Captivity Narrative: Q&A with Molly McNett

“This is what I love about historical pieces—trying to find a voice.”

Is Child of These Tears a true story?

Anyone familiar with the 1704 raid of Deerfield, Massachusetts will recognize some elements of that point of departure, and the dates are similar, but this version is fictionalized. Eunice Williams is the name of the girl in the real story that inspired Constance Baker in this book, and Eunice’s father John Williams wrote a famous narrative about the event, The Redeemed Captive Returning to Zion. Many things are changed in this version, including the name of the New England town, the name of the mission in Canada, as well as the people in the story, and, to some extent, what happens to them.

How did this project begin?

I got interested in captivity narratives when I first read Mary Rowlandson’s in a graduate class. (Captivity narratives are the personal stories of those who have been captured by an enemy. Sarah’s voice in this story is one of those.) Mary Rowlandson was an English colonist who was captured by Native people in 1675 during King Philip’s War, and held for ransom. Her account became what was really the first American bestseller, and established the captivity narrative as a genre.

Years later, after I’d written a few pieces of historical short fiction, I decided to try a captivity narrative of my own. This was more than ten years ago. I must have read about fifty of these narratives, in order to get a feeling for the language, writing down idioms and turns of phrase and biblical underpinnings and allusions. This is what I love about historical pieces—trying to find a voice. For me it starts as mimicry of primary sources, usually, and then after a time someone begins to emerge.

At some point while I was reading narratives I came across the account by John Williams, The Redeemed Captive Returning to Zion, which led me to a nonfiction book about Williams’ daughter Eunice, The Unredeemed Captive by the historian John Demos. This is a truly remarkable book, the most fully imagined piece of historical nonfiction I’ve ever read. Young Eunice was taken captive together with her mother in the 1704 raid on Deerfield, Mass., and ended up in Canada as my Constance Baker does, but Williams’s wife died on the march northward, so that Eunice came to the Kanawake mission in Canada a motherless child. By the time her father came to redeem her, he was remarried. Eunice refused to return. In a short time she had forgotten how to speak English. So many things intrigued me: when and how did she lose English and gain her new Mohawk language? How much did she remember of the traumatic past? Her point of view is the one I started with in terms of my questions and interest, but because we hear very little from ‘captivated’ children in narratives (Stephen Kellog is one exception, and there are a few others) she was also the most difficult to imagine.

This is the very interesting thing, too, about many of those children. Many preferred living among the Native people to life in New England. When you read the Puritans on child-rearing, you’re not surprised about that. The Jesuit priest, Joseph Lafitau, observed in his book on the “Customs of the American Indians” (Moeurs des Sauvages Amériquains...) that the Mohawk he lived among at Kanawake in the early eighteenth century treated their children very tenderly, never reprimanding them for anything.

I am not a scholar, but through reading primary sources I learned that the Puritans, too, truly loved their children. Even Cotton Mather’s accounts of his own children are sometimes tender, though his reputation is that of a harsh disciplinarian. These readings taught me that these ‘English Christians’ were most concerned with children’s salvation, which led them to guard against “immoderate affection.” Misbehavior was alarming to them because of what it might have signaled about their childrens’ election. Sometimes in their accounts we can feel affection or grief brimming underneath language that attempts to moderate it.

On the other hand, the Mohawk’s treatment of children, according to Lafitau, seemed analogous to grace itself; at least, I imagined that this might be the way a child would experience it. And the Native act of requickening, renaming a child and planting them in the group to replace another who has died, made affection and even status redound to the young newcomer, so that she entered the new place not as a stranger but as a blessed, beloved figure. How would that feel to the child, when so many things she had done in her former home, including play, had resulted in a beating?

Is Father Floquart (Père le Gros or “Pear”) based on a real priest?

No. I read many Jesuit Relations but at some point I started to hear a unique voice, in spite of my ignorance of so many things about the character’s life at that time, and his background. You can now read the Relations online quite easily, but the library at Northern Illinois University, where I teach, has them in black bound volumes with their seventeenth or eighteenth century French on one side and the English on the other, which I loved, and made me waste a lot of time, which I don’t regret. I was touched at the intimacy of the Relations as well as the lists of needs and wants included in them (“Oh, by the way, we need another wool blanket, we need candles,” and so on.) It’s a charming mix of the devout and the worldly.

The work of a Jesuit “green martyr of the wilderness” was very practical. St. Ignatius wrote of this work as “contemplation in action,” which Floquart mentions in the book. I was curious as to the complications of that in real practice. I see Floquart as having the bent of a contemplative, but he is in a place where he must perform works and tire his aging body to the point that he can’t fulfill his desire for contemplation, at least not until the end of the book. I have been interested in this kind of tension from the time that I had very young children and was trying to write at the same time. Things have their competing demands on us. Sometimes everything is not possible.

