An ambitious book, not only because of its large cast of characters, but because it offers so many insights about racial strife in the United States ... She explores the contradictions of American ideas about freedom, highlighting that among white people, racial progress almost never implies Black self-determination or true equality. And she paints an unsparing portrait of the Black elite ... While all these facets are compelling, the book’s most affecting contribution is Greenidge’s treatment of intergenerational racial trauma ... Greenidge provides a consummate cartography of racial trauma, demonstrating, through an adept use of the family’s letters, diaries and other archival materials, how the physical and emotional abuses of slavery traveled through generations long after abolition ... There is plenty of little-known American history in The Grimkes, but no blow-by-blow accounts of the Civil War, Reconstruction and the other major national events that shaped the family’s evolution. Similarly, while Greenidge provides context for the Grimke sisters’ contributions to abolition and the nascent women’s rights movement, she does not make forceful arguments about how the sisters influenced the trajectory of those movements, or what would have been different without them.
Greenidge’s The Grimkes is not a story about heroes. Instead, it is intended as an exploration of trauma and tragedy. Like the studies of the Grimkes that have preceded it, the book reflects the challenges of our own time, but Greenidge...regards these not with optimism about possibilities for racial progress but with something closer to despair ... Greenidge leaves the stature of Sarah, Angelina, Archie, and Frank diminished, but she offers an enriched view of the extended Black Grimke family ... Greenidge embraces this perspective as she connects the injustices of the present with their roots. She finds their origins embedded not just in the strictures of society and law, but in the human psychology formed in the families that racism has so profoundly shaped.
... brilliant ... Greenidge is an especially elegant writer, and an admirably clear one, expertly guiding readers through a century of history and a dauntingly complicated cast of characters. She manages to sketch them all with great sympathy and at the same time utterly clear and unsparing judgment. This book will, I think, make some readers uncomfortable. It’s worth it. The Grimkes is by turns heartbreaking, entertaining, and thought-provoking: a triumph.
Remarkable ... Excavating voluminous archives of slave records, correspondence, articles from the Black and mainstream presses, and speeches, Greenidge, a Tufts University professor, delves into the complexity of the Grimke family with a fresh and illuminating perspective ... A sweeping family saga.
Greatly enhances our understanding of these remarkable sisters and their legacy ... Covering many people over several generations creates narrative zigzags, but Greenidge accomplishes this gracefully and engagingly ... Although Greenidge adeptly traces the vagaries of the reformers’ lives, she underplays their intense radicalism ... Although Greenidge minimizes this landmark book, she communicates the horrors of slavery in other ways. Her portrait of Henry Grimke is harrowing ... Greenidge provides an illuminating account of the rift between women’s rights and advocacy for African Americans.
Gripping ... All told, there are many characters to keep track of, and, while always compelling, the book’s first half jumps around among them ... The author’s affecting account of Nana’s tragic life demonstrates that these traumas are not so easily overcome.
... brilliant, prodigiously researched, and utterly devastating ... Ms. Greenidge restores the poet-playwright to her place in the Harlem Renaissance and a vibrant American canon. But The Grimkes does much more than that. By placing the black members of the Grimke family at the center of a sweeping, pitiless and revelatory history of race in America from the aftermath of the Revolution to the 1930s, it watches the tree of Tenebris grow...The result of painstaking research in family papers, newspapers, government documents, maps, plantation records and more, The Grimkes is a saga as crowded with characters as a Russian novel, and many individuals carry nearly identical names ... As befits a scholar who thinks deeply about structures, Ms. Greenidge is especially skilled at rendering place.
Greenidge skillfully contrasts the simpering piety of the Grimkes with the fierce determination of leaders in the free Black community, notably the descendants of legendary Black entrepreneur James Forten ... A sobering and timely look at how self-centered 'benevolence' can become complicity.
Kerri K. Greenidge complicates the accepted history of the abolitionist Grimke sisters with the full, complex story of their Black and white relatives ... Provocative and well-written.
Revelatory ... Greenidge offers no tidy or optimistic conclusions about the long shadow of slavery, but readers will be riveted by how she brings these complex figures and their era to life. This is a brilliant and essential history.
Absorbing ... Greenidge reveals the significant roles of Black women in the family’s complicated history ... The author’s discoveries reveal both 'white reformers’ disavowal of their complicity in America’s racial project' and 'the limits of interracial alliances' ... A sweeping, insightful, richly detailed family and American history.
