Caleb's Crossing

by Geraldine Brooks

This is a work of imagination, inspired by the life of Caleb Cheeshahteaumauk, a member of the Wôpanâak tribe of Noepe (Martha’s Vineyard), born circa 1646, and the first Native American to graduate from Harvard College.

Caleb discusses the myth of Orpheus as it relates to his own experience of crossing between two very different cultures.

Listening, not speaking, has been my way. I have become most proficient in it. My mother taught me the use of silence.

At fifteen, I have taken up the burdens of a woman, and have come to feel I am one.

We are taught early here to see Nature as a foe to be subdued. But I came, by stages, to worship it. You could say that for me, this island and her bounties became the first of my false gods, the original sin that begot so much idolatry.

Now, here, in the scant days I have left before Caleb comes to us,

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.

why was it that grandfather had sought the patent to this island? Why put seven miles of confounding currents between himself and the other English, at a time when there was land to spare on the mainland for any who wanted to hive out a new settlement?

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.

the name they give themselves, Wampanoag. It means Easterners.”

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.

“Bethia, why do you strive so hard to quit the place in which God has set you?” His voice was gentle, not angry. “Your path is not your brother’s, it cannot be. Women are not made like men. You risk addling your brain by thinking on scholarly matters that need not concern you. I care only for your present health and your future happiness. It is not seemly for a wife to know more than her husband . . .”

took my mother’s words as license enough to continue to study in secret.

Goody Branch was pleased to have me at her side as she collected plants and made her decoctions.

but just rambled, using the island as my text, lingering to glean what lessons each plant or stone might have to teach me.

If he created scallops simply for our nourishment, why paint each shell with delicate and particular colors? And why, indeed, trouble to make so many different things to nourish us, when in the Bible we read that a simple manna fed the Hebrews day following day? It came to me then that God must desire us to use each of our senses, to take delight in the varied tastes and sights and textures of his world. Yet this

seemed to go against so many of our preachments against the sumptuary and the carnal. Puzzling upon it, I had walked some good distance, head down, inattentive to all but my thoughts, when I glanced up and saw them, far off; a band of them, painted strangely as I had been told they did for war, running headlong up the beach in my direction. I grasped Speckle’s bridle and urged her in all haste into the dunes, which were high and undulant and concealing. I was cursing my folly, to find myself alone, far from help, and my mare, hard ridden, fairly spent. My boots I had tied together about my neck but my hose, knit by my own hand, I lost a grip on as I struggled with the horse, and watched several hours toil and several skeins of scarce, good yarn blow away into the sea. In the lee of the dune, protected from the wind, the voices of the band carried toward me. They were laughing and calling out one to another. The sounds were of merriment, not warfare. Taking care that Speckle remained well concealed, I fell down upon my belly and crept along to a parting between the sand hills from whence I could look back along the beach. I saw then what my first fear had obscured from

uncovering few shellfish worth placing in my basket. I was about to give up and try another spot when I felt eyes upon me. I straightened and turned, and saw him for the first time—the boy we now call Caleb.

His smile was unguarded, his teeth very fine and white, and something in his expression made it impossible to fear him.

this boy kept exclaiming, to my discomfort, “Manitoo!” which is their word for a god, or something godlike, miraculous.

It was the first of many times I followed that feathered head through eel grass and over sand dune, to clay pit and to kettle pond. He showed me where the wild strawberries sweetened and

he told me, later, that I left a trail plainer than a herd of running deer.

I had never had such a friend before. As a child I had not needed any, since Zuriel was always at my side, all the companion I wanted. When he died, I was without whatever knack it requires to draw someone close.

He had soon become more of a brother to me

had learned to expect no word from Makepeace but to correct or to command. No playful banter, no genuine opening of our heart one to the other.

anointed with raccoon grease. He was, quite simply, my dearest friend.

And yet, I told no one this, not even myself. I knew that I deceived others,

heard him thank the fish for its life as he dispatched it with a quick blow. I had never thought of such a thing, and that day, I recall that it seemed to me outlandish. He said we wouId eat it, and I said it was not meal time. He laughed at that, and said that he had heard that the English needed a bell to tell them when they were hungry.

mother’s eyes smiled at me, misperceiving that my pink flesh bespoke a modesty like her own; a fine quality that I did not in fact possess.

For him, it seemed that every plant had some use, as food or medicine, as dye or weaving matter.

He was forever chewing upon one or another fresh green leaf from some plant that I had thought a weed, but which, when he gave it me, proved most palatable.

It was many weeks before he would even give me his name, that being considered a grave intimacy among his people.

That summer, perhaps because of the lean winter that had preceded it, brought the first theft of a drift whale.

Of these we generally had two or three a season.

Thou shalt not have strange gods before me . So I had been instructed all my life.

Subdue the earth. So the Bible said, and so we did. But I could not believe that God meant us to be so heedless of his creation, so wanton and so cruel to those creatures over which he had given us dominion.

I began to move to the beat. Slowly at first, my limbs found the rhythm. Thought ceased, and an animal sense drove me until, in the end, I danced with abandon.

But ever since the singing and dancing at the cliffs, my fear had given way to fascination,

once I told him that Bethia meant “servant.” He said a servant was but a lowly thing—their

Of a sudden he turned to me and announced that he had decided to name me over, in the Indian manner. He said he would call me Storm Eyes, since my eyes were the color of a thunderhead. Well and good, said I. But I will rename you, also, because to me you are not hateful. I told him I would call him Caleb, after the companion of Moses in the wilderness, who was noted for his powers of observation and his fearlessness.

He was never idle, not for a minute.

“Only one god. Strange, that you English, who gather about you so many things, are content with one only. And so distant, up there in the sky. I do not have to look so far. I can see my skygod clear enough, right there,” he said, stretching out an arm towards the sun. “By day Keesakand. Tonight Nanpawshat, moon god, will take his place. And there will be Potanit, god of the fire . . .” He prattled on, cataloguing his pantheon of heathenish idols. Trees, fish, animals and the like vanities, all of them invested with souls, all wielding powers. I kept a count as he enumerated, the final tally of his gods reaching thirty-seven.

Caleb took it. This was the first book he had held in his hands.

“These snowshoe tracks,” he said. “They speak to you?”

He says you can do that which we cannot, such as catch the beaver, who is too cunning for the English.”

Father had spoken often about his difficulties with Indian ideas about gift giving. For them, personal property had but little meaning.

When father had first come to negotiate for some land here, the sonquem had laughed at the notion that anyone thought they might “own” land. “If I have said that you might use it to hunt and fish and build your dwellings, what more do you need?” he had asked. Although father maintains to this day that he explained it, I am still not convinced in my own mind that the sonquem fully understood what we proposed to do here.

Father had, with the help of Peter Folger, established the day school in the winter of 1652.

It brings no good to us, walking with Coatmen.”