She placed her palm on the side of her belly and closed her eyes as if warding off the thrust of an elbow or foot. The gentleness in her voice, her very presence in my room revealed how distressed she was for me, and yet she seemed to suggest their unkindness was justified.
“Your father believes you are an anomalous girl with your craving for books and your aspirations, but he’s wrong.”
I looked at her with surprise. The hauteur had left her. There was a lament in her I’d never seen before. “Every girl comes into the world with varying degrees of ambition,” she said, “even if it’s only the hope of not belonging body and soul to her husband. I was a girl once, believe it or not.”
She seemed a stranger, a woman without all the wounds and armature the years bring, but then she went on, and it was Mother again. “The truth,” she said, “is that every girl must have ambition knocked out of her for her own good. You are unusual only in your determination to fight what is inevitable. You resisted and so it came to this, to being broken like a horse.”
She bent and put her arms around me. “Sarah darling, you’ve fought harder than I imagined, but you must give yourself over to your duty and your fate and make whatever happiness you can.”
Oprah’s note:
This passage where Sarah realizes she’s never going to be permitted to become a lawyer was striking on many levels. Her mother delivers harsh words gently. It was striking to me how quickly we’ve forgotten how far we’ve come as women. Even white women were slaves, they just didn’t know it. Women had no rights. You couldn’t own property. You were dependent on your father or on your husband for everything. There were so many things you couldn’t be—in essence, you were a slave. A slave to society.
Click here to return to the text.
Since that day a year past, I’d got myself a friend in Miss Sarah and found how to read and write, but it’d been a heartless road like mauma said, and I didn’t know what would come of us. We might stay here the rest of our lives with the sky slammed shut, but mauma had found the part of herself that refused to bow and scrape, and once you find that, you got trouble breathing on your neck.
Oprah’s note:
I love this—we as readers get to witness the seeds of rebellion growing inside Hetty. This passage reminded me of Victor Frankel’s A Man’s Search For Meaning—it means your life has meaning.
Click here to return to the text.
I’d entered society two years ago, at sixteen, thrust into the lavish round of balls, teas, musical salons, horseraces, and picnics, which, according to Mother, meant the dazzling doors of Charleston had flung open and female life could begin in earnest. In other words, I could take up the business of procuring a husband. How highborn and moneyed this husband turned out to be would depend entirely on the allure of my face, the delicacy of my physique, the skill of my seamstress, and the charisma of my tête-à-tête. Notwithstanding my seamstress, I arrived at the glittery entrance like a lamb to slaughter.
Oprah’s note:
I love the parallel narrative being built here, of slave life versus southern belle society.
Click here to return to the text.
My aspiration to become a jurist had been laid to rest in the Graveyard of Failed Hopes, an all-female establishment.
Oprah’s note:
That is perfectly put. Again, this is a reminder that not that long ago, women couldn’t aspire to most of the things they do today. They were slaves to their family’s expectations, to society’s rules.
Click here to return to the text.
The day mauma started sewing her story quilt, we were sitting out by the spirit tree doing handwork. We always did the trouble-free work there—hems, buttons, and trimmings, or the tiny stitches that strained your eyes in a poor-lit room. The minute the weather turned fair, we’d spread a quilt on the ground and go to town with our needles.
Oprah’s note:
I was struck here by the imagery of finding happiness where and when you can, and her passion for quilting—finding joy in it.
Click here to return to the text.
Late in the afternoon, after the Grimkés had gone off to their plantation and the few slaves left on the premise were in their quarters, mauma sent me into master Grimké’s library to find