Library Director’s Notebook
September, 2011
Historical fiction is a very popular genre for readers, and it is one of my very favorite forms of novel. Yet, quite a bit of historical fiction falls flat as far as I’m concerned because too often it is loaded with both physical and psychological anachronisms. Physical anachronisms are just the result of poor research; for example, having someone talk on the telephone when it may not have been invented at the time the novel takes place. Much more subtle, and to me, even more disappointing are psychological anachronisms in which characters act or speak or think in ways that would have been extremely unlikely, if not actually impossible during the time they lived. Falling into the use of psychological anachronisms is a common trap for many authors of historical fiction.
A writer of the quality of Geraldine Brooks, author of A Time of Wonder and People of the Book, does not fall into such traps. In her latest novel Caleb’s Crossing, Brooks shows a pitch perfect ear for the culture, psychology, language, and mindset of the very earliest English colonists in America and the Indigenous Indian tribes they encountered.
Caleb’s Crossing has at its heart a terrible, ultimately irreconcilable tension. How can a young man raised with pride, love and a sense of his own nobility make the transition to an entirely different culture, one that disputes all he has been taught to believe and value?
The time is 1660, and a young English girl named Bethia Mayfield, living on Martha’s Vineyard, befriends a young Indian boy named Cheesbahteaumauk. Both are remarkable in their own way. Bethia has a brilliant mind that devours reading and languages despite little encouragement from her family; Cheesbahteaumauk, later renamed Caleb, a nobleman in his Wampanaug Indian tribe, has a burning curiosity and blazing intelligence that makes him want to know more about the wisdom of the “Coatsmen”, as the Wampanaug call the English settlers.
Both Bethia and Caleb are driven by a desire for book learning; but whereas Caleb is treated like a rare, almost freakish prize to be carried off to Harvard to be educated in the finest classical traditions, Bethia must suppress her intellectual curiosity and read books on the sly. Both end up at Harvard, Caleb as a scholar and Bethia as an indentured servant to help pay the tuition for her slow-witted brother Makepeace. At Harvard their friendship formed in the invigorating wilderness of Martha’s Vineyard must survive the harshness, deprivation, and severity of the Harvard college town in the 1660’s.
Conflicts are not limited only to Caleb’s attempt to cross over to the world of the Coatsmen. Bethia is pressured to marry a local farmer if she wishes to end her degrading servitude. Many of the English settlers dispute the need to give an Indian an expensive Harvard education. The Wampanaug tribes are torn between their belief in their own customs and religion and the pull of the Christian missionaries of whom Bethia’s father is a respected leader. Under it all is the tension of racism , intolerance, and the unquenchable desire for land by the colonists, a desire that would ultimately lead to devastating war between the English and the Indians, with atrocities enacted on both sides.
But these wars are not the subject of Caleb’s Crossing. The battles are mostly internal, and Caleb is the battleground. As with all conflicts, the survivors are the ones who get to write the story. This story is seen through Bethia’s eyes. It is a sad story, but also one leavened with love, wisdom and acceptance.
