1981: JACOB HAVE I LOVED by Katherine Paterson
As soon as the snow melts, I will go to Rass and fetch my mother.
"God loves you/
But not enough to save you."
-Ethel Cain
In the past year, during the occasional heavy rainstorm, my basement has flooded with sewage about four or five times, leading me to the natural and reasonable conclusion that God hates me and wants me to be miserable. It’s not just the multiple times I have had to mop up poopwater (although I did not enjoy mopping it) or the money we had to spend to remove and replace drywall (although I did not enjoy spending it). It was the number of times that I was sure everything was fixed and that we weren’t going to have any problems this time. We rodded out the sewer line. We rodded it out again. We jetted out the sewer line. We ripped out part of the sewer line, dug under the sidewalk, and replaced it1. But after a few months, we’d have another flood, and it would become clear once again that the things we had done to clean everything and pay for repairs and get everything replaced just weren’t enough. It felt like we would never be free of this problem, it was just going to always be there, forever. Every time it rained, I would be unable to focus or sleep or do or think about anything else, I would just have this awful smothering dread on top of me, which was compounded by the sense that I was always going to feel this way, that there would never be a point when I would not have to worry that I was going to have to take another day off of work to bleach the floors and rent an industrial-strength dehumidifier. It was the sense that I was, somehow, not allowed to be happy, not allowed to ever be relieved, my life was just going to keep literally flooding with shit whenever I least expected it.
Look: God doesn’t actually hate me - okay maybe God hates me, but even if that’s true, this is unlikely to be the way that a divine entity would express its personal hatred of me - and my life is generally very comfortable. We even have sewer insurance now, which I didn’t know was a thing you could buy, and there’s a chance we may have figured out what the actual problem is. But that feeling that I am not allowed to be happy, no matter what steps I take to try and prevent the shit from flooding in, that’s real. Maybe that’s just a universal feeling for people who live in a place with a basement, I don’t know. Katherine Paterson’s second Newbery medalist is also about this feeling.
1981 medalist Jacob Have I Loved is significantly knottier than Paterson’s first medalist, the better-known Bridge To Terabithia. Terabithia appears to skew towards a slightly younger audience, and the story and lessons are pretty direct: your classic “unlikely friendship”, your classic “finding refuge from the real world in fantasy and escapism”, your classic “taking the first steps out of childhood and seeing how big the world really is”, your classic “sudden and fatal rope swing accident that is, while completely absurd, nevertheless foreshadowed directly like forty times in the action of the novel”. Paterson is very clear about what she’s trying to say and why she’s trying to say it, and all but directly states the intended lessons of the novel in the final chapters. You don’t get the same training wheels with Jacob Have I Loved, you don’t get the lesson directly written at you, you get 250 slowly-paced pages of God and loneliness and family and broken hearts and trying to fix things but still suffocating under the dread that you’re going to keep getting dealt bad hands, that you’re not allowed to feel happy here, that you somehow screwed something up way back when and that God is going to keep getting revenge on you for the rest of your life. And the novel’s protagonist, fourteen-year-old Sara Louise “Wheeze” Bradshaw, doesn’t even have a basement in her home.
The Bradshaws live on Rass, a fictional marshy island of crabbers in the Chesapeake Bay that’s pretty isolated from the rest of the country - you have to take your crabbing boat to mainland Maryland if you want to see a doctor - and Louise comes of age in the early 1940s, after America enters the second World War. There are a few different storylines that float past you throughout the novel: Louise’s family lives with her grandmother, who is slowly going senile. An elderly stranger, one of the scions of an old Rass family, moves back to the island to restore his house. One of Louise’s friends eventually gets drafted and sent off to fight in the Pacific. A hurricane wipes out part of the island, floods the entire first floor of the Bradshaws’ house, and reminds me of my sewer problem.
But the main conflict is pretty clear: Louise is so damn sick of her perfect twin sister, Caroline. Caroline is beautiful and smart and kind and a great singer, and just so perfect that Louise is constantly fighting the urge to punch her in the face, and even mad that Caroline won’t match her anger:
“Without a word, she would turn and leave me before I was through [yelling at her], shutting off my torrent, so that my feelings, thus dammed, raged on in my chest. She would not fight with me. Perhaps that was the thing that made me hate her the most. Hate. That was the forbidden word. I hated my sister. I, who belonged to a religion which taught that simply to be angry with another made one liable to the judgment of God and that to hate was the equivalent of murder.”
That’s the other key backdrop of the novel: the Bradshaws, and everyone else on Rass pretty much unanimously, are Methodists, as the island was famously converted by a missionary centuries earlier. This is another Newbery winner that is explicitly pretty religious; Paterson’s parents were missionaries in China when she was born, Paterson herself did missionary work for years in Japan, worked for the Presbyterian church, and has a master’s degree in Bible studies. There have been a bunch of previous Newbery winners that included religion - often Catholicism - as a significant part of the setting and themes, but this is the first book I’ve read that put Methodism at the center of everything. And I honestly don’t know very much about Methodism at all: everything I do know I learned from this novel, and based on Louise’s character, it seems like the two main things about Methodists are that they read the Bible and they’re terrified of going to Hell (as opposed to Catholics, who do not read the Bible and are pretty sure they’re already in Hell). This helps explain Louise’s mindset: she keeps getting dealt bad hands, but she feels like she deserves every one, because she thinks she’s somehow atoning for some vague sin.
