Sadie Lockhart grew up on the Lockhart farm, where silence was expected and usefulness passed for affection. Hidden deep in the hills, she was raised far from the world, and the Lockharts made certain no one knew she existed.
The woman told my mother the little girl in the photograph was her.
She said she’d been stolen as a child.
The people who took her dressed her that way, and she grew up never knowing where she’d come from or who her real family was. I never forgot that story. But I kept thinking about the child. What would it mean to remember being taken? What happens to a child when the adults around her give her another name, another family, another version of who she is? And what happens when that child grows up?
Those questions became the beginning of A Feed Sack Dress for Sadie.
Sadie Lockhart is fictional. Her life is not the life of the woman in my mother's care. But once I began writing, Sadie became her own person, with her own childhood, her own choices, and her own way of moving through the world.
Sadie Lockhart is fictional. Her life is not the life of the woman in my mother's care. But once I began writing, Sadie became her own person, with her own childhood, her own choices, and her own way of moving through the world.
In the novel, Sadie is stolen and kept on an isolated farm in rural Appalachia. She grows up in a place where silence and usefulness pass for affection. Her world is small, but Sadie remembers enough to know that once her life was different, better.
Sadie hadn’t forgotten everything. Something inside her remained her own. A memory. A question. The knowledge that before she was Sadie Lockhart, she’d belonged somewhere else. The story is set in the Appalachian world of The Glens, the fictional mountain range where several of my novels take place.
In Sadie’s world, readers walk the roads with her, enter the houses, sit at the tables, and feel how easily a person could disappear into a place where families lived miles apart and much of life remained private. That world also has to belong to its time.
I researched the world around Sadie closely: the work people did, the clothes they wore, the distance between farms and towns, the way news travelled, and the things a family could buy or had to make for themselves. By the time those details reach the page, they are no longer research. They are simply part of Sadie’s life.
The feed sack dress came from the photograph my mother described, and eventually it gave the novel its title. But the dress was never the story. The child wearing it was. As Sadie grows older, the question becomes larger than what was done to her.
If a child’s family, name, and history are taken from her, what remains that is still her own? Sadie survives much of her childhood by being useful. Later, that same instinct becomes part of the woman she grows into. She sees what needs doing. She helps before someone has to ask. People come to know her through the things she does, without knowing the truth of how her life began.
The reader carries that truth. Sadie’s past is always there, even when no one around her can see it. What was done to her shapes her life, but it doesn’t become the whole of who she is.
That’s one of the things I return to often in my writing. People live through circumstances they didn't choose. Families give us names. Communities give us places. Other people may decide what they think we are.
Still, somewhere inside all of that is the person who has to live the life. When I write, I don’t stand outside my characters and watch them. I step inside them. It’s much like an actor taking on a role. While I’m writing, their world becomes the one I live in.
I see what they see. I hear what they hear. I can feel the roughness of wood beneath a hand, the bumps in a road, the cold in a room. The story follows me long after I’ve stopped writing for the day. I lie awake thinking about the character, the place, what’s happened and what comes next. I stay there until the world feels real to me. I cry with them. I cry for them.
That was especially true with Sadie. The stolen child could never remain simply an idea at the beginning of a story. She had to become a whole person whose life I could enter and live beside. The farther I went with Sadie, the question became less about where she’d come from and more about who she would become. What happened to her began the story. It didn’t have to define the rest of her life.
A Feed Sack Dress for Sadie is part of Stories from The Glens, my growing collection of standalone Appalachian novels. Alice Anyway, Ivaleena, and Child H belong to that same imagined world, although each book tells a separate story.
I was grateful when A Feed Sack Dress for Sadie recently received an Honorable Mention in the 34th Annual Writer's Digest Self-Published Book Awards in Mainstream/Literary Fiction.
Awards are wonderful things for an author to receive. But they aren’t where a story begins.
Sadie began with a stolen child and a question I couldn’t put away. What happens to someone when so much of who she was has been taken from her? I followed that question until Sadie became more than the child who was stolen. She became Sadie.
Brenda K. Thompson
# # #
About the Author
No comments:
Post a Comment
Thank you for commenting