The Old American (40 page)

3. The novel plunges the reader into the story by opening with the raid on Upper Asheulot and the capture of Blake by Caucus-Meteor. However, the first few pages are devoted to Caucus-Meteor's covert observation of Blake and his unhappy family. What expectations about the story to follow are established by this mix of action and reflection?

4. The author says that he “built the character of Caucus-Meteor” on the line: “It's a poor Englishman that cannot go to Canada without his breakfast.” In what ways do you read this line as typical or revealing of Caucus-Meteor's character? How has the author extrapolated the character from the implications of this quip?

5. How do you respond to the scene in which Caucus-Meteor interrogates Blake? What do the questions and answers reveal about both men? Caucus-Meteor threatens to burn Blake but then, surprisingly, burns his own arm instead. How does this affect your understanding of him? How does Caucus-Meteor himself understand his action?

6. How do you respond to the scene in which Blake and the other captives run the gauntlet? What is revealed about Blake? About Caucus-Meteor? How does the scene foreshadow future developments in the story? What themes of the book (the confounding of expectations, e.g.) are developed in this scene?

7. How do you respond to the relationship between Caucus-Meteor and Bleached Bones? What do you make of this rather enigmatic figure? What are Caucus-Meteor's own feelings towards him? Why do they both believe one should “call sudden death the best of luck”?

8. Caucus-Meteor believes that oratory is the basis of power and largess the “best part of being a king”; he is skeptical about gods, curious about Christianity, and soothed by the incomprehensible Latin Mass; he frequently longs for death as an end to his obligations. How do these and his other obsessions shape his behavior? How do his notions of power and religion compare with those of the European characters?

9. Issues of language and naming are very important in this novel. In what ways do questions of words and language define the characters and shape their interactions? Why does Caucus-Meteor yearn to know his true name?

10. European Americans today often romanticize the traditions and cultures of Native Americans. In what ways does this novel either engage in or avoid such romanticization?

Author's Note

The Old American
is fiction, but I've stayed close to the facts of the Nathan Blake captivity as I've been able to divine it from the history books. I used very few original sources; most of my information comes from the work of others, scholars and writers to whom I owe a debt of gratitude.

For purposes that should be apparent to the reader, I took liberties in my novel with the words
American
and
Algonkian.
The New England colonists referred to the natives as Americans during the Puritan era, but by 1746 when the Blake drama began, most colonists were already calling themselves Americans, and the natives were being called Indians. I combined Algonquian (referring to languages) with Algonquin (referring to peoples) to create “Algonkian.” Some Indian characters in my novel are named to honor place names in New England and historical personages without regard to the actual meaning of the names in the native languages.

François Bigot, the Canadian civil magistrate known as the intendant, was eventually arrested by French authorities, convicted, and jailed for his misdeeds. Ensign Pierre Raimbault St. Blein was killed in a raid the year following Blake's release. My characterization of Blake, St. Blein, and Bigot is a fiction, as is my characterization of all who appear in this novel, for while the histories tell us much of what people did they tell us little of who in their hearts they were. Samuel Allen, like Nathan Blake, was redeemed and lived to a great age as a New England farmer, but he insisted to the end that his time with the Indians had been the happiest period of his life. A man named Warren ran the Gauntlet with Nathan, turned on his tormenters, and in retaliation was crippled for life. The historical Nathan Blake may not have walked the gauntlet, but he did get through with superficial wounds by being passive. He claimed also that he had a moment when he could have killed his captor when he bent to drink, but Nathan prayed and the message he received from God was not to kill. Nathan the great runner and Nathan the house builder also existed in fact. It struck me as remarkable that the pioneer who built the first log house for an English border town also built the first timber-frame house for a tribe of Canadian nomads. Nathan comes through as gutsy and athletic, but also nonviolent and pious, though he did leave a record of occasional rash and risky behavior—attempting unsuccessfully to winter over in a hut on the frontier, losing a horse on thin ice, and leaving the safety of the fort during an Indian attack.

Nathan Blake neither criticized nor praised his captors; he told his story in spare and descriptive language, but said nothing about his feelings; unlike some captives, he never attempted to set down on paper his experiences for memory or profit. Elizabeth Blake did indeed die at age eighty-three when Nathan was ninety-one. Three years later Nathan remarried an “interesting widow,” as he wrote in a letter to his children, the only document I could find in his own hand. He died in 1811, his hundredth year.

