Posted on by TracyC · 2 Comments

The Witch of Blackbird Pond

The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Speare, 1958.

This is a book that is often used in American schools or recommended to students, but because of the complexity of the story and dark subject matter, I wouldn’t recommend it to young children. It’s more appropriate for middle school level children and older.

The year is 1687, and a sixteen-year-old girl named Kit (short for Katherine) Tyler is traveling by ship from Barbados to the Connecticut Colony. Kit was born in Barbados, where her grandfather owned a plantation, which he received in a grant from the king. However, Kit was orphaned at a very young age, and now, her grandfather has died, so Kit is on her way to live with her Aunt Rachel, her mother’s sister, who is married to a Puritan and is living in Connecticut.

In Barbados, Kit was part of a prominent, slave-owning family, but in Connecticut, she’s just another girl. The people in Connecticut are Puritans, which puts Kit on the opposite site of a political conflict. Her father’s side of her family in Barbados was on the side of the Cavaliers, who supported the king against the Puritans, or “Roundheads” in the English Civil War (1642-1651). Because her Aunt Rachel has married a Puritan, Kit’s Connecticut relatives are on the side of the Roundheads. When Kit first sets off on her journey, she has very little idea of the difference between the two and what it’s going to mean for her future life.

People in Connecticut do things differently, and from the very beginning, Kit strikes them as strange and unpredictable. She is impulsive, and even her grandfather used to warn her about thinking before she acts. Kit is accustomed to living in luxury, giving orders to slaves, and generally being allowed to do as she pleases. It comes as a shock to her that not only can she no longer do these things, but others may heap harsh judgement on her for behaving oddly, even when she does it in the name of a good cause.

Kit gets her first impressions of what life in Connecticut will be like when she talks to the ship captain’s son, Nat Eaton, and an aspiring clergyman named John Holbrook. John Holbrook is the son of a tanner who has had to work by day and study by night since he was young, and he struggles to complete his education because his family doesn’t have enough money to send him to college. Because Kit’s grandfather was wealthy, Kit has never really had to think much about money before. She never had to work or even do chores when she was young, and when she tries to talk to John Holbrook about the books that she’s read, he disapproves of her choice of reading material because he thinks that reading should be reserved for the serious study of religion.

Kit’s naivety and views of slavery are challenged when Nat Eaton talks her about the horrible conditions slaves endure when they are transported from Africa to the Americas and how many of them don’t survive the experience. Kit is accustomed to owning slaves and having them work for her, but just as she has never had to think about the cost of the fancy clothes and other luxuries that her grandfather gave her, she realizes that she’s never given a thought to where slaves come from and how. Kit learns that, while there are people in the North American colonies who own slaves, there are others who vehemently disapprove of the practice, including Nat Eaton. He says that if his family had dealt in slaves, they could have a lot more money, but they’re doing fine carrying more humane cargo and passengers.

Note: Racial issues are more of a side issue than the main part of the story, and this is the part of the story that addresses the issue the most. I can’t say that Kit ever comes to reverse her early view of slaves completely, but this is the beginning of a revelation to her, one of the first indications to her that the life she previously lived is actually the exception instead of the norm, and not everyone looks favorably on people who live the way she used to live. None of the main characters in the story are black.

Kit is dismayed that there seem to be few topics from her old life (politics, money, slaves, the luxuries she owned, the relative freedom she had, not having to work, having plenty of time to read whatever books she liked whether they were useful or instructive or religious or not, etc.) that don’t cause some awkwardness, discomfort, or disapproval from the people who live in the community she is about to join and who will now be playing significant roles in her life. People don’t seem eager to be friends with her, and they look at her suspiciously as a stranger.

As her ship nears its destination, a little girl on board loses her doll overboard and Kit jumps into the water to get it back, alarming everyone. Most of the other women and girls don’t know how to swim, and they think it’s strange when Kit says that her grandfather taught her how to swim when she was little. The sea around Connecticut is too cold for swimming, so they’re not used to the idea of recreational swimming. (This time period was part of the Little Ice Age, so the area was even colder then than it is today.) Some people also consider that one of the tests for witchcraft involves seeing if a woman could float in water, and they begin whispering that Kit might be a witch.

When Kit finally arrives at the town where her Aunt Rachel and Uncle Matthew Woods live, Wethersfield, she is disappointed to see that it’s much more rural than the community where she used to live. The streets are not paved. Kit is dressed in an overly-elegant way for the community and even for her own family. When she finally meets her aunt, she thinks that she must be a servant at first because she is dressed so plainly. Aunt Rachel is happy to see her, and Kit meets her cousins, Judith and Mercy. Judith is very pretty, and Mercy walks with crutches. Kit is surprised at the very simple way they live, and they are taken aback at her fine clothes and all of the possessions she brought with her in her trunks from Barbados.

Her relatives are stunned when they find out that Kit plans to stay with them. They had not even expected her to come for a visit, and they had not heard about her grandfather’s death. Uncle Matthew asks why she didn’t write to tell them that she was coming, and Kit admits that she was afraid to write to them because she didn’t want them to tell her not to come and she didn’t have any other choice but to come to them. After her grandfather’s death, the overseer of the plantation sold off the entire crop and kept the money for himself, and all of the other plantation owners in the area presented Kit with debts her grandfather had with them that needed to be repaid, so she was forced to sell off the slaves and almost everything else to pay them. (From Kit’s description about the sudden influx of supposed debts after her grandfather’s death, I wondered whether at least some of these supposed debts were fraudulent and if Kit was simply too young and naive to challenge them, being accustomed to her grandfather handling all of the family’s money and business arrangements, but I can’t really be sure. She doesn’t go into detail about what proof the creditors offered of the debts or if she simply took them at their word, and its only real importance is in helping to provide her with a reason for going to live with her relatives.) Aunt Rachel says that Kit did the right thing by repaying the debts and coming to them, but Uncle Matthew seems less sure. He disapproves of Kit’s grandfather for being a royalist and seems reluctant to take on a now impoverished relative accustomed to a luxurious life.

