James A. Michener, Chesapeake, Random House, 1978
Texte intégral
1In 1979, UK TV broadcast a 12-episode NBC-produced serialization of James A. Michener’s Centennial (1974), portraying life in an eponymous Colorado town over several generations. I loved it so much that I immediately read the original novel, followed by Michener’s Hawaii (1959), then Chesapeake (1978) and other works, though my favorites were his epic histories, Chesapeake in particular. The historical novels follow a formula, depicting a place from its geological formation, precontact Indigenous people, European settlers, and then their descendants to the present. Chesapeake is told as a series of “Voyages” and extended vignettes, beginning with Pentaquod’s 1583 flight from the Susquehannock nation to a cliffside “Refuge” by the Choptank River on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, and his eventual joining with the Patamoke people further downriver. His voyage is followed by those of European settlers: Catholic refugee Edmund Steed, Quaker Edward Paxmore, convict and indentured servant Timothy Turlock, enslaved African rebel Cudjo Cater, Irish immigrant Michael Caveny, and German immigrant Otto Pflaum. The rest of the novel tells the stories of succeeding generations, each family representing the various people of the region: Native Americans, explorers, planters, plantation mistresses, slave traders, pirates, hunters, fishermen, abolitionists, fugitive slaves, civil rights activists, writers, lawyers, politicians, and realtors. Their lives center on the Steed plantations of Devon Island (at the mouth of the Choptank) and the inland Refuge, the Paxmores’ Peace Cliff, the Turlock swamps, and the town of Patamoke. But some also venture into the Atlantic and Caribbean world encompassing England, France, Ireland, Angola, the West Indies, and other mainland colonies. The scenes include everyday life but also Indian wars, piracy, slave trading, the American Revolution, the War of 1812, the Civil War, Jim Crow, the Great Depression, and Watergate.
2The books were exciting enough that I, a 14- to 16-year-old with little interest in schoolwork, rose at six every morning to read successive Micheners for an hour or so before breakfast. Then, at 17, when I had no idea what to do with my life, an astute Careers Advisor asked me what I was reading. I said I was then into Alex Haley’s Roots but I also loved Michener, and she immediately told me something that transformed my life: I “could study American history at university.” Boom! My newfound interest in schoolwork took me to the University of East Anglia in 1983 and five years later to the Chesapeake region itself to study at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore for a doctorate on early national Prince George’s County, Maryland, researched largely at the State Archives in the Annapolis I’d encountered in Haley as well as Michener. While there I befriended Phoebe Jacobsen, the archivist who found the records of the Lord Ligonier that brought Kunta Kinté to the state capital in 1767. My early readings, especially Michener’s Chesapeake, and the crucial words of a Careers Advisor, thus led me to a place I still love and a life I still live—teaching, researching, and writing American history.
3Reading Chesapeake again for this article, I found, perhaps inevitably, that some of it is cornier than I could have known as an adolescent. First, there are implausible encounters with famous figures: Edward Steed writes portions of Captain John Smith’s journal; various Steeds, Paxmores, and Turlocks play cards with George Washington in his voyage to take up the Presidency in 1789; Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and John C. Calhoun sojourn at Devon Island; Woolman Paxmore meets Hermann Goering and Adolf Hitler; and Pusey Paxmore encounters a suitably shadowy Richard Nixon. Woolman Paxmore is crudely modelled on John Woolman, and Cudjo Cater on Frederick Douglass and Eden Cater on Harriet Tubman. There is also a later Reverend Douglass of the Patamoke AME church. There are gross appropriations: Ruth Paxmore makes British America’s first written protest against slavery 20 years before the Germantown petitioners of 1688. And there are absurd coincidences: Cudjo Cater, after being kidnapped from the Congo and then overthrowing the Paxmore-built oyster-clipper-turned-pirate-ship-turned-slave-ship Ariel and killing Captain Matt Turlock, finds himself enslaved on Devon Island before buying his freedom and moving to Patamoke. Michener’s is thus the kind of storytelling satirized in John Barth’s The Sot Weed Factor (Doubleday, 1960), which, ironically, was also set in Maryland.
4Then there are questionable storylines, including a sexual relationship between Paul Steed and an enslaved Eden, before she married Cudjo, although Michener highlights the violence and exploitation involved. Native Americans, depicted in rich variety before Europeans arrive, rapidly vanish after European settlement. And there are aesthetic assessments of women that reflect the views of a man who turned 71 in 1978 and whose mind was unmoved by feminism. There is also the use of certain words, such as one beginning with n and ending with r, and another beginning with r and ending with -skins, that Michener deployed to reflect the tenors of the times but which one would be more circumspect in using today.
