55 pages • 1 hour read
Nancy E. TurnerThese Is My Words: The Diary of Sarah Agnes Prine, 1881-1901
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1998A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 19-21Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 19 Summary: “November 24, 1892”-“December 2, 1892”
Ernest arrives in Tucson for Thanksgiving with a surprise—a new wife, Felicity. She is a gaudily dressed, Eastern city-bred lady who is given to riled nerves and unaccustomed to any kind of work. Ernest beams with pride about her, but she insults and annoys Sarah, the rest of the family, and the Maldonados.
Much of the chapter’s action centers around Felicity’s character: her unwillingness to contribute to daily tasks at the Elliots’ Tucson home, her greed and flirtatiousness, and her incompetence at the ranch. While she spends her honeymoon at Sarah and Jack’s home, Felicity expects to be waited on and takes advantage of her new in-laws’ hospitality. She spends hours primping in the bathroom, so everyone else must use the outhouse. Sarah also reports that Felicity runs Ernest ragged with her many demands. However, Ernest is oblivious to his wife’s behavior and asks Sarah to keep her house quiet and behave genteelly toward her.
After Thanksgiving, the family travels to their ranch with Ernest and Felicity in tow. Felicity’s avarice is revealed when they arrive. Sarah learns that before they were married, Ernest deceived Felicity about owning shares in Albert’s farm and Sarah and Jack’s ranch. Interested in cashing in those shares and buying more, Felicity badgers Sarah about buying part of her ranch on credit. Even when Jack refuses, Felicity insists to Sarah that she will stay on at the ranch and cook for the hired men. Sarah tells her this help is not needed, but when Felicity continues to push the issue, Sarah decides to teach her a lesson. At Sarah’s instruction, two of the hired men go with Felicity to a field, where she is directed to castrate, brand, and cauterize the horns of some bulls. As these chores are demonstrated, Felicity faints twice. Upon waking, she runs to the house and demands Ernest pack her things; she’s ready to leave the ranch for good.
Chapter 20 Summary: “December 8,1892”-“January 22, 1896”
Contrasting with the dark comedy of Chapter 19, Chapter 20 brings significant tragedy and hardship into Sarah’s life. Early in the chapter, Sarah reports that Adelita gave birth; however, soon after, she murdered her infant daughter and was shot by Lockwood. He appears at the Elliots’ house one evening and offers a partial confession but disappears into the night. Jack is overwrought by his colleague’s situation but reports Lockwood to the marshal.
Sarah loses her fifth baby during childbirth. The baby boy is born two months early and is stillborn. Her friend Mrs. Page claims the stress from Lockwood’s situation may have been the cause, but her doctor insists this is only an old wives’ tale. Either way, the loss of their child saddens Sarah, as she looked forward to his arrival.
Sarah also begins having terrifying nightmares in this chapter, but she does not disclose the details of these recurring dreams. Some context clues indicate the nightmares may involve Jack or her children, as she reverts to her old habit of worrying about Jack’s safety, especially when he leaves to assist the marshal in rounding up some train robbers. While Jack is away, their youngest daughter falls ill with scarlet fever, and she dies before his return. When Jack returns, he is distraught over the loss of Suzanne and decides to quit the army for good.
Jack and Sarah are both changed as a result of this sudden spate of tragedy. Sarah reports not caring about most things in which she is usually interested. She longs for the earlier days of her marriage when she and Jack were in love and the future looked bright. At the end of the chapter, Jack receives a letter from the army inviting him to return as a post commander in Wyoming; although Sarah pushes the subject, he insists he is not interested.
Chapter 21 Summary: “March 10, 1900”-“June 30, 1901”
The chapter opens with a letter from Ernest, who Sarah hasn’t seen since Thanksgiving four years ago. He writes of women’s health issues that Felicity is facing and urges his sister to write to her. Sarah decides she will write to Felicity with advice but will not encourage her to visit. Savannah brings her children for a visit, and Sarah realizes her friend and sister-in-law is now a mother of six. Sarah, on the other hand, has not had any more children since losing Suzanne. Savannah loves her family but admits she is tired of having children, and Sarah gives her advice about birth control—a “Lady’s Preventative” that she offers to buy for her.