Kit tries to share some of her fancy clothes with her cousins when they admire them, and Judith and Mercy love the new clothes, but Uncle Matthew puts a stop to it. He disapproves of Kit’s clothes because they are just too fancy and he thinks they encourage vanity. Uncle Matthew is very direct with Kit, explaining to her that people in this family and in this community live a very different life from the one she is used to, and she is going to have to adjust to their ways if she wants to live with them. Adjusting to this new life, which is so different from everything she knew before, is a major struggle for Kit throughout the story.

Privately, Kit confides in Mercy that she had another reason for wanting to leave Barbados. There was a man there who was a friend of her grandfather’s. Her grandfather also owed money to him, but he would have forgiven the debt and paid the other debts if Kit had agreed to marry him. Other people in Barbados said that it was a smart match and that she should marry him, but he was fifty years old, and Kit couldn’t bring herself to marry someone so much older than herself. That’s why she wanted to leave Barbados in such a hurry and didn’t want to wait even long enough to write to her relatives. (The issue of the girls’ marriage options and what they mean for their family and future lives is a major focus of the story. It is taken for granted throughout the story that all of the girls will get married at some point and that their primary future occupation will be being someone’s wife. However, what being a wife means for them depends on who they marry, what their husband’s occupation and position in society are, and the type of lifestyle they can support.) Mercy says that Kit did the right thing by leaving Barbados and that her Uncle Matthew will get used to her being there if she can demonstrate that she can be useful (an important factor in the occupation of being a wife or daughter of a Puritan family).

Being useful is a problem for Kit, who is unaccustomed to doing work of any kind. She doesn’t know how to do even basic chores. People need to explain to her how to do everything, and even then, Kit is extremely clumsy and lacks the patience to follow their instructions properly. Judith loses her patience trying to teach her and isn’t happy to learn that they’re now going to have to share a bed. Kit appreciates Mercy for her understanding and her quiet strength. Even though some people disregard Mercy because of her disability, Kit knows that Mercy has valuable skills and that she can work as hard as anyone. Life with the Woods family is a monotonous series of chores that previously Kit would have thought of only as labor for slaves that she would never have to do.

Then, there are religious differences between her and her relatives. When Kit lived with her grandfather, they never attended regular church services, but Uncle Matthew’s Puritan household is strictly religious, so Kit is expected to go to church with the family. At the church services, she sees that other people in the community are wearing clothes that are about as fashionable as her own, so not everyone in the community is as strict in their dress as the Woods family is. However, Kit is bored by the services (which last all day), the other parishioners don’t seem very friendly, and it seems like word has spread that Kit is a charity case that her aunt and uncle have taken in. However, she does attract the attention of a young man named William Ashby, and Judith meets John Holbrook for the first time.

As Kit spends more time with her relatives, she discovers that Uncle Matthew is a local selectman but that he has political disagreements with some of the other men in town, and some of them think that he is less loyal to the king than he should be. Kit also becomes involved in the romantic interests of her cousins and confronted with some choices she needs to make about her own future. William Ashby is from a wealthy and socially prominent family, but Uncle Matthew dislikes the Ashby family for being Royalists. Kit learns that Judith was interested in William Ashby before she came, and she worries that Judith will be angry with her for attracting his attention, but Judith tells her not to worry about it because she is now in love with John Holbrook. Kit still feels uncomfortable at William’s sudden interest in her because she has only just come to live in the area, she knows very little about William, and the two of them don’t seem to have much to talk about during his visits with her. However, Aunt Rachel and her cousins encourage her to pursue the relationship because William Ashby’s family is prosperous and he can provide a good living for her. Kit is flattered by William’s attention because he admires her whether she is “useful” or not. With his family’s money and position, William Ashby could give Kit a life similar to the one she had before with her grandfather with nice clothes and relative freedom from routine household chores.

However, Kit’s views and ambitions in life begin to change when she starts helping her cousin Mercy to teach young children in the community’s dame school. Basically, a dame school was when a woman of the community would teach children basic lessons, such as reading and writing, informally in her own home for a fee. (For more information, see Going to School in 1776.) Mercy explains that after children learn to read in the dame school, they can go on to the more advanced lessons in the community’s formal grammar school. Kit always enjoyed reading and discovers that she likes working with the children. As a dame school teacher, Kit earns fees from the students and performs a useful service that she enjoys much more than weeding gardens, scrubbing floors, and other household chores. Kit was not raised to have a profession, but there is more than one kind of work in the world and even in this small community, and this particular kind of work suits her. It pleases Kit that the students appreciate her and enjoy her lessons and stories.

The girls’ romantic dreams and life decisions as they come of age and begin making lives for themselves in the community could make for an interesting historical novel by themselves, but there is more to this story. This is a witch trial story. Kit has already had people making witch comments about her because of her odd behavior, but through her work at the dame school, she demonstrates other odd habits that cause her to get on the wrong side of community members. When she gets the idea of having students act out the story of the Good Samaritan instead of simply listening to it, the situation gets out of hand. She is criticized for using the Bible for play-acting, and the dame school is temporarily closed. Then, Kit befriends Hannah Tupper, a somewhat eccentric widow who lives in an undesirable area near Blackbird Pond that often floods. Nobody understands why she wants to live out there, all alone with her cats, and people in the area say that she’s probably a witch. The truth is that she is known to be a Quaker, and the Puritan community doesn’t like to associate with her because of her religion. Kit likes Hannah because she is kind and understanding to her and calms her when she is upset, but her family doesn’t like her to associate with Hannah, saying that evil can seem innocent at first. Kit also realizes that, while William Ashby admires her, he is also scandalized by her behavior. Hannah, on the other hand, is supportive of Kit and helps her continue to secretly teach a young girl whose mother doesn’t want her to have reading lessons.

