The Emancipation of Angelina Grimke by Katherine DuPre Lumpkin

Author:Katherine DuPre Lumpkin [Lumpkin, Katherine DuPre]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780807897164
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2011-01-27T00:00:00+00:00

IV. Like a Dark Cloud

“Why is it that we are not happy?. . . The fear often comes over me like a dark cloud that ... we are not fulfilling our destiny.”

ANGELINA GRIMKÉ WELD, in a letter to her husband,

in 1849, after ten years of marriage.

1.

The hidden struggle had begun even before their engagement, when Weld had confronted Angelina with her “faults.” Angelina, while wounded, had not feared for the future, for though she knew she loved this man, she then supposed her love was hopeless. Moreover, she supposed that she shared Weld’s belief in what he termed the duty of “absolute faithfulness,” the obligation, as he later put it to Sarah, “that we can not only bear to hear the whole truth of ourselves from each other but the mutual understanding that we are to hear it at all times and the whole of it to the very uttermost.”1

The controversy that had arisen over Henry C. Wright and Angelina’s accusations against the national Executive Committee,2 which had brought from Weld unsparing and caustic criticisms of her, was Angelina’s first experience with Weld’s “faithfulness” at its harshest. His words might have gone unheeded; Angelina might have remained herself and not sought to force her life into a mold not her own. But then, after many weeks, she at last had replied to the accumulated criticisms he had heaped upon her in that letter “never-to-be-forgotten,” and Weld, appalled by the rejection in her response, had burst his self-imposed bonds and declared his love. Thus their union was assured, with all that was to follow.

Once they were engaged, Angelina had told Weld that she recognized her faults and added some to his roster. She deplored her pride, how selfish she could be, how often irritable and impatient of contradiction. “Such an impatient temper, such a little soul, such a selfish heart.”3 Also it appears that she had become sensitive to what Weld had said of the dangers of ambition. She revealed this in a letter written on the evening following her first appearance in the Massachusetts State House, excited exhilaration sounding in her words. She had described how she was finally ushered to the speaker’s desk—she, a woman—and had spoken for two hours without the least interruption “to the densest and most quiet crowd I have ever spoken to before.” “I think it was good,” Angelina wrote Weld, then she suddenly grew fearful lest her spirit seem wrong, whereupon she voiced “deep humiliation of soul, for what am I?”—adding these surely fateful words: “I expect you to help me crucify the old man of sin and to crush down the first things of pride and self gratulation. O! Lord Jesus . . . purge out the old leaven and turn thy hand upon me until I am purified from dross. ... I am sorely tempted to believe I have had a triumph this afternoon, but I pray to be delivered from such sinful, presumptuous thoughts.”4 After their engagement Angelina had written Weld that the wound he had inflicted was healed by his love.

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