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Chapter 4: Hattie
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Girl, Woman, Other, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Diaspora, Culture, and Identity
Love, Sexuality, and Race
Home and Community
Contradiction, Complexity, and Intersectionality
Radical vs. Reformist Social Movements
Summary
Analysis
Grace’s mother, Daisy, tells her that her father, Wolde, was an Abyssinian seaman who she met while he was on a stopover in South Shields in 1895. Daisy, 16, gets pregnant and he doesn’t find out until she’s about to give birth. Daisy describes him as otherworldly because he’s unlike the boys in her town and had been all over the world. He doesn’t speak English, so their conversations are limited, but before he sails off he tells Daisy he’ll come back for her. Daisy promises that they’ll go looking for him one day to show him the daughter he left behind.
Daisy is attracted to Wolde because he represents a far-off culture and different way of life. Her naïve, youthful love leads to her teen pregnancy that will parallel her great-granddaughter, Hattie’s, own teen pregnancy years later. Daisy spends the rest of her life waiting for Wolde to come back and deliver on his promise to make a home and family with her.
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Daisy gives birth in the tenement she shares with her large family. When her father sees that the baby is “a half-caste,” he’s furious and ashamed. He tells her to give it up, but unable to abandon her child, she moves out instead and cuts her mom off for not being strong enough to stand up to her father. Daisy gets a job at a factory and lives with another young woman who has a child. Daisy has little money but takes care of Grace the best she can. She promises to move to the countryside where Grace can run free and she can find a husband who will be a good father.
Daisy’s father reacts to her pregnancy in much the same way that Hattie’s will two generations into the future. He demands that she give the baby away in order to protect his own pride and reputation. This demand is compounded by his fury that the baby is mixed race. Both racism and sexism intersect here to drive Daisy out of her family and onto the streets. Having lost her first home, Daisy dreams of building a new one for herself and her daughter in the countryside.
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Daisy is diagnosed with tuberculosis when Grace is eight. She’s put into quarantine, leaving Grace with the other young mother they live with. Not wanting to take care of Grace, Daisy’s roommate sends her to the girl’s home she herself had grown up in. In this unfamiliar home in the countryside, the other girls gawk at Grace’s brown skin and hair. She explains, proudly, that her dad was Abyssinian, remembering that her mother told her never to be ashamed of where he was from.
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Grace has nightmares that wake the others, who tell her she’ll adjust soon. She curls up in her blanket remembering her mother’s promises that she’d never leave her, remembers that her mother screamed out that she’d be back as she was dragged off to the sanatorium. Every time someone knocks on the door of the home, she hopes that it’s her mother, but eventually that hope fades. She starts dreaming that her father will come instead to take her away to his paradise.
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At the home, Grace learns how to cook, clean, sew, and garden alongside reading and math. They have the girls walk with books on their heads in deportment class and Grace imagines she’s from Abyssinia and walking on air. Her teacher tells her she has a natural elegance, which makes Grace proud. The girls in her dorm all become friends and each has their own special talents. Grace does the best impersonations and when she’s caught by Mrs. Langley is told she has too much personality, which is unattractive in a girl. Grace notices that she wasn’t the only one misbehaving but the only one who got caught. She’s scared while she’s being reprimanded because girls who misbehave can be kicked out.
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Grace is told that she’s not like the other girls and needs to be on her best behavior because her life will be hard and full of rejections by people who are “less enlightened” than the people at school. Mrs. Langley tells her to “tone down” her personality and exercise restraint. She threatens to kick her out onto the streets where she’ll be forced into prostitution. She threatens that if she doesn’t behave the school won’t be able to recommend her for employment as a maid. Grace commits to becoming restrained and decorous.
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Grace hoped to become an assistant at a department store, and breaks into tears when, instead, Mrs. Langley finds her a job as a maid for a baron who’d just returned to his family’s castle after years away running a plantation in India. The baron has Indian servants, an Indian mistress, and their two sons, so doesn’t have a problem having a “half-caste” maid. Years later she’s shopping in the department store, the last place she wants to be after a manager had shut the door on her when she asked for a job. Two girls from the home are working, and they complain about the job, enraging Grace who suffers harder conditions as a maid even though she was just as smart as the rest of the girls at school.
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Grace finds the material she needs for her dress. She and the other maids are making themselves “risqué” dresses that fall below the knee. She’d seen the lady of the house and her rich friends modeling this look. Grace knows she’ll never look like them but is happy she’ll have a trendy dress for the rare special occasions she gets to enjoy. As she’s walking home through the busy town, a man approaches her and says she “must be the Lady of the Nile.” The man has bright red hair and blue eyes. He doesn’t ogle her the way other men do.
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He introduces himself as Joseph Rydendale and, as he walks her across the street, tells her he’s just left the bank where he made a large deposit. Grace guesses he’s trying to impress her, something a man has never tried to do with her before, and she is impressed. Unlike the seedy men who call her a tease, he seems like a good man. Up until this point she’s been able to fend off advances from the types of men who assault women or leave them pregnant, once even suffering a close call with a guest who snuck into the servants’ quarters. She’d accepted that she’d likely be single her whole life because no man wanted a “mongrel” as she was often called.