Kit’s friendship with Hannah gets her into trouble with community and even puts her life in danger. People in Wethersfield start to die from a disease that has struck the community, and Hannah is blamed. Kit risks her life to save her from an angry mob. Although she successfully gets Hannah to safety, Kit is also accused of witchcraft and put on trial.

I often find stories of people falsely accused frustrating, but this one has a good ending. There is a note in the back of the book that explains the historical background behind the story. Kit Tyler is a fictional character, but there are some real historical characters in the book, and the political situation involving the colony’s charter is real.

The book is a Newbery Award Winner. It’s available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).

My Reaction

The time period of the story is a time of witchcraft suspicions, like those that sparked the infamous Salem Witch Trials in Massachusetts (1692-1693). Historically, suspicions of witchcraft and actual witch trials were more likely to occur in communities suffering from internal divisions and instability, especially when the community suffered some further calamity with no apparent explanation, such as a sudden epidemic of illness (possibly ergotism in Salem), heaping panic on top of existing community tension and anger. Then, the community would take out its feelings on someone who was generally disliked by a majority of community members, usually targeting someone who lacked resources to fight back against the allegations of witchcraft, like a poor woman or a widow. Basically, the community wanted someone who could serve as a convenient scapegoat (as described by the Salem Witch Museum) or whipping boy for the commu,nity’s roiling emotions and real problems that they either didn’t want to address or lacked the means to address. Even when it became obvious in hindsight that they had killed innocent people, most of those involved wouldn’t even suffer feeling guilty or bad about themselves for murder because there was always Satan and his trickery to blame for their own actions and decisions. No one could prove that they hadn’t been honestly deceived by the devil, so they would not be held responsible by their friends, who liked them personally and had been actively involved in the entire episode themselves. The community would already be accomplished at mental blame-shifting, so their minds would be relatively untroubled by personal responsibility. Knowing that they didn’t experience regret or remorse for their actions, that they felt right and good about their personal choices, doesn’t help the people they killed, the families of their victims, or people vicariously experiencing the injustice through history or historical novels. Miscarriages of justice are deeply frustrating, which is why I don’t normally like this type of story, although in the past, I’ve been fascinated by the historical background of this incidents, which is why I wrote a couple of papers on witchcraft trials, both American and European, in college, back when I majored in history. (Don’t make the mistake of saying anyone was burned at the stake for witchcraft in America. It’s not true, not even at Salem. The accused were hanged, and some were pressed to death with heavy rocks, but nobody was burned at the stake for witchcraft in the American colonies. That happened in Europe but not America, and it always annoys me when people get that wrong.)

In the book, the community in Wethersfield has all of the historical elements necessary for producing a witch hysteria. From the beginning, Kit notes the the political divisions in the community. Particularly, her uncle is at odds with other prominent community members about specific local issues and the amount of loyalty owed to the king, and there is also a conflict over the colony’s charter. Even though Kit would be the side of those favoring the king, more so than her uncle, the feelings that community members have about her uncle’s political position would give them a natural prejudice and suspicion toward what they would view as the strangest and most problematic member of her uncle’s family. Then, there is a sudden sickness that causes community members to die. The community also has an outcast who would make a convenient scapegoat, Hannah Tupper. When Kit first hears about her, her cousin Judith tells her that some people already think that she may be a witch. As both a widow and a Quaker outcast, she would have been unable to save herself from the townspeople without Kit’s help. When Kit provided that help, and the community lost their first choice of scapegoat, they picked Kit as their second choice, an acceptable substitute.

On the one hand, my own anger at the injustices of the past leads me to return the witch hunters’ judgement with some harsh judgement of my own. Some of the world’s most judgemental people are so unaware of any other emotions besides their own that they are shocked to discover that other people actually have minds and feelings and an equal ability to look back at them and assess what they see. I suppose that these people wouldn’t have guessed what future people would think when they looked back at them because their views of themselves wouldn’t match what independent observers, seeing their actions and the consequences across time, would see. Human beings often have internal fantasies about themselves where they are more brave, clever, attractive, and on the side of moral right than they actually are, and I think the witch hunters are a definite example of that. I don’t like people who wriggle out of personal responsibility, no matter why they do it, and if I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times, I only consider people as “good” as their own personal behavior and the way they affect other people around them. Nobody’s “good” simply because they say they are or like to think of themselves that way, especially if their real actions say otherwise. Actions speak louder than words. There are many things about the people in the community in this story (as well as in real historical communities) that don’t live up to my high personal standards. Offending me isn’t a criminal offense, and there aren’t many consequences for doing it, but it does provoke a lot of griping.

I think that there’s little point in having standards if you don’t actively live them, and although I think some of that sentiment would have been in the witch hunters’ thoughts, I further believe that everyone has an equal responsibility for both the standards they have and how they choose to demonstrate them. If people would give more thought to the “hows” of their actions and the consequences of what they do, I think there would be fewer problems in the world in general. I also think letting people get away with harmful behavior and not at least clearly criticizing it sets a terrible precedent that is likely to lead to further harm. In the book, once Kit’s name is cleared, she is inclined to forgive her accusers, although she is offered the opportunity to charge them with slander. I understand the reasons why Kit would decide not to pursue these charges, but at the same time, there is clearly one person in the story who was more responsible than the others for the charges brought against Kit and who has also been shown to be hostile toward her own innocent young daughter, and this person does not receive punishment for her actions in this story. I did feel better that the father of the child, realizing that his wife has been wrong about their daughter, falsely labeling her as a half-wit and keeping her from the education that she should have, stands up for the child and her continued education in the end, but I still kind of wanted to see the rest of the community give the mother more of a direct, official warning or censure to bring it home to her that there would be consequences for further misbehavior on her part because of the serious consequences, even possible death, that she almost imposed on others. Sometimes, I feel like this sort of conflict comes to an end too quickly and easily in stories with kind of an air of “We’re all good here now” without some of the underlying problems really being confronted or resolved. It happens sometimes like this in real life, but it’s not very satisfying, and just because some people say “We’re all good here now” doesn’t mean that everything is really fine and everybody involved is really fine. I’m never comfortable with pretending that things are okay that are clearly not. The mother of the child seems to have some mental issues of her own and some kind of emotional conflict over her own child that gives her a warped view of reality. That isn’t fully explained or resolved in the story, probably because the other characters don’t fully understand it, either.

