The Witch of Blackbird Pond - Elizabeth George Speare [1]
I read the book as an adult, but in order to write this introduction, I wanted to know how those who came to the book as young women responded to the character and the themes. Did they see themselves in Kit? What did they find important or memorable about the book? So I asked some of them.
Some women loved it for its vivid, realistic picture of a Colonial New England beyond the romantic images of the Mayflower, Pocahontas, and the first Thanksgiving. Others remembered enjoying a literary crush on the fiery, vexatious seaman Nat Eaton. Cynthia Leitich Smith, a writer, identified with Kit's love of reading and her courage. My daughter found the romance charming, the witch trial exciting, and the values her own, but said, "For me that book is all about the image of that little cottage, filled with herbs and good smells and a cat and loved ones."
And countless young women cherished the story for the model it offered readers tired of books in which teen girls were, as my friend the Reverend Robbie Cranch put it, "portrayed as deferential flirts or swooning idiots." Kit is neither an idiot nor a flirt. She is lonely and confused but is also brave, compassionate, determined, and resilient.
And that character was not only me. She was Alyce of The Midwife's Apprentice. And Rodzina and Matilda Bone and Catherine and any of the girls I have written about. I found myself wondering how much of the Kit Tyler I encountered in my twenties stayed with me and reappeared thirty years later when I myself began to write.
Elizabeth Speare and I both wrote as children, but, busy with home and family and work, neither of us attempted a novel until we were nearly fifty. My first novel was Catherine, Called Birdy. Elizabeth Speare's was Calico Captive, based on a diary of 1807 that told of the four-year Indian captivity of Susanna Johnson and her family. Speare fully intended, she said, to do something similar for her next book, this time set where she lived in Connecticut, but she found nothing that inspired her until she realized that people were waiting, not in the pages of a diary but in her own mind: "There was a girl," she related in her Newbery acceptance speech, "lonely and insecure, a child who needed friendship, a wise and gentle old woman, and two young men, one shy and uncertain, the other self-confident and merry."
The Witch of Blackbird Pond was awarded the Newbery Medal for 1959, the only time, according to the editor and literary critic Anita Silvey, that a book was chosen unanimously on the first ballot. It's a marvel of a book. The writing is clear, the atmosphere is vivid and convincing, and the characters are well drawn and fully human. Speare wrote only four novels for children, for which she was awarded two Newbery Medals and a Newbery Honor. Were she a baseball player, she would have by far the highest batting average in the history of the sport.
Elizabeth Speare presents contradictions and dualities that make her as three-dimensional and real as the rest of us. Writing in conservative, conformist 1950s America, she nonetheless tackled themes of bigotry, gossip, intolerance, and guilt by association. A Sunday school teacher and author of a Newbery-winning book about Jesus, she wrote, too, of the downside of religious faith. A homebody dedicated to her family, she always said home came first, but her creation, Kit, is a spunky, determined, outspoken girl who follows her own path.
Elvis is dead, there is yet another new pope, and the cold war is long over. Elizabeth George Speare died in 1994, but Kit Tyler will live on, as long as girls look to find themselves—their ordinary, brave, compassionate, outspoken, independent selves—in a book.