Girl, Woman, Other: Chapter 4: Hattie  Summary & Analysis

Hattie’s politics have changed over her lifetime. She starts and ends her life as a conservative, like her father. When Slim arrives he leads her down a more progressive path, but the rural, economic downturn turns her on to the right-wing UKIP party and their Brexit campaign. Hattie highlights how economically depressed rural communities often come to lean right politically, as seen both in Brexit-era England as well as the Trump-era United States.

Hattie’s family and their obsession with maintaining their whiteness reveals how insidious and destructive internalized racism and oppression can be. While she knows Slim would be devastated to know that his children and their descendants have intentionally erased their Black identities, rather than wear them proudly, Hattie views it as a practical choice made to make life easier in a hostile and racist world. However, she hates that their racism isn’t just internal, but that they wield it against Chimongo and Julie. They’ve turned their backs on their ancestors and heritage, and instead have sided with the oppressors. In this way they preserve, maintain, and defend white supremacy. Chimongo tries to protect his kids and their self-esteem as much as possible in their white-supremacist society and family. Hattie feels guilty, but when she was raising her children society was less progressive and there were fewer books and other media that provided representation for children of color.

Unlike the rest of the family, Morgan and Bibi genuinely care for Hattie, likely because Hattie has always been an ally and source of support for Morgan. Just like it’s easier for Lennox to accept Amma because his aunt was gay, it’s easier for Hattie to accept Morgan because she personally knew a lesbian couple. Both cases highlight the role that interpersonal relationships play in fighting oppression and discrimination. While the town accepted the couple, it was still too taboo to acknowledge their identities out loud, so it was an imperfect acceptance. Hattie’s tradition of leaving flowers on their graves speaks to her loyalty to her now dwindling community.  

The conflict between Hattie and Morgan mirrors the conflict between Amma and her father Kwabena. Both Hattie and Kwabena can’t understand the identities and politics of the younger generation, which left both Amma and Morgan furious. Morgan, however, is forgiving of Hattie, willing to recognize and accept that a woman from her generation might never fully understand queer identities. Hattie may be too old at this point to fully unlearn the narratives society ingrained in her about sex and gender. Because Morgan accepts Hattie’s resolution to meet them in the middle, they can focus on enjoying the time they have left together as grandparent and grandchild, as opposed to Amma who came to this understanding too late, when her father was already gone.

Hattie is deeply hurt that her children abandoned the home that is so precious to her. It’s meant to be passed down through the generations, and their abandonment is a stinging betrayal. This also compounds Hattie’s fear that she’d somehow failed as a mother. Hattie sees the farm as the source of her life and health. It’s not just the physical labor that kept her in good health, but the deep sense of purpose and connection to her ancestors and family legacy that it gave her. Hattie is steadfast that her children don’t deserve their inheritance because they don’t value their ancestors, including her. For Hattie, family is about staying rooted and loyal both to people and places.

Slim and his family faced horrific racism and violence back in the United States. His brother was one among the thousands of Black men lynched on false rape allegations based in society’s untrue stereotypes of Black men and hyper-aggressive sexuality. Because his experiences were so much more brutal in comparison to Ada Mae and Sonny’s, he tells them to toughen up rather than comforting them and acknowledging that they, too, were accumulating the trauma of racism.

On the one hand, it is important for Ada Mae and Sonny to know their family history. On the other hand, Hattie was right that they’d wind up hating themselves after hearing these stories on top of the racism they experienced every day. Due to colorism, Hattie’s lighter skin gives her privilege over other people whose skin tones are darker. As a result, she can’t fully understand what it’s like to be her children, whose skin is darker than hers. Hattie calls Slim out for his own colorism, reminding him that her lighter complexion is one of the traits that attracted him. Slim’s appreciation for both Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X speaks to his belief that both the reformer and the radical have their role to play in social justice movements. While other characters throughout the novel have pitted these two roles against each other, Slim understands that one cannot exist without the other. Progress depends on the gains that both sides make.

Ada Mae and Sonny struggle immensely with internalized racism and attempt to distance themselves from their Blackness at a very young age. Society’s racism breaks their family apart as the kids distance themselves from their darker-skinned father. Ada Mae and Sonny choose to abandon the family altogether, determined to escape the racism of their small, rural town for the big city. 

Although the move to the city meant escaping the racism of their hometown, neither sibling reclaims their racial identity. Instead, their internalized racism spills over and become racism against other people of color, a blatant hypocrisy and contradiction. The immigrants of color they live with in the city notice that Ada Mae and Sonny have assimilated into white culture, and although they’ve spent their lives intentionally distancing themselves from their Blackness, this statement still offends them. This contradiction confuses Hattie. They give up on their dreams of London, where their identities were only more complicated. 

