Sisters and Rebels by Jacquelyn Dowd Hall

Author:Jacquelyn Dowd Hall
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Epub3
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

It was the time of my deepest despair. I had called on reason. It didn’t help. I had called on our philosophy of materialism. It had only left me weak and empty. Then I said out loud “If there is a God, please help me.” And instantly, in the most amazing way a wonderful peace came to me. . . . Loving arms were supporting me, holding me up. There was even joy, as if someone said: “Don’t be afraid. I am here.” And I went to sleep and slept for hours.37

But when she awoke, she was again overcome by the feeling of misery and unworthiness the sinner feels upon recognizing the depths of her fall from grace. “I was homesick” for that experience of God’s grace, “but I couldn’t get it back again.”38

She was also homesick for the family she had lost and the region she had left behind. She fled to Asheville to stay with her widowed sister Elizabeth, who was struggling to manage her late husband’s businesses and maintain her modest law practice but had succeeded in putting all four of her children through college and returning to her civic and theatrical pursuits. With their youngest brother, Bryan, the two sisters made what Elizabeth called “a little trip, such as the ancient Chinese make, to the tombs of our ancestors in Georgia! Not to worship, but to learn and to see; to obtain facts . . . that we may each use in different ways.” Bryan added to his store of genealogical knowledge; Elizabeth interviewed relatives and wrote rapturously about antebellum homes; Grace sought information about her father’s legal mentor Alexander Stephens, vice-president of the Confederacy. “It was an interesting and delightful trip,” according to Elizabeth; “we like each other better for it!” As Grace remembered it, however, the trip did not go well: Elizabeth “fussed at me all the time. . . . She thought the thing she had to do was to teach me to get out of Communism,” a lesson that, for all her confusion and discontent, she was still not fully prepared to accept.39

On December 7, 1941, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, and a day later the United States entered World War II. A few months after that, Michael Intrator finally left Kok-I House for good. By 1942, he had settled in Florida, obtained a divorce, and married a woman he had met in New York. Lost and bereft—more so, by her account, than she had ever been before—Grace left her beloved flat and found lodging at Henry Street Settlement, which by then had devolved from a major bastion of female Progressivism into a service center for the poor. She was “practically penniless,” “but the greater hardship consisted in her loneliness and uncertainty about the purpose and direction of her life.”40

Then, one day, she remembered something her oldest sister had said. Elizabeth was an admirer of the Oxford Group (renamed Moral Re-Armament in 1938), which she described as “a very wonderful movement for Christianity, that will do more toward combating Communism, which has no religion, than anything I know of.

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