Moses, Wilson Jeremiah. “The Novels of Sutton
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- Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1978.
Jai Young Park
Grimké, Angelina Weld (1880–1958)
As a writer of plays, fiction, and poetry, Grimké
devoted much of her art to examining the ef-
fects of racism on the African-American family.
Born into a celebrated family herself, she seems
to have always been interested in the dynamics of
the parent-child bond within the context of Afri-
can-American history. Grimké was biracial. Her
mother, Sarah Stanley, was white, and her father,
Archibald Grimké, was a prominent African-
American writer and scholar who had been born
a slave. Archibald’s mother was also a slave, owned
by his white father, Henry Grimké. Henry was the
brother of the prominent abolitionists Sarah and
Angelina Grimké (Weld), who fled their southern
home for Massachusetts before the Civil War in
protest of their family’s slaveholding. Archibald’s
aunts later acknowledged him as their nephew
and supported him during his years at Harvard
Law School. Named after her great-aunt, Angelina
grew up with her family’s passionate commitment
to civil and women’s rights. She did not, however,
grow up with her mother. A victim of mental
health problems, Angelina’s mother left the family
shortly after her daughter was born. Archibald was
a doting and involved father, and his love of learn-
ing and writing flourished in his daughter as well.
Employed for most of her life as a teacher,
Grimké wrote poetry from a young age. Her first
published writing was fiction and drama, how-
ever. The play Rachel, like most of Grimké’s prose,
exposed the roots of American racism and its
detrimental effect on the hallowed ideals of the
American family. The threat of lynching and rape
deter the healthy interaction of the African-Amer-
ican family and the growth of love relationships.
Produced in Washington, D.C., in 1916, Rachel
was the first play written by and wholly performed
by African Americans. The work was published in
- Grimké’s other play, “Mara,” was never pub-
lished and did not meet with the same critical suc-
cess as her first. Most scholars agree that the play is
too sentimental—a criticism leveled at most of her
short fiction as well. Grimké’s target audience for
her prose was white, middle-class women—noto-
rious fans of sentimental novels of the time—and
Grimké may have structured her writing too much
to that taste. Nevertheless, all of her work exam-
ines how the most simple and natural human re-
lationships, especially those between mother and
children, are tragically altered by the effect of racial
prejudice.
Grimké is best known for her poetry. Published
in such hallmark anthologies as ALAIN LOCKE’s The
NEW NEGRO (1927) and COUNTEE CULLEN’s Carol-
ing Dusk (1927), Grimké’s poetry is redolent with
images of nature and the pain of lost love. “When
the Green Lies over the Earth” is exemplary:
... when the wind all day is sweet
With the breath of growing things,
.....
Then oh! My dear, when the youth’s in the
year,
Yours is the face that I long to have near
Yours is the face, my dear.
(Caroling Dusk 41–42)
Recent feminist scholars suggest that Grimké’s
love poetry reflects her repressed lesbianism. Most
of these poems are written through the voice of a
white male persona to a female lover (often African
American), and the choice to construct the poems
in such a manner with an emphasis on forbidden
racial love may indicate Grimké’s displacement of
her own desires in a world that would have not
accepted her sexuality. Though she is often in-
cluded in contemporary anthologies of HARLEM
RENAISSANCE poets, she was not widely published
with other members of the movement, nor was
she known to meet or correspond with them. The
themes found in her fiction and drama are not as
present in her lyrics. The poetry represents some-
thing more private and personal for Grimké, while
her prose more directly explores the social climate
of her time.216 Grimké, Angelina Weld