Ada Mae and Sonny’s disparate experiences reveal a double standard in interracial dating, specifically white and Black coupling. While white men view Black women as undesirable, ignoring them and fearful to bring them home to their racist families, white women objectify and over-sexualize Black men. What remains consistent across genders is that racist white family and in-laws protest against the interracial couplings. While Sonny knows what it’s like to be cast out from a family due to race, he and his family do the same years later when Chimongo and Julie marry. While Ada Mae’s husband may have loved her “regardless” of her race, their marriage wasn’t a place where she could celebrate or embrace her racial identity either. Marrying white partners allowed both siblings to distance themselves even further from the Black identities they’d been trying to outrun since childhood.  

Hattie, herself mixed race with a white father, objectifies Slim the first time she sees him. She  exoticizes him and his darker skin tone when she compares him to the African warriors she saw in National Geographic growing up. The magazine is now widely criticized for portraying people of color as “exotic” and promoting stereotypes and bias. In Hattie’s majority white hometown, her only hope for finding someone to marry is at this dance. When she gets there she feels at home in a community that, for the first time in her life, is filled with people who look like her. Among these women of color, she is not alone in her struggle to find love due to her race.

Hattie feels at home among these women because of their shared racial identities, but her intersecting class identity as a rural farmgirl sets her apart. The other girls embrace her nonetheless and help bring her into the fold by doing her makeup. White men either ignore Black women entirely, never entertaining the possibility of romantic love with them, or oversexualize them, playing into societal stereotypes about Black women’s sexuality. Colorism also shows up on the dancefloor. The Black American men have internalized racism that leads them to perpetuate the same bias and discrimination that affects Black women in the world of dating. The soldiers view these lighter-skinned women as higher-class and more desirable.  

Slim’s first words to Hattie are likewise objectifying, even if that objectification is couched in a compliment. His internalized colorism shows in his privileging of her lighter skin. He dehumanizes her when he talks about her “stock value” as if she is an object to be bought and sold. At the same time, Hattie has never been treated so well by a man. He doesn’t view her as a farm laborer, but as a beautiful potential wife. Ultimately, both Hattie’s father and Slim are progressive for the time. Each of them wants Hattie to maintain her natural power and autonomy.

Despite the terrible racism he and his children face in the U.K., it’s still better than in the United States where Black people have suffered great atrocities. For Slim, marrying into ownership of Greenfields farm is his way of living out the dreams and promises denied to his family after the abolition of slavery. Although he understands the power that land grants, and how that power is especially important to marginalized groups who were denied that power for generations, he still lacks intersectional awareness. He assumes that, as a man, he will possess the land alone because land is traditionally passed down from one man to the next. Hattie has to remind him that they are co-owners. 

Slim made Hattie feel at home in her own body. He loved her for who she was and thought her Blackness was beautiful. She’s lost that loving and intimate home with him. Hattie goes out searching for Slim on these long walks. The cane with its Black power fist keeps her connected to him, and to the ways he made her feel proud of her identity. Without him, the land no longer feels like a complete home. At this point in her life she looks forward to reuniting with Slim in the afterlife because life is so incomplete without him. 

The farm is slowing down as Hattie’s body does. They are both losing their lives. Her beloved home is changing, but what remains the same are the beloved memories that root her in this place and her identity.

Hattie’s love and loyalty for family comes from the strong bond she shared with her mother. Grace’s wish to know her father is a family mystery she passes down to Hattie, so that it haunts her to this day. Joseph wants Hattie to pass the farm down to a man after they’d had no choice but to stray from patriarchal tradition because their only child was a girl. Joseph wants Hattie to turn the land, and its power, back over to a man, but she bucks tradition by giving it over to Morgan and Bibi whose genders defy the binary.

Since its founding, Greenfields has been home to Black people. Despite the fact that Hattie’s family now desperately wants to maintain their perceived whiteness, Blackness runs throughout their ancestry. Slim discovers that Hattie’s beloved home was built with the blood money earned through the slave trade. He's furious because the place he now calls home was funded with money that cost his ancestors their dignity and freedom. It’s a cruel twist of fate. Hattie, however, thinks this discovery is a sort of karmic justice. The farm now belongs in the hands of a Black couple, rather than a white, slave-owning man. From that point of view, it’s a roundabout reparation.

Growing up in an almost all white town, Hattie was used to being ignored by boys. Her Blackness made her undesirable in their eyes. In her excitement that comes with  finally being noticed, Hattie ends up pregnant. The pregnancy is traumatic for her physically and emotionally. She struggles with internalized blame while at the same time contends with her father’s shame, which is what leads to their decision to keep her hidden. Joseph exerts patriarchal authority over both Grace and Hattie when he takes Barbara away against their wishes. He is more concerned with protecting his pride than he is worried about the emotional damage this decision will cause. He doesn’t want Hattie to be “ruined” for marriage, putting some future man’s comfort above his own daughter in the present.

Barbara is a ghost that haunts Hattie the same way that her mother, Grace, was haunted by her mysterious, unknown father. Hattie so deeply internalized her father’s shame over Barbara that she kept her existence a secret from even Slim, the most beloved person in her life. Her daughter, Ada Mae, who takes her for granted, wakes her up from this dream of the sister that she’ll never know.