The Greenfields Farmhouse symbolizes land, legacy, and power. The Greenfields Farmhouse is a powerful source of empowerment, identity, and legacy for Hattie. It’s kept her young, powerful, and independent even in her later years, illustrating the physical benefits of privilege of land ownership. It’s a place where she, a Black woman, has carved out power within a white, patriarchal English society as represented by the predominately white village where her farmhouse sits. Hattie’s husband Slim, an African American man from Georgia, emphasizes the importance of land ownership when he recounts his family’s experience as sharecroppers in the wake of the broken promise of 40 acres and a mule that was meant to be a financial reparation in a post-slavery society. His co-ownership of the farm is therefore a significant and exciting moment for him. When Hattie and Slim eventually discover that the farm was built with blood money from her ancestors’ involvement in the slave trade, Slim is outraged. Hattie is too, but she also sees their co-ownership of the farm as a roundabout sort of reparations. Hattie’s deep love for the farm and all it represents is why she is intent on honoring her ancestors’ wishes that it stay in the family, and it’s also why she chooses Morgan as her heir. Hattie’s own children married into white families. Leaving the farm to Morgan and their partner, Bibi, not only keeps the farm in Black hands, but it also symbolically allows Hattie to pass down the empowerment of land ownership to future generations of Black people. What’s more, Hattie suggests that Morgan and Bibi turn the farm into a refuge for the transgender community, which means the land would continue to serve as a site of empowerment those pushed to the margins by a still patriarchal and white-supremacist England. Ultimately, Hattie’s decision about the future of Greenfields symbolizes her hope for a future when race, gender, and class no longer limit who owns land and has access to the empowerment that comes with it.
The Greenfields Farmhouse Quotes in Girl, Woman, Other
after Joseph died, Slim broke open an old library cabinet when he couldn’t find the keys, said that as the man of the house he needed to know what was in it
he found old ledgers that recorded the captain’s lucrative business as a slave runner, exchanging slaves from Africa for sugar in the West Indies
came charging like a lunatic into the kitchen where she was cooking and had a go at her for keeping such a wicked family secret from him
she didn’t know, she told him, was as upset as he was, the cabinet had been locked her entire life, her father told her important documents were inside and never go near it
she calmed Slim down, they talked it through
it’s not me or my Pa who’s personally responsible, Slim, she said, trying to mollify her husband, no you co-own the spoils with me
she wrapped her long arms around his waist from behind
it’s come full circle, hasn’t it?
The Greenfields Farmhouse Symbol Timeline in Girl, Woman, Other
