“Angelina Grimké Ruins Her Clothes”
Book Excerpt: Printer’s Fist
Angelina Grimké Ruins Her Clothes
CHARLESTON, 1829
Red cashmere shawl and pink bonnet roses,
shoe-bows and cape fringes, cap feathers and netting,
beaded bags and pearl glove-buttons —
it’s the kitchen scissors for you all, and all
the fashionable ladies of Charleston
can stare at one of their own gone Quaker drab.
Hauling everything from her closets,
Angelina strips fripperies as one convicted.
No more jonquil-colored muslin for morning wear,
no more garnet velvet for the opera. No more opera.
Her colors now are gray or black or white, although
they make her look washed out. Might as well be
in mourning. Her mother rings the bell
for the second course, shaking her curls,
adjusting her lace fan and the rest of her laces,
cutting her eyes at her youngest daughter. Never pretty
anyway, now she’s set herself at such
a disadvantage, wearing that absurd bonnet
that doesn’t flatter anyone.
On the better streets of Charleston,
Angelina’s old friends giggle behind their gloves —
green or yellow, embroidered or leather —
at her black skirts, too stiff to swish,
and unmemorable collar, about as elegant
as a cornmeal bag, as she clunks in her boots
down the promenade, past the Episcopal church,
on her way to the meetinghouse, lingering
by the workhouse, her wool gloves wadded
in her fist. Later, walking through the market,
she watches enslaved women in linsey-woolsey
sent out to shop for the night’s supper they’ll fix
for mistresses who will, by eight o’ clock, have changed
into how many dresses that day? She wants
to say something, doesn’t. She thinks
of her mother’s closets, her mother
rumpling her expertly pressed and endless
silk dressing-gowns the color of sugar,
her mother ringing for cups of milky tea
Angelina wishes she would let her bring —
her mother, who scolded her the one time she tried.
The tea is William’s business, not yours.
Her mother, with her dresses, and her girls
to lace her into them, then unlace her.
Copyright © 2026 by Melissa Range. Excerpted from Printer’s Fist (Vanderbilt University Press). Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.
Melissa Range is the author of Scriptorium, winner of the 2015 National Poetry Series competition, and Horse and Rider, a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Prize. Her recent poems have appeared in Ecotone, The Hopkins Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Nation, and Ploughshares. Originally from East Tennessee, she teaches creative writing and American literature at Lawrence University in Wisconsin.
