1980: A GATHERING OF DAYS: A NEW ENGLAND GIRL’S JOURNAL, 1830-32 by Joan W. Blos

Sunday, October 17, 1830: I, Catherine Cabot Hall, aged 13 years, 7 months, 8 days, of Meredith in the State of New Hampshire, do begin this book.

I know I just put the first line of the book in the sub-head, but it’s not the actual first line of the book, because there’s a framing device before Catherine’s first journal entry in 1980 medalist A Gathering Of Days. Before the first entry, there’s a letter dated from 1899, also from Catherine, in which she gifts her old journal to her great-granddaughter on her fourteenth birthday:

“Once I might have wished…never to grow old. But now I know that to stay young always is also not to change. And that is what life’s all about - changes going on every minute, and you never know when something begins where it’s going to take you. So one thing I want to say about life is don’t be scared and don’t hang back, and most of all, don’t waste it.”

There are some interesting plotlines in A Gathering Of Days - which we’ll get to in a minute - and the novel was overall fine, but we should understand what happens in Catherine’s journal within the context of the frame. An elderly Catherine, having lived through an awful lot of history including the war between the states, wanted to give this to her great-granddaughter, presumably because she thought her great-granddaughter would find something valuable or relatable or useful, or at the very least entertaining, in what Catherine wrote as a thirteen- and fourteen-year-old in the 1830s, something that would have contributed to the overall 1899 message of not wasting your life. She obviously wasn’t thinking about this when she wrote the journal, and sixty-some years later she thinks the journal will be good for getting that message across.

I will add, as a side note, that I hope my daughters basically never discover any of my writing, going back to my Xanga and my pathetic emo poetry that I wrote my sophomore year of high school, all of which, I’m pretty sure, has been destroyed. I definitely don’t want them to find the second Xanga blog I wrote in college, which has also been destroyed. Starting in college, I started doing National Novel Writing Month and have four just absolute dogshit unfinished novels floating somewhere on my hard drive; they, too, will be destroyed. The journal I kept when I was doing improv comedy stuff might not be destroyed - I’m not exactly sure where it is - but they do not need to see that, either. And they don’t really need to read the actual novels that I’ve finished - like, things I felt good enough about to ask people to pay money for - and they don’t need to read this, and they sure as hell are never gonna see G.O.T.H.S. When my oldest daughter and I were reading a novel together and she saw the dedication, she asked me what it was, and I grabbed one of my books to show her that I had, in fact, dedicated it to her, and she asked me “can we read that?” and I said “absolutely not”. If I think about what I want my kids to learn from me - or if anyone thinks about what they want their kids to learn from them - “an accurate depiction of what the Los Angeles indie improv scene was like in the early 2010s” is not anywhere near the top of the list. I just hope that my kids learn how to be a good and compassionate person, and I hope that they can learn some of that from me, but it’s more important to me that they just learn it from somewhere.

And that appears to be the elder Catherine’s priority in sharing her Gathering Of Days journal; at one point in the early entries, her friend even tells her explicitly that “Kindness must be the highest virtue - don’t let me forget that ever. Were I to strive for one thing only ‘twould be to be kind to others, as you are, Catherine.” But the context in which Catherine’s friend says these words is, in my opinion, the most important plot point in the novel.

Earlier that week, Catherine had lost her schoolbook, and found it returned to the edge of the school lot a few days later, with a note scribbled inside reading “PLEEZ MISS, TAKE PITTY, I AM COLD”. She didn’t know who it was from, she didn’t know what to do about it. So she and her friend steal a quilt from the house and leave it out for the note’s author to find. The quilt is taken by someone after the leave, and they never really find out who left the note.

