FROM SLAVERY
Novelist confronts her complicated family history
A Reckoning Linda Spalding McClelland & Stewart
TORONTO There was a moment a year or so ago when awardwinning Canadian writer Linda Spalding found herself in a Kansas cemetery gazing down on a pair of 19th-century graves.
They belonged to John and Lavina Dickinson, two ancestors who play pivotal roles in her epic new novel, A Reckoning. And she remembers how conflicted her emotions were as she stood there.
“I have to say that I felt a real twinge — of shame, possibly — that maybe I was taking their names in vain.”
But perhaps it was simply that she was continuing to be haunted by her own family history — by the knowledge that she was the descendant of slave owners and by a compulsion to deal with that fact through her fiction.
“Actually, (it’s) my paternal family history, as my mother pointed out to me more than once,” Spalding says with a smile. She has sought to come to terms with that past not only with this new book, A Reckoning, but with her 2012 novel, The Purchase. That dark and brooding story focused on Daniel Dickinson, a troubled Quaker attempting to establish roots in Virginia, and chronicled the devastating consequences of his decision to spend his life savings on the acquisition of a slave.
The Purchase won Spalding a Governor General’s literary award. Although she had several earlier books to her credit, this was her first real success.
“I never really felt I could say I was a writer until The Purchase got noticed,” she says candidly. “It was a big thing to happen to me in my 69th year. The ground shifted for me. It’s terrible to say that having outside affirmation gives you a sense of confidence, but I believe it did that for me.”
But she knew she was not finished with the Dickinson family — which is why she’s now introducing us to a later generation and sending it on an adventure that assumes epic proportions.
Initially, she thought this new story might simply be part of The Purchase, but her agent warned Spalding that because of a 30-year time gap, she would have trouble making it work and that it would be wiser to write a second novel.
The result is The Reckoning, an exciting page-turner that works as a standalone novel.
It’s about betrayal and redemption — about John Dickinson, a fiery circuit-riding Methodist preacher whose shameful private conduct triggers such rage in his wife Lavina that she leaves their Virginia home and joins a wagon train heading west in search of some kind of rebirth in a new promised land.
It’s also the story of their 13-yearold son, Martin, who accompanies his mother into exile along with a pet bear named Cuff, whose presence raises the novel to an almost mythic level. And finally, interlocking with other narratives, there’s the saga of Bry, a slave who escapes the Dickinson farm and embarks on a perilous journey in search of freedom in Canada.
“John is my father’s great-grandfather — right?” Spalding, pleasant and unassuming, is in her publisher’s office, attempting to sort out the generations.
“So Martin is my great-grandfather. I’m very fond of Martin. Because of him, this is a comingof-age story.
“He does grow up. He surmounts his parental heritage.”
Much of the story is seen through the eyes of Martin, a boy coping with his own painful knowledge of parental fallibility and betrayal while acquiring the tools of survival in an often hostile landscape.
As for Cuff the bear, there was no way he wouldn’t be playing a role in this tale.
Spalding, who has lived in Canada since the early 1980s, first learned about him as a youngster growing up in Kansas.
“The story I heard as a child and then read about later was that the family left Virginia and that they had a pet bear whose name was Cuff.
“As a child I obviously found that fascinating. I didn’t know at the time that they had travelled on paddle boats — which of course complicates things with bears! But even travelling with a bear on a wagon train would be a bit tricky.”
The young Linda knew about the bear before she knew that her ancestors owned slaves. And she admits this latter discovery left her in “a kind of overwrought fantasy” about what she saw as a family blight.
“I was so horrified that I came from slave owners and that my father sort of brushed it off. He said, ‘Don’t worry about it. We freed them and gave each one a donkey.’ ”
But Spalding also emphasizes that her father was a committed liberal who played a “linchpin” role in the desegregation of U.S. schools.
The process of writing fascinates her. There was more than one occasion when she was so satisfied with a scene that she would rush downstairs from her study to share her exhilaration with husband, Michael Ondaatje, also an awardwinning novelist. But then, doubt would resurface.
“I love to imagine a scene but to get it from ‘A’ to ‘Z’ and ensure that the characters have motives — that’s really hard for me. There were times when I was absolutely ecstatic and other times when I was saying — I can’t make this work.”
What also intrigues Spalding as a novelist is that a reader can have a different view of a particular scene than what she had as the writer.
“When you and I are sitting here having this conversation, you’re having a totally different experience than I am,” she says.
And she also suggests this happens with the characters she has created.
“John and Lavina and Martin and the other characters are living in the same little unit but experiencing things differently.”
Spalding cites John’s sexual affair with a female slave. “Does John love her? Or is he a scoundrel? I guess I want people to understand ambiguity.”
The story I heard as a child and then read about later was that the family left Virginia and that they had a pet bear whose name was Cuff. ... I didn’t know at the time that they had travelled on paddle boats — which of course complicates things with bears!