Repeats and First Times: These Are Mine; What Are Yours?

Last week in Traverse City --

Morning sunshine brought out orchard gold in Leelanau, as those cherry trees not yet bare of leaf burst into song. I burst into smiles myself when the sun came out, feeling as if an old friend not seen in ages had suddenly called my name from across the road. While the gold of the tamarack seems tarnished now, dulled from its brightness of only days ago, there is still a lot of yellow and orange and warm burnt umber in the landscape. I’ll add a few more end-of-October images as I go along so you can see what I mean.

Morning sun on Leelanau cherry orchard --

Tuesday of last week Sunny and I got to our new agility class for the first time, passing through a torrential downpour to get there. This week we had sunshine for the drive but a little scare with the tire pressure warning light in my car, necessitating an unscheduled stop at the tire shop. Sunny behaved beautifully! Not a single bark! I was so proud of her. When we got to class, though, my confidence for the sport was low, Sunny’s energy much too high, and she was so wild on our first turn through the course that she had to be put on-leash. By our third turn, however, she acquitted herself well, so I felt better driving home through snow squalls. Typical Michigan Halloween weather!

Sunny at Juniors -- being a good dog!

Halloween snow!

 

Seasons are repeats, though never identical from one year to the next. When I re-read a book, as I often do, each reading differs slightly from previous experiences, so that re-reading favorite books is always for me a rich experience. My focus for today, however, is on novels I read this year for the first time and thus, those at the top of my recommended fiction list from 2023.

 

What order should I use to present them? Alphabetical by author? By title? Chronological in the order read? In the order published? Considering and rejecting all these possibilities but also thinking that the order of presentation really doesn’t matter at all, I decided to be whimsical and list in reverse alphabetical order of author’s last name.

Asparagus in autumn is beautiful.

Yourcenar, Marguerite. Memoirs of Hadrian. I wrote a bit about this historical novel back in August, somewhat amazed at myself for reading it at all. In the past, I was not much of a reader of historical novels: I thought of them as genre fiction, somehow less than literary, but such certainly cannot be said of Yourcenar’s fiction (nor of many of the other historical novels I have recently found so engrossing). Nor was I ever drawn to the Roman Empire. But Memoirs of Hadrian captivated me. I read it in French and intend to read it again in English translation – and then probably again in both languages in my future re-reading.

 

Straight, Susan. I Been in Sorrow’s Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots. This is an amazing novel. ‘Amazing’ is one of those words I seldom use, as it seems used far too often for books, movies, ideas, events, etc. that are far from amazing, but Sorrow’s Kitchen, like Memoirs of Hadrian, is a tour de force. The main character, Marietta, is like no other fictional woman I’ve ever met before. Born into an isolated Gullah community in South Carolina, Marietta is physically and imposingly large, “blue-black” like her father, silently observant, and self-reliant. The course of her life, as is true of every human life, is in part self-chosen and in part shaped by circumstance, but Marietta’s response to circumstance is all her own. Many reviews describe as “lyrical” books that do not seem that to me at all. Straight’s novel is lyrical. It also rings true. Marietta is not an easy character to know, but as her essence slowly unfolds every reader will want a happy ending for her. Read this book!

 

Gloss, Molly. The Hearts of Horses. Back at the beginning of August, I wrote that The Hearts of Horses was the horsiest novel I had ever read. In that earlier post I also wrote of the Gloss novel (repeating myself here for those who don’t follow links), that The Hearts of Horses takes place in the period of World War I: “Although far from the fighting, some of the farmers and ranchers in Gloss’s novel are swept up in a jingoism that puts their German immigrant neighbors in peril. There is also discussion between the characters of the fates of the thousands of horses shipped over to Europe to become cannon fodder or shell-shocked survivors right along with the soldiers. The main story, however, takes place out West. It is no longer open, fenceless rangeland, but big-boned teenager Martha Lessen is determined to lead as free a cowboy life as she can and rides away from home to offer her services 'breaking' horses. Martha does not have much in the way of social graces, but, perhaps because she was so sensitive to the feelings of horses, she wasn’t bad at picking up cues about people’s feelings without having to have everything spelled out for her.” Like Marietta in Sorrow’s Kitchen, Gloss’s Martha is atypical of her gender, but she makes her own way, as does Marietta, and I loved this story, too.

