1959: THE WITCH OF BLACKBIRD POND by Elizabeth George Speare
On a morning in mid-April, 1687, the brigantine Dolphin left the open sea, sailed briskly across the Sound to the wide mouth of the Connecticut River and into Saybrook harbor.
1959 medalist The Witch Of Blackbird Pond was the first Newbery winner chosen unanimously on the first ballot, so let's start there: it deserved it. It's among the best books I've read so far for this project. In terms of pacing, structure, and characterization, the novel is basically flawless. If I were teaching a class on how to write a children’s novel, I’d make all of my students read this book. But its beloved status really can be credited to Katherine "Kit" Tyler, one of the great protagonists in historical fiction. Kit is a whip-smart, free-thinking sixteen year old who grew up with her grandfather in the English colony of Barbados until his death. She sold off his estate, settled his debts, and hitched a ride on a boat to a new country to live with her aunt, uncle, and cousins; she didn't exactly let them know she was coming, but Kit is not one to meticulously plan things or think through what the consequences of her actions might be. She's a headstrong teenager, and she eagerly dives into this next chapter of her life. She also literally dives into the next chapter of her life; early in the novel, one of the children on board her ship loses her doll overboard, and Kit, without giving it a second thought, dives into the Atlantic to recover the doll, because, hell, she's a good swimmer and she's not going to see her young shipmate cry on her watch.
The copy of Witch I got from my library included a new foreword by fellow Newbery medalist and historical fiction writer Karen Cushman, who wrote:
". .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."
Kit was a very different female protagonist from her contemporaries. She was intelligent and learned, she bristled when other characters told her what to do, and she was not defined by her relationship to a man; towards the end of the novel, she breaks up with her fiance, and as they argue, she understands that "a month ago [her] temper would have flared. But all at once she realized that William could not really anger her." And young women reading this book in 1958 got to see a great and smart and independent woman move to a new world and start a new life.
Unfortunately for Kit, the new world was the Connecticut colony in 1687. Which was run by the Puritans. Which made it an extremely bad time and place to be a smart and independent woman. Who could also swim.
Like I said, the novel is basically flawless in terms of its structure. Having now read over twenty Newbery medalists, I'm starting to notice some recurring storytelling tropes across the winners. Witch has them all too, and executes them perfectly.
First, Witch explains some complex part of society to readers by showing it to them through the eyes of a child, to convey as much information in as simple terms as possible. Maniac Magee did this with racism, Johnny Tremain did this with the American Revolution, Dead End In Norvelt did it with the New Deal, and Speare’s second medalist The Bronze Bow would do it with Jesus’ teachings. Witch does it with the society of the Puritan New England colonies, run by people who escaped their home country to find the freedom to practice their religion and then brutally impose that freedom upon everyone else they could. Just like all of the other parts of society that the other novels tackled, there are inherent contradictions within the Connecticut colony that are absolutely baffling to a child; as Kit headed to her first Sunday service, she "recoiled at the objects that stood between her and the Meeting House; a pillory, a whipping post and stocks." Piece by piece, Speare gradually widens the scope of Wethersfield, Connecticut, starting with the close-knit family that Kit crashes with, expanding to the church at the center of the city’s social order, and bringing in more families to complete the picture of the town and heighten those contradictions. Every chapter has new information that builds out the world even further and keeps you reading.
Witch is also a fish-out-of-water story. So was New Kid, so was Bridge To Terabithia, so was The One And Only Ivan. We don’t just see this world through the eyes of a child, we see it through the eyes of a child who has never seen anything like it before and is used to something different and more comfortable. The central tension of the book is not the actual witch hunt - which is a relatively short portion of the story near the end - it’s Kit trying to learn about and navigate a world she doesn’t understand, and eventually forging a connection with another outsider. Kit is very smart, which sets her apart from many other girls in the town. She can read, which sets her apart from most of the other girls in the town. And she’s read books other than the bible, which sets her apart from every other girl in the town and most of the men. She’s not trying to get married, she comes from money, she never paid much attention to “Christianity” or “praying”. This also means that there’s some good moments of humor in Witch as well, mainly in how Kit’s wit and occasional bluntness horrify the Puritans around her. But the funniest passage, in my opinion, is when Kit attends her first Sunday service, finds it the most boring two hours of her life, and then realizes with slowly dawning horror that the Puritans do two services on Sundays.
Finally, Witch has a sense of stakes and justice. Bad things happen to Kit - with the main bad thing being "the town almost hangs her because they think she's a witch" - but ultimately, the good guys win and the bad guys lose and, without giving too much away, it is precisely Kit's courage and independence that ends up saving her in the end. What makes her good is also what saves her; we can see the same thing in Caddie Woodlawn or Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!
So we have a great novel here, about a fascinating period in history: witch trials in Connecticut. Which were not the Salem witch trials, because as the novel makes very clear, Connecticut was not Salem.