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Joseph survived World War I unscathed, unlike many of his compatriots. He returned home to his family farm, Greenfields, and found it in disrepair. His father had gone senile and wandered the fields in his underwear searching for his long-dead wife. It takes him years to restore the farm and when he’s finished he’s ready for a wife. After years spent abroad, however, none of the girls back home attract him until he sees Grace on the street. Grace soon starts to fall in love with Joseph, who visits her at the estate where she works every Sunday. When Joseph proposes to her, Grace can’t believe that a man truly wants her. They marry and move to the farm.
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Joseph’s father, who died three months prior, never would have approved of their relationship. The day he brings her home on his horse cart, the townspeople stare at Grace, never having seen a Black person before and shocked that she was able to “steal” one of the most desired men in town. The townspeople eventually warm to her because her accent reveals that she’s “local-enough.” But she still faces racism. The grocer threw her change down on the counter rather than hand it to her, so she does the exact same thing when she goes to pay the next time. She walked away “with her Abyssinian nose in the air” thinking her mother would be proud.
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Greenfields farmhouse was dirty and dark compared to the estate Grace had grown used to living on. Joseph had a maid who he said would do all the housework so Grace could do as she pleased, which she finds amusing both because she’d been a maid herself so recently and because the house was still filthy. Grace begins to act and speak like the rich people she served at the estate. She notices that the maid doesn’t take orders from her the way she does from Joseph, that she refuses to listen to “a half-caste, a negress.” Grace tells Joseph to fire the maid, which he does, and finds that she likes doing housework now that she’s doing it for herself.
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The house starts to come back to life and Grace convinces Joseph to refurbish the house in preparation for their future children. They fill the house with new furniture and jazz records. They dance into the night and read and talk for hours. Joseph loves her curls and she can’t believe he loves the thick hair she’d always been embarrassed by. The only part of the house she doesn’t clean is the cabinet in the library that Joseph says is full of important records that can’t be thrown out. He says he’ll deal with it eventually, but for now puts a lock on it.
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When they have sex, Joseph calls Grace “his expedition into Africa.” He compares himself to Dr. Livingstone heading down the Nile. Grace reminds him she’s Abyssinian and Joseph responds: “whatever you say, Gracie.” Joseph wants ten sons, but Gracie thinks five children would be enough and wants at least two daughters. In their efforts she suffers two miscarriages. Then she gives birth to a boy who dies hours after delivery. Grace becomes severely depressed. She and Joseph can’t speak of the losses. Finally a daughter, Lily, arrives and survives for one year, two months, and four days before passing away in her sleep.
Joseph doesn’t give Grace any time to grieve because he’s desperate for an heir to the 120-year-old family farm. Grace suddenly understands how much the farm means to him as his way of honoring his ancestors. Joseph starts drinking and is angry all the time. When they have sex he’s more a robot than a lover, concerned only with impregnating her. She endures the sex, committed to her role in helping him continue the family legacy. She’s afraid he’ll leave her if she can’t provide. They don’t read on the couch together anymore, instead sit across the room from one another as he reads National Geographic and she reads anything that gets her mind off her “body that [gives] birth to death.” They stop sleeping together at night.
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Grace gives birth to another daughter. After three brutal days of labor, Grace refuses to name or breastfeed the girl, convinced that she’s doomed to die. Joseph names the baby Harriet after his grandmother who’d lived a long and healthy life. Joseph knows that Hattie will survive, that she’s “a fighter” even though she’s a girl. He stops talking to Grace, who views Harriet as a screaming demon unlike her peaceful baby Lily. Grace is severely depressed for months, unable to do anything. A nanny moves in to care for Harriet.
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Grace becomes suicidal and one night Joseph catches her looking at the kitchen knives. He snatches one from her hand, warning her “don’t you dare.” She thinks about drowning herself in the nearby lake and Joseph threatens to take her to the asylum. She is too miserable to care. Their relationship is broken, the powerful love they shared is only a memory. When Joseph tries to force Grace to mother Harriet, she walks away refusing to even touch her. He calls her a “wicked woman” and says she’s failing at her duty.
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Grace feels as alone as she did when her mother was taken from her, and wishes she was here now to guide her. Harriet is 30 months old when Grace’s depression breaks suddenly one morning. She can see the world again the way it was before her dread settled down as a thick fog. She gets showered and dressed, then walks into the kitchen where Harriet and the nanny are eating breakfast. Grace looks like an entirely new person to Harriet, and Grace, really looking at Harriet for the first time, sees a healthy baby girl. Grace notices that Harriet and the nanny have grown too close. Grace sits close to Harriet and announces that everyone will call her Hattie now. Hattie sits on Grace’s lap only after the nanny urges her to, which hurts Grace. Later that day Grace reads to Hattie outside while Joseph looks on stunned.
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Grace carries out a conversation with her mother in her head. She tells her how she and Hattie found each other once her darkness lifted. She loved her and gave her everything she wanted. Hattie and Joseph were close, too, and he let her follow him around the farm, teaching her to work and not caring that she was a girl. Grace wishes her mother was there to be Hattie’s grandmother and see how strong she was. She mourns that her mother missed her own growing up and the love she shares with Joseph. She wishes that her mother could have met Hattie’s American husband Slim, and her grandchildren, Ada Mae and Sonny, that Grace herself only knew for a few years. She remembers how happy Joseph was when Sonny was born. Finally there was a boy to keep the family’s legacy alive.
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