 

Dorris, Michael. Yellow Raft in Blue Water. Why had I never read this novel before? When I look online now, I find that it is taught in university classes all across the country. Dorris was the first chair of Native American Studies at Dartmouth College but perhaps remembered most these days for having been the husband of Louise Erdrich. I won’t comment on any of that. I only want to say that this novel is beautiful and surprising. It could almost be described as three novellas, the first with a young woman as the main character, the second focused on the mother of the first, and the third going back to the Horse mother’s mother. Three generations, the youngest of mixed race, her father Black, mother Native American. Now there’s a problem, and I don’t have the book here to refresh my memory and can’t find the answer online: Is “Native American” as close as we get to First  Nation affiliation? Online search turns up the idea, sometimes in question, that Dorris was “part Modoc” on his father’s side. All we know of the three fictional characters in Yellow Raft is that their reservation is in Montana. But the novel can be looked at on its own, apart from all that (and the author’s suicide and so much that preceded it in his personal life), and my opinion of this book is that it holds up well as powerful fiction, each earlier generation shedding light on where the more recent finds itself. 

 

Brooks, Geraldine. Horse. Yes, another book of historical fiction, yet another horsey novel, but it wouldn’t get on my top fiction picks for 2023 for those reasons alone. Set partly in 19^th-century America (the novels jumps back and forth between time periods), Horse tells the story of real-life Lexington, adding for the purposes of fiction an enslaved Black character and his free Black father, as well as a young mixed-race man in the sections of the book set closer to our own time. Brooks and Gloss write knowledgeably and convincingly about horses and no less so when it comes to their human characters. If you want a second opinion, one of my good friends here in Northport (an accomplished author herself) said that Horse was “the best book” she read this year! If you missed and want to read what I had to say about this novel in August, here is the link. 

And finally – 

 

Atwood, Margaret. Hag-Seed. First a confession: I have yet to read The Handmaid’s Tale, though every year I swear that this winter I’ll finally get to it. It is not a matter of avoidance. Just hasn’t happened. But a friend brought me Hag-Seed, and because I have respect for her recommendations I sat down to read the book. Reading on the back of the book that the main character was reduced to a hut in the – was it woods? country? Whatever it was, that pulled me in, and I was immediately hooked. If you are a Shakespeare reader, if you have any experience with or love for live theatre, if you relish literary themes of betrayal and revenge, magic and illusion, you will be delighted with this story. About the title: "Hag-seed" is one of the epithets spat at Caliban in Shakespeare's "The Tempest," the play which forms the background and structure of Atwood's novel, life mirroring drama and containing drama of its own, of course. Absolutely brilliant. And entertaining!

 

There you have it, my top read-for-the-first-time novels of 2023, so far! There are two months left in the year, and more books await my first reading (including an ARC from an author who never disappoints), so I may be adding a couple works to this list before New Year’s is upon us. And really -- it is only coincidence that two of my top novels read this year could be called "horse books," given that very, very few novels for adults feature horses, let alone novels this good. It's also only coincidence that all but one book on this short list are by women authors. Another year it would have been different. 

Just because --

Next I suppose it would only be fair to name my top nonfiction picks. For now, though, what are your favorite novels from this year’s first-time reading? Note that they need not be newly published this year. Maybe you finally read a modern classic for the first time and would put that on your top picks list. Whatever your top recommendations are in fiction from your reading this year – that’s all I’m asking for today. 

Tamarack on All Saints' Day

Home and Heroes

I live in northwest lower Michigan, but for me that is not a single place. My official homestead residence is in Leelanau Township, the northernmost of our county’s township divisions. Tell that to my new phone, though! It keeps identifying my photographs near home as having been shot in Leland Township. Wrong! Trust my camera and me instead: the camera doesn’t try to be smarter than I am.

