feminist bloomer costume.
My favorite event in Sarah’s later history occurred in 1870, a few years before she died in Hyde Park, Massachusetts, when she and Angelina led a procession of forty-two women to the polls amid a town election. They marched through a driving snowstorm, where they dropped their illegal ballots into a symbolic voting box. It was the sisters’ last act of public defiance. Sarah lived to be eighty-one. Angelina, seventy-four. Despite sisterly conflicts from time to time, the unusual bond that tethered them was never broken, nor were they ever separated.
Besides Sarah and Angelina, I’ve included other historical figures in the book, rendering them through my own elucidations of their history: Theodore Weld, the famous abolitionist, whom Angelina married; Lucretia Mott, another famous abolitionist and women’s rights pioneer; Sarah Mapps Douglass, a free black abolitionist and educator; Israel Morris, a wealthy Quaker businessman and widower who proposed marriage to Sarah, twice. (Her diary suggests she loved him quite deeply, despite turning him down. She maintained that she was bound to her vocation to become a Quaker minister, perhaps believing she could not have marriage and independence both.) There is also Catherine Morris, Israel’s sister and a conservative Quaker elder, with whom Sarah and Angelina boarded; William Lloyd Garrison, editor of the radical abolitionist newspaper The Liberator; Elizur Wright, secretary of the American Anti-Slavery Society; and the poet John Greenleaf Whittier, Theodore Weld’s friend, who along with Theodore made a vow not to marry until slavery was ended, a vow Theodore broke. I might add that both men were supporters of women’s rights, and yet in letters to Sarah and Angelina, they strongly pressured the sisters to desist from the cause of women for fear it would split the abolitionist movement. Some of the more salient words that Angelina wrote back to Theodore are included in the imagined scene in which the men arrive at Mrs. Whittier’s cottage and order the sisters to stop their fight for women. Sarah and Angelina defied the men, and indeed as historian Gerda Lerner pointed out, they were the ones who attached the cause of women’s rights to the cause of abolition, creating what some saw as a dangerous split and others as a brilliant alliance. Either way, their refusal to desist played a vibrant part in propelling the cause of women into American life.
I’ve tried to represent the members of the Grimké family with a fair amount of accuracy. Sarah’s mother, Mary Grimké, was by all accounts a proud and difficult woman. According to Catherine Birney, Sarah’s earliest biographer, Mrs. Grimké was devout, narrow, undemonstrative in her affections to her children, and often cruel to her slaves, visiting on them severe and common punishments. She did not, as far as I know, inflict the one-legged punishment on her slaves, but it was an actual punishment, one that Sarah herself described in detail as being used by “one of the first families in Charleston.” My representation of Sarah’s father, Judge John Grimké, and of the events in his life, are reasonably close to the record, as is the account of Sarah’s favorite brother, Thomas. I have no doubt that I deviated with Sarah’s older sister Mary (“little missus”), whose history is mostly unknown. Though I found one source that referred to her as unmarried and others that listed her spouse as unknown, I married her to a plantation owner and later had her return home as a widow. She did, however, remain committed to the cause of slavery and unapologetic about it until her death in 1865, a detail I built upon.
It was a thrill for me to visit the Grimkés’ house on East Bay Street. Though the house can be dated only to circa 1789, it may have come into John Grimké’s possession at the time of his marriage in 1784. It remained in the family until Mrs. Grimké died in 1839. Today, it’s well preserved and occupied by a law firm. It is likely that some of the house’s original layout and interiors remain the same, including the fireplaces, cypress panels, Delft tiles, pine floors, and moldings. Wandering through the house, I could picture Handful in an alcove on the second floor, gazing out at the harbor, and Sarah slipping down the staircase to her father’s library as the slaves lay asleep on the floor outside the bedroom doors. I was even permitted into the attic, where I noticed a ladder leading to a hatch in the roof. I can’t say