The voice of Sarah turned out to be one of my biggest challenges. I rewrote her chapters in the early
part of the book over and over before I felt like I found her voice. I’d read the real life Grimké sisters’
diaries and essays, and they gave me an extraordinary glimpse into their lives, but their writing was
rendered in nineteenth century language, wrapped in rhetoric, piety and stilted phrases. I wanted
Sarah’s voice in my novel to feel authentic and carry some of the vernacular of the time, but I knew
I had to bring some modern sensibility to it. Writing her voice was all about loosening it. I decided
that my task was to tap into her inner life and set her free to speak from that timeless place, as well
as from the time in which she lived.
By comparison, Handful’s voice came with considerable more ease. I was certain only that I didn’t
want it to be weighed heavily with dialect, and that it must have traces of humor. I read a great many
first person slave narratives from the nineteenth century, as well as the Federal Writers’ Project of the
1930s, and they gave me a lot of valuable insights. And I think Handful’s voice must surely carry
traces of the African-American women from my own childhood whose voices go on resonating in me,
and also of the quilting women of Gee’s Bend, whose voices I read and reread. But in the end, what I
most wanted was for Handful’s voice to be all her own—the voice of a slave who has learned to read
The voice of Sarah turned out to be one of my biggest challenges. I rewrote her chapters in the early
part of the book over and over before I felt like I found her voice. I’d read the real life Grimké sisters’
diaries and essays, and they gave me an extraordinary glimpse into their lives, but their writing was
rendered in nineteenth century language, wrapped in rhetoric, piety and stilted phrases. I wanted
Sarah’s voice in my novel to feel authentic and carry some of the vernacular of the time, but I knew
I had to bring some modern sensibility to it. Writing her voice was all about loosening it. I decided
that my task was to tap into her inner life and set her free to speak from that timeless place, as well
as from the time in which she lived.
By comparison, Handful’s voice came with considerable more ease. I was certain only that I didn’t
want it to be weighed heavily with dialect, and that it must have traces of humor. I read a great many
first person slave narratives from the nineteenth century, as well as the Federal Writers’ Project of the
1930s, and they gave me a lot of valuable insights. And I think Handful’s voice must surely carry
traces of the African-American women from my own childhood whose voices go on resonating in me,
and also of the quilting women of Gee’s Bend, whose voices I read and reread. But in the end, what I
most wanted was for Handful’s voice to be all her own—the voice of a slave who has learned to read
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