Perceptions are important, but a person’s perceptions don’t stop reality from being, well, real. I know that, in real life, all or many of the supposed witch threats probably seemed real to the individual accusers in the middle of their personal panic, but the reality of the situation is that they did a great deal of harm to innocent people who were unable to stop them. In fact, they specifically targeted people they knew couldn’t stop them, which sounds pretty calculating. They did it because of their own personal problems and the demons that lived in their own minds, whether or not those mental demons had any supernatural help. It’s frustrating because you can’t communicate completely rationally with determinedly irrational people any more than you communicate can with dead people or fictional people and convince them to change their minds. There are times when there’s just nothing you can do when there is no way for the other person to receive new information or they’re just determined not to and no way to help someone who not only doesn’t want help but doesn’t think they need it and would be deeply offended and suspicious at the mere offer. On the other hand, the psychology of such incidents is kind of interesting.

Years ago, I attended a talk given by a team of professional ghost hunters where they said that people who call them to investigate hauntings in their homes tend to be people who are already troubled about something else in their life, such as money problems, marital problems, health problems (mental and/or physical), problems with their kids, or some combination of these. Then, when something happens that seems strange and inexplicable, they get startled by it because they’re already on edge. People who are more secure in their lives and are generally happy might brush off one or two odd things that happen as just rare oddities and forget about them, but people who are already upset about something else tend to seize on them. They become hyper-vigilant. They start noticing more and more odd things that they might otherwise have overlooked and draw connections between these things in their minds, actively looking for more. Soon, they have themselves convinced that they’ve got a full-blown haunting in their house, when at least some of what they’ve experienced is just the ghosts in their own minds. In one case, they said that a man was troubled by a mask he bought at a garage sale. He thought it was cursed because, soon after he got it, a bunch of bad things happened to him. (As I recall, his wife divorced him, he lost his job, and he had health problems.) The ghost hunters said, “To be fair, we don’t think that this mask was cursed when the man bought it. We think it became cursed because he bought it, and he continually blamed it for every bad thing that happened to him around that time, even though these things were probably going to happen anyway.” This is basically the same process that leads to witchcraft trials, except that in witchcraft trials, it happens on a larger scale. Witchcraft trials involve whole troubled communities instead of just a single troubled household.

This still happens in modern communities, but in places where people don’t believe in witches, it’s more likely to take the form of a kind of moral panic, where people get upset about a possible infiltration or excess of people seen as some kind of disruptive moral deviants, rather than a witch hysteria. In both cases, the community experiences extreme fear or paranoia about some perceived threat, but in moral panics, the perceived threat comes from some part of human society, like Communists during the Red Scare or some variety of criminal, not a supernatural force. Actually, I believe that we’ve been living in a state of moral panic in the US for at least the last few years, probably longer, on more than one front. I can’t help but notice that much of what’s been happening in modern times fits all the criteria and follows the typical stages of a moral panic, particularly the parts about the “hidden dangers of modern technology“, a belief in “a ‘hidden world’ of anonymous evil people“, and fear of an “evil stranger manipulating the innocent” (which, weirdly, is what I think is behind the willingness of some people to believe conspiracy theories in the first place as they accept stories that come from apparent “friends”, or at least people who look like people they might want to get a beer with or something – some people use them as their primary source of media, thus checking another box in the requirements for a moral panic and leading up to the final point). In my experience, the fear is particularly about evil people who want to “control” others and tell them what to do, the ultimate community boogeymen where I live. I’ve heard a lot about it for years from real people who habitually like to tell me what to do and how I should feel about things themselves.

This is kind of a digression from the story, but I put it here to illustrate that we might not have to question how people can get themselves into community hysteria over perceived threats, most of which prove to be not that threatening in the long term. Most people might not believe in witches anymore, but they’ve found plenty of creative substitutes for the same basic process over the years. A complete list would take too long to compile, but if you spend any amount of time on social media, you can come up with several “evil” or “deviant” groups or ideological concepts that people hate and fear in the space of a few minutes. Thanks to modern technology, you don’t have to wonder what’s going on in people’s heads. You can Google it. Many people will just tell you right up front what boogeymen are lurking in their minds, and they’ll gladly share that information with untold numbers of total strangers through Twitter, Facebook, and Quora, feeling validated and supported if faceless usernames agree and spread their stories, no matter why they do, and often raging against sinister forces trying to spy on them at the same time. It’s not rational, but it is recognizable. I put it to you that a few moments of honest self-reflection, considering not how you feel but what you’re actually going to do and what it’s going to mean in real terms, can be the stitch in time that saves nine. There are dangers to modern technology, but I don’t think they’re really that hidden. They’re the same dangers human society has caused itself in the past, just much faster, and they come mostly from the demons in the minds of the people involved. There is nothing online that wasn’t designed, written, promoted, spread around, and ultimately accepted by individual humans. It’s when people lose touch with the realities of the situation and the consequences that their actions have for real people around them in the real world that I really worry. It seems to me that blaming the Internet or the media for the things people have decided to do themselves has become the 21st century version of “The devil made me do it.”

Posted on by TracyC · 2 Comments

Mystery of the Witches Bridge

Mystery of the Witches’ Bridge by Barbee Oliver Carleton, 1967.

Thirteen-year-old Dan Pride is an orphan. His father was an international correspondent, and during his early years, Dan lived in different European countries, as his parents traveled around to his father’s assignments. However, three years ago, his parents died in a plane crash. Since then, Dan has been living in a British boarding school. Now, he has returned to the United States to live with his father’s brother, Uncle Julian. Dan doesn’t know what to think about his new town because it’s very different from everything that he’s known before, but he likes the idea of belonging to a family once again because he has been lonely since his parents died.

