Anya Raneva

Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry

Anya is a character in The Orchard [published 2022], by Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry. Though her story is told in the first person and it happens to her, Anya tells it as if she were a part of something greater, part of a family, a generation, or a country.

Anya lives with her parents, who are aero-space engineers, and her grandmother, at the edge of Moscow. She and her best friend, Milka, are inseparable, going to school together, sharing homework and plans. Milka is thin, always famished, but very smart and possessed of a fearless honesty which Anya envies. Milka lives with her mother and stepfather. Anya’s mother thinks her hunger is from the lovelessness in her household.

In summer, Milka spends all three months with Anya’s family at their dacha near Moscow, a modest summer home set in an apple orchard. Everyone enjoys the long summer days, gathers mushrooms and herbs and helps preserve apples to liven up their winter diets. Victory day in May is celebrated with a barbecue with the neighbors.

Though loving, Anya’s parents never stop arguing about their country. Her father feels Russia saved the world from Nazi fascists in World War II, but her mother feels they aren’t free, that their lives are controlled by their government. Grandmother survived the Leningrad blockade. She doesn’t argue, “courage and sadness tucked into the folds of her face.” 

Anya and Milka are 14 in 1982 when Brezhnev dies. They want to travel, enjoy life. They smoke and explore their bodies, playing a Queen tape over and over, “We are the champions, and we’ll keep on fighting to the end.”

When Andropov dies in 1984, Anya’s father feels that it is the end of an era. He is frightened for his daughter. Anya and Milka invite two boys into their close friendship. Lopatin is of peasant stock, attractive but not smart. Trifonov is a bookworm, of noble blood, but asthmatic. “If the iron curtain collapses, we’ll be blinded by the light,” they think. “But the world will see our disabilities.” “Maybe the world has its own disabilities.” “Our country is the only thing we will love and hate forever,” says Milka.

The four friends stick together when they take a class trip to the Crimea, visiting Chekhov’s home and Yalta where peace was concluded in 1945. It is sunny and warm. Milka is sleeping with Lopatin, and Anya with Trifonov by this time. At night they bring cherries and wine to the beach, swimming naked out to a rock and looking out at the infinite sky and stars beyond.

Every day the news sounds worse that year, but at New Years there is still enough for a celebration at Anya’s house, with duck, potato salad, caviar, chocolate, mandarins, champagne and presents. Anya is infinitely happy, in love with life. In March, Gorbachev comes to power. Everyone worries, but they teeter on the cusp of happiness. Anya’s class prepares to present Hamlet with Milka playing the lead role.

At Easter, at the dacha, the four start a fire to keep warm, but Trifonov sees that Lopatin is burning the pages of a book. “The country is like this orchard. Your ancestors were dutiful revolutionaries, but they walked on corpses,” he says. Lopatin responds, “Your people pretty much fucked up this country and then tried to blame mine. But it’s over. We’ll build a new country, plant a new orchard.” They fight and Trifonov ends up in the hospital.

Later that spring, Milka asks Anya to punch her in the stomach. She is pregnant by her stepfather and hopes to miscarry. Anya is horrified, at first refuses, and then pummels Milka. She goes home, but Milka calls her, asking Anya to come and bury the dead baby. Anya does this, taking the baby out to the dacha and burying it under an apple tree. Then she hears that Hamlet cannot continue, as Milka is dead. Anya is in shock. She cannot tell anyone what really happened, cannot betray her friend. She goes to the funeral. Both Lopatin and Trifonov speak, but Anya does not emerge from her depression for months.

At last Anya matriculates into the Institute of Foreign Languages. She loses herself in the study of literature. She goes to the United States as an exchange student, meets a contractor named Mike, and marries him in a small country wedding in Virginia in 1991. Though she talks to her parents constantly by phone, she does not return to Russia for 19 years.

When she does finally go back, she finds things much the same. Her grandmother has died and her parents are retired, though her father goes to an outdoor market every day to sell what he can. Everything is shabby and run down, the stores full of luxury goods, but the prices are so high, her family cannot afford them. They refuse the money Anya tries to give them. A developer wants to put a resort where their dacha and orchard are. A meeting of all the neighbors is called and they refuse to sell. Anya finds that Lopatin is associated with the developer. He tells them it is a good deal. “The developer always gets what he wants.”

Anya goes to Milka’s house, trying to find out how she died. She tells Milka’s stepfather Milka died because of him, but he insists it was Anya’s fault. “She bled to death,” he finally says. “We couldn’t save her.” No one wanted to say what had really happened.

