The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family
(Liveright, $32.50)
History largely remembers Sarah and Angelina Grimke as heroic abolitionists, said Michael Jeffries in The New York Times. The sisters had, after all, turned away from their own slaveholding family in Charleston, S.C., to move north and join the anti-slavery cause. But historian Kerri Greenidge has peered beneath the story’s surface, and in her new book, she “takes the Grimke sisters off their pedestal so that we understand them as pieces of a tapestry that could only be sewn in America.” Yes, the sisters spoke out boldly against slavery and for women’s rights. Later, they helped facilitate their Black nephews’ rise in Northern society. Still, “the lives they built, and their relationships with Black relatives, were poisoned by the profits, violence, and shame of white supremacy.”
“Like all family stories, this one gets messy,” said Kate Tuttle in The Boston Globe. Those nephews were the children of the Grimke sisters’ brother and a woman he had held in slavery. The sisters met them after the Civil War, and the young men “immediately faced a lecture on thrift and modesty.” They would achieve greater career success than their white cousins, but racism remained inescapable even within their own family. Greenidge also tells the story of one of the nephews’ daughters, Angelina Weld Grimke, a gay Harlem Renaissance poet and playwright. Greenidge captures each of her subjects with sympathy as well as “utterly unsparing judgment,” and her book “will, I think, make some readers uncomfortable. It’s worth it.”
The Grimkes’ story, since recently being rediscovered, “has served as a kind of Rorschach test,” said Drew Gilpin Faust in The Atlantic.“The sisters have represented the possibility of moral redemption; their nephews have embodied the myth of personal uplift.” By retelling the story with a focus on how hopes engendered by emancipation were disappointed, “Greenidge has found in the Grimkes’ experiences a world chillingly like our own.” In our time, “when the accomplishments of the civil rights movement are being overturned and its promise abandoned,” racial equity feels similarly unattainable.