The Pride family lives in a New England seacoast town. They were one of the founding families of the town in Puritan times, but Dan discovers that the local people aren’t particularly friendly with the Pride family. Billy Ben Corey, a man who works for his Uncle Julian, explains that the Pride family has been rather stand-offish with the townspeople, and there are also rumors and stories about witches that go back to Puritan times. Billy Ben says that most of the modern locals don’t really know all the details of the witch incidents, but the vague rumors that have circulated about the Pride family have caused the townspeople to treat them with suspicion.

This sounds like a somewhat sinister beginning to Dan’s life in York, Massachusetts as he comes to understand how much of life there is governed by the past relationships between the oldest families of the area. Billy Ben tells him that the Coreys have worked for the Prides for generations, but relations between the Prides and the Bishop family haven’t been good and that Dan should avoid them.

Dan presses Billy Ben for more information, and Billy Ben tells him the story of how one of his ancestors, Samuel Pride, was accused of witchcraft back in Puritan times. Some unfortunate happenings at the time, which were probably just the result of bad luck and bad weather, were blamed on him because he was kind of an odd, temperamental person. He was known for playing the fiddle extremely well, and people said that he used it to summon up the devil in the form of a black dog out of the marsh. The person who made the accusation and who led the group that came to arrest Samuel Pride was an ancestor of the Bishop family. Samuel came out to meet the group that came to apprehend them on the old stone bridge that leads to the island in the marsh where the Pride family has their house and farm, Pride’s Point. The story goes that when Samuel met the mob on the bridge, he placed a curse on them, that doom would come for them out of the night, out of the fog, and out of the marsh. Samuel and his wife were executed for witchcraft, and not only after, there was a terrible fog and a sickness that killed many people in town. People said that it was the result of Samuel’s curse. That’s why the Prides and the Bishops have a bad relationship even though they’re neighbors, why the townspeople are still a little suspicious of the Prides, why the Prides are somewhat standoffish of the townspeople (When you think about it, who really wants to be outgoing and friendly with people whose ancestors not only killed yours but who are not welcoming or friendly themselves because they have continually looked at you and your family with suspicion for generations, like you’re the weird ones? The townspeople basically created this situation and have been perpetuating it ever since, yet they act like the problem is with the Pride family instead of themselves. Gaslighting is a relatively new term from the 20th century, but the concept has been around forever, used even by people who don’t know what it is and that it’s what they’re really doing.), and why people in the area are afraid of the stone bridge that they call the Witches’ Bridge, the place where the curse was supposedly delivered. Even into modern times, people in the area see strange lights in the marsh and hear mysterious fiddle music or dog howls that they think might be Samuel’s ghost.

There is still more to come because the mysterious misfortunes of the Pride family have continued even into modern times. Dan is named for his grandfather, Daniel Pride, who died suddenly under very mysterious circumstances, something that still haunts his Uncle Julian. Young Dan learns the story from Mrs. Corey, a relative of Billy Ben’s, who is Uncle Julian’s housekeeper. Daniel Pride had been working to change the family’s image in the eyes of the local people, debunk all the old ghost and witch stories, and lay past quarrels to rest. To try to make peace with the Bishop family and restore the Pride family’s former fortunes, Daniel had been trying to arrange to buy the shipyards that the Bishop family owned, which had formerly been owned by the Pride family. The Bishop family initially agreed to the sale, and one foggy night, Daniel went to see the Bishops to finalize the sale. What happened after that is still a mystery. Daniel was found dead the next day near the old chapel with a look of terror on his face. It’s known that he had a heart condition, so he apparently had a heart attack, but from the marks on the ground, it also appears that he had been running before he collapsed, possibly deliberately frightened to death. Also, there were marks on the ground nearby where his briefcase fell, but the briefcase containing the sale papers was never found. The superstitious people in the area think that Daniel’s death was another symptom of the family’s curse, but it might also have been deliberate murder and theft. The Bishop family insist that they never finalized the sale of the shipyard with Daniel before his death, but Uncle Julian believes that the sale was finalized and that the Bishops are lying to take advantage of his father’s sudden death, just like their ancestors arranged the execution of Samuel for their own advantage. Uncle Julian remains suspicious and bitter about what has happened, just as the townspeople continue to look at the Prides suspiciously.

All of this makes York seem like it’s not the best place to raise a sensitive young orphan, and that’s basically what Uncle Julian says to Dan when Dan arrives at Pride’s Point. Uncle Julian seems elderly and physically frail, and Dan senses that he is a deeply troubled man. Uncle Julian tells Dan that the family and the old family home have a troubled history. That’s why Dan’s father decided to go away and live his life traveling to different places, and that’s why Uncle Julian delayed sending for Dan for so long after his parents’ deaths. Uncle Julian doesn’t seem to think that Pride’s Point is a very healthy place, and he hints at buried secrets. However, he does say that, now that Dan is there, there are going to have to be some changes.

Dan doesn’t think this sounds too hopeful, and he’s lonely and disappointed that he hasn’t found the happy family and home he was hoping for and that he doesn’t even seem particularly welcome there. He can’t even really enjoy playing his violin because of the connection people there seem to have between “fiddle” music, witchcraft, and his supposedly sinister ancestor. As Dan is looking around his new bedroom that night, he suddenly spots a mysterious flashing light from his window, outside in the marsh. It’s creepy because it not only supports all the ghost and witch stories that Dan has just heard but because he recognizes the patterns in the flashes of light as Morse Code … and the message being sent is his own name: D-A-N P-R-I-D-E.

Dan doesn’t believe that any supernatural force was using Morse Code to flash his name at night. It was obviously some human person, but who would do that and why? What is the truth about his grandfather’s death? Is Uncle Julian right that the Bishops caused Daniel Pride to die and then lied about the sale of the shipyard to cheat the Pride family? Or is someone else responsible?