 

I live in an old farmhouse with a dog, but I also live outdoors (with the dog), working in the yard, going for long walks, noting the passing seasons in signs like the ripening of chokecherries and the way Queen Anne’s lace blossoms curl up into little brown birds’ nests come late summer.

During my working days, I live in my place of business, of course, the bookstore that was 30 years old in July. It wasn’t always in the same location (I’ve been in four different buildings in Northport), but whenever it’s moved I have kept the basic arrangement of books more or less the same, so there is a familiar continuity from one place to the next, and my current location has been home to Dog Ears Books since – can it really be since December 2006? Seventeen of my 30 years???

On a long drive across several states, a vehicle becomes a “mobile home,” even if it’s only a two-door sedan. A van, of course, holds even more, and on a good trip one comes to live in it (or two or more live together in it) with the feeling of being at home even when not stationary (though some days are more comfortably homey than others). Over our years in Leelanau County, the Artist and I enjoyed many a “county cruise,” as he liked to call our Sunday expeditions or slow summer evening drives down to Maple City for pizza or Cedar for ice cream. We could have found pizza and ice cream in Northport, but after being in situ all day we enjoyed the leisurely changing scenery of favorite back roads, and we sought out horse farms for the pleasure of seeing beautiful animals. 

But (my point is that) wherever the Artist and I were together felt like home to me. There was one unhappy night during our otherwise joyous time in France when we wished ourselves elsewhere, but that was due to a flat tire in the rain on a narrow road and a strangely (uniquely) unsatisfactory meal. By the time we ditched the offending rental car in Fontainebleau the next day and were on the train back to Paris, everything was fine, and once back in Paris, we were “home” again. Here is an old post I found with thoughts on travel and home. 

 

During winters in Cochise County, Arizona, the Artist surprised himself one evening when we returned to the cabin and he remarked, “It’s good to be home.” It was only a rental, but over time it filled with our own things – art on the walls, bookcases filled with books, kitchen items and linens and cowboy boots and hats picked up here and there – so that it did, indeed, come to feel like home to us. We had routines there, we had pleasant neighbors….

 

All earthly homes, after all, are temporary, are they not?

 

Anyway, as you know if you’ve read this blog before, (and as you might guess, anyway, knowing that I have a bookstore), I also live in books. Recently reading Horse, by Geraldine Brooks, I lived multiple lives stretching from 1850 to 2020, and now, nearing the last pages of Confederates in the Attic, by Tony Horwitz, late husband of Geraldine Brooks, I am traveling through the South and meeting people I never would have met in my own “real” life. Both these books have my highest recommendation. I’m not sure everyone would respond to them exactly as I did, however. 

 

Would other readers tremble as they turned the pages of Horse, and would their eyes fill with tears, not only over certain passages when a human or equine character is in danger or difficulty but nearly all the way through the book? And was my reaction influenced by the knowledge that Brooks had begun the novel before her husband’s sudden, unexpected death and finally returned to it as she worked through her grief at his loss? Ah, but I loved the story, and not only for its horsiness, though that was certainly part of the appeal. 

 

At least one reviewer felt that the author had made the characters of Jarrett and Theo, both young black men, too good. As a white female writer (Australian to boot), Brooks knew some people would fault her for trying at all to portray the inner life – thoughts and feelings – of black men, particularly the 19^th-century life of enslaved Jarrett but also that of modern mixed-race Theo. But if writers only wrote characters like themselves, literature would be a rather barren field, wouldn’t it? And isn’t it strange that fictional characters might be seen as too good? 

 

I can’t help feeling that the “too good” judgment says more of our times than of the author’s choices. There are many kinds of heroes in literature, after all, and not all have to be tragic heroes, brought down by a tragic flaw. They certainly don’t all have to be anti-heroes, either, I hope! Read through this list and see – if you’ve read Horse, and if you haven’t yet, then get on it right away! – what kind of hero you might call Jarrett or Theo. Or not heroes at all? Then, why not? Another question here: Does the 21^st century accept everyman or classic heroes only in fantasy fiction? That seems sad.