5But in many important ways the book was better than I remember or was able to appreciate when I first read it. And, as I discovered to my surprise and delight on re-reading, it had much more influence on me than I had ever realized. Many of Michener’s depictions of history and comments on the nature of history were sophisticated for his time, sometimes even ahead of his time. He explored the Chesapeake countryside when the New England town was still thought to be the archetypal American story, and portrayed an Atlantic history when parochial community histories were still in vogue. He was also on-trend with contemporary developments in African-American studies. Cudjo and Eden Cater come into the story late, in the 1820s and near 200 years after the arrival of Black people on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. But, when they do arrive, they represent the Black people of the Choptank as other characters represent other communities. And, although Michener occasionally depicts “good” masters (e.g. 229), he is otherwise unflinching on the barbarity of slavery and Jim Crow, and portrays sympathetically the more radical elements of abolitionism and Civil Rights, with both Hiram Cater and his sister Luta Mae Cater unjustly jailed for protesting, in part because the lapsing Quaker Pusey Paxmore put the FBI on their trail, betraying a long family tradition of allying against racism. Paxmore later gets a comeuppance, finally arriving in the same prison as Luta Mae due to his involvement in Watergate. Michener even invents and condemns an ironically titled A True History of Patamoke (1938) by Lawton Steed that glorifies the planter class, condescends to middling and poorer whites, but never once mentions “the blacks who had shared that history and played a major role in it” (831).
6Michener also powerfully advocated for the environment, not only highlighting the damage caused by sewage, industrial and commercial waste and pollution, over-planting, over-fishing, excessive hunting, and greedy realtors, but also inciting an appreciation of the environment that should discourage damage and encourage repair and care. Among his voyagers is a family of geese migrating from Canada to the Choptank. Another is less benign but still a part of nature: the hurricane of 1886. And, ultimately perhaps, the book’s main character is the Chesapeake Bay itself, or at least the Choptank River and its shores. Above all, though, Michener’s Chesapeake is a place in time, human as well as geological, to borrow the title of Darrett and Anita Rutman’s 1984 community study, A Place in Time: Middlesex County, Virginia, 1650-1750. He tells the story of the Bay from its formation 11,000 years ago, but in part through To the Ice Age, a precocious geographical history of the Bay purportedly written by Eastern Shore farmer Thomas Applegarth, who made a voyage to its source in 1811. The book is later mentioned reverentially in a college literature class that inspires third-generation Chris Pflaum on a life’s mission to save the Choptank landscape. The Choptank, its animals, its people, and the interactions of all are the heart of Chesapeake.
- 1 Doreen Massey, for space (Sage, 2005).
7The novel’s later chapters, furthermore, are replete with reflections by recent generations on their ancestors and their now-ancient homeland. The variety of those reflections inspire fascinating insights on what we now commonly call historical memory. I remember being struck, first time around, by the observations that more Choptank residents remember fighting for the Confederacy than actually did so, and more remember voting for John F. Kennedy than did so. Lawton Steed’s selective recollections are pitched against Hiram Cater’s radicalization by his ancestor Eden Cater’s long-lost manuscript of her days as an underground railroad agent, Fourteen Journeys North, rediscovered in the centenary year of Emancipation. Ruthven Turlock promotes his real estate enterprise with road-side advertising billboards depicting his pirate ancestors to attract the attention of businessmen clients who fancy themselves as latter-day renegades. And, in a beautiful full-circle, Owen Steed, retiring to the Refuge after a career in the Oklahoma oilfields, is moved to save the blue heron, a bird that first enchanted Pentaquod as he arrived there four centuries before. Chesapeake thereby brings to mind today the words of geographer Doreen Massey, who saw places as defined by the “stories-so-far” of past and present people animals, plants, and objects whose paths cross there (9).1 Not a bad place for a historian to start.
Pour citer cet article
Référence électronique
Steven SARSON, « James A. Michener, Chesapeake, Random House, 1978 », e-Rea [En ligne], 22.2 | 2025, mis en ligne le 15 juin 2025, consulté le 19 juillet 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/erea/19634 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/144q8
Haut de pageDroits d’auteur
Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.
Haut de page