Why is the voice of John Baker given to us through his Commonplace Book?

In The Unredeemed Captive, Demos tells us that John Williams kept a commonplace book, and gives a few excerpts. The voice was different from that of The Redeemed Captive Returning to Zion. And the subject matter Demos mentioned was sufficiently bizarre and delightful to make me determined to include a “book” like this among the genres of captivity narrative and Jesuit Relation. So I examined probably a hundred of these, too, from online collections and databases, all primary sources, some in handwriting I could barely read. Then I actually made a physical commonplace book and put the most interesting entries there by hand, most of which I didn’t include in Child of These Tears. Again, it was an inefficient way to work, but fun.

I love the strangeness and miscellaneous nature of commonplace books, their love of knowledge and information and advice for its own sake, which I might have thought would run counter to Puritan mores, but I learned that their authors were most devout. They will quote Scripture or a sermon, and then turn to describe a mythical creature who takes her eyeball out at night, or suggest how a dead mouse laid across the brow will bring down a fever, or that some line on the forehead means you’ll die in a foreign country. The juxtaposition is wonderful. The books sometimes contradict themselves, too, which intrigued me. I saw some possibility there for John Baker to change his mind or evolve through his reading and making of the book, as the entries loosely move toward Enlightenment ideals.

What other sources did you read as research?

Books about the Ursulines, especially Marie de L’Incarnation, who abandoned her young son to live in the convent, and is a disturbing, fascinating figure for any mother to consider. Also, to get a feel for Floquart, I read Christian mystics. I am an amateur in this world too, but to me it feels like the mystics’ relationship to God is so intimate and so pure that I imagine all sects converging in them, in a primary state that precedes language. This seems true for The Cloud of Unknowing, Teresa of Ávila, Julian of Norwich, St. John of the Cross, and of course, St. Augustine. Puritan sources quote St. Augustine as well as Catholic ones, and when we read him today, he seems to be writing to us, too. The writing still feels intimate. His words might have been written yesterday.

We hear the voices of the English and French characters, but no Native or Mohawk people. Why is that?

I tried, but I think because I didn’t have written sources to absorb, these voices were harder for me to access. Ultimately the ones I came up with did not seem full enough to justify their existence in the book. I did read some Mohawk points of view on the 1704 raid on Deerfield. It is not a big event in Mohawk history, but there is a Mohawk account of a church bell that was meant for the Mohawk in Canada, stolen by the English and taken to Deerfield. In this account the bell was taken as plunder in Deerfield in 1704, and returned to its intended place in Kanawake. This did give me the idea to use the monstrance in a similar way. One good source on indigenous points of view in King Philip’s War (a little earlier than the time of Child of These Tears), which includes a chapter on Rowlandson’s captivity narrative, is Our Beloved Kin, by Lisa Brooks. Brian Moore’s novel Black Robe also accesses all points of view in a story of Jesuits among the Huron.

Can you talk about the theme of beauty in this book?

I grew up in the country, on a farm. Most of the churches I saw growing up resembled schools or ranch houses or even machine sheds, places of utility. They did not take my breath away. On the other hand, the hayloft of our barn, which had some verticality, a nave and keel, was a sort of dreamscape. The first really beautiful church I saw was St. Paul’s Cathedral. I didn’t travel when I was young, so this was early in college when I went to study abroad in London. I remember that I had a physical reaction when I walked into it—to its immensity and extravagance and even its coolness. This is why Père Floquart thinks a monstrance will make a difference in such an austere place—beauty can awaken longing. So can immensity, which he felt as a boy in church, and he lacks in the little wooden wilderness chapel. As Mary McCarthy wrote in The Stones of Florence: “Bigness too, is a kind of beauty.” So I think Père Floquart is right, in a way. Yet he is also too attached to beauty, just as he is to other comforts, such as food and chintz pillows.

Molly McNett’s fiction has appeared in The Best American Short Stories and The Pushcart Prize anthology, as well as many literary journals. Her book of stories, One Dog Happy, was the winner of the John Simmons Award for short fiction from the University of Iowa Press. McNett has received a fellowship to MacDowell, as well as a teaching/writing fellowship from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she earned her MFA. She lives on a farm near Oregon, Illinois, with her husband, the writer Dan Libman.

Molly McNett’s new novel, Child of These Tears, is now available from Slant Books. We invite you to learn more about Slant here.