At New Year’s, Anya’s family again plans a family celebration. Lopatin arrives in a Father Frost costume. When Anya suggests they call Trifonov, Lopatin is startled to find that she doesn’t know he died protesting in the coup in 1991. Anya accuses her parents of hiding the news from her and leaves with Lopatin. They go out to the dacha.

“What is it like to live in the United States?” Lopatin asks. “Like I have no legs. I can’t find my footing. It’s familiar and foreign at the same time.” She tells Lopatin about her husband, about what happened to Milka. Lopatin has never married, has Milka’s name tattooed on his arm. “Trifonov waited for the moment he could prove himself a hero. He was reciting from Chekhov when the tank mowed him down. We are the survivors, the champions of the world.” Anya finds that “no amount of truth could change us, but the little that we knew felt like everything.”

The dacha and cherry orchard are sold and Anya’s mother and father come to Virginia for a visit. They lay out and plant an orchard with Anya’s husband, language being no barrier. Anya finds the rootstock often comes from Russia.

The intimacy with which Anya’s story is told, full of sensuous detail and human truth, allows us to fully enter the world she describes. Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry wanted to tell the story of her Generation Perestroika, which uncovered truths and then had their hope betrayed. The story is full of her own nostalgia as an emigrant, longing for a home to which she cannot return. I hear the depths and breadth in her voice which we have come to expect from the great country of Russia. 

Emma Rauschenbach Jung

Emma Rauschenbach was born in a lovely house in Switzerland on the Rhine into a family of well-off manufacturers in 1882. Quiet and studious, Emma would have liked to go to university and study natural history, but this wasn’t permitted to women of her class. She broke off a conventional engagement when Carl Jung, an impoverished Swiss doctor, began courting her. 

Jung was handsome, extroverted and intense. He told Emma about his patients, gave her books to read and encouraged her studies. Finally, after rejecting him once, and under the influence of her mother who knew Jung’s family, Emma accepted him. They were married in 1903 and had a honeymoon in Paris and London before taking up residence in Zurich.

Jung worked at the Bergholzli Clinic which was becoming renowned for its innovative treatment of the mentally ill. The staff and their families lived on the site, where Jung researched word associations as well as listened deeply to patients. Patients worked in the gardens and did domestic work, dined with the staff and participated in social events. Emma, living in this hot-house atmosphere, helped with research and reports and learned a lot. Her first two daughters were born while the family lived at the clinic.

Jung was especially popular with women patients. His second personality, introverted and insecure, responded positively to them. In particular, a Russian patient, Sabina Spielrein, sought his attention. Her dementia was cured by Jung, but that was not the end of her infatuation. Emma was hurt by the rumors. She asked for a divorce, which she knew Jung did not want. Instead, she and Jung began to plan a house of their own.

During this time, the couple visited Sigmund Freud in Vienna several times. Freud was very taken with Jung and hoped he would become his heir in psychiatry. The two of them traveled to America together to lecture. But Jung could not agree with Freud on the roots of psychosis and this fractured their relationship. Emma wrote to Freud, fearing the pair could not agree, but then backed off when she felt she had made a fool of herself.

By 1909 the new house in Kusnacht was ready. Jung resigned from the Bergholzli Clinic and took up private practice. Emma became more of a partner at this time, running the household, making appointments and having three more children by the time she was 32. Jung was impetuous, unrestrained and constantly driven by his complexes to travel and work. Emma was quiet, steady, stepping in for Jung when he traveled and providing the normal home life Jung depended upon.

The years before World War I were difficult for the Jungs. A definitive break with with Freud led Jung to go deep into his own unconscious. He was helped in this by another patient, Toni Wolff, who became a fixture at the Jung house for many years to come. Jung began his Red Book and colleagues felt he was “dicing with madness,” though they admired his courage in doing so. He shared his psychic experiences with both Emma and Toni, a woman with forbidding, mystic eyes, who seemed to be all spirit. Emma felt jealous and disassociated, going about looking elegant, but with head bowed. The children didn’t like Toni, but Emma did not allow them to be uncivil to her.

Jung told Emma she must find her own way, stop relying on him and the children, individuate. She began an analysis with a colleague. When American friends built a place for a Psychological Club in Zurich in 1916, Emma became its president. She steered the group when it had money problems and sometimes lectured. When she began to work with patients of her own, Emma was simple and direct, helping others to find their own way, as she had.

