Cinderella
Liberator
Rebecca Solnit
•
with illustrations by
Arthur Rackham
Text © 2019 Rebecca Solnit
Illustrations by Arthur Rackham
Published in 2019 by Haymarket Books
P.O. Box 180165, Chicago, IL 60618
www.haymarketbooks.org
ISBN: 978-1-64259-119-4
Haymarket Books offers discounts for organizations
and schools for orders of ten copies or more.
Cover design by Abby Weintraub. Book design
by Abby Weintraub and Rachel Cohen.
Typeset in William Maxwell and 14pt Hoefler Text.
Illustrations based on Arthur Rackham’s
paintings appearing in the 1919 edition of
Cinderella and the 1920 edition of Sleeping Beauty,
both published by William Heineman, London,
and J. B. Lippincott Co., Philadelphia.
1
The Cinders
Once upon a time there was a girl named Cinderella. She was called Cinderella because she slept by the fireplace in the kitchen of a great house and sometimes the cinders burned holes in her clothes. (A cinder is another
name for a red-hot bit of wood from the fire.) Her clothes were old and worn and tattered.
She slept there because she was in the kitchen cooking and washing all day and because she did not have a bedroom. She did kitchen work all day because her stepmother made her do it. Her stepmother made her do it all, because even though there was plenty for everyone, and plenty of people to do the work, her stepmother believed there was not enough for everyone. And she wanted lots for her own two daughters, Pearlita and Paloma. (Nobody asked what Cinderella or Pearlita or Paloma wanted.)
Sometimes Cinderella was sad and wanted to go play with other children. Sometimes she was happy to go to the market to buy eggs from the chicken lady and apples from the apple farmer and milk from the dairy farmer. Sometimes she liked making cakes with the apples and the milk and the eggs and flour from the wheat farmer. Sometimes she wanted to run away, but she was not sure where to go. Sometimes she was tired.
Cinderella became a good cook. She got to know everyone in the marketplace. She grew strong and capable. Pearlita and Paloma sat upstairs trying on clothes and arranging their hair and not going out, because the people in the town were not fancy enough for them, according to their mother.
2
DRESSES and HORSES
And then one day came the news that the king’s son, Prince Nevermind, was holding a great ball, which is what they called dance parties in those days. The stepmother made sure that Pearlita and Paloma were invited, and they spent days trying on clothes and ordering dressmakers to make them new dresses out of satin and velvet and glitter and planning how to put up their hair and stick it full of jewels and ornaments and artificial flowers.
Cinderella came upstairs to bring them some ginger cookies and saw all the piles of jewels and all the mirrors and all the fabric and all the fuss. Pearlita was doing her best to pile her hair as high as hair could go. She said that, surely, having the tallest hair in the world would make you the most beautiful woman, and being the most beautiful would make you the happiest.
Paloma was sewing extra bows onto her dress, because she thought that, surely, having the fanciest dress in the world would make you the most beautiful woman in the world, and being the most beautiful would make you the happiest. They weren’t very happy, because they were worried that someone might have higher hair or more bows than they did. Which, probably, someone did. Usually someone does.
But there isn’t actually a most beautiful person in the world, because there are so many kinds of beauty. Some people love roundness and softness, and other people love sharp edges and strong muscles. Some people like thick hair like a lion’s mane, and other people like thin hair that pours down like an inky waterfall, and some people love someone so much they forget what they look like. Some people think the night sky full of stars at midnight is the most beautiful thing imaginable, some people think it’s a forest in snow, and some people . . . Well, there are a lot of people with a lot of ideas about beauty. And love. When you love someone a lot, they just look like love.
Cinderella wished she could go to the ball, but she had nothing to wear aside from her everyday dress with the ashes and the patches and the holes. And she had not been invited.
There is nothing worse than not being invited to the party.
She went upstairs on the great day and helped Pearlita and Paloma pile up their hair with ornaments and put on their fancy dresses, which were so long and tight they couldn’t have run after a dog or climbed a fence. They were not sure they were beautiful, but they were sure that being beautiful would make them happy.
Off to the ball they went, in the family coach pulled by the family horses, and down went Cinderella to the kitchen, which was very quiet. She sat by the fire, feeling very sad and alone and staring into the fire, and cried three tears. It was so quiet you could hear each tear fall into the ashes with a tiny splash.
I wish someone would help me, she said out loud in the quiet.
Suddenly there was a knock at the kitchen door. She opened the big creaky door, and a little blue woman was standing on the doorstep. She had a big skirt, and a big nose, and a pointed hat, and hands like knobby blue twigs, and she was holding a stick in those knobby hands.
May I help you? asked Cinderella, and the little blue woman said, I came to help you! I am your fairy godmother. You wish to go to the ball at the castle; is that so?
Yes, said Cinderella.
And then you shall go, said the fairy godmother, whose voice sounded like milk pouring into a glass and the wings
of the pigeons.
She said, You need a ride. Run into the pumpkin patch and get a pumpkin. Cinderella opened the kitchen door as she was told and ran out into the night and picked a big orange pumpkin from the garden, as heavy
as she could lift.
The fairy godmother waved her wand, and the pumpkin became a glass coach that glittered in the moonlight—for it was a full moon night, and moonlight made the town look like a magical blue world of blue light and darkness like black velvet. The moon was reflected in the glass coach.
Oh, sighed Cinderella, and then she thought, But you can’t have a coach without horses. It was as if her godmother heard her thoughts. Get me six mice from the trap, she said, and Cinderella wondered what she had in mind.
The trap was just a box that mice walked into when they smelled cheese inside, but they couldn’t get out until Cinderella let them out. Cinderella would walk down to the river with the box of mice and let them go free where they couldn’t nibble at the cakes and loaves she baked. This time she opened it at the kitchen door. The fairy godmother waved her blue arm, and the tiny legs and round bodies and long hairless tails of the mice began to change.
Their legs and their necks grew long, the dainty little mouse feet with their tiny toes became horses’ hard hooves, their coats became shiny instead of soft, and their round backs arched. They shivered and shouted and suddenly six dapple-gray horses stood there, with black manes and tails like black rivers, black muzzles as soft as velvet, and the same round black eyes and pricked-up ears the mice had, but no mouse whiskers. They were lively horses, and they stamped and snorted and switched their tails and tossed their heads, ready to go.
Cinderella was astonished. Now, said the fairy godmother: We need a coachwoman.
I will get the rat trap, said Cinderella. There w
as one big gray rat in it, and then with another wave of the same blue arm with the same black stick, the rat was no longer a rat. It was a coachwoman with gray curls in a beautiful white velvet suit with a velvet hat, who bowed to her and said, Good evening, young lady.
Now, said the fairy, six lizards from the garden, and when Cinderella brought them back in a flower pot, there was another wave of the wand, and six footwomen stood before her, in silver satin pants and jackets, and the footwomen immediately began hitching up the horses.
Oh my, said Cinderella. Did the lizards want to be footwomen? (Footwomen stand at the front and the back of the coach and make it look very important and busy. They open doors and deliver letters and sometimes blow a little gold trumpet to announce your arrival or hold the horses’ reins when the coach stops.)
For tonight, said the fairy godmother, they are here to help you, because you have always been kind to the mice and the rats and never put out poison for them or traps that hurt them, and you have always smiled and said hello to the lizards when you went out to pick some lettuce or some raspberries.
The coach is amazing. But I can’t go in my rags, said Cinderella.
The fairy godmother said, What rags? and waved her stick, which was a magic wand, and giggled. Sometimes, being a blue-skinned fairy godmother was fun.
Cinderella looked down, and her patched, worn work dress had
become a beautiful ballgown embroidered with birds and trees and crystals that looked like raindrops or tears. It was made out of silk and it sounded like water when she moved, and it looked like the sky at the end of the day, blue and then deeper blue and then so blue it was almost black, with pale clouds drifting by.
She looked like a girl who was evening, and an evening that had
become a girl.
They call some dresses evening gowns, but this dress really was one, with clouds and the first stars coming out and a crescent moon somewhere in there, and a few birds flying across the hem, black and shaped like the letter W, in all that blue. The stars sparkled and the fabric swished when she moved.
I love this part of my job, said the fairy godmother and giggled again.
Oh, said Cinderella, as she was almost ready to get into the coach in her beautiful dress, I am still barefoot.
One more wave of the wand, another giggle, and her dirty bare feet were clean, and she was wearing slippers that, like the coach, were made of deep-blue glass. They were not very comfortable and made a lot of noise when she walked on hard floors or stones, but looked very special indeed.
Away they went—the six horses yearning to gallop, the coachwoman keeping them at a lively trot—through the town at night, hooves clattering on cobblestones, to the castle.
No one questioned who the late guest was when she pulled up in such a fabulous coach led by such a fine team of horses, and she went into the ball, and she danced—for she had learned to dance in the market square at the harvest festival and by watching her stepsisters’ dancing lessons and sometimes dancing about the kitchen by herself when she was at work or dancing with the boy who delivered the mail or the girl who delivered the newspaper when they knocked on the kitchen door.
She danced with so many people to the beautiful music of three drums, four tubas, five trumpets, six violins, seven harps, eight guitars, and nine flutes, round and round the ballroom, all the people in dresses twirling around, so that if you saw them from above, they looked like whirling flowers in full bloom. The people in satin jackets and velvet breeches and brocade hats looked like flowers that had not yet bloomed but were still folded up like buds.
