The Kitchen House
Kathleen Grissom, 2010
Historical fiction Contemporary fiction
A white indentured child is raised by the enslaved cooks of a Virginia plantation, where the kitchen house becomes the only family she has.
Feels like melancholy, tenderness and unease. About family, identity and power.
A page from the book
How a father explains race to a child using nothing but the chickens.
Could I be your girl, too?“ I asked quickly.The large, broad-shouldered man looked away before he answered. ”Well, now,“ he said, as though he had given it deep thought, ”I sure do think I would like that.“”But,“ I said, concerned that he hadn’t noticed, ”I don’t look like your other girls.“”You mean because you white?“I nodded.”Abinia,“ he said, pointing toward the chickens, ”you look at those birds. Some of them be brown, some of them be white and black. Do you think when they little chicks, those mamas and papas care about that? Kathleen Grissom.Grissom's debut became a word-of-mouth bestseller and was followed by a sequel, Glory Over Everything, in 2016.
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Questions readers ask
- What is The Kitchen House like?
- Feels like melancholy, tenderness and unease. About family, identity and power.
- What should I read after The Kitchen House?
- If you liked The Kitchen House, try The Vanishing Half (Brit Bennett), Everything I Never Told You (Celeste Ng) and The Color Purple (Alice Walker).
A taste of the feed
Where do you look for God when prayer stops working?
God is inside you and inside everybody else. You come into the world with God. But only them that search for it inside find it. And sometimes it just manifest itself even if you not looking, or don’t know what you looking for. Trouble do it for most folks, I think. Sorrow, lord. Feeling like shit. It? I ask. Yeah, It. God ain’t a he or a she, but a It. But what do it look like? I ask. Don’t look like nothing, she say. It ain’t a picture show. It ain’t something you can look at apart from anything else, including yourself.
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Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly, but the love of a free man is never safe. There is no gift for the beloved. The lover alone possesses his gift of love. The loved one is shorn, neutralized, frozen in the glare of the lover’s inward eye.
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Sometimes it’s exhausting for me to simply walk into the house. I try and calm myself, remember that I’ve lived alone before. Sleeping by myself didn’t kill me then and will not kill me now. But this what loss has taught me of love. Our house isn’t simply empty, our home has been emptied. Love makes a place in your life, it makes a place for itself in your bed. Invisibly, it makes a place in your body, rerouting all your blood vessels, throbbing right alongside your heart. When it’s gone, nothing is whole again.
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