But I don’t want to go too much more into colonial porn (oh, all right—here’s when Kit unpacks her seven trunks and Judith is consumed with envy at what passes for daily wear in Barbados: “Imagine!” cried Judith, pulling out a handsome gown of filmy silk. “Five slits in the sleeves!”) because the actual plot is such a vibrant machine that you don’t want to waste all the time on the trappings—just as Kit’s colorful personality is, at times, outshined by the splendor of her clothes.
Kit arrives in Wethersfield during the beginning of the Puritan colonists’ breakaway from England. (For those of you, like myself, with deeply uneven public-school educations who studied this roughly a quarter century ago, Puritans can be differentiated from Pilgrims in that they sought to “Purify” the church from within, not feast on turkey ceaselessly.)
As we soon learn, Kit has been forced to leave Barbados not only because she is penniless, but because a friend of her late grandfather’s with “pudgy red fingers with too many rings on them” wanted to forgive the debt and marry her instead. Not so much. But not so fast with escaping from the wealthy, stocky suitors, either! Kit soon catches the eye of William Ashby, one of the wealthiest young men in town, unwittingly tearing him from the hands of Judith.
Judith doesn’t care, however, because, on the boat, Kit met the handsome scholar John Holbrook, and, after Kit introduces him to the family, Judith “sets her cap” for him, inconveniently failing to realize that he is desperately in love with her gentle sister Mercy, whom no one really notices because she’s so pure hearted and crippled and everything.
Taking place outside the environs of Wethersfield Place is, of course, the formation of America as we know it—complete with Indians, Quaker separatists, Royalists, Puritans, slaves, and the explosion of persecution and resistance betwixt and between. (The majority of which makes it unsurprising that settlers might go a little nuts and seek to mitigate their anxiety by seeing if a woman floats before killing her.) What’s wonderful about Witch is that the narrative isn’t a flimsy cover for a history lesson, and neither is Kit a standin for heroic, spunky girls resisting the powers-that-be everywhere.
True, Kit tutors poor Prudence Cruff and makes friends with Hannah Tupper, the older Quaker woman. But she’s also a former slaveowner who seriously considers marrying William Ashby simply to escape the cycle of hard labor of her uncle’s house. She acts impulsively, which means she saves people with her kindness, but she also endangers them at the same time. Yes, she takes Prudence Cruff away from the poverty of her upbringing and teaches her to read, but her insubordinate inclinations also nearly close Mercy’s school. Yes, she saves Hannah from the angry mob who comes to torch her house, but her visits are partly what has drawn attention to the woman in the first place. Yes, she’s brave to go see Hannah, but she also exposes her entire aunt’s family to the condemnation of the community. But worst of all, even though Elizabeth George Speare mentions that Nat’s eyes are twinkling and blue and smiling and that William Ashby is stocky a million times, Kit takes like 900 years to figure out she’s in love with him.
By the time Nat has saved her from hanging in a courthouse scene reminiscent of those boardroom wrap-ups in 1980s movies like The Secret of My Success, we’ve truly grown to love Kit and her surrounding cast, not in spite of their flaws or for their lack of flaws but for how truly they all embody the contradictions of their time. In other words, it is all right, my dears, if you jump overboard in all of your fine clothes to save a young girl’s wooden dolly like a nitwit, too. FYI, I am available to make soap, tutor worthy children, and be confounded by any suitors at first light.
BOOK REPORT
Homecoming
By Cynthia Voigt 1981
Traveling in Steerage
The woman put her sad moon-face in at the window of the car. “You be good,” she said. “You hear me? You little ones, mind what Dicey tells you. You hear?”
Is there anything better than having to count out your every meal? I don’t mean in real life (that’s horrible, of course) but stretching foodstuffs to match your difficult situation is—you will forgive me—a staple of a certain brand of teen fiction. Take Julie (of the Wolves) and her dried seal meat rations. Take Claudia (of Mixed-Up Files) stretching the coins hard earned by scraping the bottom of the Met’s fountain to get her and Jamie a hearty breakfast at the Automat. Take A Little Princess’s Sarah Crewe managing to pull together enough pence for four large, fragrant buns—then realizing she is not going to be able to enjoy them if that really poor street urchin keeps looking at her wolfishly.
