Best-selling author Sue Monk Kidd to stop in Savannah on new book tour
Best-selling author Sue Monk Kidd first tackled racism and social injustice on the pages of "Secret Life of Bees." In her latest work, "The Invention of Wings," she examines the root of the problem in a story about urban slavery set in Charleston.
"I wanted to go back to slavery and look at that because I think this is where it all started," Kidd said. "It's the original sin of America."
Kidd is currently on a book tour to promote the paperback release of "The Invention of Wings" and will stop in Savannah on Wednesday for an event hosted by the Savannah Book Festival.
The story was inspired by the real lives of Sarah and Angelina Grimke, two sisters from a rich, white, slave-owning family who grew up to be abolitionists and feminists.
Kidd came across their names while at an exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum in New York.
"I lived in Charleston for quite a while and never heard of them," she said. "I thought, 'How did I miss them?' So I went on a mission to discover them."
"The Invention of Wings" begins at the grand Grimke house on East Bay Street in Charleston in 1803, and alternates first-person accounts. The main characters are Sarah Grimke, a reluctant slave owner, and a young slave named Hetty, who had been given to Grimke as a birthday present. Throughout their complicated relationship, both women strive to break free from the society that confines them.
Kidd's works are colored by her experiences growing up in Georgia in the '50s and '60s, where she said she witnessed terrible racial injustice and divides.
That the Grimkes overcame such divides despite their background and upbringing fascinated Kidd.
"I was astonished by their lives and how it was possible they had fallen through this crack in history and were only marginally known," she said.
"The Invention of Wings," although fiction, follows the events of the real Grimke sisters' lives closely.
Before her visit to Savannah, we caught up with Kidd and asked her about Sarah and Hetty's relationship, the relevance of historical fiction, and how she views the current state of racial tension in the country.
Question. How did you decide you wanted to write a book about the Grimke sisters?
Kidd. I think what compelled me the most was the question, "How was that possible that they did what they did?" You have this wealthy slave-holding family in Charleston at the top of society, yet these two daughters end up becoming pariahs and abolitionists. Sarah's metamorphosis was very painful. She had to make a break with her family, her traditions, her religion. She went north and carried on this public crusade for women's rights, along with her sister. That fascinated me. What is the process that goes on inside of a person that allows you to make this extraordinary metamorphosis? How do you become that brave? How did she find her voice? How do you end up changing history?
Q. How would you describe the relationship with Sarah and Hetty (also known as Handful), the slave she is given for her birthday?
Kidd. I should say that the minute I decided to write a novel in the voice of Sarah, I knew that I would also need and want to write the story of an enslaved person to go along with it. I discovered that Sarah had a slave, called a "waiting maid," and that she died young. I thought, well, that's my character, and I'll imagine what her life might have been like if had she lived.
I felt like I had to portray the relationship in a stark and honest way but still hold out some kind of hope that there could be a relationship and friendship there.
It's an ambivalent relationship. They're divided by the great gulf of slavery. This often kept me up at night, trying to figure out how to write this relationship. But it was marked by guilt on Sarah's part, marked by defiance on Handful's part, and many other complicated emotions. So I just tried to portray what that might have been like.
Q. As this is historical fiction, was it easier to have background information to work off of or harder because you had to stick to it?
Kidd. It was true with writing Sarah. It was harder to write her, because she was confined by this historical script, and I was trying very hard to be true to every part of it.
With Handful, she had free reign in my imagination. Finally I had to tell myself that I could discover Sarah in my imagination, too. The story is a blend of fact and fiction, but I know that a reader will come away with a very accurate understanding of Sarah and what happened in her life.
Q. Do you think historical fiction has the potential to be relevant to today?
Kidd. I'm not sure I would've written the story if I didn't think it had relevance today. In some ways I felt like I was writing about the present. I think knowing where we came from, knowing our history, gives us a vision of who we are, why we're here. We are the sum of our history. That then allows us to look ahead and see where we're going.
For instance, how is it possible that so-called upstanding, good people in the 19th century did not think slavery was wrong? How do things like that become invisible to us? How does it creep up on you? How do we find our voice? I think questions like this that are inherent in the story are relevant to us today.
Q. As someone who writes about race relations and racial injustices, how do you view everything happening today in Ferguson, Mo., and now in Baltimore?
Kidd. It seems to be at a worse place than I've seen it in a very long time. I'm very disturbed and concerned by all of that. We have to acknowledge that we've come a long way with civil rights, but the legacy of racism is still with us.
Today we see this legacy still. You can't always legislate the human heart. That has to be changed some other way. It's one of the major things that's facing our country today, this undercurrent -- and now exploding -- issue of racismm
This story was originally published May 1, 2015 at 11:05 PM with the headline "Best-selling author Sue Monk Kidd to stop in Savannah on new book tour."