Read Online The Idea of Home by Geraldine Brooks - Free Book Online
Authors: Geraldine Brooks
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perfect clarity. But at the time, I did not know it had happened. It took me ten years to find out. It was a rare, beautiful English summer day and I was taking a brief break from reporting in the Middle East. As a respite from the hot and dusty places of my beat, my husband, Tony, and I were rambling in Englandâs Peak District. We came across a finger post pointing to Eyam, and underneath it said âPlague Villageâ. Intrigued, we went there, and in the parish church was a small exhibit that gave an account of how bubonic plague had struck the town in 1665 and the villagers, alone among all other infected communities, had elected to quarantine themselves and prevent the spread of the disease into the surrounding population. Theaccount described how, at the height of the plague, the surviving villagers had closed the church and met for services in a field, where the worshippers could stand apart from each other. We went to that field, and in the play of the light through the leaves, I could see them: standing alone, worshipping together, somehow still willing to talk to a God who had asked so much of them and yet offered no respite. The pale faces lifted towards the weak English sunlight were haggard, weary, grief-racked. Yet hopeful, because they yet lived, and so many others had died.
I did not speed home that day and call the Wall Street Journal to tender my notice, run up to my garret and start writing a novel. I went back to my work covering modern catastrophes. But the story of that ancient time of crisis was on my mind. I would use the conduct of the people I was covering as a template to imagine it: did the villagers of Eyam act like this? Did crisis bring out their best selves, or their worst? Did one of them answer disaster with the kindness of that Kurdish man, the grace of that Eritrean girl? Didanother become as vicious and morally lost as this Baathist torturer, that Somali boy-soldier?
The questions nagged at me until I started hearing voices. Or one voice, at least: the voice suggested in half a line from one of the Eyam ministerâs few surviving letters, written just after his wife has died of plague. In it, he mentions that his maid has survived and is attending to his needs. That brief mention was all there was of that maid in the historical record; there was nothing more of her to be found, not even a name. Yet her voice was very clear to me. And how she sounded told me who she was. Who she was told me how she would act, and that, in turn, set the plot of the novel in motion.
Something similar has happened in all my novels. Someone rises up out of the grave and begins to talk to me. Until they do, I do not have a book. Often, the voices that speak to me are the voices of the unheard. The maid who was illiterate and who did not get to set down how she felt about caring for that minister, how she grieved for his wife. The enslaved woman on a Virginia plantation, when teaching slaves to read wasagainst the law. The puritan ministerâs daughter who had been taught to read, because it was good for her to study her Bible, but not to write, for women were not believed to need a tool to communicate outside the boundaries of the family. Which is one reason there are no female diaries from colonial America before 1700, and no good ones until 1750.
So where do you go to hear their voices, to imagine how they might have expressed themselves, what issues might have occupied their minds? Well, sadly, you go to court. You will find her there, in every era. Accused of being a witch, because she was poor and alone, or a scold, which meant she had been overheard criticising a man in public. And if the English assizes or the Massachusetts Bay Colonyâs religious tribunals took down verbatim transcripts, you will be able to read what she had to say. And you will recognise her â her anger, her sense of injustice, her awareness that she, as a woman, is getting a crook deal. Some critics have
I did not speed home that day and call the Wall Street Journal to tender my notice, run up to my garret and start writing a novel. I went back to my work covering modern catastrophes. But the story of that ancient time of crisis was on my mind. I would use the conduct of the people I was covering as a template to imagine it: did the villagers of Eyam act like this? Did crisis bring out their best selves, or their worst? Did one of them answer disaster with the kindness of that Kurdish man, the grace of that Eritrean girl? Didanother become as vicious and morally lost as this Baathist torturer, that Somali boy-soldier?
The questions nagged at me until I started hearing voices. Or one voice, at least: the voice suggested in half a line from one of the Eyam ministerâs few surviving letters, written just after his wife has died of plague. In it, he mentions that his maid has survived and is attending to his needs. That brief mention was all there was of that maid in the historical record; there was nothing more of her to be found, not even a name. Yet her voice was very clear to me. And how she sounded told me who she was. Who she was told me how she would act, and that, in turn, set the plot of the novel in motion.
Something similar has happened in all my novels. Someone rises up out of the grave and begins to talk to me. Until they do, I do not have a book. Often, the voices that speak to me are the voices of the unheard. The maid who was illiterate and who did not get to set down how she felt about caring for that minister, how she grieved for his wife. The enslaved woman on a Virginia plantation, when teaching slaves to read wasagainst the law. The puritan ministerâs daughter who had been taught to read, because it was good for her to study her Bible, but not to write, for women were not believed to need a tool to communicate outside the boundaries of the family. Which is one reason there are no female diaries from colonial America before 1700, and no good ones until 1750.
So where do you go to hear their voices, to imagine how they might have expressed themselves, what issues might have occupied their minds? Well, sadly, you go to court. You will find her there, in every era. Accused of being a witch, because she was poor and alone, or a scold, which meant she had been overheard criticising a man in public. And if the English assizes or the Massachusetts Bay Colonyâs religious tribunals took down verbatim transcripts, you will be able to read what she had to say. And you will recognise her â her anger, her sense of injustice, her awareness that she, as a woman, is getting a crook deal. Some critics have
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