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

My Reaction

I stand by my earlier statement that there is basically inter-generational gaslighting of the Pride family going on. It’s gone on for so long that the townspeople have trouble recognizing what they’re doing or stopping themselves from doing it, even though some of them seem to have the feeling that it isn’t right. At one point, some of the townspeople who come out to Pride’s Point to help fight a fire make jokes about the Pride curse. I could sense tension in them, and I think it was an attempt to lighten the mood, but under the circumstances, it wasn’t really appropriate for them to joke around, especially not about something that’s been a sensitive topic for the Prides, something that has literally caused members of their family to die and others to be persecuted for generations. Keep your audience in mind, and learn how to read a room, people of York!

Uncle Julian hates the stories and rumors that have circulated about his family since before he was born, but he doesn’t know what to do to stop it, and he sometimes wonders if it wouldn’t be better for the family to simply leave their old family home and start up again somewhere else. Mrs. Corey tells Dan that every single time anything bad happens in the area, people either look at the Prides suspiciously or find a way to blame them, even though they didn’t have anything to do with whatever it was. Dan can tell that Uncle Julian is so accustomed to having people blame him and his family for things and repeat scary stories about them that he halfway believes the stories in spite of himself, and he’s overly sensitive anytime it looks like the townspeople might be trying to blame the Prides for something yet again. That’s what makes this situation gaslighting, because the community’s constant untrue stories have warped even the Prides’ sense of reality and views of themselves. The community of York as a whole has created a situation that makes it difficult for the Prides to make friends with other people and get reality checks, and the most dangerous part of it is that among the few people that the Prides are in the habit of trusting is someone who turns out to be the person they should fear the most.

I couldn’t help but notice that there was someone in the story that Dan trusted too much in the beginning. It’s partly because Dan is young and in a situation where he is just getting to know the circumstances and people involved, but even when this person says things that are untrue, contradictory, or just plain mean, he doesn’t call him on it or seem to question within himself why this person is talking like that, at least not until about the middle of the book. Gaslighters will do this to a person, playing mind games, lying, alternately being friendly and praising their victim and then putting down their victim and/or trying to blacken their name to other people, discouraging them from getting close to people who care about them and might actually help them, acting like normal things that the victim does or feels are somehow weird or abnormal, trying to keep their victims in a constant state of confusion, unsure of what the reality of the situation really is. Although I found myself angry with the people of York in a general way for perpetuating something awful that their ancestors did for generations and for being apparently oblivious to what they’re doing in modern times, there is a definite villain in the story who is both deliberately and concretely evil.

There is a parallel drawn in the story between Uncle Julian’s big, black dog, Caliban, who is disfigured from an old injury and the Pride family themselves. Dan is afraid of the big dog, and Billy Ben tells him that it attacked him once, but Uncle Julian says that Caliban is just distrustful because he was badly abused and injured in his earlier life. People are like that, too. I understand that because I used to volunteer at an animal shelter, and that’s where I got my dog, Betty. (If you look at my About page, you’ll see a picture of Betty.)

I’ll never know Betty’s complete history because she was found wandering alone without a collar before she was brought to the shelter. However, I’m pretty good at reading between the lines, and I can read at least part of the story from her behavior. Betty is afraid of anyone, even me, walking behind her, and I’ve noticed since her shelter days that sometimes, her back end looks a little off-center when she runs. Her tail has an odd, permanent bend at the very tip that we didn’t discover until we had the hair on it trimmed. I think she’s been kicked hard from behind before, hard enough to leave permanent injury. She’s not as scared of things as she used to be after having lived with my family for a few years, but she used to be terrified of newspapers or anybody standing over her with anything in their hands, so I think she’s been hit with things before. Betty also gets scared when people laugh. She’s not as scared as she used to be because she’s gotten used to us laughing at something funny on tv, but there are times when she’s cringed and slunk away with her tail between her legs from people when they laugh and she can’t figure out why they’re laughing. Betty’s fear of laughter actually disturbs me because I think I know why it scares her. Based on her reaction, I’ve think that it’s likely that whoever hurt Betty before laughed when they did it. I think Betty has an association between laughter and pain, and that’s why she takes laughter as a bad sign, reacting fearfully to it when she thinks it might be directed at her. Laughing while inflicting pain is a sick thing to do, the product of a sick mind. There are stories in Betty’s reactions, and I’m disturbed by the mental picture I have of the person who had Betty before.

I have to admit that my own history has also both colored/given me insight into Betty’s behavior. If it isn’t obvious from comments in my previous reviews, I don’t see teasing as a positive thing. I’ve reacted to it in the past much like Betty does to sudden, unexplained laughter, which is why I understand the feeling behind it. Some people say that they like to tease their friends and people they like, but I just don’t like it, and I’ve learned to be more open and honest about how I never will like it. I do not have good feelings about people who tease others for fun, and I deeply resent being told that I have to like it because the people doing it are “just having fun.” It’s not a bonding activity, not with me, no matter who says it is. I absolutely refuse to “bond” with anyone who does it. Anyone telling me that I have to change myself to like people who tease is 100% guaranteed to get on my bad side. I have a bad history with teasing and bullying, I have a bad history with the people who do it, and I just don’t want to be around it. Teasing involves getting a laugh at someone else’s expense, benefiting from their discomfort, and getting a good feeling from making someone else feel bad. I don’t think any of that is right, and it doesn’t take much for it to get way out of hand, especially when people have the impulse press harder to get the reaction they want to their “jokes”, like the other person just didn’t get it, instead of cutting it out when their “jokes” just aren’t funny. It’s always awkward when it comes from people who don’t know the sore spots that they shouldn’t poke at and try to act like they’re special friends who should be cut some slack when the reality is that we don’t really know each other that well, we’re not really close friends, and no such special relationship actually exists between us. Real friends understand and demonstrate respect for each others’ feelings, and they don’t intentionally poke at a friend’s sore spots, like the people of York did to Uncle Julian with their jokes in this story.

