Geraldine Brooks’s new novel is about the first Native American graduate of Harvard.
Quickly, off the top of your head: in what year did the first Native American graduate from Harvard? If you guessed the mid-60s, you’d be half right. That was Geraldine Brooks’s assumption, too, when she first stumbled across a reference to Caleb Cheeshahteaumauk and assumed he made history during the Civil Rights era.
In fact, it was a full three centuries earlier – 1665 – when the young Wampanoag from Martha’s Vineyard graduated alongside the young men of the Puritan colony. His success, as Brooks writes in Caleb’s Crossing, was “the incontestable argument, the negat respondens”: a solid rebuttal of the prevailing idea that indigenes were “primitive and ineducable”.
For this novel, Brooks has drawn some characters directly from the historical record, and created others from whole cloth. Her Caleb takes shape – from respect, or necessity – as a Barack Obama-like paragon: charming, handsome, fit, intelligent and yet strangely unknowable. But her most complex and riveting creation is the novel’s narrator, Bethia Mayfield.
A dutiful minister’s daughter, Bethia secretly craves learning, and while carrying out her wearisome chores eavesdrops on her brother’s lessons and her father’s conversations with the Wampanoag. She’s also a natural sceptic: “They say the Lord’s Day is a day of rest, but those who preach this generally are not women.”
Bethia’s curiosity leads her to roam the island, a place of Edenic beauty. On one of her outings, she encounters a native boy. They instantly perceive each other as kindred free spirits, and soon learn each other’s tongue. She dubs him Caleb, he calls her Storm Eyes – but their illicit rambles must remain secret from their respective communities.
There’s a hint of Romeo and Juliet among the blueberries, but conveniently shorn of any impropriety by the pre-teen innocence of both parties. Their mutual passion is knowledge. Caleb, the son of a chief and nephew of a shaman, cannot fathom the Puritan obsession with sin and self-denial, but is eager to learn to read.
Bethia welcomes his knowledge of local foods and medicines, but struggles with the native religion, although she eventually embraces the notion of living “in a world aswirl with spirits, everywhere ablaze with divinity”.
But Eden cannot endure, and as sickness and death visit the island, the novel gives way to darker themes. When Caleb’s talent is recognised and he is sent off to college with Bethia’s brother, she goes, too – but as an indentured servant. The grimness of life in the muddy, unhealthy city stands in harsh contrast to their island home, and both Bethia and Caleb suffer for it.
Brooks convincingly captures the speech and thought patterns of the time, bar an anachronism or two. Forgivably, some descriptions of the island (Brooks’s own beloved home) drift into lyrical tones typical of a later, romantic sensibility. The prose is stronger when she evokes Bethia’s worldview in the bluntest of terms: feeling her “hand as heavy as an ingot”, or measuring the age of the settlement by the size of the English trees. The cumulative effect is immersive and powerful, a fresh and beautiful picture of early America. This is a sad, classic tale, told with persuasive charm – not just, in Bethia’s words, “a dissonant and tragical lament”, but a fully conjured vision of a lost world.
An enigmatic document forms the endpapers of this evocative novel: Caleb’s sole material remnant. It’s a letter of gratitude, signed with his name, to his benefactors in London. In exquisite handwriting and impeccable Latin, it artfully likens education to the lyre of Orpheus, comparing Caleb and his fellow students to the trees, rocks and animals summoned to life by music.
I wish the novel included a translation, so we might hear Caleb in his own words (if indeed they are his words; scholars remain divided). Still, it is a fine thing to meet him via Brooks’s passionate and sincere imagination, and to contemplate those who have travelled in his – and Bethia’s – footsteps since.
CALEB’S CROSSING, by Geraldine Brooks (Fourth Estate, $39.99); Brooks is appearing in a Women’s Bookshop event at Epsom Girls Grammar School, Auckland, June 9.
Jolisa Gracewood is a New Zealand reviewer and editor living in Connecticut.