Thanksgiving Holiday Reads: The Mayflower Bride and Weetamoo

I recently made the goal to read one holiday book for each month of the year. For November, it was important to me that I read both a Native American colonial era book and a Pilgrim book. I'll tell you right off, it's a lot easier to find Native American historical fiction that it is anything having to do with pilgrims. Revolutionary War books? Sure. Salem Witch Trials? Absolutely. But there's little on Plymouth or Jamestown and you have to reach back to the nineties or early 2000's to find it. 

I credit political change. We're living in an era where rebellion is a virtue, so the revolution plays nicely, and the Salem Witch Trials have a built-in victimization narrative. But pilgrims are associated with colonialism and racism. I think it's unfair to center that guilt on the early colonial era. There were certainly massacres and persecutions of Indians during the witch trial and revolutionary periods. Any point up through the end of the nineteenth century, really. And is not the theme of religious freedom inherent in pilgrim narratives an important one for our day? 

After a few weeks of searching, I finally found The Mayflower Bride by Kimberley Woodhouse, which is, from what I can tell, the only pilgrim novel to be published in the past ten years for any age group-adult, YA, or middle grade. There are some picture books. I think the stage of my life where I remember the cultural history of Thanksgiving being discussed the most was early elementary school (I'm a millennial, so that lands in the early 2000's). Is that because Thanksgiving fiction peaked around the turn of the millennium or because young children are usually the ones being introduced to holidays? 

It's called The Mayflower Bride and not The Plymouth Bride for a reason. Expect to spend most of the book on the boat. Mary Elizabeth is a shy, humble Separatist (Pilgrim) girl who sets out for the New World in a spirit of apprehension. She's already lost her mother and she knows both the voyage and the destination will jeopardize the lives of her remaining family, but she puts her trust in the Lord. 

William is a street kid turned carpenter with no background in religion, but he keeps his roots a secret as he gains an interest in both Christianity and Mary Elizabeth. I love that these two desires come independently. Lots of Christian romance featuring a believer and a non-believer has the non-believer changing themselves to, at least initially, win favor with a lover. That rings both problematic and inauthentic from a conversion standpoint, though of course their are real-life people who change religions that way. I was pleased to see William come to his faith independently. 

The moralizing is constant, both in Mary Elizabeth's and William's POV, and in comments from side characters. Lots of prayers, lots of quoting specific bible verses. Sometimes it felt a bit heavy handed, even compared to other religious historical fiction I've read, but I reminded myself that they were, after all, religious refugees. So really, the moralizing is honest to the time period and to skimp on it would dishonor the people it portrays.

I came out of this book with an increased respect for the Pilgrims. I had a few ancestors aboard the Mayflower but didn't know much more than their names. One of them, Elizabeth Tilley, had a quick cameo and I was sad to learn that she became orphaned during the voyage at age thirteen. The constant threat of loss is very present. There romance is subtle, not just physically but emotionally, too. Mary Elizabeth is a shy, modest character who blushes at any mention of her romance with William by a third party, so there's not a lot of overt affection. But again, this could also be a consequence of the time period. 

Weetamoo: Heart of the Pocasetts by Patricia Clark Smith is part of the Royal Diaries series I adored as an elementary schooler. It takes place about a generation after the first Thanksgiving. Most of the titles in the epistolary series feature princesses who came from an eras and cultures where they could keep diaries. But Weetamoo, the girl who grew up to be a sachem (chief) of the Wompanoag people, couldn't read or write, which brings me to my favorite part of this book: the structure.

The "diary" element is a series of stream of consciousness narratives, presented as Weetamoo meditating on her life in quiet times when she goes to sit in nature and be apart from the rest of her village. These narratives are interspersed by birchbark drawings Weetamoo makes of objects and animals from her everyday life, elders' oral tales, and prayers to her favorite goddess, Squant. Weetamoo's tale takes place about a generation after the first Thanksgiving. I was floored by the structure in just the first few pages. An epistolary novel with a protagonist who can't read or write!