Emma also continued her life long interest in the legend of the Holy Grail, beginning a book on it which was eventually published. It represented the quest of “every individual for psychic health and wholeness, who, by asking the right questions, could free themselves from the dark forces of the unconscious.” [Labyrinths: Emma Jung, her Marriage to Carl, and the Early Years of Psychoanalysis by Catrine Clay, 2016]

By the mid 1930’s Jung seemed to be less attached to Toni Wolff. He was building his tower at Bollingen and interested in alchemy. He and Emma traveled to America, London, and Glastonbury for Emma’s study of the Grail legends. When World War II began, the family moved up into the Alps, but returned when it was deemed safe. Jung had a heart attack in 1944. Emma never left his side. They had learned from each other and depended upon each other all their lives.

At the house in Kusnacht, Emma reigned, modest and strong; aristocratic in a positive way. There were now 19 grandchildren rambling around. Emma was always available, respected and loved. In 1955 she became ill with cancer and died in November. Jung was 80 and very broken up, though he lived another five years.

Emma’s life long struggle was to live beside a powerful, charismatic man who attracted many people to him and his all-consuming work. Observers felt she had gone through a “spectacular transformation” during her marriage. Carl Jung’s strength came through her, but he was always encouraging of her work and the role she played as well. I read the biography by Catrin Clay noted above, but there have also been others. It is easy to believe, as it was said, that her presence was a gift to all she met.

Melba Pattillo Beals

Melba Beals grew up in a middle class black suburb of Little Rock. She had a room of her own where she kept stuffed animals, listened to Nat “King” Cole and Johnny Mathis, and wrote in the diary her Grandmother gave her to make her complaints to God. She was afraid of white people, but also wanted to ride on the merry-go-round in the park, which was forbidden.

Born in December, 1941, Melba lived with her mother, who was a teacher, her grandmother, and brother. Her parents had divorced when she was seven. Melba hated seeing how frightened her parents seemed to be of whites. When the family visited relatives in Cincinnati, she was thrilled by how simple relations between whites and blacks seemed, and wanted to move there. But she had volunteered to be among those ready to integrate Little Rock’s big Central High School. The day arrived sooner than she expected, though Orval Faubus, Arkansas’ governor was dead set against it. 

Integration began in September, 1957, and as Melba’s grandmother said, “all Hades broke loose.” The day school opened, such a hateful mob gathered at the school that Melba and her mother barely escaped. For the next few days she and the other eight black students waited at the NAACP office studying by themselves. Eisenhower co-opted the Arkansas National Guard which Faubus had used to prevent students from coming to school, and sent in the 101st Airborne Division of the army to protect the students. 

On September 23, 1957, the nine students went to school. Melba was 15, a junior. She was terrified. Her grandmother told her, “You are a warrior. God’s warriors don’t cry. You pull yourself together and recite the 23rd Psalm.” In classes Melba was the only black. She was called names, kicked, spit upon and slapped. Between classes, at least at the beginning, her guard Danny protected her, following her with a rifle and bayonet.

In addition to the hatred Melba faced at school, she lost her old friends, who felt she was too “fancy” for them. The phone at their house never stopped ringing, with people giving their opinions. Some nights Grandma India sat up with her rifle across her lap. Weekends were more normal with Melba going to church with her family.

As the weeks went on, Melba was harassed at every turn. “Two, four, six, eight, we ain’t goin’ to integrate,” students shouted. The teachers didn’t seem to have any control over the situation. Gym class was horrific. She was scalded in the shower, her clothes stolen. When acid was doused in her eyes, Danny washed them out with water, saving them. Danny too told Melba she must become a warrior and taught her ways to protect herself. By November the 101st Airborne was gone. The Arkansas guards watched, but did nothing.

By the end of January, when Melba told her grandmother she wished she were dead, her grandmother gave her Gandhi to read. “Fighting back is never a solution,” she said. “Anger brings defeat. Change the rules of the game. Thank your tormentors.” Melba did achieve some peace with this strategy, but the abuse didn’t stop. Once when an angry group came toward her, a white kid, Link, told her to take his car. He called her at night and prepared her for what might happen the next day. He pretended to be a segregationist, but he protected Melba as he was able.

As school came to a close, the segregationists were determined to prevent the one senior in the group, Ernie, from graduating. Senior events were canceled. Officials told Melba’s mother her next teaching contract would be canceled if she didn’t take Melba out of high school. But Grandmother India had a remedy for this too. “We’ll go see Bishop Sherman.” That did the trick and Melba’s mother was given a contract.

Finally school was over. Ernie graduated and the “Little Rock Nine” as the group came to be known, traveled to several cities, receiving awards for their courage and meeting people. Melba prepared to go back to school in the fall, but Governor Faubus closed all the high schools in the city!

