmark's plans for a slave revolt have been discovered by Charleston authorities, Handful notes the quilt which house the list of slaves willing to join the cause: "The black triangles were laid out perfect on the red squares, but they looked sad to me now. Like a bird funeral" (256). This is Handful's acknowledgement that this fate that her mother and her had once planned out for themselves, putting the triangles into their personal stories, is out of reach. Dead. Rather, people will just talk about what might have happened, and can only continue to cry out for freedom. But similar to a dead bird, who will never fly again, freedom for the slaves appears impossibly out of reach.