1996: THE MIDWIFE’S APPRENTICE by Karen Cushman
When animal droppings and garbage and spoiled straw are piled up in a great heap, the rotting and moiling give forth heat.
This one is great. Karen Cushman, a former Museum Studies professor turned children's author, is great. Of the 103 Newbery medalists, about 2,000 of them are historical fiction novels set in medieval Europe, and most of them have an implied message of “wasn’t this a cool and interesting time in which you could have lived? There were castles and horses!” But Cushman was always very good at expressing “actually, this is the worst possible time that you could live in as a person.” The road in Adam Of The Road is an exciting world when you can meet people from all walks of life; in Cushman’s world, that road is covered in shit and populated by shit-covered poor people, including our nameless protagonist, nicknamed Beetle by the midwife who discovers her huddling in a dung heap for warmth, and takes her in as her apprentice. The abbey of The Door In The Wall is the starting point for both a physical and spiritual journey; you don’t see the monks in Cushman’s world because they don’t hang out with the shit-covered poor people. I, Juan de Pareja takes us inside the court of the Spanish king and the artist that he patronized; in Cushman’s world, the only art is staying alive another day, and occasionally drunkenly singing at the tavern.
Not that Cushman’s world is bleak at all, it’s delightful. 1996 medalist The Midwife’s Apprentice was Cushman’s second novel, after what is likely her most famous novel, the hilarious Catherine, Called Birdy, which Cushman wrote at age 50. As Cushman said in an interview with IPL (responding to a question from a young reader):
“I had been interested in the Middle Ages for a long time. I like the music, the costumes, the pageantry, and the color. It seems an interesting time, when western civilization was growing towards the Renaissance just like a child growing into adolescence. I first thought about writing books set at that time after reading about the lives of children in times past. I thought about what life might have been like for them when they had no power and little value. Especially girl children. I wondered how they coped with their lack of value and still kept a sense of their own worth; how they made choices when there were few options; how they survived when they had little power. Because the lack of value, options and power would have been even more true in the Middle Ages, I decided to set both CATHERINE, CALLED BIRDY and THE MIDWIFE’S APPRENTICE in that time period. In the Middle Ages, these are ordinary stories. Many children endured arranged marriages. There were a lot of homeless children at that time and very few people or places to care for them. In modern times, Birdy and Alyce would be unusual, no longer be ordinary, and that ordinariness is what I wanted.”
In Catherine, Called Birdy, Birdy’s social climber parents are desperate to marry her off, and Birdy is desperate for any shred of independence, so she ends up sabotaging every visit from every suitor that her parents bring in. The slapstick of those scenes, coupled with Birdy’s marking of the calendar with grotesque (and accurate) stories of early Christian martyrs, as well as the frequent use of medieval-era swear words like “God’s Thumbs!” or “Corpus Bones!”, made it the funniest book your eighth grade quiz bowl team captain had ever read. Birdy still endures today as a staple of children’s historical fiction - especially if you’re looking for one with a strong female protagonist - and was actually adapted into a film in 2022, but I am deeply sorry to inform you that the film was written and directed by Lena Dunham, but then I’m happy to inform you that Andrew Scott is in it, but then I am once again deeply sorry to inform you that Russell Brand is also in it. This shit contains multitudes.
The Midwife’s Apprentice was Cushman’s sophomore album, and is less slapsticky than Birdy (although still wickedly funny in several parts). Beetle is another one of Cushman’s “ordinary” girls who has to make choices and survive when she has very few options. That’s how she ends up living with and helping Jane the midwife, who begrudgingly takes her in and starts to teach her some of the trade. The attention to period detail and language that you’d expect from a former university professor is all there, as is the same presentation of medieval Europe that we saw in Birdy: a weird, gross, cruel place. Acts of kindness go unnoticed, and everyone is walking in the shit just trying to stay alive for one more day. Even after the occasional good thing happens in Beetle’s life, or she decides to act kindly when she could be indifferent, it doesn’t take the world long to reset itself:
“If the world were sweet and fair, [Beetle] and Will would become friends and the village applaud her for her bravery and the midwife be more generous with her cheese and onions. Since this is not so, and the world is just as it is and no more, nothing changed.”
