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The Greenfields Farmhouse symbolizes land, legacy, and power. The Greenfields Farmhouse is a powerful source of empowerment, identity, and legacy for Hattie. It’s kept her young, powerful, and independent even in her later years, illustrating the physical benefits of privilege of land ownership. It’s a place where she, a Black woman, has carved out power within a white, patriarchal English society as represented by the predominately white village where her farmhouse sits. Hattie’s husband Slim, an African American man from Georgia, emphasizes the importance of land ownership when he recounts his family’s experience as sharecroppers in the wake of the broken promise of 40 acres and a mule that was meant to be a financial reparation in a post-slavery society. His co-ownership of the farm is therefore a significant and exciting moment for him. When Hattie and Slim eventually discover that the farm was built with blood money from her ancestors’ involvement in the slave trade, Slim is outraged. Hattie is too, but she also sees their co-ownership of the farm as a roundabout sort of reparations. Hattie’s deep love for the farm and all it represents is why she is intent on honoring her ancestors’ wishes that it stay in the family, and it’s also why she chooses Morgan as her heir. Hattie’s own children married into white families. Leaving the farm to Morgan and their partner, Bibi, not only keeps the farm in Black hands, but it also symbolically allows Hattie to pass down the empowerment of land ownership to future generations of Black people. What’s more, Hattie suggests that Morgan and Bibi turn the farm into a refuge for the transgender community, which means the land would continue to serve as a site of empowerment those pushed to the margins by a still patriarchal and white-supremacist England. Ultimately, Hattie’s decision about the future of Greenfields symbolizes her hope for a future when race, gender, and class no longer limit who owns land and has access to the empowerment that comes with it.
The Greenfields Farmhouse Quotes in Girl, Woman, Other
The Girl, Woman, Other quotes below all refer to the symbol of The Greenfields Farmhouse. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 4: Hattie
Quotes
after Joseph died, Slim broke open an old library cabinet when he couldn’t find the keys, said that as the man of the house he needed to know what was in it
he found old ledgers that recorded the captain’s lucrative business as a slave runner, exchanging slaves from Africa for sugar in the West Indies
came charging like a lunatic into the kitchen where she was cooking and had a go at her for keeping such a wicked family secret from him
she didn’t know, she told him, was as upset as he was, the cabinet had been locked her entire life, her father told her important documents were inside and never go near it
she calmed Slim down, they talked it through
it’s not me or my Pa who’s personally responsible, Slim, she said, trying to mollify her husband, no you co-own the spoils with me
she wrapped her long arms around his waist from behind
it’s come full circle, hasn’t it?
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The Greenfields Farmhouse Symbol Timeline in Girl, Woman, Other
The timeline below shows where the symbol The Greenfields Farmhouse appears in Girl, Woman, Other. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 4: Megan/Morgan
...and harmonious routine. Morgan spends every other weekend with GG who still lives on her farm despite being 93. GG doesn’t fully understand Morgan’s gender identity but is leaving the farm...
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Chapter 4: Hattie
Hattie doesn’t want her children to inherit the farmhouse just to sell it off to foreign investors. If they ever try to force her...
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...hire cheap foreign labor because she feels loyal to the locals, and she blames her farm’s decline on globalization and the influx of foreign produce. She recently voted for England to...
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...the New Year. She loves when they’re around because they genuinely like her and the farm. Hattie remembers that Morgan always loved spending summers on the farm and that’d she’d known...
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...her own son. Hattie thinks her children would be healthier if they hadn’t left the farm where the work would’ve kept them fit and young like her. Because they abandoned her...
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...16 and 17 respectively, they declared that they were done living and working on the farm and were leaving forever. They left for London on the expensive motorbike Hattie and Slim...
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Back on the farm, Hattie and Slim felt strange in their newly empty house and worried about their kids...
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...without makeup and the other girls, feeling bad for her because she lives on a farm, help her put some on. Every girl is paired up on the dancefloor, so unlike...
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Slim always admired Hattie’s strength, and she kept their farm running into her 80s. Over the last decade the farm has fallen into disrepair. The...
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...time that they all—her, Slim, the kids, and her parents— lived and worked on the farm together. Hattie remembers that her mother was tortured by the mystery of her father, “the...
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The farm has been in Hattie’s family since 1806. Her ancestor, Captain Linnaeus Rydendale, who’d started out...
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Chapter 4: Grace
...World War I unscathed, unlike many of his compatriots. He returned home to his family farm, Greenfields, and found it in disrepair. His father had gone senile and wandered the fields...
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Greenfields farmhouse was dirty and dark compared to the estate Grace had grown used to living...
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...Grace any time to grieve because he’s desperate for an heir to the 120-year-old family farm. Grace suddenly understands how much the farm means to him as his way of honoring...
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...wanted. Hattie and Joseph were close, too, and he let her follow him around the farm, teaching her to work and not caring that she was a girl. Grace wishes her...
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Epilogue
...Two hours later they arrive in a deserted village and head up a hill to Greenfields. Penelope notices that the entire place looks wild and rundown. She gets out of the...
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