This Other Eden

“Esther drowsed with her granddaughter, Charlotte, in her lap, curled up against her spare body, wrapped in a pane of Hudson’s Bay wool from a blanket long ago cut into quarters stitched from tatters even older.”

The quilt in this excerpt represents the community of Apple Island and the Honey family. It is a quilt that is stitched together from different, old materials, representing the coming together of different people. Apple Island is diverse, and the Honey family can trace its roots across the world, and despite its patchwork, it keeps both Esther and Charlotte warm.

“It was a whale-circling, nosing at Patience and the other fugitives newly arrived in his kingdom, until he caught sight of an ancient great white shark cruising through the schoolhouse, trolling for drowned children and spinster marms. The whale launched after its prehistoric nemesis and the monsters jetted away from the shallows of the newly drowned world back into the proper abyss.”

In this excerpt, the whale acts as a guardian of Apple Island. It chases the whale away from the members of the community and back into the ocean, where it belongs. The shark represents the preying forces outside of the island, like the government that will eventually evict the islanders and claim the land for the state.

“She used some leftover chum Theophilus had in a bucket that smelled so horrendous when she took the cover off she gagged and nearly gave up. But she turned away and took a deep breath and wiped the tears streaming down her face and figured the stench was probably good for attracting fish.”

Theophilus and Candace Lark are siblings turned mother and father, running a household defined by the spurring of established gender norms. Theo wears his mother’s dress and tends to the housekeeping while Candace, who never takes to child-rearing or housework, takes up fishing, and through sheer determination, excels at it.

“Or gently preventing her older sister, Rabbit, who eschewed nearly all human food and was the thinnest human being anyone had ever seen-gaunt, hollowed- from eating the bark off a spruce or peeling a starfish from a rock in a tide pool and biting its arms off one by one.”

Rabbit Lark is one of the more unique characters of Apple Island, often in the background, observing the lives around her and eating whatever she can get her hands on. She is one with the island, taking sustenance from whatever the island provides. Her connection to the island is so strong that when the state comes to take her, she dies in an accident and never knows a life away from her home.

“Iris said, Vi, it’s not Indians you can’t trust, its people. Men, mostly, if you want to know the truth. Maybe white men most of all, I’ll grant–and you know what I mean; plain white; not the color of their skin but the state of their minds, just like being a man or a lady is a state of mind. But it’s veritable prejudice to say you don’t trust Indians as a rule.”

In this excerpt, Iris scolds her sister for demonstrating prejudice against Indigenous people while also redirecting her distrust to white men. She asserts that it is not actually the color of their skin that makes them untrustworthy, but the state of mind that comes with being white and a part of the power structure of society. This warning comes to fruition later in the novel when the islanders are evicted for not meeting societal standards as defined by the government.

“Sometimes, he stayed in the hope of that it might help rid him of a degree of his-there was no other word for it-disgust, which, also incomprehensible but a relief, he did not feel toward any of the children, only the adults.”

Matthew Diamond possesses ill-will toward the adults of Apple Island, feeling prejudice rising, making him feel disgusted by their lives. However, he does not feel the same way about the children, creating an interesting question on the nature of prejudice and innocence, and whether it is the youth and perceived innocence of the children that saves them from his disgust.

“The intern from the hospital showed Tabitha and Charlotte and Ethan images, of a telephone, a steam engine, President Taft, and asked them what and who they were and recorded in a notebook that the subjects could not identify any of the objects or persons depicted. Matthew Diamond wanted to say, this girl could answer your questions in Latin.”

When the state visits Apple Island to discern the conditions of the community and its inhabitants, they judge the islanders based on their own standards, not the standards of the island. They ask them to identify people and objects that the islanders have likely never learned of or seen, making the results of their “tests” skewed. This, in turn, eliminates opportunities for the islanders to show their intelligence and abilities and gives the state their reasons for evicting them.

“The typical Apple Island family traditionally has had a turncoat white for a father, a scrawny frau black as coal for a mother, or vice versa, and a litter of tan children their issue.”