Thirteen-year-old Dicey Tillerman’s mastery over milk, bananas, donuts, clams, and throwaway fish makes her no less an illustrious follower of this tradition. When we meet up with Dicey, she, along with smart, bookish brother James, gentle sister Maybeth, and rebellious youngest brother Sammy, have been left in the parking lot of a mall in Peewauket, Massachusetts, by their mother, with only the address of a distant relative in Bridgeport, Connecticut, that the woman has pressed into Dicey’s hand to go by.
Before I get into their adventure, I’m going to swing into the first meal at the mall, which sets the gustatory heights from which the four are about to plummet:
…They were drawn to restaurants that exuded the smell of spaghetti and pizza or fried chicken, bakeries with trays of golden doughnuts lined up behind glass windows, candy stores, where the countertop was crowded with large jars of jelly beans and sourballs and little foil-covered chocolates and peppermints dipped in crunchy white frosting; cheese shops (they each had two free samples), where the rich smell of aged cheeses mingled with fresh-ground coffee, and hot dog stands, where they stood back in a silent row. After this, they sat on a backless bench before the waterfall, tired and hungry. Altogether, they had eleven dollars and fifty cents, more than any one of them had at one time before, even Dicey, who contributed all of her babysitting money, seven dollars.
They spent almost four dollars on supper at the mall, and none of them had dessert. They had hamburgers and french fries and, after Dicey thought it over, milkshakes.
Ah, poor fools! It’s a last meal in a very real sense, since this plasticine, industrial Agora and everything it represents is about to be left behind by the Tillermans, perforce—and Dicey will be thinking it over at every meal, from now on. After making a call to find out how expensive buses to Bridgeport are and almost being nabbed by a guard at the mall, Dicey decides they’ll set off to walk to Bridgeport, to their Aunt Cilla, whom they’ve never met, because Dicey thinks there’s a chance their mother will be there.
But it’s not completely clear why Dicey runs from the guard, instead of marching right up to him and telling him exactly what’s happened. Partly it’s dim understanding that doing so would mean they’d be split up, and certainly taken away from their mother and put into foster care. There’s also the fact that, since the children were raised in a rambling shack in Provincetown, out of the mainstream, their father absent, their mother (almost certainly) bipolar, they’re used to acting on their wits and whims, not on the say-so of adults. But mostly it’s Dicey’s pure instinct—something in her resists handing over their destiny to someone in authority who doesn’t know them. It’s her family. She’s the authority, even if she doesn’t quite know what she’s going to do with it. “Sometimes I think we can do anything,” Dicey tells James, once they’re on their way. “Because we’re the Tillermans.”
So they set off, on foot, on Route 1, “mostly garages and small shopping centers and discount stores and quick food places. There were no green patches and few sidewalks.” James comments that it was probably a “nice road once, a country road,” and soon, Dicey realizes they’ll be better off sticking to actual country roads, where they can camp out and forage for their own food. So they begin a pattern—she’ll buy them donuts, bread, apples, and other cheap, filling things during the day, and then they’ll stay in parks at night. Sometimes, they stay in abandoned houses in developments. She buys them hooks to fish,
and Sammy (who is SIX—they built six-year-olds better then, obviously) actually proves to be a good fisherman. Maybeth is skilled at gathering wood and suchlike. Dicey, having grown up on the beach, knows how to build a driftwood fire and roast whatever they catch. And when they need more money, she asks for work at gas stations and supermarkets, washing windows (she’s big on washing windows!) or carrying other people’s groceries.
Still, the adult world continues to conspire to confound them. After a big catch of fish, she’s told by a sports salesman that it’s illegal to fish in the park where they’re hiding out:
How were they supposed to eat then, Dicey asked herself. By buying food, she answered. The whole world was arranged for people who had money—for adults who had money. The whole world was arranged against kids. Well, she could handle it. Somehow.
Julie (of the Wolves) was unencumbered on the tundra, able to hunt whatever she needed. Subsisting on the land is all Dicey wants to do, but one may not, unfortunately, hunt in a Grand Union:
So, she had to earn some money. But how? There was that shopping center. It had a big parking lot, and a supermarket. She pictured it carefully, and then pictured herself coming out of the market with two big bags filled with fruit and meat and breads and cans of vegetables and a pan to cook things in. And a can opener; it would be just her luck to forget the can opener.
