Geraldine Brooks ‘talks’ to the ghosts of the past. Bron Sibree reports.
Her children think she talks to ghosts. "And, in a way, I do," admits Geraldine Brooks, whose uncanny ability to give voice to the past in her fiction has won her the Pulitzer Prize and a global readership in the millions. A single shard of historical fact, a well-worn artefact or, as in the case of her recent best-seller, People of the Book, a bar room rumour, can send her off to the archives to coax fiction from the seams of history in ways that seem almost miraculous to fans and critics alike.
"I always have these ideas stacked up like aeroplanes with air-traffic control," she laughs. "I keep coming across these things on the historical records that are fascinating, and noodle away at them until I start hearing the people talking to me, and then I know it's time to do that one."
Her new novel, Caleb's Crossing, she explains, was crowding her consciousness well before she'd completed People of the Book. It tells the story of Caleb Cheeshahteaumauk, the first Native American to graduate from Harvard University in 1665, but for Brooks it began with a single six-word notation on a map. The map was of Martha's Vineyard, where the Australian-born author lives. On it were notations of sites of significance to the Wampanoag Indians who have inhabited the island for centuries.
"One of the notations said 'first Native American graduate of Harvard', and when I saw the year 1665 I thought it was a misprint," recalls Brooks. "I thought they meant 1965, Civil Rights time and all that." But when she discovered the graduation had taken place in the 1660s, "I was basically a done dinner from that minute on."
Brooks spent the next few years scouring Harvard's archives, visiting archaeological digs and meeting with the Wampanoag Indians on Martha's Vineyard to learn as much as she could about Caleb and the time and place in which he lived.
Little is known of this extraordinary scholar who was the son of a Wampanoag sonquem, or leader, and studied the classics alongside the sons of the American colonial elite. "Here's a boy who grew up, we can be fairly certain, totally immersed in his own culture and language, then moved into the English world and became one of the most eminent scholars within it," says Brooks, who also discovered the existence of another Wampanoag scholar, Joel, who studied alongside Caleb. "There was tragic misadventure and murder before he graduated, then Caleb went on to graduate alone. But it must have been an astonishing thing to have made such a complete transition. It's an amazing achievement."
Almost as astonishing is the way in which Brooks gives Caleb's story imaginative voice. Her narrator and lens on this 17th century frontier world is Bethia Mayfield, daughter of the charismatic minister who tried to convert the Wampanoag to his own strict puritan beliefs. Within a year of coming to the island, he has Caleb and Joel studying Latin and Greek, an education that is denied Bethia. Instead, she is indentured as a housekeeper at the newly established Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where the boys are later sent and where she observes their intellectual journey or "crossing" into another culture. A crossing with immense costs, as well as triumphs.
Just as she did in her début novel, Year of Wonders, Brooks miraculously reprises the idiom and syntax of the period in this deeply evocative tale, which documents the disenfranchisement of an entire people as it tells of Caleb's crossing.
Indeed, it is very much a novel about spirit, or as Brooks puts it "those brave spirits who want to steal fire, in the old sense of Prometheus". Little wonder that it is dedicated to her second son, Bizuayehu, who she says also "made a crossing", when she and husband Tony Horwitz, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author, "adopted him from Ethiopia, three years ago aged 5".
At the time she was already writing Caleb's Crossing and says although she wasn't conscious of it until she'd finished, "watching Bizu acquire English and the speed and the proficiency with which he mastered that gave me a lot of confidence to allow Caleb to master English and Latin very quickly. I was living with an adept who was doing that very thing".
She is quick to acknowledge the novel's palpable echoes with Year of Wonders for, as she points out, "It's set in the exact same period, the exact same year. That was kind of mind-blowing for me, because although you have completely different life experiences for your characters the psychological milieu is the same. My Year of Wonders town, Eyam, was a puritan town.
"I find it a fascinating time. It is a time when you can see the modern mind emerging from the medieval mind. It is the time of the birth of science and of the Enlightenment, and I love the willingness of people to toss over old orders. Whether I agree with them or not, I like the impulse to try a different way and re-think things."
A former foreign correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, Brooks re-thought her own life's direction and traded reporting on war zones for writing fiction after the birth of her first son, Nathaniel. She'd already written two non-fiction books, Nine Parts of Desire, and Foreign Correspondent before penning Year of Wonders, which so vividly re-imagined the 17th century outbreak of plague in the Derbyshire village of Eyam, that it sold more than 800,000 copies.
She then re-imagined America's Civil War along with the missing father of Louisa May Alcott's classic Little Women in her second novel, March, which won her the 2006 Pulitzer Prize. That same year she and her family moved to Martha's Vineyard where she completed her New York Times best-selling third novel about the Sarajevo Haggadah, People of the Book.
Yet even now she is at a loss to explain her ability to connect with readers through fiction. "It's fantastic, but all I do is write the book that I like to read. The one thing I can conclude is that I'm not alone."
Caleb's Crossing (Fourth Estate $39.99). Geraldine Brooks is speaking at the Raye Freedman Arts Centre, Epsom Girls Grammar, on Thursday June 9 at 8pm; tickets $15 (09) 376 4399 or email from books@womensbookshop.co.nz.
