Summary
Morgan is a genderfree person who uses they/them pronouns, but the journey to become Morgan included significant hardships. Morgan was born Megan into a mixed-race family. Growing up, Megan was always a tomboy, a fact that her mother, Julie, tried to change—by buying her endless Barbies, dressing her up in poofy pink dresses, and worst of all for young Megan, not allowing her to ride horses with her brother. Despite the lack of support from her mother, Megan always had the steadfast support of her great-grandmother, GG. As she went through puberty, Megan blossomed into a beautiful young woman—by her grammar school peers’ standards, that is. However, Megan herself felt disoriented and disgusted in her body, with its newly developed breasts, rounded hips, and long hair. As such, she shaved off her hair and began to dress in clothes traditionally associated with men. Almost overnight, she became a target of harsh bullying at school, so she dropped out to work at a McDonald’s instead.
There, she fell into a crowd of other misfits who were involved with drugs. At just 16 or 17, Megan began to use—heavily—anything that would “t[ake] her to a higher, happier plane.” This drug use quickly spiraled into addiction, leading her to precarious behaviors and putting a heavy strain on her relationship with her family. Fortunately, at 18, Megan realizes just what sort of harm she is putting herself in. She gets sober, moves out of her parents’ home and into a hostel for teens. There, she discovers online LGBTQ+ communities, where she quickly forms a deep bond with Bibi, a trans woman, who induces Megan into the world of gender queerness. The two meet in person after months of online chatting, and form a deep romantic relationship. Bibi supports Megan’s transition to Morgan.
Six years later, Bibi and Morgan are still going strong, and have moved out of London to be in a more rural part of England. Morgan has become confident in their identity, and is even a social media celebrity activist with a million followers on Twitter. It is through this role of celebrity activist that suddenly Morgan’s life converges with Amma and Yazz’s: Morgan is invited to review Amma’s play, The Last Amazon of Dohamey, and runs into Yazz, whom they had previously met while guest lecturing at Yazz’s university.
Hattie is Morgan’s great-grandmother, but is known by her loved ones as GG. She was born on a farm in rural England that has been in her family for over 200 years, and is a quarter Ethiopian. She grows up beloved by her parents, and in turn, loving them and the farm life they live. When she is a young adult, she meets Slim, an African American soldier, at a ball for black and mixed-race people. The two fall in love and marry. Slim moves into Hattie’s family farm, and for a time, the young couple enjoys the perfect bliss of rural farm life. Soon come two children, Ada Mae and Sonny. Unlike Hattie, who is more white-passing, her two children are darker-skinned, and face bullying from their peers as a consequence. The young family’s happiness is threatened by conflict as a result of the harassment that the teenaged Ada Mae and Sonny face: the two children become embarrassed to be associated with their black father, and in turn, their father feels frustrated that his children are “weak” in the face of bullies when African Americans like him lived through lynchings, beatings, and slavery in the American South. At 16 and 17, the two siblings decide to leave home and head to London.
The rift between Hattie and her children never fully heals, not even when Ada Mae and Sonny are both in their 60s and visiting GG for Christmas. In fact, Hattie feels that they are simply waiting for her to die so that they can sell her lands to commercial developers. She refuses to let this happen, and since she has had a strong relationship with Morgan since their childhood, she decides to bequeath the family farm to them instead.
As the tale unfolds, we are told that Hattie fell pregnant at 14 after sleeping with a boy from school. Her mother and father took her out of school with claims that she was sick to avoid scandal. When the baby, Barbara, was born, Hattie’s father took her away and left her on the doorstep of a church—otherwise, he told Hattie, no one would ever marry her.
Grace was Hattie’s mother, born to a working-class mother, Daisy, and an Abyssinian sailor who had long since sailed away after impregnating Daisy. Upon learning about her pregnancy, Daisy’s father was furious, leading her to leave home and try to make a living for herself in a factory. By the time Grace was eight, they lived with a kind landlady, Mary. Unfortunately, Daisy caught tuberculosis and was sent to a sanatorium to be quarantined. She soon passed away, leaving Grace effectively an orphan. Lacking the resources to take Grace in, Mary brings Grace to a home for girls, where she is promptly told that while elegant, she has far too much “personality.” When Grace comes of age, she is sent to be a maid for a baron.
Grace hates being a maid—the ugly uniforms, the tough work, and the harassment she faces from friends of the wealthy baron. One day, when she is in town buying fabric, a man named Joseph Rydendale introduces himself and begins courting her. He has been a soldier overseas, has known “Ottoman beauties,” and finds Grace as beautiful as the “Queen of the Nile.” The language he uses, by today's standards, could be considered exoticizing and perhaps even fetishizing, but he treats Grace well and gives her an opportunity at a new life as mistress rather than maid. He courts her, and soon enough, she becomes mistress of the Rydendale family farm, Greenfields. With Grace’s help, Joseph turns the declining farm into a profitable business, and the two begin trying for children—heirs to the family farm. The couple have four children who all die before making it past infancy, a fact that puts great strain on the marital relationship. By the time Grace has her fifth pregnancy, she is exhausted and defeated at the prospect of birthing another child that will simply die, and Joseph resents her for not being as enthusiastic as he is for childbirth.
Grace gives birth to Hattie, but it is a difficult and painful birth lasting three days. Grace sinks into a deep postpartum depression. She resents the newborn Hattie as a “demon child,” while Joseph resents her, in turn, for being a neglectful mother. Joseph hires Flossie, a nanny, who will take care of Hattie for the first three years of the child’s life, as Grace loses herself to depressive, suicidal ravings. When Hattie is three, something changes in Grace. She cleans up, combs her hair, and slowly becomes an active mother and wife. Her relationships with her husband and daughter are healed, and Joseph and Grace live happily on the farm with Hattie and Slim for many years.
Analysis
Though family and cross-generational conflict is a theme throughout the entire novel, Chapter 4 deals with family and the intergenerational changes within a single family more strongly than any other chapter. However, the reader does not know this, and will not until he/she finishes reading the entire chapter, since we do not know of the relationships between Morgan, Hattie, and Grace until we read about them.
In fact, because the lives that each of the three women live seem so different, if one were to read the vignettes of each chapter separately, the vignettes would lend themselves to the impression that Morgan, Hattie, and Grace were all entirely unrelated characters. Morgan's struggles with gender and identity, for example, are entirely foreign to Hattie, her great-grandmother. In the same vein, Grace's struggles as a single teenage mother bearing a "half-caste" child would have been foreign to Hattie, and certainly foreign to Morgan.
However, all three seemingly unrelated lives are in fact entirely intertwined, and this is the point of Chapter 4. Though Morgan and Hattie have disparate upbringings, disparate struggles, and disparate tastes, they both still find value in each other's presences. Even when, for instance, Hattie refuses to use Morgan's preferred pronoun of they/them/theirs, the two can find understanding and common ground as people and as beloved relatives. Morgan must compromise—by conceding that their grandmother has simply grown up in a different time—and Hattie also adapts, by staunchly defending her great-grandchild against unsupportive family members and being Megan's support system when the whole world seemed against her.
