There are many books written about the relationship between white mistresses and black slaves, and this too is one such, but there is an added angle with the book addressing both racism and sexism almost equally – that the white girl, Sarah Grimke, from an aristocratic family of Charleston – struggles with the limitations set on her as a girl/woman in a strongly patriarchal society – while Handful (Hetty) the slave girl given to her as a present on Sarah’s eleventh birthday, is of course regarded as an item of belonging, shackled in that ”peculiar institution”, which was how Charleston referred to slavery in the 1800s.
Handful is brought up by a remarkable mother, Charlotte, a skilled seamstress who has a rebellious spirit, and is always breaking the rules, refusing to submit her selfhood to her owners or to white people, insisting on seeking her own way. Charlotte is one of the slaves who knew her ancestry; she knew who her own mother was, and that her mother came from Africa, and she knew some of the rituals and traditions, and perhaps most importantly, some of the stories of her people. Charlotte’s rebellion involves lies and deceptions, stealing, other petty acts of revenge against her owners, and sneaking out and hiring herself out without permission, saving money with the intention of buying herself and her daughter free. She instils the same proud, independent spirit in Handful.
One of Handful’s rebellions is to sneak a bath in Sarah’s own room when the family is supposed to be away, in the prized copper tub. Sarah returns early and catches Handful in the act, but keeps her secret, because she correctly reads what it means:
She’d immersed herself in forbidden privileges, yes, but mostly in the belief she was worthy of those privileges. What she’d done was not a revolt, it was a baptism (p115).
It is never quite explained to the reader why Sarah is so different from the rest of her family, why she alone tried to free/manumit Handful when she was given ownership of her as a eleventh birthday present (although that was not permitted by her family).
As can be guessed, the initial warm friendship between the two girls of similar ages becomes a little more tensed as they grow up and take different paths in life. Sarah had a happy girlhood with her father indulging her intelligence by allowing her to read whatever she liked and take part in debate and discussion with him and her 3 brothers, but when Sarah mistakenly assumes her family, and her father in particular, would support her ambition to do the unthinkable – to become a jurist – her father harshly takes her to task. When Sarah is discovered to have taught Hetty to read, Hetty gets the lash while Sarah is banned from all books. Sarah loses the illusions of daring to have her own ambitions,
“My aspiration to become a jurist had been laid to rest in the Graveyard of Failed Hopes, an all-female establishment” (p88).
As Sarah grows up, she finds more and more to rail against in the sexism she suffers:
“We [the women] couldn’t vote or testify in a court, or make a will – of course we couldn’t, we owned nothing to leave behind. Why didn’t the Grimke men assemble in our defense? [sic]” (p122).
As they leave girlhood behind, Handful’s main task becomes that of a seamstress, a skill she learnt from her mother. While Sarah’s task is to enter society and find a husband. A blow comes to both rapidly – Sarah’s fiancée turns out to be a con, and Handful loses her mother when her mother runs away, caught by guards for an altercation in the city streets. Sarah has the choice of mobility, and chooses a life up North in Philadelphia away from Charleston and her family home, but Handful of course is stuck there, and worse, always with the fear of being sold.
“Be careful, you can get enslaved twice, once in your body and once in your mind” (p201).
The novel illustrates how Handful is enslaved in her body, while Sarah is enslaved in her mind. The novel is about both of them fighting for freedom, in Sarah’s case, learning to set herself free, and in Handful’s, seeking freedom/manumission for her and her family.
The novel does mention the abuse of slaves – the branding, whippings, rapes, treadmill, plus the non-physical abuses too – but only dipping at the very shallow end of it. It acknowledges the reality of these conditions, but the Grimke household is not particularly cruel, comparatively speaking. It is not one of those novels which sets out to show the unremittingly wretchedness of slavery, though it does not ignore the horrors of it. It is a novel which shows different kinds of oppressions, gender as well as race oppressions. It is quite a woman-centric kind of novel, with all the key characters as well as protagonists being the women; we hear a lot about Sarah and Handful’s sisters and mothers, but the male members of the family and even of the slaves, are very much in the background, or props to the story.
It is nevertheless still quite a nuanced read in many ways, for example, Sarah who seems exceptionally anti-slavery, nevertheless recognises that her sympathy and support of slaves is more in theoretical than anything else:
“I was very good at despising slavery in the abstract, in the removed and anonymous masses, but in the concrete, intimate flesh of the girl beside me, I’d lost the ability to be repulsed by it. I’d grown comfortable with the particulars of evil” (p115).
Be that as it may, Sarah is still an unusual product of society in her inability to be hypocritical, and her characteristic of being completely candid, particularly about herself and to herself.
The writing is smooth and consistent and of the period, and the book has a charm even as it gives voice to frustration piled upon frustration. It is a book which celebrates strength, endurance, resistance, of white and black women both.
Recent Comments