 White people (called the Coat-men) are around, but Weetamoo's mostly isolated from them. The story opens with corn harvesting and a great fall feast, which reads as a nice nod to the Thanksgiving vibe. Sometimes the slice of life stuff gets boring and I was itching for her to have more interactions with the Coat-man instead of reading more "Dear diary, today I ground corn again" type stuff. But I remind myself that I'm no longer the target age for the book. I remember reading the other Royal Diaries books when I was nine years old and being fascinated by the day-to-day details of exotic cultures, so I think it's fitting. I read this one first before listening to Mayflower Bride on audible and some of the historical details check out. Weetamoo talks about Native people being hurt when Pilgrims steal corn out of "abandoned" food storage pits when the pits' owners have migrated away to a winter village. Mayflower Bride shows the desperation and heavy death tolls of named characters leading up to the corn robbery. 

I was pleasantly surprised to find a spiritual narrative here, too. Weetamoo undertakes a coming of age ritual where she fasts and sits apart from her village for two straight days. She enters a dream state and has a visions, both a peaceful one of Squant and an ominous one where she sees her adult self marked for death as a leader of an uprising against the Coat-men.

My favorite passage is one where she reflects on the pros and cons of modernization and what that would mean for her tribe's spirituality and oral culture. 

One thing is plain to me. I do not want iron kettles or glass beads or anything to do with this reading-the-marks business, not if it means living in square Coat-man towns and not being in the care of our Creator and Squant and Mother Corn and all the rest of the Beings who quicken our world.

This is the other thing I have been thinking about the Coat-man's writing. If we do learn it, it might make us lazy...what if, whenever we waned a story, we could just reach out and read it from a paper, instead of waiting for the right time and place and the right storyteller to tell it to us?

-pg. 93 and 94

I don't know if I would've been so moved by the significance of this passage as a young reader, but as a college student who's studied folklore, I was floored. The two books complement each other nicely and provide a fuller picture of what was going on in New England in the early seventeenth century. Together, The Mayflower Bride and Weetamoo formed the perfect pair of contrasting religious freedom reads for the Thanksgiving week. 

Will Covid Actually Leave a Literary Legacy?

 As an English major, I was assigned books dealing with wars, from the big wars to the mini Spanish-American War. A professor told me once that nearly every author who was alive at the time of the Titanic sinking wrote a poem or essay or something about it. But I never read any literature about the 1918 Influenza or other disease outbreaks. If it existed, it didn't survive the tests of time. Modern authors do touch on it in historical fiction-occasionally. 

I read four books about the 1918 Influenza during my childhood and college years. The two that deal with the pandemic as a main plot are Palace Beautiful by Sarah DeFord Williams, which I reviewed on my book blog back in middle school, and Gracie's Angel by Launi K. Anderson. Both were set in my home state, Utah, so I thought back to them during the early stages of lockdown for a model on how my community would react to this. I don't know if I would've been aware of these books if they weren't local titles. Gracie's Angel is part of a seventeen book historical fiction series and I get the sense that it's only being written about because after so many books, the author had to scrape the bottom of the historical barrel. No Peace with the Dawn is another local read. It's about World War I, but towards the end it touches on the pandemic as it affected the student body of Utah State University. The only non-local book I'd read was Shoeless Joe & Me by Dan Gutman. Stosh, a teenage boy who can time travel with vintage baseball cards, goes back to 1919 to prevent the Black Sox Scandal. He meets his great-great-uncle, an influenza patient, and Stosh just so happens to have modern flu medicine on him. When Stosh comes back to the present day, Uncle Wilbur is living with the family.

Two months ago, I saw an agent or editor on twitter saying she wanted to read a YA covid romance. She added, "must wear masks and follow social distancing." I rolled my eyes so hard. The people of September 2020 did safe things the people of March 2020 would think are paranoid. The people of spring 2020 did "safe" things the people of September 2020 know are paranoid, like healthy people wearing a mask while jogging. If we can gain that much perspective in six months, what will the people of March 2021 think of their younger selves? It takes roughly two years for a book to get written, queried, agented, edited, and published. Often it takes much longer. A modern person cannot write about the pandemic without their perspective becoming dreadfully dated. 