That year was lonely for Melba. Her grandmother got leukemia and died in October. The following year the NAACP put out a call for families in which students could board and finish school. Melba went to Santa Rosa, California, where she boarded with a Quaker family, George and Carol McCabe. She then continued on to San Francisco State.

Melba married John Beals and had a daughter, Kelli, but was divorced a few years later as she wanted to have a career. She worked as a journalist, getting a master’s in journalism; and then as an educator, with a doctorate. Her first book, Warriors Don’t Cry [published 1994], detailing her year at Central High School, was followed by White Is a State of Mind [published 1999] which discussed Beals’ further coming of age.

I especially loved the descriptions of Melba Beals’ family life in her books, utterly normal in the mid-century modern sense. In the photographs, she and the other teenage girls all wear the crinolines I had to fight for! In the years after high school, Beals embodied all the feminine quandaries of our time. She never stopped using her faith and the grounding words of her Grandmother India to help her through the moral and professional questions which she faced. Becoming a pioneer activist, she lost her original community, but gained much. She continues to live on the west coast.

Irina Ratushinskaya

Irina Ratushinskaya was born in Odessa, then part of the U.S.S.R., in 1954. She graduated in physics and married Igor Gerashchenko, a physicist. They worked for human rights in Kiev, photographing books and signing an appeal on behalf of the dissident physicist Sakharov. Both of them became Christians, though they did not acquire a Bible until 1980. Irina worked as a primary school teacher and her poems were published in samizdat. The two of them were arrested in Moscow at a protest in 1981 and held for ten days.

Irina was again arrested in 1982 and sentenced to seven years for “agitation against the Soviet regime.” While in prison, she smuggled her poetry out to her husband who published it. The poetry celebrated the small good things happening around her, such as frost on the windows. She became one of the most well-known Russian dissidents in her time. She was released early, in 1986, just ahead of the summit between U.S. president Reagan and Gorbachev, the Russian premier. She was 32.

I became aware of Ratushinskaya through my reading of The New York Review of Books, which featured her plight in prison, and then interviewed her in 1987 on her release. I was fascinated that she was close to me in age (nine years younger), and that her trials were going on half a world away from me. In my journal, on 11.12.87, I wrote:  “If I look at houses with lighted windows imagining that behind them ordinary, happy people live, how must it have been for her to look out at the mountains and know that beyond them were her husband and friends.” 

When her book Grey Is the Color of Hope was published in 1988, I learned exactly what her thoughts and experiences in prison were. In it she writes of the friendships she made with the other eleven political prisoners in “the small zone” in a notorious penal colony in Mordovia as they tried to preserve their humanity. They made gloves, tried to plant a few vegetables and, when one of them was sent to the horrifying Shizo isolated, unheated detention, tried to protect each other.

On the day she was released, October 10, 1986, Irina wrote in thanks to those who had kept her name alive:

Believe me, it was often thus:

In solitary cells, on winter nights
A sudden sense of joy and warmth
And a resounding note of love.
And then, unsleeping, I would know
A-huddle by an icy wall:
Someone is thinking of me now,
Petitioning the Lord for me.
My dear ones, thank you all
Who did not falter, who believed in us!
In the most fearful prison hour
We probably would not have passed
Through everything – from end to end,
Our heads held high, unbowed –
Without your valiant hearts
to light our path.

After her release, Ratushinskaya and Gerashchenko lived and worked in Chicago and then in London, where their twin sons were born. They wished to give their sons a Russian education, however, so they began attempts to reclaim their Russian citizenship. They returned to Moscow in 1998. There, Irina continued to write, her books translated into many languages. She died of cancer in 2017.

Nao Yasutani

At 16, Nao Yasutani begins a diary, telling of her life in Japan after she and her family had to leave Sunnyvale, California, because her father, a brilliant programmer, had lost his job. This diary, together with letters written by her great uncle Haruki Yasutani, a kamikazi pilot during World War II, washes up on a beach in British Columbia. Ruth, a writer, finds the packet wrapped in layers of plastic and begins a search to find out whether the diary and Nao are real.

The diary begins by telling us of Nao’s miserable family life in a tiny apartment in Tokyo. Her father can’t find work and her mother finally takes a job to support the family. After her father’s failed suicide, Nao has little faith in him. She misses California, where she lived from age 3 to 14. She can barely speak contemporary Japanese and at school she is first physically bullied and then ostracized with a mock funeral, which is filmed and put on-line. “In my heart, I am American,” she says.

