Caleb's Crossing

by Geraldine Brooks

I know that father sets great store in Caleb. He sees him, more than any other here, as a great hope to lead his people. Certainly Caleb seems to want this also; no one toils at his book more diligently; no one has gathered such a rich harvest of knowledge in the scant seasons he has had to study these things. But I also know this to be true: Caleb’s soul is stretched like the rope in a tug o’ war, between my father and his own uncle, the pawaaw. Just as my father has his hopes, so too does that sorcerer. Caleb will lead his people, I am sure of it. But in which direction? Of that, I am not in the least bit certain.

By the time I met Caleb, I already had a great store of common words and phrases. Since then, I have come to speak that tongue in my dreams. I remember once, when I was small, and had said “the salvages” in my father’s hearing, he reproved me. “Do not call them salvages. Use the name they give themselves, Wampanoag. It means Easterners.”

“Easterners,” indeed. As if they speak of east or west as we do. Nothing is so plain and ordinary in that tongue. Wop, related to their word for white, carries a sense of the first milky light that brightens the horizon before the sun appears. The ending sound refers to animate beings. So, their name for themselves, properly rendered in English, is People of the First Light.

Harvard College. It seems the college has built a second house there, alongside the English one, exactly for the education of Indian youths, with the aim to make them into instruments for the propagation of the gospel among the tribes.

It presently had in residence five or six English scholars, and a young Nipmuc man, John Printer, who tended to the college press. This press—the only one of its kind in the colony—had formerly occupied space in the college president’s house, but Master Chauncy had a large household and was very glad to have it removed to the Indian College hall.