But it’s the 1830s in New Hampshire, and the thought definitely occurs to Catherine and her friend that they might be helping a fugitive slave, and Catherine doesn’t know how to feel about that. Debates over abolition are ripping through the state, Catherine’s neighbors are reading The Liberator, Catherine’s father is arguing in favor of resettling freed slaves back in Africa because “would you want, then, to have a black man as your neighbour, or thinking he might expect a share in the town decisions?”, and, as it turns out, there's also a Critical Race Theory School Curriculum Controversy back in 1830s New Hampshire, because nothing that happens to us, ever, is new or original:

“Wednesday, February 23, 1831: As if he would do it in the town’s despite, Teacher Holt has brought Boston’s news [presumably The Liberator] into the school house to consider an advertizement [sic] which had appeared in a Southern newspaper. Mr. Garrison re-published it to call smug Yankee attention to the nature of the offenses which the South condones. ‘FOR SALE: A black girl, 17 years of age of excellent character, and of good disposition; a very useful and hand person in a house for a turn of years. Apply at the office of…’ Seventeen years is scarcely older than the oldest at school. Suppose that we had been made to be slaves rather than being born free. Would not a black girl know love and fear - love and honour her father and mother, and fear lest anything change? I had not considered the matter in this way before.”

The teacher, as you have probably guessed, is castigated for this, and while he barely hangs onto his job, he gets kicked out of his home and has to crash with one of his students’ families. Opposing slavery was controversial in the 1830s, even in New Hampshire. Helping a fugitive slave was definitely controversial in the 1830s. But Catherine has a record of a time she made a moral choice - maybe not fully understanding all of what it represented or what the ramifications were, and she didn’t exactly know for sure that she was helping a fugitive slave although that was the most likely outcome of her actions - and from the perspective of the 1890s, it would absolutely have been seen as a good and correct moral choice, so maybe that’s what she wanted to pass along to her great-granddaughter, the story of this one good thing she did at a time where it may have been hard to do a good thing, so that her great-granddaughter might be encouraged to someday do the right thing herself.

Except most of the book isn’t really about this choice at all. Catherine gave away the quilt, but after that we don’t hear about it again for like 60 pages. Even then, we only hear about it very briefly, near the end of the novel, when Catherine’s mother finally finds out what happens to her missing quilt and scolds Catherine for potentially exposing herself to danger. 40 pages later, Catherine receives a note that reads “SISTERS BLESS YOU. FREE NOW. CURTIS. IN CANADA”, confirming her suspicion that she had helped a fugitive slave run away.

In total, the story of the quilt and the fugitive slave takes up maybe 20 pages of a quick 150-page novel, although there are other references to William Lloyd Garrison and the abolition debate, and, in one scene, an argument among Catherine’s family about the ramifications of Nat Turner’s insurrection. I would argue that it’s the most important thing that “happens” in the novel, graded against the criteria of what a great-grandmother would want her great-grandaughter to take away from a passed-down journal. Most of the novel is a nice little time capsule of 1830s life in New England, with a special focus on Catherine and her best friend, who falls ill and dies by the end of the novel. But I had to recalibrate my expectations after reading the quilt story early in the book: I originally thought “ah, I get it, she’s passing along the quilt story so that her great-granddaughter won’t be afraid to do what’s right, to make tough moral choices in the future,” but that wasn’t it. Catherine’s good deed was in the background, and in the foreground we find the other things that we would expect a young teenager to care about day-to-day.

By the time I got to the end of the novel, though, I came around to the idea that this is how “doing a good thing” probably works most of the time. It happens, maybe you think about it a little when it happens, and then you don’t think about it again too much after that unless a brief reminder lands in front of you. You don’t do it because you want a big dramatic moment when somebody tells you ‘thank you’, you don’t do it because you want to see the results of it play out fully in front of you, and you definitely don’t do it because you want to write it down and have people remember you for it years from you. You do it because you think it’s right and you hope that somebody else would do the same thing for you if you were in that situation, and after that, it’s on to the next thing; maybe you’ll even get to do it again some day. I don’t really know if sharing that lesson was really Blos’ intent in writing A Gathering Of Days, but there are worse lessons to take away from a children’s novel, and worse lessons to take away from your great-grandmother’s diary.

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 2015 medalist, The Crossover by Kwame Alexander.