That summer, Nao goes to stay in a mountain monastery northeast of Tokyo with her 104-year-old great grandmother, the nun Jiko. Jiko had been an intellectual and writer and Nao has great respect for the tiny woman. Jiko inquires into Nao’s anger and teaches her to sit zazen. “It can become your superpower,” she says. On the beach below the temple, Jiko encourages Nao to fight with the waves rolling in. She requires Nao to run up and down the steep temple steps every morning. 

All summer, Nao works in the temple kitchen, bathes in the hot springs and listens to her great-grandmother’s wisdom. “Up, down, same thing,” she says. “Not same, but not different.” Once when they are on a walk and Nao sees some scary girl bikers, she tries to hurry Jiko past. But Jiko takes her time and bows to them. The girls return the bow.

At the end of the summer the Obon festival, at which the spirits of the dead burst through the membrane separating them from the living, is celebrated at the temple. In the shrine room, in the dark, Nao believes her father has come, but it is actually her great-uncle Haruki. The man is quite young. He sings a French song and then is gone. Nao looks at a photo of Haruki to make sure and a letter slips out from the frame. It is the official letter of farewell he wrote to his mother, Jiko.

Back in school, Nao studies harder, but the bullying hasn’t stopped. After a particularly bad incident, she cuts off all her hair and goes to school in a hooded sweatshirt. In class she stands up on her desk, makes a loud cry and takes off her hood. She bows to her teacher and to her classmates and leaves.

Nao does not go back to school. At a cos-play coffeeshop, she meets Babette, to whom she speaks freely. Babette sets her up on some “dates” and she begins writing in her diary. Nao has very little hope and, like her father, plans to commit suicide after she has written down the story of her great-grandmother’s life. 

Jiko’s companion calls to tell Nao that Jiko’s last hours are approaching and she should come quickly. Nao takes the train and waits all night for the bus. In the morning her father joins her. Jiko writes a last character, the one for “life.” “For now and for the time being,” she says and dies. Nao and her father know that Jiko was speaking to them. “We must do our part,” says Nao’s father. “We must live.” They assist with the funeral and go home.

At home, Nao’s father begins a program which searches for every reference of a person’s name on-line and expunges it. He wants to clean up the cyber bullying of his daughter. Nao learns that her father was fired for raising the issue of conscience and wondering if he could build it into the game controllers he was working on, which were being purchased by the U.S. military. She also learns that her great uncle Haruki flew his plane into the ocean rather than aiming at an American ship.

Nao takes her equivalency exams and qualifies for an international school in Montreal, where she studies French. She remains determined to write down Jiko Yasutani’s story.

Nao’s story is confirmed by Ruth’s correspondence with an old friend of Nao’s father in Sunnyvale. In parallel with Nao’s story, we learn much about Ruth’s life on a remote island off British Columbia with her husband Oliver and their friends. Ruth gets so deep into Nao’s story she feels she has participated in it and Oliver tells her about quantum mechanics theories which possibly support this.

Much of Nao’s story is earthy and raunchy, the underside of being an adolescent girl in Japan. It is hard to read, but this part of the book is redeemed by the equally true stories of life in the temple with her “old Jiko.” We have the feeling that Nao is being absolutely honest about what she sees and feels, courageous in and of itself. We do not see her overcome her almost universally bad experiences in Japan, except through one defiant act. Later, we discover that she makes her way to Canada and a better life.

Learning of the anti-war lineage of her family makes Nao very proud. Ruth Ozeki tells her story in A Tale for the Time Being [published 2013], a rich evocation of both Japan and British Columbia. She puts together accurate science, everyday detail and characters with so much reality you feel you know them. Writing this open to actual, difficult life continually takes you by surprise.

Hester Prynne

The Scarlet Letter by Hugues Merle 1861

Hester Prynne was raised in England, but married a scholar whose desire for knowledge took them to Amsterdam. From there, about 1642, Hester was sent to  New England. Nathaniel Hawthorne, who tells Hester’s story in The Scarlet Letter [published 1850], does not tell us how she managed there. It cannot have been easy to be a young woman alone among the Puritans in Boston.

We meet Hester, a woman with a rich coloring and abundant dark hair, emerging from the jail with a baby in her arms. She will not tell the name of the child’s father and is condemned to stand on a scaffold above the marketplace for three hours and to wear a scarlet “A” on her breast for the rest of her life. From the scaffold, Hester sees her long lost husband, standing with some Indians at the edge of the crowd. He comes to her when she is put back in prison, saying “The man who has wronged us both still lives. I will find him.” He makes Hester promise that she will not reveal their former relationship.