The Salem witch trials of 1692 were, of course, the most famous literal witch hunts in American history. Twenty-five people died as a result of the trials, zero of whom were actually witches. The Salem witch trials are still referenced today as a cautionary tale about group hysteria and religious extremism, and as a clunky metaphor by College Republicans mad that their professor told them to stop saying the n-word in seminar. We remember Salem as this theocratic, autocratic hell where everyone hated each other and was looking to stab anyone else in the back with a false accusation.
Connecticut was also a Puritan colony like Massachusetts, but Witch repeatedly highlights the political differences between the two colonies. In Speare's telling, Massachusetts was much more loyal to the British than Connecticut was. Political debates that start to flirt with ideas of independence happen throughout Witch, mainly in the background; Kit's family in Barbados were loyal subjects of the king, and she really doesn't get what all the fuss is about. When Britain tries to tighten its chokehold on the Connecticut colony by appointing a new governor, the colonists chafe and Kit's uncle rages at a young royalist studying to be a preacher:
"What do you young men know about rights and justice? A soft life is all you have ever known. Have you felled the trees in a wilderness and built a home with your bare hands? Have you fought off the wolves and the Indians? Have you frozen and starved through a single winter? The men who made this town understood justice. They knew better than to look for it in the King’s favor."
Connecticut - still nicknamed "The Constitution State" - was the first colony to experiment with a proto-constitutional government, in the form of a charter written by elected representatives from the colony and eventually approved by the previous king. When, in Witch, the new governor revokes the charter, the colonists literally steal and hide the piece of paper with the charter written on it, to symbolically preserve their independence and rule of law, with Kit's uncle proclaiming:
"There are hard times ahead for Connecticut. But some day, when the hard times have passed, as they must pass, we will bring our charter out of hiding and begin again, and we will show the world what it means to be free men.”
This is the same Great American Theme that we saw in Johnny Tremain and Caddie Woodlawn and that we'll see in other medalists: being an American means that we can rule ourselves and we'll fight to defend that. For Speare - who noted in an afterword that "the freemen’s struggle to preserve their charter is known to every schoolchild in Connecticut" - that was a key difference between the Connecticut and Massachusetts colonies. Connecticut took early steps towards democracy. They cared about the rule of law. They fought for the ideal of self-rule and against the monarchy. Connecticut was America before America was America.
They hunted witches anyways.
Kit's trial at the climax of Witch is the only one that the town of Wethersfield holds; it's not part of a roiling wave of accusations against everyone in the town, but rather a response to a very specific hardship. When a flu-like virus starts spreading among the Wethersfield children1, the town is desperate for someone to blame, and turns their anger to the witch of Blackbird Pond.
That's not Kit, though. That's Hannah, a kindly, if somewhat eccentric, old widow who lives alone in the swampland outside of town. She was exiled from Massachusetts for being a Quaker, but Kit forms a friendship with this other outsider and visits frequently to keep her company. When the mob goes after Hannah, Kit helps her escape, and the mob finds a new target.
It would be naive to assume that Speare didn't want to comment on contemporary American society at least a little bit. Witch came out five years after Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible, one of the least subtle allegories in the history of American playwriting, in which the Salem trials were an obvious stand-in for the McCarthy hearings and the red scare. Some versions of The Crucible include narration at the start of each act, with the Act II narration saying, in so many words, "to be clear, Salem is a lot like America right now. This is a play about right now". Speare had something to say about "right now" as well.
But Connecticut is a better place than Massachusetts! Speare keeps insisting on that throughout the novel; the citizens of Wethersfield are more emotionally measured, more politically mature, more connected to the rest of the colonies than the citizens of Salem were. They hunted witches anyway, because fear and exclusion can still do that to people. And what can save us from that is being like Kit Tyler: being smart and honest, thinking and standing up for yourself, and making an effort to be kind and compassionate to the people around you.
There's a lot more in this novel that I didn't cover: Kit's wonderful relationship with her cousins Mercy and Judith, her clumsy adaptation to the grueling workload at her new home, the judgment of the abolitionist Puritans towards a girl from Barbados whose old family owned slaves, the boy in town courting Kit (who's all wrong for her), Kit's love/hate relationship with a curmudgeonly sailor (who's all right for her), or the fact that Speare only wrote four novels for children that still included two Newbery medalists and one Newbery finalist. Her hit rate on awards is basically an unmatched accomplishment in children's literature. But Kit Tyler and The Witch Of Blackbird Pond are also unmatched accomplishments in children's literature.
Newburied is a series by Tony Ginocchio on the history of the Newbery Medal and a whole bunch of other stuff related to it. You can subscribe via Substack to get future installments sent to your inbox directly. The next installment will cover the 2009 medalist, The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman.
"Plague" is also a recurring theme in Newbery medalists, including in Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! and The Door In The Wall, and the mention of the Spanish Influenza pandemic in Dead End In Norvelt. Part of this is a function of multiple winners being historical fiction set during the medieval era, but it's fascinating to see it keep coming up as I read these books in 2022.