What’s remarkable is that Beetle continues living anyways. Jane the midwife is pretty nasty to her, and the other boys in town enjoy mocking her, but Beetle is smarter than she looks. The second-best chapter in the book is chapter 7, “The Devil”, in which the town is spooked by ominous occurrences:
“And that is the way it was until the day the Devil walked about. It started with the two-headed calf born to Roger Mustard’s cow, Molly. And then a magpie landed on the miller’s barn and would not be chased away. Suddenly the whole village saw witches and devils everywhere, and fear lived in every cottage.”
As weird as these details are, they were things that would have freaked people out in the Dark Ages, and the villagers start turning on each other as strange hoofprints show up. Soon, some of the villagers’ darkest secrets are being uncovered, and, coincidentally, it only seems to affect the villagers who have been cruel to Beetle in the past. Sure enough, she is revealed at the end of the chapter to have been manipulating everyone’s paranoia the whole time. And, by that time, she’s not Beetle anymore.
See, that’s what happens in the best chapter in the book, chapter 5, “The Merchant”, in which Jane the midwife is laid up with an injury and sends Beetle to the Gobnet-Under-Green fair on Saint Swithin’s day in her place to pick up more apothecary ingredients for her, including “water that a murderer washed his hands in”; as Cushman points out in a later aside, “the hangman was doing a brisk trade in murderer’s wash water”. It’s one of Beetle’s first times on her own with actual resources and purpose, as opposed to her early days of sleeping in dung heaps. She’s awed by all of the sights of the fair: the colorful flags, the puppet shows, the singers, the horse races, the soothsayers, the roasting and baking foods, the spices that she’s never smelled before, and Cushman’s descriptions of all of these wonders is, again, delightful. But things get better when a merchant gives her a free comb as a kind gesture and compliments her hair. Does someone really think of Beetle as pretty, as even beautiful? The comb is, as Beetle realizes, the first thing that she has ever owned for herself, “except for her raggedy clothes and occasional turnips”. When another fairgoers mistakes Beetle for a different girl named Alyce, everything starts coming over her in waves:
“Beetle stood perfectly still. What a day. She had been winked at, complimented, given a gift, and now mistaken for the mysterious Alyce who could read. Did she then look like someone who could read? She leaned over and watched her face in the water again. “This face,” she said, “could belong to someone who can read. And has curls. And could have a lover before nightfall. And this is me, Beetle.” She stopped. Beetle was no name for a person, no name for someone who looked like she could read. Frowning, she thought a minute, and then her face shone as though a torch were fired inside her. “Alyce,” she breathed. Alyce sounded clean and friendly and smart. You could love someone named Alyce. She looked back at the face in the water. “This then is me, Alyce.” It was right. So the newly called Alyce shifted the pack on her shoulders, and with her head back and bare feet solid on the ground, she headed back to the midwife’s cottage and never noticed when it grew cool and dark, for the heat and light within her.”
Cushman is very good at painting the world of Dark Ages Europe accurately: a terrible and unforgiving world to the shit-covered poor people who made up the majority of the population, one where, as Cushman points out in her afterword, “Sometimes a woman could get no other work, because she was poor or ignorant or dirty, so she hired herself out as midwife for women who could afford no other help.” Once Alyce has named herself, once that heat and light are kindled within her, once she determines that she wants, needs, and in fact deserves “a full belly, a contented heart, and a place in this world”, there’s no stopping her. Even with her limited knowledge of midwifery, she gives her charges “all she had of care and courtesy and hard work”. When Jane kicks her out of the house, Alyce does some soul searching and ends up right at Jane’s front door again, shouting in the final chapter:
“Jane Sharp! It is I, Alyce, your apprentice. I have come back. And if you do not let me in, I will try again and again. I can do what you tell me and take what you give me, and I know how to try and risk and fail and try again and not give up. I will not go away.”
The world is just as it is and no more. The real adventure of this age is staying alive one more day, is keeping the fire burning inside of you so it will make you kind and diligent and determined and selfless. Karen Cushman’s Alyce is all of those things, and when it comes to the real adventure of the Dark Ages, she is triumphant.
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 1932 medalist, Waterless Mountain by Laura Adams Armer.