times. The development of Sarah’s freedom necessitated a whole series of “copper tub moments,” each one bringing her a little closer to breaking fully free. My favorite such moment may be when she’s caring for her dying father at the Jersey shore, and she wades into the ocean. Turning loose of the sea rope, to which all the women grasp, she strides off on her own into the waves. Floating alone in the water, far from the tether, became her own baptism into her apartness and independence. It was a small beginning. Later, she would have another moment when the inner voice showed up, telling her to go north. They go on and on, but the final piece of her liberation doesn’t come, perhaps, until the end, when she’s able to speak her mind in the house where she was born.
6. Sarah shared a close friendship with Lucretia Mott. What motivated you to include this relationship in the story?
It was a surprise for me when Lucretia Mott turned up as a character. I knew from my research that Mott, a famous abolitionist and women’s rights pioneer herself, had attended the same meetinghouse in Philadelphia as Sarah, at least for a time, but I didn’t know she would step into the pages of my story until the very moment she did so. It was a relief to me when she turned up. At this juncture, Sarah is alone in the North, and the only female presence in her life is Israel’s sister, who is hardly a friend to her. Inevitably, a community of women will show up in my fiction, even if it’s a community of two.
Many years ago, when I read Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, I was captivated by the idea of a woman having an independent space that belongs to her, that’s devoted to her creative life and her intellectual and spiritual liberation. I rather loved creating such a room in Lucretia’s house, a place where she and Sarah could spend time together. It is cozy, full of books, journals, art palettes, and velvet squares pinned with luna moths, which Lucretia finds lifeless in the garden, and it looks out over a copse of trees. Sarah calls it a studio, but it’s inspired by Woolf’s room of one’s own. So much of Sarah’s life is about exile and seeking her place of belonging in the world, and it seemed that the studio would offer her a taste of what belonging to one’s self could be like. The studio wasn’t on the pages of the novel for very long, but the time the two women spent there was distilled and transforming for Sarah.
It was in the studio that Sarah poured out her story to Lucretia and had it truly received. At one point, Sarah asks Lucretia, “Do you think I could become a Quaker minister?” and Lucretia responds, “Sarah Grimké, you’re the most intelligent person I know. Of course you could.” Sarah had never really known this kind of listening, validation, and encouragement. The scene brought to my mind theologian Nelle Morton’s words, that women “hear one another into speech,” and I thought, too, of the theologian Mary Daly, who said, “Only women hearing each other can create a counterworld to the prevailing reality.”
There’s a line in the novel that I truly loved writing, which actually thrilled me to write—it was four words that I had Lucretia send in a letter to Sarah and Angelina during their public crusade and which arrived at the height of backlash against them. It said, simply: Press on, my sisters. Honestly, I think it was I who wanted to say those words to Sarah and Angelina every bit as much as Lucretia did.
7. How did you go about writing the complicated relationship between Handful and Sarah?
It’s hard to come up with a relationship between characters more challenging to write about than that of an owner and a slave. Even if the owner is an unwilling one, even if she has an abolitionist’s heart beating in her chest, as Sarah does, it’s still a problematic situation. It was the thing that kept me up at nights—Handful and Sarah’s fraught connection and whether I was getting it right. In the novel, their relationship spans three and a half decades, much of which they spend as constant companions. To a large extent, they mold one another’s lives and shape each other’s destinies. There’s an undeniable caring between them, but also the built-in gulf of