Hester goes to live in a thatched cottage by the seashore, making a living for herself and her child with her needle. She embroiders the scarlet letter with gold thread and dresses her child in beautiful clothes. At three, her Pearl of great price, is something of a fairy child, happy to play in nature, since she and her mother are shunned by the townspeople. She is beautiful and intelligent, but has a wild and defiant mood. Her mother has trouble disciplining her.

When the town fathers discuss taking Pearl away from her mother, Arthur Dimmesdale, the town’s beloved young minister, intervenes: “The child is all she has to bring her to God.”

For Hester, her isolation, shame and the scarlet letter itself are teachers. She thinks her thoughts freely. “The world’s law was not law for her mind.” Though Hester becomes a cold, dignified figure as her energy leaves her body and enlivens her mind, to the townspeople she has become an inexhaustible sister of mercy. She is humble, quick to give where charity is needed and a nurse to the sick. The “A” comes to stand for able. Her consciousness of sin also makes her a counselor for those who need one.

By the time Pearl is seven, Hester observes that the minister, Dimmesdale, is very ill. She notes that her husband, Chillingworth, has been living with him. She tells Chillingworth that she will tell the minister he was her husband and is now his enemy.

Looking for a chance to speak to Dimmesdale, Hester meets him in the forest. The minister confesses his misery at the fact that people imagine he is blameless, while he himself is wracked with guilt. Hester throws her arms around him. “I do forgive you. I am your friend. May God forgive us both.” She tells him that there is a larger world around them. “Begin anew,” she says. “Make thyself a new name!” Dimmesdale does not believe he can do this alone.

For an hour Hester casts off the terrible ”A” and the two imagine leaving on a ship together. They will make a new life for themselves in the Old World. Pearl, who has been playing by the brook, will not come to Hester until she puts the “A” back on her breast, however, and when the minister kisses Pearl, she runs to the brook and washes it off.

A ship sits waiting in the harbor, to leave in three days. Hester, with her child and Dimmesdale, plans to be on it. Boston takes a holiday when a new governor is to be elected and Dimmesdale preaches an especially powerful sermon on this day. After it, Dimmesdale struggles up to the scaffolding in the marketplace, begging Hester’s help. Once there he confesses his guilt. Pearl kisses him, her father, which brings her a sense of relief and Dimmesdale dies.

Hester and Pearl disappear and are not seen for many years. But one day Hester, a stately and solemn older woman, still wearing the gold-embroidered “A” on her breast, resumes living in the seaside cottage at the edge of town. It is observed that she is the recipient of tokens of love from a foreign country and that she is embroidering clothes for a grandchild. Clearly Pearl is married and happy, living elsewhere.

Hester herself resumes her nursing, bringing counsel and comfort to those who need it. She looks forward to the day when a “new truth would be revealed in order to establish the whole relation of men and women on a surer ground of mutual happiness.” When she dies, Hester is buried beside the minister Dimmesdale in the churchyard.

Hester Prynne comes to her redemption through solitary and free-thinking reliance on natural morality and common sense rather than civil law. She is resilient enough to walk freely through the town and become a help to others. Late in life, she returns to the place which has been most meaningful to her. She reminds us that none of us live for ourselves alone, and that service to others is more important than obsession with righteousness.

Maria Campbell

Maria Campbell tells her own story in the book Halfbreed [published 1973 and updated 2019]. She was born in 1940 near Spring River, Saskatchewan, the oldest of eight children. Part of a vibrant Métis culture (made up of descendants of European men who married Native American women), she was deeply influenced by her great-grandmother, whom she calls Cheechum. 

Cheechum was a Cree woman who married a Campbell from Edinborough, who came out to Canada to run a Hudson Bay Company store. He was terribly jealous of her, and flogged her because he believed he was not the father of her son. Cheechum left and became very self-sufficient, living on her own with her son. She was a niece of Gabriel Dumont, a general in the failed Métis rebellion of 1885, and never stopped hoping the Métis would rise up and demand respect and land for themselves.

Cheechum was a small, neat woman who taught Maria Cree ways with herbs and roots, basket making, dancing and the stories of her people. Though most Métis were Catholic, Cheechum refused to have anything to do with religion. She saw beauty in everything, felt time spent praying was wasted and found God in the world. She lived with Maria’s family, helping raise the kids though she was already in her 80’s.

