The fictional Sarah is presented with a slave as a gift on her 11th birthday - a gift she tries desperately to refuse. Kidd transformed that story into an incident that occurs at the beginning of the novel. In one of Grimke's journals, Kidd read about a young slave named Hetty who had been given to Grimke as a young girl.
"I didn't want it to be just one side looking at it through one lens." I wanted both worlds to be there," she says. "I knew from the very beginning that I couldn't tell the story of Sarah Grimke without telling a comparable story in substance to that - of an enslaved character. But she needed another, equally compelling character. Kidd decided to make Sarah Grimke's story the basis of her novel. I knew from the very beginning that I couldn't tell the story of Sarah Grimke without telling a comparable story. In doing so, they also had to face stiff opposition to the idea that women had a right to speak out at all - on any issue. In the years before the Civil War, Grimke and her sister Angelina left the comforts of their wealthy family's home in Charleston, S.C., to travel the country speaking out against slavery. So when Kidd first heard of Sarah Grimke, she was intrigued. There is something about these kinds of social injustices that go to the deep of me." But race matters to me, racial equality matters to me, as does gender. "I can't explain exactly why it lives within me for so long and passionately. These experiences shaped her, and they still pull at her as a writer. As a white teenager, she watched as the civil rights movement played out around her. Kidd, author of the best-selling novel The Secret Life of Bees, grew up in Georgia in the '50s and '60s. The book, The Invention of Wings, takes on both slavery and feminism - and it's inspired by the life of a real historical figure.
One strives her whole life to be free the other rebels against her slave-owning family and becomes a prominent abolitionist and early advocate for women's rights. One is a slave the other, her reluctant owner. Sue Monk Kidd's new novel is a story told by two women whose lives are wrapped together - beginning, against their wills, when they're young girls.
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