What ties all of this together is that Betty’s reaction to laughter is like Uncle Julian’s reaction to the townspeople and their jokes and comments; it’s a conditioned response from long-term negative association. The townspeople are uneasy because Uncle Julian doesn’t laugh with them, but Uncle Julian doesn’t laugh with the townspeople because none of it was actually funny. By perpetuating these witch stories, even in the form of “jokes”, they’re constantly feeding the myths and ghost stories and making the situation worse, and they don’t seem to care about how he or his family feels or how it affects their lives. You can tell who respects you and who doesn’t by seeing who tries to treat you the way you want to be treated. The people of York were making jokes to soothe their own feelings, sharing in-jokes that they’ve had with each other at the Prides’ expense, and they got really uncomfortable when suddenly confronted with Uncle Julian’s, feelings that they helped to provoke and didn’t want to deal with.

Don’t worry about Betty. It’s sad that she’s been afraid of things and it’s kept her from being more outgoing and friendly, but we’re working through it. In non-pandemic times, I take her to places where I know she’s welcome, and she has acquired a fan club of people who like to see her and say hi whenever we visit. Anytime she seems uneasy because we’re laughing about something, I sit next to her, pet her, and praise her for being a Good Girl so she knows that nobody is trying to be mean to her and that we value her. When someone has been programmed through negative reinforcement, positive reinforcement is needed for balance. I’m trying to build more positive associations for her. It’s working, and she’s improving. She behaves very well and is very happy little dog when she’s treated well. Don’t worry about me, either. I’ve had some bad experiences, but I’m not the only one who’s had to deal with this stuff. There are lots of different kinds of people in the world, and I’ve learned some things about finding the kind of people I want to be around and making it clear how I want to be treated. I just gripe and vent now and then because I don’t like mean behavior or seeing others in these situations, and I’m all out of patience for it. I’ve learned what to do to help remedy such problems, but that doesn’t stop me from resenting the people who create problems that need to be solved.

The way both people and animals behave offers clues about what’s been happening with them. Sometimes, they offer warning signs of people to avoid, and sometimes, they are signs that the person or animal is in distress and needs some outside help and support. Caliban’s behavior in the story is more defensive than aggressive. That is, Caliban is reacting, not instigating … and if I saw what Dan saw in the story, I would know immediately to be very suspicious of the person Caliban hates the most because it explains where the source of harm in his life is. In a similar way, the Pride family is mostly reacting, not instigating. They have been harmed, both physically and psychologically, for an extended period of time, and while they seem to have the sense that’s the case, they’ve been too close to the problem for too long to see what the source of the greatest harm really is. But, about halfway through the book, Dan does learn to correctly read the people around him and comes to realize who is really his friend and how isn’t, based not on how others talk about them but by how they each actually treat him. When you pay attention and think about people’s actions in context, you can see who really has your best interests at heart and who doesn’t.

Dan spends much of the story, particularly at the beginning, feeling like he is unwanted, both in York and at Pride’s Point. At first, he thinks that his Uncle Julian doesn’t want him, but he gradually realizes that’s not it. There is someone else who doesn’t want Dan there, for reasons of their own. As I was reading, I noted times when this person said and did things that manipulated Dan’s feelings, even actively trying to make Dan feel bad while carefully seeming “honest” or “helpful” so Dan would continue to listen. I felt so much better when Dan finally realized the truth about this person. I have to say that I was really angry with Uncle Julian when I discovered that he was fully aware of who hurt his dog and that he still trusted this person. For me, the first hint of that would have caused me to permanently sever the relationship because it’s sick behavior and a sign of a disturbed mind, but I can only suppose that he felt unable to because he had been dependent on this person for too long, largely shunned by the wider community, who could have given him a reality check if they’d had a firmer grasp on reality themselves.

Dan, who had never heard of the Bishops before arriving in York, finds himself becoming angry and resentful of them, hating them for what they’ve done to his family for generations. His uncle even warns him not to get involved with the family, but that’s exactly what the real villain wants. When Dan makes friends with a boy named Pip Cole and his twin sister, Gilly, he confides his anger at the Bishops and how he blames them for this whole mess and for perpetuating it for generations, but Pip knows more about the situation than Dan suspects, and he has seen a different side of the problem. Pip tells Dan his family would have less problems if they would just forgive the Bishops, but Dan doesn’t believe it at first because, the way he sees it, the Bishops are the villains, who have actively profited from their villainy all along. I appreciate Dan’s situation. Pip doesn’t fully appreciate that, for Dan and his uncle, it’s not just about the past because they’re still actively suffering from the townspeople’s stories, rumors, and suspicions about them. It’s hard and maybe impossible to forgive something that’s ongoing from people who see no problem with the situation and aren’t particularly sorry. On the other hand, the resolution of this situation requires at least one of the parties involved to make the first move. Dan’s grandfather was trying, but his mysterious death prevented his mission from being completed. Even Uncle Julian reveals that he had been prepared to forgive the Bishops and marry their daughter, but some of the circumstances of his father’s death led him to believe that his fiance actually had a hand in it, and that apparent betrayal is what has left him such a haunted man all of these years.

The stories that Dan has heard about his family are not the complete story. Dan eventually comes to realize that the Prides and the Bishops each have only half of the real story, and because of their reluctance to associate with each other, the Bishops partly out of continued superstition and guilt, not knowing how to deal with the Prides’ anger, and the Prides, because they are both justifiably angry and accustomed to unfair treatment and being shunned by the community. However, it’s important that they do talk to each other because it’s the only way for each of them to get the complete picture of what’s really been happening and learn the real villain’s true motives.

