Caleb's Crossing

by Geraldine Brooks

At this college, we go further. One of the seven arts we teach here is fine speaking. I assume you know the name we give to that study?” “Rhetoric,” answered Caleb.

Caleb returned the president’s smile. “Yet they say that Homer was unlettered, and did he not give us Achilles, a half-clad pagan warrior, who was both ‘doer of deeds’ and ‘speaker of words’?”

calculated that college body came to thirty-three,

possible. I need, I suppose, to account for my life, and for my part in Caleb’s crossing from his world into mine, and what flowed on from

though a lifetime’s sermons tell me I have earned the hard judgment of an angry God. I do believe that God appointed the moment of my birth and the instant of my death and all the circumstances of my life in between.

Pleiades like a swarm of fireflies,

took leave of Joel and Caleb with few misgivings: they seemed well embarked upon their sophomore year, and well set, both in their studies and in their place as members in good standing of the college community. With the president himself so invested in their success, the fact of it seemed to me to be assured.

spires and cupolas of Venice, luminous in the pale sun.

We returned to Cambridge in 1664. Samuel’s father beckoned us home.

As impressive as Caleb’s disputations seemed to me, the whispers about the hall that day concerned Joel. The rumor was that come commencement, Joel would be named valedictorian of his class, ranked above the scions of Eliot and Dudley and all the other high-born English scholars.

Caleb was to go to live in his house at Charlestown, directly from Harvard, and study the law under his inspection.

we will make the crossing, home to my island. You will like it there.”

He was ten years old when we came back here to live, seeking refuge from the dreadful events that then beset the mainland. All through that terrible year of 1675, we would climb the bluffs and look across to the far shore, scanning the distant horizon for rumors of war.

For half a year things went ill for the mainland English.

Terrible fires scorched the homes and warehouses of Boston in ’75 and again in ’79, and

Sometimes, four generations gather here at board. At such times, I look about me, amazed that such a restless girl should have grown old as matriarch to such a settled brood.

grandchildren and have lived to see three of my great-grandchildren.) Ammi Ruhama is a boatbuilder,

Thus perished from this world our hopeful young prophet Joel.

I had begun this journey following him into the hidden corners of

his world and here it ended with him crossed over into the brightest heights of mine.

Nothing was said about Joel’s untimely and tragic death, and if the honor would have gone to him, no sign of it was given.

Well, I thought. You have done it, my friend. It has cost you your home, and your health, and estrangement from your closest kinsman. But after today, no man may say the Indian mind is primitive and ineducable.

expect that every person alive today has sat with someone dear to them through the rigors of the consumption.

So I stayed in Charlestown and spent my every waking hour at Caleb’s bedside.

so complete a crossing as Caleb has made into English ways,

Only later, when I was face-to-face with Caleb and looked into his eyes, did I understand exactly what kind of help Tequamuck had sent, and that it was both less, and more, than what I had asked of him.

Caleb raised his chin, and made a mighty effort to gather his breath. Then his lips parted, and though the sound that uttered forth was strained at first, his voice gained strength until I felt his hymn like a paean, resonant in my soul. He sang out his death song, and died like a hero going home.

They pulled the Indian College down.

It is an old story to me, by now. And that college had proved itself the greatest thief of all. It was, I now think, a cursed place.

and then we sit together, hand in hand, and watch the last light dance upon the water.

The “college at Newtowne,” which would be named Harvard, was founded in 1636, just six years after the establishment of the Massachusetts Bay colony. The total number of

its graduates in the seventeenth century was only 465. Caleb Cheeshahteaumauk was a member of this elite.

John Printer, a Nipmuc, ran the printing press housed in the college, where the first Indian bible and many other books in Algonquin were published.

On his way back from Martha’s Vineyard to Cambridge for the 1665 commencement, Joel Iacoomis was shipwrecked and murdered on Nantucket and never received the degree he had earned.

Caleb marched with his English classmates in 1665, received his degree, but died just a year later of consumption.

Among those to whom she awarded a BA in 2011 was Tiffany Smalley, the first Martha’s Vineyard Wôpanâak since Caleb Cheeshahteaumauk to complete an undergraduate degree at Harvard College. Also recognized was Joel Iacoomis, who was awarded his degree posthumously, after three hundred and forty-six years. Vineyard Haven, November 1, 2010