In “Life on the Sea Islands,” Forten Grimké writes in startling detail about her surroundings: the moss hanging from the trees, the movement of small children playing around their mother, the colors of women’s dresses as they carry a pail of water atop their head. In her writing, flora and fauna are not merely part of the landscape but richly described central characters in the story. “First comes the yellow jessamine, with its perfect, gold-colored, and deliciously fragrant blossoms,” she writes. “It lights up the hedges, and completely canopies some of the trees. Of all the wild-flowers this seems to me the most beautiful and fragrant. Then we have the snow-white, but scentless Cherokee rose, with its lovely, shining leaves.” Later, “the hedges were all aglow with the brilliant scarlet berries of the cassena, and on some of the oaks we observed the mistletoe, laden with its pure white, pearl-like berries.”
But Forten Grimké’s essays are notable not only because of their lyricism but also because they reveal the cognitive dissonance that many Black Americans experienced in a society that in one breath told them how their circumstances proved that they were the lesser race and in the next told them that they could not have access to the levers of upward mobility that might change those circumstances. “One’s indignation increases against those who, North as well as South, taunt the colored race with inferiority while they themselves use every means in their power to crush and degrade them, denying them every right and privilege, closing against them every avenue of elevation and improvement,” she wrote.
After the Civil War, Forten Grimké eventually made her way to Washington, D.C., where she worked as a teacher at what became Paul Laurence Dunbar High School and then as a clerk for the U.S. Treasury. In 1878, at age 41, she married the 28-year-old Reverend Francis James Grimké, who served as pastor of the Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church, one of the prominent Black churches in the city.
Forten Grimké continued to publish in Black periodicals in addition to supporting her husband’s church. In 1892, she and luminaries such as Ida B. Wells, Anna Julia Cooper, and Mary Church Terrell established the Colored Women’s League. In 1896, Forten Grimké helped start the National Association of Colored Women. She died in Washington, D.C., in 1914 at the age of 76.
Forten Grimké’s work helped lay the groundwork for generations of Black writers who refused to separate their politics and their writing. Forten Grimké was both an ardent abolitionist and someone who could wield language with precision and beauty. She never accepted that these should be mutually exclusive, and showed other writers that they shouldn’t either.