Character Analysis
I Once Was Lost…
We're just going along, reading Marked by Fire, when all of a sudden there's a tornado that rudely interrupts Abby's Library Award ceremony. When the students and teachers emerge from the basement of their school, what they find is a vast swath of destruction where hours earlier their town had stood. And Lily Norene finds Miss Sally:
"Look over there!" said Lily Norene. Abyssinia followed the direction of Lily's finger and saw Miss Sally hiding behind a tree. The two girls walked toward her.
Miss Sally grabbed Abby by the wrist and held on tight. The woman's eyes were two raccoon rings of terror.
"I saw it! I saw it, Abby," she said, her voice shaking.
"What, Miss Sally?" Abby asked.
"I saw the wind," she answered.
"The wind?"
"I saw the wind. Picked up the house." She halted. Abyssinia and Lily looked toward Miss Sally's house. The space where the house had been was empty.
"Lord," said Miss Sally, "it picked up the house and took it on up in the sky!" She held her ears. "It sounded like a whip whipping through the air."
"A whip, Miss Sally?" asked Abby.
"Yeah, and it almost got a hold of me."
Miss Sally tapped her head. Bushy, twisted black ropes of hair were scattered this way and that over her scalp. The two girls looked down at Miss Sally's legs. They were ashy now, as if the wind had whipped all the cold cream off them. (7.30-40)
Interestingly, although it's Lily Norene who notices Miss Sally, it's Abby whom Sally addresses as she recounts the terror of losing her home. And from this moment forward, Sally—now called Trembling Sally—never loses track of Abby again. In fact, she becomes completely obsessed with the girl, repeatedly stalking her down and trying to kill her. Yikes. Somehow, Trembling Sally comes to believe the tornado is Abby's fault, and she holds tight to this idea for years. Already in this passage we can see Sally's come unhinged; it's alluded to in her physical description.
But Now I'm Found…
Trembling Sally has it out for Abyssinia big time. She fills the girl's room with wasps while she's healing after being raped; she sneaks up on her swimming in the creek and almost succeeds at drowning her; and she sets fire to Lily Norene's house as Abyssinia and Lily's daughters sleep. Trembling Sally is a woman on a murderous mission.
And yet much as this means Abby is haunted and under threat, Sally's actions have unintended benefits. Abby goes mute after she's raped, but finds her voice once the wasps fill her room, managing to scream out for her mother. Somehow, Strong comes along at the very moment Sally is holding Abby's head under water, not simply saving his daughter's life, but reuniting with her as well. And as for the fire at Lily's house, it kills Sally, freeing Abby from her once and for all, but also enables Abby to appreciate the lineage of women she comes from and truly appreciate her own strength.
Is any of this Trembling Sally's intention? We don't think so—she really does seem to have it out for Abby. But it's an interesting twist, for sure, and while there are men who are purely destructive in this book (ahem, Brother Jacobs and Willie Johnson), Trembling Sally's path of destruction actually leaves some good in its wake. In a book that holds women in such high regard, it's hard to think this is a coincidence.