Ragtime

by

E. L. Doctorow

Sarah is the girlfriend of Coalhouse Walker Jr. The couple has a baby together. A poor Black girl whose personal history never comes to light, she attempts to abandon her baby after he is born in New Rochelle. Subsequently Mother shelters Sarah and her child. In the house, Sarah and Younger Brother become friends because they are about the same age. Sarah is a woman of few words but strong convictions. When Coalhouse begins visiting her at the family’s home, it takes several weeks until she’s certain enough of his devotion to agree to see him. She is a kindly and innocent person who struggles to understand the inhumanity around her. When Coalhouse postpones their wedding while trying to get redress for his mistreatment at the hands of Willie Conklin, Sarah tries to ask the Vice-President for help, but she is severely injured by Secret Service agents in the process. She succumbs to pneumonia that develops from these injuries.

Sarah Quotes in Ragtime

The Ragtime quotes below are all either spoken by Sarah or refer to Sarah . 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:
The American Dream Theme Icon
).
Chapter 9 Quotes

So the young black woman and her child were installed in a room on the top floor. Mother made numbers of phone calls. She cancelled her service league meeting. She walked back and forth in the parlor. She was very agitated. She felt keenly her husband’s absence and condemned herself for so readily endorsing his travels. There was no way to communicate with him any of the problems and concerns of her life. She would not hear from him till the following summer. She stared at the ceiling as if to see through it. the Negro girl and her baby had carried into the house a sense of misfortune, chaos, and now this feeling resided here like some sort of contamination. She was frightened.

Related Characters: Coalhouse Walker Jr. , Father, Mother, Sarah , Baby (Coalhouse Walker III)
Page Number: 71
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 14 Quotes

It was apparent to them both that this time he’d stayed away too long. Downstairs Birgit put a record on the Victrola, wound the rank and sat in the parlor smoking a cigarette and listening […] She was doing what she could to lose her place. She was no longer efficient or respectful. Mother marked this change to the arrival of the colored girl. Father related it to the degrees of turn in the moral planet. He saw it everywhere, this new season, and it bewildered him. At his office he was told that the seamstresses in the flag department had joined a New York union. He put on clothes from his closet that ballooned from him as shapeless as the furs he had worn for a year.

Related Characters: Father, Mother, Sarah , Robert Peary
Page Number: 110
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 25 Quotes

Nobody knew Sarah’s last name or thought to ask. Where had she been born, and where had she lived, this impoverished uneducated black girl with such absolute conviction of the way human beings ought to conduct their lives? In the few weeks of her happiness, between that time she accepted Coalhouse’s proposal and the first fears that her marriage would never happen, she had been transformed to the point of having a new, different face. Grief and anger had been a kind of physical pathology masking her true looks. Mother was awed by her beauty. She laughed and spoke in a mellifluous voice. […] She laughed in joy of her own being. Her happiness flowed in the milk of her breasts and her baby grew quickly. […] She was a girl of perhaps eighteen or nineteen years, now satisfied that the circumstances of life gave reason to live.

Related Characters: Coalhouse Walker Jr. , Father, Mother, Sarah , Baby (Coalhouse Walker III)
Page Number: 187
Explanation and Analysis:
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Ragtime PDF

Sarah Quotes in Ragtime

The Ragtime quotes below are all either spoken by Sarah or refer to Sarah . 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:
The American Dream Theme Icon
).
Chapter 9 Quotes

So the young black woman and her child were installed in a room on the top floor. Mother made numbers of phone calls. She cancelled her service league meeting. She walked back and forth in the parlor. She was very agitated. She felt keenly her husband’s absence and condemned herself for so readily endorsing his travels. There was no way to communicate with him any of the problems and concerns of her life. She would not hear from him till the following summer. She stared at the ceiling as if to see through it. the Negro girl and her baby had carried into the house a sense of misfortune, chaos, and now this feeling resided here like some sort of contamination. She was frightened.

Related Characters: Coalhouse Walker Jr. , Father, Mother, Sarah , Baby (Coalhouse Walker III)
Page Number: 71
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 14 Quotes

It was apparent to them both that this time he’d stayed away too long. Downstairs Birgit put a record on the Victrola, wound the rank and sat in the parlor smoking a cigarette and listening […] She was doing what she could to lose her place. She was no longer efficient or respectful. Mother marked this change to the arrival of the colored girl. Father related it to the degrees of turn in the moral planet. He saw it everywhere, this new season, and it bewildered him. At his office he was told that the seamstresses in the flag department had joined a New York union. He put on clothes from his closet that ballooned from him as shapeless as the furs he had worn for a year.

Related Characters: Father, Mother, Sarah , Robert Peary
Page Number: 110
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 25 Quotes

Nobody knew Sarah’s last name or thought to ask. Where had she been born, and where had she lived, this impoverished uneducated black girl with such absolute conviction of the way human beings ought to conduct their lives? In the few weeks of her happiness, between that time she accepted Coalhouse’s proposal and the first fears that her marriage would never happen, she had been transformed to the point of having a new, different face. Grief and anger had been a kind of physical pathology masking her true looks. Mother was awed by her beauty. She laughed and spoke in a mellifluous voice. […] She laughed in joy of her own being. Her happiness flowed in the milk of her breasts and her baby grew quickly. […] She was a girl of perhaps eighteen or nineteen years, now satisfied that the circumstances of life gave reason to live.

Related Characters: Coalhouse Walker Jr. , Father, Mother, Sarah , Baby (Coalhouse Walker III)
Page Number: 187
Explanation and Analysis: