She was just a girl when she began, a girl with tangled black hair and ink-smudged fists. The farm where she lived grew mud and broken dreams. Stiff straw filled the mattresses. In January, the water froze in the bucket and feet turned the color of eggplants. The farmhouse where she was born was a stick of a place with a few sticks of furniture and BOOKS lining the kitchen walls. A framed portrait of Julius Caesar frowned down on the butter churn.

“Ma-ma? Da-da?” inquired the child. “Ma-ma? I hungwy. Gimme something to eat—baby’s very hungwy!”

The mother sighed and gazed through the shutters at whirling snow. Snow and snow and snow scoured the house and cracked every nail with rust. The mother was skinny; the chickens’ cries were skinny; the pantry was skinny. The children were skinny. Everything was skinny except the father’s imagination.

The baby’s name was Sarabeth Wheatley, the place was Morningville, New Hampshire. The year was 1816. The children’s mouths were like gaping baby birds. They hopped on their frostbitten feet and would not learn their lessons. Because their father, Daniel Wheatly, ran a “school” in their farmhouse, all the firewood burned in his study, leaving the other rooms like ice boxes.

“Ma-ma! Ma-ma! Give baby something to eat!”

The farmer’s boy burst through the barnyard gates and caught Baby Sarabeth fleeing on her stubby little toddler legs. Fleeing across snowy fields, fleeing toward the empty dirt road, she howled that she was hungry.

“Ahoy! Stop it this instant, you naughty thing!” The farmer’s boy, a big-nosed and stupid youth known as Lewie, lashed her with the riding whip and stuck her baby head under the icy pump until her cries died away. Then he ran off and left her unconscious in the snow. Fortunately, her eight-year-old sister found her while gathering eggs, brought the baby indoors, and saved her life.

“She’s always in trouble!” her sister grumbled. “She tries to run off from home every week. I was never so naughty.”

Sarabeth lay snoring before the raging fire in her father’s study, where words floated around in her head. In the laws of nature…illuminating the inner man…the theory of forms…the immortality of the soul…

The baby sat up with a shiver. The fire had died to withering smoke and her father’s voice droned on. Sarabeth played with the heavy fireplace poker, and hot little flecks of coal rained on the carpet. The ragged carpet began to smolder, then crackle and then blaze. Even then, her father dreamed away in his droning voice.

“Mr. Wheatly! The room’s on fire!” shrieked a young pupil.

The entire Wheatly household raced to stomp out the flames, but they had no water in the bucket—it was frozen like rock. The pump was too far away. Wind, gusty winter wind, fanned the flames, and soon the entire farmhouse crumbled.

Sarabeth was not yet two, and she had managed to burn her family’s house down.

Mrs. Wheatly turned teary eyes to her husband. The school pupils dashed home as fast as possible. Her hand rested on her stomach; she was expecting twins in three months and could hardly do any housework. And here they stood, homeless.

“It is good,” said Mr. Wheatly. “Very good indeed. The house has burned nicely, and we have all been warmed. Now we will go to Peace River, Massachusetts. We will work and walk until we reach the place where my dear friends will house us.”

That is exactly what the Wheatly family did. Where Mr. Wheatly said to go, they went. His dear friend, Avram Dunker in Peace River, lived in a shack scarcely big enough for him, his wife, and three children, and the only heat was packed bodies. Like the rockabound woman she was, Mrs. Wheatly feebly attempted to clean the dingy place, to no avail.

Sarabeth cringed in her tiny heart as she saw the house. She remembered playing with the fireplace poker and how their house disappeared and she couldn’t even save her rag doll. She reached for the hand of her daddy, her best friend, and he grasped her tightly, lovingly. He seemed to reassure her that this was not her fault. “Our lives will turn out right in the end,” he said.

The Wheatly family was Daniel and his dutiful wife, Moline, and their children: Annemary was eight, Sarabeth two, and soon the twin girls arrived. They were Tess and Sallie. The family had saved the family Bible, and there everyone’s name was written down forever and ever, amen.

This is how the Wheatley girls grew, moving restlessly about New England, learning philosophy from their father and wisdom from their mother.