Louise’s main sin, the one that she thinks she’s atoning for, is the jealousy she has for her twin sister Caroline; the title of the book is a reference to the biblical brothers Jacob and Esau, and God’s favoritism for the former brother over the latter. To Louise, her need to atone for her jealousy is obvious, because every crappy thing that happens to her, every opportunity that gets taken away from her, is at least indirectly her sister’s fault. When Louise’s new friend, the elderly exile who moved back to Rass, gets access to some money, he spends it to send Caroline to music school. When Louise’s old friend, the whiny Call, comes of age after serving in the Pacific, he realizes that he’s in love, not with Louise, but with Caroline. And when fourteen-year-old Louise realizes that she is sexually attracted to the seventy-year-old drifter that came to town, Caroline is the one who ensures the drifter’s financial stability by fixing him up with another Rass widow.
Now, it’s possible you may have gone back and re-read that last sentence once or twice. Let’s back up.
So, I wouldn’t say Jacob Have I Loved is “relatable”. It’s certainly beautifully written, but it’s a story about dense, heavy jealousy and loneliness and regret and despair and frustration, set among the most specific and specialized people imaginable: isolated Maryland Methodist crabbers. At one point the main characters go to a sick old woman’s house to clear out all of her cats, load them into sacks, and take them to the Chesapeake to dump them and drown them, a fun relatable activity that every child loves reading about. Compare this to Bridge To Terabithia, which is about a boy who feels alone and makes a friend who is very different from him. That is a pretty broadly relatable storyline. Jacob Have I Loved is about a teenage girl buckling under the crushing weight of a very complicated and very adult feeling, that some divine power is keeping her from being happy and blocking her at every turn. That’s something that a homeowner feels when he has to buy sewer insurance, but it doesn’t strike me as something that a fourteen-year-old would be able to articulate as thoroughly as Paterson can write. And I also don’t think there are a lot of fourteen-year-olds who feel like this after they hug the seventy-year-old man, The Captain whose old house she’s been cleaning out over the summer:
“Then, suddenly, something happened. I can’t explain it. I had not put my arms around another person since I was tiny. It may have been the unaccustomed closeness, I don’t know. I had only meant to comfort him, but as I smelled his sweat and felt the spring of his beard against my cheek, an alarm began to clang inside my body. I went hot all over, and I could hear my heart banging to be let out of my chest. ‘Let go, stupid,’ part of me was saying, while another voice I hardly recognized was urging me to hold him tighter.”
Yeah! This is a major plot point! She’s capital-H Horny for the old man! This passage is immediately followed by Louise’s shame-filled realization that she is in love with The Captain and wants to be with him any way she can. Now, I think the most realistic interpretation of this plotline is that Louise is just a giant pile of hormones and jealousy and has no idea what she’s really thinking or feeling, but is overwhelmed with shame nevertheless. But it feels impossible to me to read this passage without doing a spit take. Caroline even picks up on Louise’s attraction, gently teases her for it, and then takes steps to fix The Captain up with someone else, which breaks Louise’s heart. And I honestly don’t know how I’m supposed to feel here: am I sad that Louise is not going to end up with a man old enough to be her grandfather? Am I relieved that she’s not going to do that (I mean, I am relieved, but am I supposed to be relieved?)?
But more importantly, I don't know how I'm supposed to feel about Paterson's resolution for everything in the novel. Louise struggles to live outside of her sister's shadow, and after Caroline leaves Rass to study at Juilliard, Louise proves herself to be a very capable crabber who can help her dad out on his boat. But if you were a woman in the 1940s, you weren't going to grow up to be a crabber, so after being goaded by The Captain into deciding what it is she really wants to do with her life, she decides, almost arbitrarily, "a doctor". This revelation comes with less than thirty pages to go in the 250-page book, and unlike the Terabithia rope swing, Paterson does not foreshadow this decision at all. There was nothing that pointed to Louise deciding to pursue a career in medicine, but she eventually becomes a nurse midwife and goes to work serving a different isolated community in eastern Kentucky, where she falls in love and raises children of her own as the novel ends. All of this comes on extremely suddenly in the novel, and it's what makes this, in my opinion, far less accessible and appealing to young readers. This is a heavy book. I've said before, first when discussing Bridge to Terabithia, that great literature for children teaches that the world is bigger than you think, and you're not alone in it. Jacob Have I Loved teaches those lessons too, but they're buried under the lesson of "life is a long stretch of feeling like God is punishing you", which is not something I'm in a hurry to teach my children, although they witness it firsthand every time the basement floods.
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 1934 medalist, Invincible Louisa: The Story Of The Author Of Little Women by Cornelia Meigs.
I keep saying “we” when what I mean is “the plumber we hired”.