In Confederates in the Attic, Tony Horwitz tours historic Civil War sites in ten states and learns just how alive the Civil War still is for many Southern groups and individuals, their cast of heroes and villains very different from that of Americans in other parts of the country. That is, while I don’t recall being taught in my Illinois education that any of historical persons of the 1860s (other than anonymous slave-holders) were exactly “villains,” Illinois as the “Land of Lincoln” certainly saw Abe as a hero and martyr. Yet I always had my doubts about Sherman’s march to the sea, which appeared to me somewhat like America’s dropping atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the argument in both cases being that the wars came to a close sooner, thus saving soldiers’ lives. Killing civilians, including children, to save men in uniform, though, never sat right with me. And who knows when or how the Civil War and World War II might have ended without those civilian atrocities? 

 

Joseph Campbell, in Hero With a Thousand Faces, identified a universal hero myth, in which the protagonist leaves home, has transformative adventures, and eventually returns, changed and triumphant. I wonder about this. I’ll go along with the adventures – challenges to be met, adversities to be overcome – but is life really that much like baseball, with return to home plate the only possible good outcome? I see that homecoming can be a good way to bring a life to wholeness, but I question whether or not it is the only way. Some of us whose families have not been established in the same place for generations are fortunate, as I have been and as John Denver was, to “come home” to a new landscape and to create memories there in whatever time we have.

 

One man Tony Horwitz spent time with, in a little Southern crossroads called Sutherland Station, lived in the same building where he had been born. It had been a general store when his parents were alive.

 

We sat on the porch, spitting watermelon seeds and watching traffic pass on the busy new highway bypassing town. I told Olgers about my journey and asked why Southerners like himself revered the past. “Child, that’s an easy question,” he said. “A Southerner—true Southerner, of which there aren’t many left—is more related to the land, to the home place. Northerners just don’t have that much attachment. Maybe that means they don’t have as much depth.” He paused, then added, “I feel sorry for folks from the North, or anyone who hasn’t had that bond with the land. You can’t miss something you never had and if you never had it, you don’t know what it’s all about.”  

 

Someone who has never traveled 100 miles from home, I guess, can be forgiven for imagining that people in other parts of the country are not attached to their home ground. Certainly Wendell Berry has a bond with the land of his Kentucky farm, but I know people here in Leelanau County, farmers or not, with similar feelings. “I’ve come home,” one young woman told me just the other day. She had lived away for a few years but has returned now to the house her grandparents lived in when they farmed the land. And the now-vanished log cabin site I visited only the other day housed an early generation of a family many of whose members (though not all) lived and died not far from those beginnings.

 

My personal story is that of more restless Americans: father born in Ohio and mother in California, they married in Chicago, and I was born in South Dakota, later to grow up in Illinois where my younger sisters were born. Our family started camping in Michigan when I was 12 years old, though, and when I was 18 it became my home and has been ever since, despite my love for France and a more recent romance with the mountains of Cochise County, Arizona. “I can’t imagine not living in Michigan,” I told our grandson when he asked if I might someday want to move permanently to Arizona. 

 

The catalpa trees that have appeared on their own and grown since the Artist and I began living in the old farmhouse, apple trees I planted that now bear fruit every year, old maples and basswood planted by the original owners, as well as smaller discoveries, some of them new in the past couple of years, like young hawthorns and exciting wild ginger – all of this, along with every road in the county, spells home to me and is redolent of priceless memories.

I look forward to reading very soon Pamela Perro’s The Long Field: Wales and the Presence of Absence, a Memoir. That phrase “presence of absence” certainly speaks to me. My more specific expectations of this book I will save for another time, however, when I have read it and can report on what I found in its pages.

 

Thank you for being with me today, on  whatever “today" you are reading these words. 

Anniversary, Reading, Loss, Gratitude, Dog

Quiet reflections

First, Nice things people say,

or,

Thirty years is a long time 

 

I’ve been having a quiet 30^th anniversary summer in my bookstore. Setting up an anniversary guest book, however, was a happy inspiration. Not that everyone writes in it. In fact, I usually have to urge people to leave their marks after they say something that touches me, but I know looking over these pages in the future will mean a lot to me.