Maria’s father taught her to set trap lines, ride spirited horses and do men’s work, while her convent-educated mother read to her Shakespeare, Dickens and Sir Walter Scott. They lived in a two-room cabin which Maria thought beautiful. Her father had built it on crown-owned road allowance property. In the summers they joined other Métis families, camping and collecting roots and berries which they sold in town. There was drinking and dancing and fighting. While Indians were passive and quiet, Métis people were raucous and fun. Even so, Maria hated to see them hang their heads around white people.

Maria went to school in mended clothes with her brothers and sisters. Their lunch pails held gophers, and bannock smeared with lard. Maria longed for her brothers and sisters to have toothbrushes, apples and oranges in their lunches, and cookies and milk in the afternoon. But her father began drinking after a failed political campaign, and her mother died giving birth to her last child when Maria was 12. Cheechum continued to help. At 96, however, she left, too old to cope with the small ones.

Maria was determined to keep her brothers and sisters together, even taking the littlest ones to school and hiding them in the bushes when no one was at home to watch them. Their father would be out on his trap lines, but he wanted the kids in school, so he hired housekeepers. The family refused to accept charity and were ashamed when people tried to help them. Maria quit school and worked as a housekeeper to bring in money.

At 15, Maria began to go to dances and out with men. When she became afraid the social workers would take the children away, she married Darrel, a man she didn’t love. Briefly they all lived together and Maria had her first baby. But Darrel called the agency and Maria’s brothers and sisters were sent to foster homes. Darrel took Maria to Vancouver, but they lived in very poor circumstances and Darrel soon left. Destitute, Maria turned to sex work, sending her baby to a convent to be cared for. 

Maria used drugs to numb herself and forget. She sank into worse situations. One of the men she worked for got her a job cooking on a ranch in Calgary when he went to jail. She was only 20, but proved herself. Though she wanted to stay out of trouble, she gambled and drank with the men. She tried going to hairdressing school, but the wages were insufficient, and by this time she had another baby.  Some people helped her. She was lonely for her family and felt she couldn’t go back a failure.

Working as a waitress, Maria felt she had met her life partner in David. They had a baby together too, but Maria didn’t tell David about her former life. She grew so worried he would find out, she was suicidal. After a nervous breakdown, she landed in a psychiatric hospital.

A condition of getting out of the hospital was going to Alcoholics Anonymous. Maria had spurned these meetings, but once there, she realized for the first time that she could break the cycle of drink and depression. At 24, she began turning her life around with the help of her sponsors, who insisted she face reality. Also, at  AA, Maria met the people would become part of the native movement in Alberta, both Indians and Métis.

Visiting her father, brothers and sisters in Saskatchewan, Maria felt conditions had deteriorated since she was a child. She also visited Cheechum, who was 104 and living quietly in her usual neat way. She was able to tell Cheechum everything. “You always had to do things the hard way,” Cheechum tells her. Maria had started a half-way house for young women in Alberta, where she offered a home and friendship, trusting the young women would then solve their own problems. Cheechum approved. “Each of us has to find herself in her own way.” Soon after this, Cheechum died.

David joined Maria and they had another child. Maria did street work and also interviewed people working in the sugar beet fields for a research project. Working with the Alberta Native Communications Society gave her new feelings of pride and hope. Written when she was 32, Halfbreed ends with her belief that people could set aside their differences and fight common enemies. The book propelled Maria into a life of activism and is taught in Canadian schools.

The native movements of the 1960’s were exciting, states Maria Campbell in an afterword, people inspiring each other. The elders demanded people reclaim their cultural history and become educated. Campbell has since been active in writing, teaching, theater and filmmaking. A video from 2020 shows the breadth of her activities and her warmth..

Told in an intimate first person, and read by the author as an audiobook, I found Maria Campbell’s book Halfbreed compelling in its honesty, particularly in telling us how low a proud young girl can sink and then pick herself up again. It is also revealing of the intensity with which our history is bound up with that of our family and people, whether we choose to recognize this or not. Throughout her book, Campbell writes of how Cheechum’s early teaching reverberated in her mind, helping her to find her own way.

Lorna Dugal Ridd

Amelia Warner, BBC production, 2000

Lorna grows up among the Doones, who occupy a valley near Exmoor in the 17th century. She believes she is the granddaughter of Ensor Doone, as she tells John Ridd when he meets her by chance while fishing. She is only eight, but a little lady with a sweet voice and large, dark eyes. Already she knows the violence of her kin. “They would kill us both, if they found us,” she tells John. “I never met anyone like you.”