Of the Indian who captured Nathan Blake, little is known. Blake reported that his captor had two “pretty daughters,” that he died from disease in the second year of Nathan's captivity, and that the tribe elected Blake to take his place as leader of the family. What set the fiction of this book into motion was a line spoken by this unnamed captor. Blake related that he left the stockade to free his animals from the barn. He accomplished that task, then fled through a back door, but an armed Indian was waiting for him. Blake told the Indian it was mighty early in the morning and he'd had nothing to eat. He never expected to be understood. But the Indian surprised him by saying in English, “It's a poor Englishman that cannot go to Canada without his breakfast.” I built the character of Caucus-Meteor out of those few words, out of my own loony imagination, and out of the inspiration provided by two dear men to whom this book is dedicated, the old Americans in my own life, my father, Elphege Hebert, and my father-in-law, Leo Lavoie.

I was born in Keene, New Hampshire, and grew up there in a family where Canadian French was the primary language in the house, and I did not speak English until I started kindergarten. As a young man, I believed I was 100 percent culturally French-Canadian. After a few visits to French Canada, the Quebecois made me realize that I was a lot more American and New England Yankee than Canadian and French. As a young man I believed my bloodlines were purely French. Then I learned that my great-grandfather on my mother's side was an Italian who immigrated to Canada. When my distant cousin Connie Hamel Hebert presented me with a genealogy of the Heberts, I discovered that a Cormac McDonald had worked his way into our gene pool. My mother, shortly before she died four years ago, confessed that her Italian grandfather's thirteen-year-old child bride, Flora Galarneau, may have been an Indian who, like many natives, took a French name. So the Blake captivity means a lot to me personally not only because Nathan Blake was from my hometown, but because his story touches on my heritage, in this land where surprises of culture, blood, and history lie in wait to abduct our cozy notions.

On the corner of Main and Winchester streets in Keene is a small stone monument. When I was a student at St. Joseph's parochial school next door, I was curious about the monument just barely visible through a hedge. One day I crept through the hedge and read the plaque.

Site of first log house built by

Nathan Blake

1736

He was captured by Indians and taken to Canada

1746

Ransomed by his wife

Elizabeth Graves

1749

Six generations of Blakes lived on this spot

An Interview with Ernest Hebert

The Old American
is set during the French and Indian Wars, but your previous novels are set in the present. What made you decide on an historical setting? How was the experience of writing about the past different from writing about the present?

The story of Nathan Blake has haunted me since I was kid and discovered the Blake monument right beside my school in my hometown of Keene, New Hampshire. The Monument says, “1736 Nathan Blake built the first log house in Keene on this spot. 1746 Blake was captured by Indians and taken to Canada. 1749 Blake was ransomed by his wife Elizabeth Graves.” The very idea—Indians in my hometown!—took hold of my imagination. When I decided to become a writer that was the first story I wanted to do, but at the time I didn't have a clue how to go about telling the tale.

The hardest part about writing a historical novel was dealing with how people talk. You can't have your characters talking in modern vernacular English—“I'm going to, like, run the gauntlet.” And standard English can sound stiff. I tried to deal with this problem by shaping a voice for the novel after its protagonist, Caucus-Meteor, which is formal but also ironic and, on occasion, humorous.

What sort of research did you have to do and how did you go about it? What were some of the things about this period in particular that interested you? What surprised you in your research?

I didn't do any writing for two years. All I did was read. I never could have written this book without the Dartmouth College library and the Cheshire County Historical Society. One book that was especially useful was a very lengthy journal kept by a Swedish scientist named Peter Kalm, who traveled from New York to Quebec in 1749. He reported in a clear dispassionate way everything he saw, from the kinds of plants, to clothes that people wore. For example, he mentioned that Indians in the Lake Champlain vicinity wore birch bark hats.

My reading not only helped me to decide how my characters should look and live, but it also transformed my thinking about what it means to be an American, which then turned my original idea for my book upside down, sideways, and inside out. I started out thinking, like most Americans, that American values and ideals were derived from English law mixed in with those from various immigrant cultures. I still think that's true, but only in part. What we think of today as the American way of life—a belief in the individual before the group, a do-your-own-thing ethic, a passion for participatory democracy, one person, one vote—comes mainly from native American culture that the English and the French internalized and made their own. It's no coincidence that the two European countries that suffered major revolutions in the 18th century, England and France, were those directly affected by the North American natives.

The character of Nathan Blake is based on an historical figure. What do we actually know about Blake and his experiences? How common was it for captured Europeans to join the communities of their captors?