In this excerpt from an article written after the state’s initial visit to the island, the journalist introduces the prejudiced and racist perception the mainland has of Apple Island. The notion that any white member of an Apple Island family is a turncoat establishes the belief on the mainland that people of different racial identities should not interact, as it is seen as a betrayal to society.

“I know the complications this would bring about in terms of separating him from his family, but the fact of the matter is this: more than anyone else in his family, he looks purely white. That is, to look at him, you would not be able to tell he has mixed blood.”

When Matthew Diamond writes to Thomas Hale and requests that he take in Ethan Honey, he cites Ethan’s ability to pass as a white man as the primary reason he wants to send Ethan away. He believes that Ethan can not only escape the eviction but also escape the prejudice directed at his family, recognizing that society will use Ethan’s appearance more so than any other quality to define him.

“None of them gave a thought yet to what people beyond the island saw as their polluted blood. Even after that shameful visit from those doctors. Soon enough, she thought. Soon enough, Pharoah will come after us, like he always does.”

Esther Honey knows why the state is coming to Apple Island and why they want to evict them from the island. She knows that her grandchildren do not yet understand why there is this attention, but she sees past whatever excuses are given by the visitors. The mainland sees their blood as polluted because of incestuous relationships, but even more so from the racial diversity of the families.

“Matthew Diamond sits across from Eha Honey, and what he would call the indelible worst of him feels pity for the mixed-blood man sitting across from him, whose son is light enough skinned and blue enough eyed and straight enough haired and artistically enough gifted that Diamond could call on one of the very few favors he thought he had to ask from his old friend and fellow seminarian.”

Matthew Diamond understands that by lobbying for Ethan to leave the island to pursue painting, he is separating a father and a son and breaking up a family. He also understands that his motivations are not based solely on Ethan’s talent, but by his ability to pass as a white man. He feels guilt that Ethan is the only Honey that can escape the fate of the eviction because of this.

“The islanders were so used to diets of wind and fog, to meals of slow-roasted sunshine and poached storm clouds, so used to devouring sautéed shadows and broiled echoes; they found themselves stupefied by such an abundance of food and drink.”

Life on Apple Island is hard, especially in the winter, and the islanders are accustomed to sparse diets. Yet, when they send Ethan off with a feast, they experience abundance, and the features of the island that they usually sustain themselves on are forgotten in the presence of many different courses and celebration.

“Hear after I see them. Haven’t heard a bird or insect since morning. Were there birds or insects this morning? No surf. So quiet, he thought. His eyes closed and his head nodded forward and he fell asleep. The Dutchmen worked in a meadow of waves, scything the tide, mowing breakers, reaping the hissing, carbonated grass.”

Ethan struggles to adjust to his new life away from the island, and in this moment, as he drifts to sleep, his new life and old life come together. His present surroundings transform into the sights and sounds of the island. Ethan is an islander, and even on the mainland, away from his family, the island rises in him, his subconscious still with the waves and wind.

“[S]he will miss her mother and her dad and her sisters and brothers so much that the comforts of the sheets and open window and lonesomeness of missing her family will make her cry herself to a dreamless sleep.”

Like Ethan, Bridget is away from her family and struggles with their absence. Her family is much farther away, but the pain of being separated is strong within her. It exhausts her to the point of dreamless sleep. At the Hale estate, she has no family network or strong relationships that could help lessen the sting of being away from them.

“Ethan sat, something too intimate and more complicated and deep than just a sign of recognition between two near orphans who found themselves ornaments on the Hale estate.”

Even before their romance begins in earnest, there is a strong connection between Ethan and Bridget. Both are from islands and separated from their families. They both feel out of place and disconnected from the lives they’ve always known and recognize these feelings in each other, drawing them close.

“Ethan leaned closer and closer to the painting, trying to see how it was possible, to see how the painter had turned a handful of plants into an emblem for the whole world.”

When Bridget brings Ethan into Hale’s house and shows him her favorite painting, he is in awe at the painter’s talent. The light that the painter uses gives the asparagus meaning beyond a mere plant. Ethan aspires to this level of talent, and he hopes to create paintings that can imbue greater meaning than their subjects.

