Published 2013
The irreversible
transplantation of a human being from one world to another can result in sheer
joy and a sense of liberation at one extreme of possibility or in tragedy and
disaster at the other. That of Honor
Bright, the young Quaker woman whom author Chevalier has created in “The Last
Runaway,” her latest novel, falls between these extremes, but the journey she
takes and her dangerous, life threatening struggle trying to acclimate to the
new environment takes her closer to the tragic/disastrous extreme than someone
her age should ever have to travel. What
makes her transplantation complete and final is the time in which she lives –
the mid nineteenth century – and an allergy to ocean travel that she discovers
on her one and only trans-Atlantic voyage to America, traveling with an older
sister engaged to be married to a frontier settler. Once in the New World, she knows that because
of that allergy she can never return to her native England.
But that turns out to be the
least of her troubles. Her sister dies
of yellow fever within days of their arrival, leaving Honor on her own and
dependent upon the help of strangers in a strange land. She is left with no alternative but to make
her way over hundreds of perilous miles to the Ohio home of her deceased
sister’s fiancé Adam, who lives with a widow named Abigail. Neither is happy to have her, a single woman,
around.
Hardly does she arrive when she
is caught up in the intrigue of the Underground Railroad and its clandestine
efforts to steer runaway black slaves to Canada and safety. Honor, a deeply devout Quaker, has always
been anti-slavery in her beliefs, those beliefs engendered by her upbringing. But she has never had any direct contact with
slaves or their raw and desperate struggle for enfranchisement while hunted by
cruel mercenaries hired to track them down and return them to their owners. What has been abstract soon becomes painfully
real, when an insidiously brash slave hunter begins harassing her and spying on
her every move, suspecting (correctly) that she is helping protect the runaways
that she encounters in her village.
Largely to escape the
lukewarm atmosphere created for her by Adam and Abigail she marries a Quaker
man named Jack from the local Friends Meeting and is at once living with his
family in yet another strange household.
Having always been accustomed in England to neatness, order, simplicity
and stability she finds herself living in a rougher and less refined country,
where people are not very settled. All
around her are rugged and rough-edged individuals (female as well as male) who
at some level are still on the move westward or dreaming of it. And to add to her discomfort she learns that
the Quaker family she has married into is not willing to help her in her
clandestine practice of hiding and feeding the slave runaways, even though they
are anti-slavery in belief. The Fugitive
Slave Law has just been passed, and there are severe penalties for anyone
caught violating it. This creates a
moral dilemma that shakes her to the roots of her tender faith and her sense of
integrity.
She does have one small ace
in the hole. She is an expert quilter,
and she forms a friendship with a woman milliner named Belle, a non-Quaker she
meets along the way. Though they live in
separate villages, Belle becomes a most fateful factor in Honor’s life and
struggle of conscience.
“The Last Runaway” is as well
stitched a piece of quilting as anything Honor herself might create. It is without a doubt a labor of love and one
of those moral tales that forces the reader to wonder if he or she could call
forth the needed courage in a dilemma such as Honor faces. Would I be able to handle being caught
between my convictions and the demands of the legal code? Would I be able to face and risk the
possibility of jail or imprisonment to perform surreptitious acts of mercy? The question becomes phenomenally more
troubling when the personal risk gets passed on to loved ones who would suffer
almost as much, and for a cause they may not have agreed to support. Such is the case for this young woman. And what would I do, if those loved ones were
alienated from my affections by what I did, even if I or they did not get
caught?
Honor, of course, does not
set out for the New World to right a social wrong. She is not an activist by nature; she comes
to America in search of new opportunity, to be joined to others of her faith
and to find a husband of like faith, after a young man in England jilts
her. Her acts of mercy derive from her
cultivated instincts, her spontaneous, second nature compassion. She is caught up in circumstances she never
expected. And pregnancy, when it occurs,
adds yet another complication. She may
be young and relatively inexperienced, but she is not fragile or
weak-minded. She learns about her new
environment very fast.
The book is an easy read,
only 300 pages in hardback, but it is not a slight work by any means. It is both historically informative and
personally engaging, with vivid characterizations and remarkable incidents and
episodes. This is Tracy Chevalier’s
seventh novel; her most commercially successful is “Girl with a Pearl Earring,”
which was adapted into an internationally popular movie a few years back. Her work is modest but mature and rich in
imagination. I strongly recommend it and
hope to read others of her works myself.
To read other entries in my
blog, please consult its website: enspiritus.blogspot.com
I welcome feedback. Direct it to bobracine@verizon.net
No comments:
Post a Comment