Seven years later, John has grown large and powerful. He takes his uncle near the Doone valley and spies Lorna. She is nimble, smooth and elegant. “I felt I was face to face with fate,” he says. He cannot stay away. Lorna has a woodland bower where she comes to read every day. “But this place is very dangerous,” she tells him. “I’m not used to kindness.” She tells him her story. “All around me is violence, pain and reckless jokes and hopeless death. They call me ‘queen’ but I want to know what I am and why set here. You who have a quiet home and a mother cannot imagine what it is like.”

Lorna tells John Ridd that what changed her from child to adult, at 15, was the killing of a courtly young gentleman who appeared and told her he was her guardian. Carver Doone pinned him down, took him away and he was never seen again. John Ridd, a yoeman farmer, his family long resident in Exmoor, knows that his father too was killed by a Doone. John falls in love with Lorna, though she is too frightened to take the ring he has bought for her. The Doones mean to betroth her to Carver whom she hates. Sir Ensor will not let them force her, however.

John continues to visit Lorna, who puts out signs for him on the mountain. When Sir Ensor is dying, she tells him: “I shall not be taken by Carver. I shall die first.” At the time of Ensor’s death, winter brings a great snow and cold. John tries valiantly to.save his sheep and cattle. When he is able to go to Lorna, he finds her barricaded in a cabin with her maid Gwenny. They are being starved into submission. John has brought a mince pie which the two girls share. Because the Doones are drunk and celebrating, John brings a little sledge, puts the girls in it and carries them off to his farm.

At the farm, Lorna slowly revives. She loves the kitchen, “the cheerful fire, racks of bacon, the richness and the homeliness and the pleasant smells.” Her bright young wit and high spirits emerge. The Doones come to the farm and Carver shoots at Lorna in the garden, but John’s family is harboring soldiers due to unrest and none of them are hurt. Jeremy Stickles, a king’s man, tells John he has found that Lorna was kidnapped by the Doones, her mother and brother killed. She is actually Lady Dugal, very wealthy. This sickens John, as he already felt he was aiming above himself in wanting to marry her.

When John returns from helping his uncle, he finds Lorna has gone to London, becoming a ward of the court until she is 21. She leaves John a message, pledging her love. But then he hears nothing from her for a year. During this year the country rises against James, the king, who is a Catholic. John gets mixed up in the fight, but not because he wants to. He has gone to look for his brother-in-law, the noted highwayman Tom Faggis. Jeremy Stickles saves John when he is about to be shot, and takes him to London to clear his name.

Amelia Warner, 2000

In London, John goes to church, where he sees Lorna in attendance on the queen, walking modestly in a white dress. She sends him a note, requesting he come and see her. She begs to know why he has not contacted her. They find that Gwenny had not sent the letters Lorna wrote to John. Gwenny believes John too low-born to attach himself to Lorna.  

But Lorna tells John how unhappy she has been at court. “I have made up my mind that you must be my husband.” She likes his manners better than those of the court gallants. “Neither of us is very religious or educated. Nothing stands between us but worldly position.” She wants to abandon her wealth and honor. Circumstances create an opportunity for John, however, who saves the life of Lorna’s guardian. The criminals are also notorious traitors and the king rewards John with a knighthood.

John goes home and leads an expedition against the Doones, as the countrymen are finally sick of their violence. All the Doone men are killed except for Carver and his father. Lorna comes home to John’s farm, having bought her way out of chancery. “I am my own mistress!” she tells the family happily.

Lorna’s spirit, so dampened by her childhood, rises. But both she and John have an abiding fear that they are too happy for fate to ignore them. They marry in a wedding attended by all the country people around them. A shot rings out as the parson pronounces them man and wife. John is horrified by the blood on Lorna’s white dress as she sinks. He rides after Carver Doone and fights him near a slough, watching as Carver sinks into the mud.

At the farm, clever cousin Ruth manages to save Lorna. John is also injured, and Ruth must save him too. John, as narrator, tells us no more of his life with Lorna, but says that whenever they felt too happy, he had only to remind her that she was once “Lorna Doone” and now deserves the life and home she has won.

Though Lorna Doone, [published 1869] by R. D. Blackmore, with violence and peril for all the characters while ending happily, may seem to be an unapologetic romance, I loved the thickness of its characterizations, its rich prose and the wealth of country lore. Its chief strength is the insistence that alliance to a good, honest, gentle man is worth more than high rank and wealth. Lorna’s story is more one of being, rather than doing, but she exhibits courage, dignity and faithfulness in clinging to her love for a farmer and the beauties of nature in which they live, despite her high birth.