The key to establishing the truth is in the missing briefcase, and both Dan and his enemy are searching for it. Dan needs to make peace with his family’s past, and he finds some help from a mysterious hermit called Lamie, who lives alone in the marsh. Lamie is another outcast of the York community. People avoid him because he has a reputation for being weird. People in this community in general may be “normal” in the sense that their behavior is fairly uniform, but uniformity by itself isn’t a virtue. When you’ve got an entire community doing something they shouldn’t, being the odd one out can be a good thing. Lamie helps Dan when he needs it, and Dan discovers that Lamie is actually a very kind and understanding person. Lamie’s solitary lifestyle is rather unorthodox, but he’s actually happy in his solitude because he knows who he is, he takes care of himself, he’s comfortable with himself, and he’s living the kind of life he likes, in touch with the natural world. When Dan talks to Lamie, he realizes that Lamie is comfortable with his own identity and at peace in his own mind in a way that his uncle isn’t. Even more importantly, Lamie sees things from a different perspective because he isn’t part of the groupthink of this community.

Lamie was friends with Dan’s grandfather, and he tells Dan about a hidden chamber built by the Prides’ ancestors, where Dan’s grandfather kept important family papers. However, Lamie tells Dan that he isn’t sure that he should look for it if his only motive is revenge. Dan does have a desire for revenge after all of the stories of injustice toward his family that he’s heard and what he’s suffered himself since he arrived in this area. Lamie helps to calm Dan’s desire for revenge by quoting from St. Francis of Assisi, emphasizing the importance of forgiveness instead of revenge. The part about truth speaks to Dan, and he comes to realize that what he really wants, more than revenge, is to know the truth about what happened to his grandfather. Lamie tells him that he saw some of what happened the night his grandfather died, from a distance. Because of the fog, he couldn’t see everything, but he knows that the Bishops were telling the truth that Dan’s grandfather didn’t make it to their place that night to complete their deal, defusing Dan’s anger at them for their supposed lies. Lamie’s memories also give him clues about the true identity of his grandfather’s attacker and the location of the secret hiding place. However, to find it and to evade his enemy, Dan will need the help of the very people his uncle has forbidden him to associate with.

I found the parts about the gaslighting of the Pride family and the poisonous duality of their true enemy frustrating and anger-inducing, but once Dan speaks to Lamie (really, my favorite charcter in the story) and begins to sort out who he can trust and who he can’t, I felt a lot better. The story is very atmospheric, with a grand old house and property, surrounded by a foggy marsh, and even when the characters know who their enemy really is, they are kind of trapped with him in a dangerous cat-and-mouse situation as they both race to find what they’re really looking for. By the end of the book, all of the old mysteries are wrapped up, including the source of the the mysterious “fiddler” music.

Posted on by TracyC

On The Mayflower

On the Mayflower by Kate Waters, 1996.

This book is part of a series by same author about children growing up in Colonial America. Each of the books is the series has photographs of historical reenactors portraying real people from Colonial history. This book focuses on two children who are traveling on the Mayflower in 1620, heading to what would become the Plymouth colony. One of the children is a girl who is a passenger on the ship, and the other is a boy who is part of the crew, a ship’s apprentice. In the section of historical information in the back of the book, the author explains that the girl was based on a real girl who was a passenger on the Mayflower, although the boy was not based on a specific apprentice; he is just meant to show what a ship’s apprentice would have been like at that time and to help explain the duties of the various crew members as he assists them.

The ship’s apprentice is called William Small. He is specifically apprenticed to the ship’s master, Christopher Jones (historical character). As an apprentice, he is learning basic navigation skills and assists the regular crew members with various tasks, including serving food.

The girl is named Ellen Moore. She and the other passengers are traveling in cramped quarters, and people are often seasick or trying to find ways to keep themselves occupied during the long journey. Ellen is traveling with younger siblings, and she plays with them in between performing routine chores, like sewing and preparing food.

During the voyage, there is a terrible storm, and the passengers are all confined below deck without light because lanterns and candles would pose too much risk of fire while the ship is rocked during the storm. William has to help the ship’s carpenter to repair leaks. Before the storm is fully over, Mrs. Hopkins, one of the passengers, gives birth to a baby she names Oceanus (historical person, the real Oceanus made it through the voyage although he sadly died young, possibly about age six, but the date of his death is uncertain).

The book ends with their arrival in the Americas. Because the storm blew them off course, the Mayflower did not arrive at its intended destination in Virginia but further north at Cape Cod in what is now Massachusetts. Because winter was setting in, the passengers decided not to risk further travel and established their colony there, 65 days after their ship first left England.

In the back of the book, the section with historical information explains more about both the characters in the story and the reenactors. The historical Ellen Moore and her siblings were traveling to the colony without their parents, under the guardianship of the other families, acting as young servants in their employment. The book mentions that the Moore children were without their parents because of a family tragedy but is not specific about what it was. I looked it up, and the story is both sad and bizarre. I can see why the author didn’t want to explain it in a children’s book. Apparently, the children’s parents had an arranged marriage and were not happy being married to each other. The children’s mother had a long love affair with another man, and also apparently, all of the children were the biological children of her lover. The mother’s husband began to notice that the children physically resembled his wife’s lover. The couple bitterly divorced, and after the husband was granted custody of the children (which, apparently, weren’t his anyway), he decided to send them away to the Americas with the departing pilgrims, paying for them to be taken on the voyage, never seeing them again. Sadly, Ellen probably did not survive the first winter at the Plymouth colony because she disappears from the historical record during that time. Out of the four Moore children traveling on the Mayflower, only one survived to adulthood, Ellen’s young brother Richard. Richard married twice in his life and had seven children of his own. He became a sailor and ship’s captain and eventually died an elderly man in Salem, Massachusetts, during the 1690s, not long after the Salem witch trials. None of this information about Richard is mentioned in the book, but I thought it was interesting background information. In the book, there is also additional information about the ship, The Mayflower, and the reproduction ship used in the pictures, The Mayflower II.

The book is available to borrow for free online through Internet Archive.