And then she danced with the prince, round and round and round some more.
Prince Nevermind had very nice satin trousers and a very nice smile, and they talked a little until he asked her who she was. She was afraid he might laugh at her or send her away in front of everybody, and she ran away before that could happen. That is, she sent herself away. As she ran, her shoes came off, and she grabbed one but left the other behind her on the ballroom floor. She did not want to tell him she was Cinderella from the kitchen in the town below the castle.
She ran out barefoot into the night, and jumped into her coach, and the coachwoman called out to the horses and the footwomen jumped up, and the horses galloped off with snorts and clattering hooves, and they were home before she knew it.
3
LIZARDS
The blue fairy godmother opened the door, and asked her if she’d had a good time, and she said Yes, and No, and It was very interesting to see all the fancy clothes and the fancy plates with fancy cakes and the fancy mirrors and the fancy lights. And then she said, It was even more interesting to see lizards become footwomen and mice become horses. The fairy godmother replied that true magic is to help each thing become its best and most free self, and then she asked the horses if they wanted to be horses.
Five of the horses said, in horse language, which fairy godmothers speak and most of us do not, that they loved running through the night and being afraid of nothing and bigger than almost everyone. The sixth horse said she’d had a lot of fun but she had mice children at home and wanted to get back to them. The fairy godmother nodded in understanding, and suddenly the sixth horse shrank, and lost its mane, and its shaggy tail became a pink tail with a fine fuzz like velvet. And there she was: a tiny gray mouse with pink feet, running back to her tinier pink children in the nest in the wall to tell them all about the enchantment that had made her a horse for a night.
And then the lizards said, in the quiet language of lizards, that nothing was better than being a lizard, being able to run up walls and to lie in the sun on warm days and to snap up flies in the garden
and never worry about anything except owls and crows,
and though they loved wearing silver satin,
and going to parties,
and they had been happy to help Cinderella,
and they would tell all their lizard friends about it, they would rather be lizards again. And suddenly they were, running off toward the garden on their little lizard legs, trailing long lizard tails, the moon making the scales on their lean lizard bodies shine like silver.
The coachwoman said she would be happy to stay a coachwoman, for her rat children had grown up and gone out into the world, and though she’d had many adventures as a rat, there were more adventures she could have as a coachwoman. And so she stayed in her velvet suit, and she led the horses off to the stable and gave them each a nice bucket of oats.
And Cinderella: she looked down at herself and said, I have to make breakfast in a few hours, and I can’t in this beautiful dress; I will spill on it; it will catch fire; it will be in the way. Suddenly she was all alone in her old patched dress, in which she could do anything, play with the dogs, climb the walnut trees, make the messiest cakes, garden where the lizards were basking in the sun. She might have thought she had imagined it all, but there was one blue glass slipper in her pocket, which she put in the kitchen drawer.
4
FRIENDS
Prince Nevermind was a very polite person, and he was sad he had frightened his guest and she had lost her shoe. He had asked and asked at the party, but no one knew her name or where she lived, so the next day he got on his own fine black mare and rode about knocking on doors, asking if the person who wore that shoe was there.
No, said the people in the big brick house by the river, and
No, said the people in the gray mansion on the hill, and
No, said the people in the tower next to the woods, and
No, said the farmer whose golden wheat fields spread on and on
beyond her fine farmhouse, and
No, said the clockmaker who lived in his little house full of ticking clocks, and
No, said the painter in the house full of pictures of animals and places you only see in dreams (and her paintings), and
No, said the dancing teacher in their house full of music, and
No, said the blacksmith as she worked iron at her forge, and
No, said the bird doctor as he fixed a sparrow’s wing,
and then the prince came to Cinderella’s house.
Her stepmother answered the door and, greedy to see her daughters become friends with a prince, said that maybe the lost shoe was theirs. So the prince came into the parlor, and sat on the golden sofa, and one sister and then the other sister tried on the shoe, but their feet were too small, because when you sit at home all day and never run down to the river or carry home a full basket from the market, your feet don’t grow strong and sturdy as they should.
Cinderella was bringing up the tea and the cake she had just baked when she saw the prince. Suddenly she was tired of so many things, of being in the kitchen, of not being at the table, of feeling like she was less important than her stepsisters, of not being invited to parties.
It is my shoe, she said. Everyone looked at her in surprise.
The prince handed it to her, and she pulled the other shoe out of her pocket (because all good dresses have big pockets), and put on the glass slippers, which had not disappeared when her dress had turned back into her everyday dress. Sometimes fairy godmothers forget a detail or two.
The two sisters ran out of the room in a tantrum—or two tantrums, one for each of them—because they believed they needed to be more important than their stepsister. Their mother had told them there was not enough for everybody and they needed to take things from other people to have enough for themselves. Which was, by the way, not true.
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