In her daydream, the Dicey she saw walking out of the store with enough food for her family to eat for days, with her eyes smiling and a big grin stretching her mouth, that Dicey tripped and fell. The food scattered over the ground. The wheels of cars squashed the scattered oranges and bananas. A dog took the package of hamburger meat and ran away with it. The people around went off on their own ways, carrying their own heavy bags of groceries.
Was this how Momma felt? Was this why Momma ran away?
Usually, in the books where the need to be fed overrides—usually mercifully—the opportunity to mope over one’s circumstances, the child in question also finds, surprisingly, that she can survive by her own wits, something she didn’t know before. Dicey is a bit different. In a way, she’s always been a survival machine, with instincts that automatically allow her to make the best of any situation, almost unconsciously. As she tells James when he’s telling her how much he loves school, “It takes different things to make me glad…. Like knowing we’ve got food…the ocean…and lots of room outdoors. But mostly the ocean. And the food too….”
Throughout, there are also those who help—and, not infrequently—feed them as well. There is, of course, Windy, the Yale student who is amused by the ragtag group and, after taking them to several meals at a diner, arranges a ride to Bridgeport for them. There’s Cousin Eunice, the only living relative of the deceased Aunt Cilla, whose cloying pressing of religion on the children becomes overwhelming, as does her old-lady food, which Dicey must prepare. (“Cousin Eunice’s house wasn’t free, it was expensive—and the price was always remembering to be grateful.”) There’s the totally creepy child molester who almost traps them on his tomato farm once they’ve made it to the Eastern Shore to try to find a grandmother they’ve only just learned about. And there’s Will, the itinerant circus director who saves the children from creepy tomato man, and who, along with his partner, Celia, takes a shine to the children, and makes sure they have a good meal in their stomachs.
And though she’s grateful to all the adults they meet along the way, Dicey finally realizes, like all those nearing the end of a quest, that in fact there’s no need to stop:
“You know,” Dicey said, “we don’t have to go anywhere. We could always travel like this, following the warm weather, like Will said he did. We can take care of ourselves.”
“Yeah, but what’s the point?” James asked.
“There doesn’t have to be a point,” Dicey said. Just doing it. Like sailing.”
Could a kid with three siblings in tow manage nowadays to walk from Provincetown to Bridgeport, then get from Annapolis to the Eastern Shore? Could a person do it? (I can’t even walk through my whole CITY.) Would our 21st-century prices make room for kids to eat, to make even enough money for a day, even eating off the dollar menu?
I don’t think the point of Homecoming is how realistic it is, although, for its own purposes, it’s realistic enough. Still, what’s wonderful about Homecoming isn’t only that Dicey and her siblings finally succeed. It’s also the understanding that the world has forces, and resources, that we can marshal to our side if we’re courageous and competent enough. When Dicey and James manage to convince two boys to take them across the bay to Easton, Maryland, Dicey realizes what she’s been doing the entire journey:
Boats, waves, water, wind: through the wood she felt them working for her. She was not directing, but accompanying them, turning them to her use. She didn’t work against them, but with them; and she made the boat do that too. It wasn’t power she felt, guiding the tiller, but purpose.
You’d be wrong to sum Dicey up as a “spunky” adventurer. She’s not. She simply is—as her name suggests—a natural sailor.
