Jeanette is prevented from going to school, and instead her mother brings her to daily sermons at church, some of which are frightening. This story reflects Jeanette’s servitude to her mother from an early age, and the ways in which all of Jeanette’s mother’s burdens became the young Jeanette’s own. The hunchback wishes to die but has too much to complete-the woman offers to take on the hunchback’s responsibilities, and the hunchback promptly dies. One story is of a beautiful woman who comes upon a hunchback in the woods. Jeanette peppers the story of her childhood with fanciful interludes: tales of her own invention which mirror whatever she is going through at a certain point in her life. Jeanette is more curious about than haunted by the woman’s prediction and begins wondering at an early age what her future will hold. When she is very young, Jeanette meets a gypsy woman who foretells that she will never marry and will never be able to be still. Jeanette, who is adopted, was brought into her mother’s home to join her in a “tag match against the rest of the world.” Jeanette’s childhood is full of rigorous daily prayer, and she spends most of her time assisting her mother, who is very involved with their Evangelist church.

Her mother was combative, devout, and saw the world in black-and-white. When Jeanette was a girl, she writes, she lived, like most people, with her mother and father.

Oranges are not the only fruit feminism