There is a fire at the courthouse in town, and Jack, now fire chief, is at the scene. When he rushes into the building to save what he believes is a crying baby, he is gravely injured. One of his colleagues races Sarah to the hospital where Jack is being treated; their children follow in the family buggy. Jack’s injuries are serious, and he tells the family he will have to leave again. Jack dies of his injuries in the hospital, and Sarah is devastated.
Chess comes to Tucson with plans to permanently live with Sarah and her now nearly grown children. Following Jack’s funeral, she decides she will move her family and Chess back out to the ranch. Everyone is happy about this relocation except April, who hates the ranch. On the day of their planned move, Sarah finds a note from April saying she ran off to marry Morris Winegold. Sarah, Chess, Charles, and Gilbert move to the ranch, and Sarah has Suzanne’s and Jack’s coffins reinterred on the property. The novel closes with Sarah watching the stars, and she names one for Jack.
Chapters 19-21 Analysis
In this section of the novel, Sarah’s character changes again, if subtly, in the face of significant hardship: Her older brother marries a woman who comes between them, two of her children and her husband die, and April runs away. Sarah worries about the future now, rather than looking forward to it. She remains constant for her friends and family, offering advice to Savannah, writing to Felicity at Ernest’s request, and taking in Chess after Jack’s death; however, the tone and frequency of her diary entries nevertheless shifts. Now in her late thirties, Sarah becomes nostalgic for the earlier days of her marriage, when things were much more difficult but—at least in retrospect—happier and more hopeful. At the opening of Chapter 21, for instance, after a four-year hiatus from writing in her diary, she reports that she “just can’t bear the thought” of keeping regular entries anymore (370). While her closing entries do not dwell on past events, her tone reads as disinterested in recording her present circumstances.
Although Sarah grew and matured significantly during the prior section of the novel, the difficulties she faces in this section highlight the limitations of that maturation and increased wisdom. While she is now the one who offers advice to others, she nevertheless faces circumstances for which all her life’s wisdom could not prepare her. Mama tells Sarah that her lack of interest in things is caused by the death of Suzanne; Mama lost Clover in Chapter 1 and attests that a parent is “never the same after a child dies” (370). However, Sarah does not directly admit that these words reflect her experience; instead, her entries demonstrate an inability to articulate her feelings about Suzanne’s death. She notes that the event seems to have changed Jack, who appears “haunted and dead and pained all at once” (363), but Sarah registers herself as only “hollow”—a feeling she also reported during her unhappy marriage to Jimmy Reed. In fact, little about Suzanne appears in Sarah’s diary following her death due to the inarticulable pain she feels as a result of this loss.
During Chapters 20 and 21, the tone and voice of Sarah’s writing shift. In earlier sections, she wrote expressly of her experiences and emotions around life’s circumstances, but near the end of her diary entries, her writing turns toward simpler reportage of events and less emotional acknowledgment of them. This shift begins with the stillbirth of her fifth child and builds through Jack’s death to the end of the novel. These tonal changes and implied inarticulacy do not reflect Sarah’s being in denial, as in earlier chapters concerning her feelings for Jack. Rather, this change in tone and voice reflects that Sarah is heavy-laden with life’s tragedies. She has faced great difficulty in her life up to this point, but the changes in her writing reflect her difficulty in processing the loss of a husband and children. For example, as was true of her own experience of losing Clover, she notes that following Suzanne’s death, April and the boys moved forward. However, as a mother, she finds she cannot do the same.
Similarly, after the death of Jack, Sarah cannot move on as she did following the death of Papa in Chapter 1. After Jack’s funeral, she is angry at him for leaving again, but she notes she will speak to Mama about these feelings because “[i]t isn’t right to feel this way” (380). However, her diary does not include an entry that relays this conversation with Mama. Instead, much of the rest of the novel centers on her sadness and her worries about April running away and Mason and Mama’s advancing age. She mentions Jack again by name only on the novel’s final page, as she looks at the stars—as they did in their courtship—and names one for him. The death of Jack also marks the end of Sarah’s entries; the text does not reveal whether this means Sarah lost her interest in writing with the loss of her husband. Thus, the novel closes on a somber note, leaving unresolved the question of how Sarah will shoulder the loss of the love of her life.