EXTRA CREDIT
The Endless Steppe: A Girl in Exile
By Esther Hautzig 1968
Miss Steppes
I must have read this autobiography of a girl being sent to the gulag by Stalin 100 times, feeling, upon each reading, more and more put upon that no one, whatever my parents did, was EVER going to come and take us from our house so we could live on a strange, windswept region in Siberia, piecing together a life bit by bit as we struggled against both the political winds and the elements. OUTRAGED, really. (We’ll see if this country ever gets around to giving my children a shot.) Esther, a young Jewish girl from Vilna, Poland, and her mother and grandmother are lucky enough to only be sent to Siberia (for the dubious crime of being “capitalists”), forced to leave a comfortable middle-class existence to become terrified homesteaders in the windswept nothingness. For all that it involves the divestiture of all one’s goods and identity, The Endless Steppe is a strangely uplifting narrative, told in amusing episodes, like the one in which Esther promises to make a sweater to trade for a cow, rips apart a skirt and labors over the sweater for months, then finds it no longer fits the buyer, who has, of course, become fat off the milk of the cow in the meantime. (You would think, being so taken with the ripping apart of this skirt, the painstaking carding of the wool, the knitting, and the washing, I would just go to H&M and replicate it, but alas, when it’s not being bought by a beautiful, wealthy Siberian to get the family a cow, it loses that special something.) As the book closes and they find they will be returning to Poland, Esther breaks away from their years of near-starving scrimping and insists on buying sapogy and a fufaika, high leather boots and a green quilted jacket that is the height of fashion in Poland. Her father’s first words upon greeting them back in Lodz? That the first thing they will do is buy her some new clothes. Me? I am in possession of the closest the mall could offer to a sapogy and a fufaika to this day—all I need is a Stalin to give them meaning.
EXTRA CREDIT
Julie of the Wolves
By Jean Craighead George 1972
Packed and Sealed
It’s tough to say if you gave a group of school-aged girls an animal to shoot, butcher, dry, store, and carry, if it would turn them off the stuff forever or have a kind of friendship-bracelet effect, spreading through the community like Miley Cyrus’s next album. Truly, nothing SOUNDS more fun, which is probably why the story of Miyax—“American” name Julie—a young Eskimo girl who, after the death of her mother, is raised by her father, Kapugen, out in the wild, is so absorbing. Truly, little else happens. As the author tells us, even Miyax’s body is part of the landscape, as she’s a “classic Eskimo beauty, small of bone and delicately wired with strong muscles…. Unlike the long-limbed, long-bodied animals of the south that are cooled by dispensing heat on extended surfaces, all things in the Arctic tend toward compactness, to conserve heat.” Sadly for Miyax, her dream to “live with the rh
ythm of the beasts and the land” is no longer supportable, since the Indians are being brought into the towns for special Indian schools and western hunters are taking over the landscape. Not only are the “seals scarce and the whales almost gone,” Kapugen himself has gone from an Alaskan hunter to a western one, using a plane to shoot animals that he doesn’t even bother to collect. Perhaps he has killed Amaroq, the last wolf hunter of the tundra, the one who has sustained his daughter in her time of need, and the only company Julie has as she putters around sustaining herself off the fat of the land. Is it partly that we know it’s not longer possible to live off the land, to never have school, to be on one’s own, that makes it so appealing? By the end of the book, the only thing left for Julie, and for Alaskan culture, is a bastardized version of their old way of life. Exit dried flesh, enter the airplane.
EXTRA CREDIT
Understood Betsy
By Dorothy Canfield Fisher 1917
Town and Country
Weight gain, confidence-building, and a breakdown in all fear-based mechanisms is the order of the day in this adorable tale, in which spindly, sickly orphan Elizabeth Ann has to be sent away from her two spindly aunts to the house of some more robust cousins, and suddenly realizes she is not as shy, delicate, and useless as she had been made to fear. When she arrives, she’s barely able to untie her own shoes, but, at the kind behest of cousin Abigail, the less kind behest of cousin Ann, and the dutiful silence of Uncle Henry, she goes from mastering the simple art of washing dishes to becoming a girl who can fetch another out of a ravine and save the day. Throughout, the act of labor is paramount—at the beginning, she cannot even remember how the asphalt in her own city was laid, which Henry wants to hear all about. By the end, she is milking, cooking, cleaning, gathering, sugaring—the best antidote to being “thin and nervous” ever invented. Who could get through this book and NOT wish to have been skinny and useless, then be made into a hearty and useful creature who has the admiration of her tough, rural cousins, and now is in possession of a bunch of useful skills involving milk and freshly shaved wooden pencils? It’s Eliza Doolittle, to be sure, but a much more wonderful Eliza Doolittle, since she’s ditched the bone-china culture for one where they talk about apples being hard enough to shoot through an oak plank.
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