I saw another writer tweet that she's writing a book where characters wear masks in the winter and do distance learning if they're sick. I think distance learning is a safer bet, but I don't know if healthy people will still go masked several years down the road. They didn't after the influenza. The only part of our society the 1918 pandemic really reformed was the health care system. Germany had an unsuccessful revolution that was spurred, in part, by the pandemic worsening economic conditions and some churches did switch from communal cups to individual sacrament cups. But I didn't know about those sacrament cups until this summer and Germany's aborted revolution is minimized by the legacy of World War II. Covid is front and center in everybody's lives, but in a few years, something else will be.

 

I don't think books dealing directly with covid will sell well for three reasons. First, this is a boring apocalypse. I'm part of the Hunger Games generation, I know how these are supposed to go. Unless you lost a loved one, all your covid memories are blah. Both of the two books I mentioned previously that put the pandemic front and center killed a main character. Shoeless Joe & Me unkilled a character. My mom and grandma have covid right now, my brother and I are quarantining while we wait for test results, and I'm in no mood for character mortality. How do you write an interesting covid book without making readers gloomy? I interview people about covid experiences all the time for a research project I'm working on. I thought those interviews might provide fodder for a non-fiction covid book, but after doing so many of them, I've realized that most people's pandemic experiences are pretty boring. 

Second, the dystopian books of the Hunger Games era boom still exist. Why would I go read a new disease book when I have Lauren DeStefano's Wither trilogy? Why would I read about an oppressive or dysfunctional government when I have Gemma Malley's The Declaration and Neal Shusterman's Unwind series? The third and most important reason people won't want pandemic books is fatigue. I don't like the way covid is dominating every conversation. In the first few months, my memories of those influenza books were important to me, but now I wouldn't read one. People are so over this. 

While we probably won't get a crop of covid books out of this, we will get authors. Forcing work and school online will turn some people into writers who wouldn't have written normally. After months to reflect on it, I really think people don't have more time during the lockdown than they do normally. If you're unemployed, that's different, but people are still bound by time even if they aren't by place. You still go to work or school, you just zoom it. But the drudgery of online working promotes procrastination. I have two jobs and I'm a student and I really was supposed to do things today, but season four of The Crown is great, thanks for asking. Some people will be motivated to write by lockdown boredom. Some published writers who are laid off from their day jobs will focus on writing more to make up lost income. 

Pandemics and all their effects-like lockdown mental illness, government inefficiency, hypocrisy in public spaces, and the virtue-signaling of mask wearers posting to all their mask-wearing followers about how cool mask-wearing is-will produce new thoughts in people. New thoughts make new books. John Green and Kathryn Stockett both wrote their first published novels to cope with 9/11 grief. Neither has anything to do with terrorism. People process emotions through all kinds of stories and the books we see coming out of this latest pandemic won't necessarily be the ones we expect.

I was already working on a project when the pandemic hit. My main character lost the bottom half of her face in a fire and covers it in a veil. I usually wear cloth masks, but I do have a bandanna, and I probably would have had her use a bandanna if I'd started it during covid. I have no intentions of changing her veil, but I did add a new scene with another burned character recently and had that character wear a bandanna. 

That book is an other world fantasy, which is what I usually write, but I finished the rough draft of a contemporary YA last week. I don't know when that book will be published, so I refer to covid only in the past sense and don't mention how old my seventeen year old character was when it happened. I figure so long as covid has taken place within the past twelve years, she will have been old enough to have solid memories of it. She references covid twice. In both cases, I made sure to make the references hopeful, even when I was talking about death. One was a quick reference to the protagonist taking virtual tours of historic sites. The other direct reference takes place on a college campus where a door is painted red to memorialize the school's use as a hospital during the influenza. I got the idea from a red door at Utah State University. My own college also had a building used as a triage, and though that building's still standing, I've gone here four years and only learned about its history last week. There are no books dealing with BYU's covid experiences that I'm aware of, so all I had was USU as a model. My main character and an older college student use both the influenza and covid to talk about how the future is long, tragedies fade, and life always gets better. 

The Karl G. Maeser Building was used a triage during the influenza outbreak

Ultimately, covid is going to end. Parts of the world will change, yes, but probably not in the ways our dystopia-trained brains expect. Authors may wish to shy away from disease books, but it will prove a ripe breeding ground for new authors who deal with troubling times in creative and reflective ways.