These Is My Words: The Diary of Sarah Agnes Prine, 1881-1901

“Ulyssa is standing a little back with a big bonnet over her face. She is pale and quieter than ever she was before and any time she speaks she is pleasant and kind but there is a cloud of darkness that slips across her face just as she opens her mouth. She only says dinner’s ready or milk the cow or wash your face Alice, as if she don’t see a future any more just here and now.”

Sarah describes her friend Ulyssa Lawrence’s affect early in the chapter following her rape. Sarah shot and killed the perpetrators, but Ulyssa is not the same anymore. (Sarah does not describe Ulyssa’s personality prior to this event.) This quote provides significant foreshadowing of Ulyssa’s future condition, as Chapter 15 reveals that she has tuberculosis. She is hospitalized for the rest of the novel, with little hope for a future.

“No, Mama, I said. It ain’t Sunday. It don’t have to be Sunday for you to talk. Come out of there. Come back here, Mama. You are acting touched.”

Sarah expresses her frustration to Mama, who withdraws from reality following the deaths of Clover and Papa. Prior to these events, Mama was already a woman of few words, and after Papa dies, she nearly stops speaking altogether. She emerges from her own mind only on Sundays when she tells Bible stories to the children on the wagon train.

“Accustomed is what the scarlet velvet woman was. She was accustomed to her sorrows it said, as she had been accustomed to great riches and fine foods. We are accustomed to Indian wars and sorrows and travelling fast and folks dying.”

Page 87 from the book The Duchess of Warwick and Her Sorrow By the Sea flies into Sarah’s bonnet a little earlier in Chapter 2 (“December 11, 1881”). The page captivates her with its description of a beautiful woman dressed in scarlet velvet and gazing worriedly out to sea. Here, as Captain Elliot tells the travelers that a band of hostile Indians is pursuing them, Sarah compares her lot to that of the woman described in the book.