Kidd stitches together another rich tale of whites and blacks (remember she is the author of The Secret Life of Bees) and covers the time of the early 1800's to mid 1830's - a half century before the Civil War. The story begins in Charleston, SC, where the Grimke's are an upper class slave owning family. It later moves up north, mostly to Philadelphia.
Sarah Grimke is given a slave girl for her 11th birthday - Hetty or Handful, as she is know in her family. Sarah tries to refuse the gift, as even at that early age she abhors slavery, but is not allowed to refuse her, so she and Handful become friends of sorts and Sarah teaches her to read, for which they both get punished. Angelina is born when Sarah is 12. Sarah asks to be the godmother, which turns into raising Angelina, so she is able to impart her anti-slavery ideas to her younger sister.
Kidd explains at the end that most of the white characters are historical, and she has moslty tried to be true to the facts know about them, but the slaves were created from slave stories she read. There was a Hetty, but she died young. Both worlds are richly described - from the way each class spent their days to their inner thoughts. The thoughts are the invention of the author, though she tries to use the words and ideas she has found in letters and other writings.
One of the things I have never quite been able to understand, is what upper class women were supposed to do. It seems their main purpose was to attend social gatherings to get husbands and then run households and spend their husbands' money. They were taught things ladies should know, but to what purpose? If embroidering doilies or pillows or some such was supposed to be such a skill, the museums must be full of the highly established crafts, but I don't remember seeing them. I will have to ask my colleague who knows about textile art history.
Handful and her mother Charlotte were good seamstresses. They made all the clothes for the household, including the fancy dresses for the white women. Charlotte also made quilts - with black triangles on red - symbolizing blackbird wings - as in the "wings" from the title of the book. She also tells her life story in quilt squares. I enjoyed this whole sub-story of quilting and sewing and it turns out Kidd researched African American quilting too for this book.
It was hard to listen to the parts where the slaves were punished, but I need to understand the reality, as I recently did with the Holocaust in Picault's The Storyteller. I did not know about the attempted slave uprising led by Denmark Vesey. The treatment of slaves and all blacks, including free ones, bothered Sarah and a few other whites in the south, and the Quakers and abolitionists in the north. Sarah and Angelina were able to bring stories of the true horrors of slavery to the northerners, having witnessed the cruel and inhuman treatment - and at the same time argue for the humanity and equality of the blacks, which spilled over into speaking and writing about equality and rights for women. I read in When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present, that the women's movement rose up out of and learned from the civil rights movement. I did not realize the connection went back to the early 19th century.
I love Kidd's explanation at the end of the book - how she was inspired to write it, the research she did and where she tweaked facts and timelines to fit her story. I continue to love historical fiction, especially well researched stories. I won't remember the details anyway, but I do get a better sense of one period of time. Looking at Latvian history, the 19th century was a time of slavery for them too. German barons owned large estates that were worked by the Latvian peasants. They too had religious orders that spoke out against the conditions. Interesting parallels.
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