“Eha realized that that was just what he was trying to make into words to say to his mother. He knew Mr. Diamond had something to say by the way he stared where the birds had been, then looked down, the took that breath before walking again, but Eha couldn’t put it like his mother did.”

Throughout the novel, Eha struggles to put his thoughts into words and frequently must defer to others for help. In this excerpt, Eha realizes that someone else has said what he wanted to say even though he did not know what he wanted to say. He understands that Matthew has something to say but cannot understand it at the same level that Esther understands and expresses it.

“She knew he had bad news about Ethan. It was like the prophets in the Bible. They didn’t have any special powers of seeing the future. They saw where the present was at, was all. They looked at where the present was at with eyes that saw and ears that heard, so the future that would come from it was as clear and simple as adding one plus one.”

Esther is rarely surprised in This Other Eden, using experience and observation to see what is in front of her and predict what will happen. In this excerpt, Matthew comes to tell her and Eha that Ethan left the Hale estate. She knows that he has bad news about Ethan not only because of his body language but because she expected this from the beginning and understood that Matthew chose Ethan because of his skin. She has seen others like Ethan leave the island and not return, and as much as it pains her, she expected this moment.

“Then Esther saw that it was at least partly with him as it had been with her when she’d pushed her father off the bluff. Her punishment for murdering her father had been the crime of murdering her father itself. Diamond’s punishment for taking Ethan away from them was that he took a son from a father, a child from its family.”

Esther is haunted by the murder of her father at her own hands and understands the severity of fracturing a family, even if it is in defense. Just as she is haunted by her father, she sees that Matthew will be haunted by his own actions that led to Eha and Ethan being separated. He will have to live with that for the rest of his life, just as Esther lives with the ghost of her father.

“He set the keg down and sat on it, facing the cabin. Esther took it as a sign of her son’s sorrow at the loss of their home and meant to leave him to his mute grief, once he did her the favor of taking her rocking chair up to the crown of the bluff, so she could look out over the land and water and think and lament it for herself.”

With the news of the eviction, both Eha and Esther go to mourn, in their own places. Esther goes to the bluff she once pushed her father off and looks out over the island and the water. It is the most consequential place in her life’s history, and with another life-changing moment approaching, there is no other place to be. Eha, on the other hand, observes the cabin he built by hand with Zachary, and will go on to reflect on the making of that cabin and its coming disassembly.

“Here is my queer old body, in a barn, behind a hedge, beneath a shadow, on a bare pallet-quick-while the murderous king still sleeps. Here is a song, a painting, a jig and a reel. Here is an island for an apple, an orchard for an eye. Here is a single, perfect apple for an island.”

Zachary rages at the eviction and the government’s interference in his community. He understands that they are targeting the islanders because of their commitment to live outside of societal norms and embraces his “queer old body” and the unique aspects of his life. He understands that his body lives outside of the state’s expectations, and he is proud of it.

“They looked like apparitions, phantoms standing on the strand, indistinct as sand blowing over sand, ghosts sighted on some shipwrecked expedition to the top of the world. Huddled together the people struck the sheriff as impossibly thin and small, undersized and malnourished.”

As the sheriff and his team approach the island, he sees the islanders gathered as shipwrecked ghosts. While their malnourished appearance stems from lives of hard living on the island, his description of them as shipwrecked is appropriate in terms of the coming eviction. The islanders are often described as members of an ark, and with the eviction, they will be scattered and adrift.

“Esther felt how hot Violet’s hands were from the friction of the rope. Rage and anger burned in both women’s hearts but there were the children to think of and work to be done and anger only ever turned to fear and both recalled the prophets’ calls for calm and fearlessness so each was quiet and gentle with the other so both remained composed, if only just.”

Both Esther and Violet are enraged by the eviction and the loss of their homes but exude calm in order to protect the children in their lives. They will have to establish new homes and continue to raise the children and want to make the painful transition as painless as possible. They know that if they display anger and fear, they will scare the children.