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Little Boy
Sarah is the girlfriend of Coalhouse Walker Jr. The couple has a baby together. A poor Black girl whose personal history never comes to light, she attempts to abandon her baby after he is born in New Rochelle. Subsequently Mother shelters Sarah and her child. In the house, Sarah and Younger Brother become friends because they are about the same age. Sarah is a woman of few words but strong convictions. When Coalhouse begins visiting her at the family’s home, it takes several weeks until she’s certain enough of his devotion to agree to see him. She is a kindly and innocent person who struggles to understand the inhumanity around her. When Coalhouse postpones their wedding while trying to get redress for his mistreatment at the hands of Willie Conklin, Sarah tries to ask the Vice-President for help, but she is severely injured by Secret Service agents in the process. She succumbs to pneumonia that develops from these injuries.
Sarah Quotes in Ragtime
The Ragtime quotes below are all either spoken by Sarah or refer to Sarah . For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 9 Quotes
So the young black woman and her child were installed in a room on the top floor. Mother made numbers of phone calls. She cancelled her service league meeting. She walked back and forth in the parlor. She was very agitated. She felt keenly her husband’s absence and condemned herself for so readily endorsing his travels. There was no way to communicate with him any of the problems and concerns of her life. She would not hear from him till the following summer. She stared at the ceiling as if to see through it. the Negro girl and her baby had carried into the house a sense of misfortune, chaos, and now this feeling resided here like some sort of contamination. She was frightened.
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Chapter 14 Quotes
It was apparent to them both that this time he’d stayed away too long. Downstairs Birgit put a record on the Victrola, wound the rank and sat in the parlor smoking a cigarette and listening […] She was doing what she could to lose her place. She was no longer efficient or respectful. Mother marked this change to the arrival of the colored girl. Father related it to the degrees of turn in the moral planet. He saw it everywhere, this new season, and it bewildered him. At his office he was told that the seamstresses in the flag department had joined a New York union. He put on clothes from his closet that ballooned from him as shapeless as the furs he had worn for a year.
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Chapter 25 Quotes
Nobody knew Sarah’s last name or thought to ask. Where had she been born, and where had she lived, this impoverished uneducated black girl with such absolute conviction of the way human beings ought to conduct their lives? In the few weeks of her happiness, between that time she accepted Coalhouse’s proposal and the first fears that her marriage would never happen, she had been transformed to the point of having a new, different face. Grief and anger had been a kind of physical pathology masking her true looks. Mother was awed by her beauty. She laughed and spoke in a mellifluous voice. […] She laughed in joy of her own being. Her happiness flowed in the milk of her breasts and her baby grew quickly. […] She was a girl of perhaps eighteen or nineteen years, now satisfied that the circumstances of life gave reason to live.
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Get the entire Ragtime LitChart as a printable PDF.
Sarah Character Timeline in Ragtime
The timeline below shows where the character Sarah appears in Ragtime. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 9
...located her and brought her to the house by ambulance. The girl (later identified as Sarah) is painfully young, and terribly upset. When Mother asks what will happen to her, the...
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Chapter 14
...aspects of the business. She’s also sheltering the little Black baby and its depressed mother (Sarah). And she has become far more affectionate in bed. Father finds this especially disturbing, because...
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Chapter 21
...drives up in a shiny new Ford Model T and asks if this is where Sarah lives. Little Boy says yes. The man parks the car, boldly knocks on the front...
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...a Harlem pianist who plays with a well-respected club orchestra, he’s clearly the father of Sarah’s child, and he’s dogged and patient in his courtship attempt. Mother becomes so invested in...
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...what he perceives to be Coalhouse’s impertinence to consider putting a stop to the visits, Sarah has finally relented, and Mother won’t refuse the musician’s visits. They’re awkward together at first,...
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Chapter 23
...Coalhouse Walker Jr.’s path as he drives back to Harlem from his customary visit to Sarah. They try to extort $25 dollars from him. When he refuses, they block him on...
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...promise to repay the money the next night. He also tells the family what happened. Sarah listens from the hallway as Younger Brother suggests that Coalhouse press charges and Father offers...
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Chapter 25
Throughout the summer—between accepting Coalhouse’s proposal and the Model T incident—Sarah had blossomed. As they worked together on Sarah’s wedding dress, Mother realized that Sarah is...
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...he was campaigning in Wisconsin for one of Taft’s competitors only days before. So, when Sarah runs toward the Vice-President with her hand outstretched, the Secret Service members think she’s a...
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Back at the house, Mother discovers Sarah’s absence when she hears the baby crying inconsolably. It takes several hours for the family...
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Chapter 26
...spends all the money he had saved for the wedding on a spectacular funeral for Sarah. Most of the attendants are people he knows through the music scene. They are all...
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Chapter 27
The spring during which Sarah dies is magnificently beautiful. The blossoming of the flowers is so exquisite that it inspires...
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Chapter 28
...drinks heavily that night and picks a fight with Mother about her decision to shelter Sarah. He gets a twisted pleasure from making Mother cry. Father plans to go to the...
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Chapter 32
...firehouse, he goes back to Harlem and leaves word at the funeral parlor that arranged Sarah’s service that he wants to talk to Coalhouse and that he will wait, nightly, by...
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