Instead, she approaches the story through another character: Bethia Mayfield, a minister’s daughter with a hungry mind who has picked up her learning a piece at a time while eavesdropping on the lessons of her older (and less intellectual) brother Makepeace.
“To tell you the truth, I had a hesitation about creating him too much in full, seeing that we know so little, and I wanted to respect that historical distance with him,” Brooks says. "Whenever anyone says, your women are ahead of their time, I tell them, go and read more 17th-century women!”īut that line on an old map of the island was one of very few records of Caleb Cheeshahteaumauk’s existence. “I’m thinking 1965, the Civil Rights era, and when I found out it was 1665, my imagination started spinning,” she says during a call to her home on Martha’s Vineyard, which she shares with her husband, writer Tony Horwitz, and their two sons.
Brooks first learned about Caleb after seeing a notation on a map. Whether she’s imagining the history of an ancient manuscript, as in People of the Book, or an English town determined to survive the plague in A Year of Wonders, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Geraldine Brooks is a master at bringing history’s little-known but fascinating stories to life.įor her fourth novel, Caleb’s Crossing, she found inspiration close to home: the tale of a Wampanoag boy who became a Harvard graduate.
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