Girl, Woman, Other

Ninety-three-year-old Hattie, or GG to her family, sits at the head of the table at her farmhouse during Christmas and watches the debauchery of presents, food, and fights. Greenfields has been in her family’s possession for over 200 years. Hattie looks around at her ungrateful relatives, who balk at driving two miles in the snow to visit her and do nothing but drink and argue when they make it to the farm for the holidays. Hattie notes to herself that Christmas should be called “Greedymas.” She looks at her grandchildren, the sons and daughters of her children, Ada Mae and Sonny, and realizes that most of them pass as white and may not identify as Black at all. Hattie reflects that this would sadden her late husband, Slim, who was African American. She recalls her children’s disapproval when her granddaughter Julie married a man from Malawi. Hattie observes Ada Mae, whose body is ruined from working in a factory in London. She wishes her children had stayed on the farm and “used their bodies as God intended, working on the land, and investing in an inheritance neither deserves” (354).

Ada Mae and Sonny were often teased at their rural school for being Black. Their father did not sympathize with their plight, reminding his children of the lynchings he witnessed growing up as a child in the United States, including the murder of his brother. Ada Mae and Sonny left together for London at the ages of 16 and 17 but shortly after settled in Newcastle, 70 miles away.

Hattie met Slim at a dance in Newcastle; he was confident, talkative, and courteous. They had been married 40 years when Slim died. After Slim’s death, Hattie took up long-distance walking, which helped her to keep the farm in production well into her eighties.

Hattie had moved back to the farm with her parents when Ada Mae and Sonny were small; she viewed their life on the farm as the ideal domestic situation, with two women and two men working the land. Hattie and her mother, Grace, were more like friends than mother and daughter. Grace often recalled missing her mother, Daisy, who died when she was young. Hattie’s mother herself died before Sonny and Ada Mae started school. Hattie’s father, Joseph, died not too long after her mother, telling Hattie on his deathbed that the farm was her legacy.

Hattie’s ancestor Captain Linnaeus Rydendale built the farm in 1806. He married the daughter of a merchant in Jamaica who was rumored to have been Spanish. When Slim saw the wife’s portrait, he told Hattie, “She’s one of us” (367). After Joseph died, Slim raided his library and discovered that Captain Rydendale exchanged enslaved people from Africa for sugar in the West Indies. Hattie mollified Slim’s anger at this family secret by arguing that since Slim now co-owned the spoils, things had come full circle.

Hattie recalls her most personal secret: giving birth to a daughter at 14 that her mother doted on but Joseph forced her to give up. Her whole life, Hattie kept her promise to her father and told no one about the child.

Grace, Hattie’s mother, begins her life as a product of a one-night stand between an Ethiopian seaman and Daisy, an English girl of 16 from South Shields. Daisy leaves home after her parents insist she give up the baby. Daisy takes a job making artificial flowers at a hat factory and promises Grace she will find a husband who can provide for them and move to the countryside. However, Daisy contracts tuberculosis while working and dies shortly after. Daisy’s friend Mary takes Grace to live at the Northern Association’s Home for Girls in the countryside, where Grace learns to cook, clean, read, and write. When Grace is caught doing impressions by one of the teachers, she is told, “You are not like the other girls here,” and “[Y]ou have too much personality” (381). Only then does Grace realize that her status as a multiracial woman means the most she can expect in life is to be a maid instead of working in a department store like many of the other girls.

Grace meets Joseph Rydendale in town one day; with awe, he calls her “Queen Cleopatra” and the “Lady of the Nile” (386). Joseph recently returned from World War I to work on his family farm, Greenfields. After Grace and Joseph see each other several Sundays, Joseph asks Grace to marry him. She accepts. Grace becomes pregnant, but the child does not survive. After several miscarriages, the couple finally has Hattie. At first, Grace does not bond with Hattie, convinced Hattie too will be taken away from her. Grace keeps her distance from Hattie until Hattie is almost three years old. Grace’s depression and apprehension then lift, and mother and daughter become inseparable.