On the bookstore counter --

One young man last week said my bookstore had changed his life! He said he’d been addicted to online gaming but found a book here that started him off as a reader and that I had really “made a difference.” That blew me away! Another thanked me for being a “significant part of [his] childhood.” I remember him coming in with his grandparents years ago. A young family visiting Northport for their fourth year in a row told me Dog Ears Books is now a vacation tradition for them -- and all the children wrote their names in the book. It feels strange to see myself as an “institution,” but that’s how people talk, and thirty years, I realize, is a long time.

 

On Wednesday a man wearing a t-shirt from the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan told me I had a “good bookstore.” Coming from a rare book connoisseur, that was a nice compliment – though, no, he did not buy books. (I knew you’d want to know.) Others, though, have bought a lot of books. 

 

If you come in soon, please take time to leave a written remembrance. (At least your name!) And if you feel inclined, here’s one more thing you can do for my 30^th anniversary: send your friends the link to Books in Northport -- or to a particular post you think will mean something to them. Thanks for that, too.

 

 

My reading, from recent past to near future

 

I finished Memoirs of Hadrian, by Marguerite Yourcenar, which took me longer than usual because I read it in the original French. I’m now ordering the English translation for my bookstore, because I highly recommend this book. 

 

Following the last page of the novel in the Gallimard paperback (1974) is a notebook put together by the author as she looked back over the years of its creation. Yourcenar began with an idea for the book’s form (conversations among different characters of Hadrian’s time) but discarded that idea when she decided it didn’t work. More than once, discouraged, she abandoned the project. Once she burned notes she had made for the writing; another time finding notes for the novel inspired her to return to it. Conceived and begun in 1924, Mémoires d’Hadrien was finally published by Librarie Plon in 1958. It is a masterpiece.

 

There is a lesson in this for all who write: not to force or rush a book into print until the author is satisfied that it fulfills the promise of its conception.

 

I’ve been postponing opening the first page of Horse, by Geraldine Brooks, because I knew that once I did there would be no putting it down until the last page. I have read Year of Wonders; March; Caleb’s Crossing; and People of the Book, so how could I resist a novel by Brooks with a horse at its center?

This morning (early, dark, rainy) I looked online to check Brooks titles and saw – did I know this and forget? – that she was married to Pulitzer winner Tony Horwitz, who died “suddenly” (probable heart attack) at age 60. They had had a long, very happy marriage. I found and watched on my phone an interview with Horwitz about his book Spying on the South and then listened to another man talking about meeting Horwitz during the author’s research for what became Confederates in the Attic, and I vowed to read both books soon (though not before Horse). But what I really wanted to know was how Brooks was affected by her husband’s unexpected death and how she went on without him, so I kept searching until I found answers.

 

(Note I say ‘death’ rather than ‘passing’ and ‘died’ rather than ‘passed,’ because for me that’s part of facing what I see as reality, though I realize others see it differently.)

 

Brooks and Horwitz were married for 35 years. She told an interviewer, “We were so lucky until we weren’t,” and those words brought tears to my eyes. She spoke of how happy she always was when Tony came home from wherever he’d been and the “fun” could begin again. For a year following his death, her work on Horse interrupted by the tragic loss, she was unable to write, but she eventually returned to the project, believing that work, as Ruth Bader Ginsberg had advised someone else, would “see her through.” 

Brooks, who started riding only at age 59, now has a horse named Valentine. She has a dog. She has a son. And she has gratitude for the life she and Tony had together for all those years. 

 

I have written before on this blog that I not only feel gratitude for my life with the Artist but am grateful for it – yes, grateful for the gratitude, though that may sound strange – but take no credit for the feeling, because it is not an attitude I worked to achieve. Rather, it is a gift that my life with him has given me, on top of all the other gifts (including Sunny Juliet). And so, having lost my love but as a bookseller with a literary life, as the mother of a son (and stepmother to other lovely humans), with a dog companion, and loving (though not having) horses, I now feel a closeness to an Australian author I will probably never meet. Her writing life and work, like Yourcenar’s, along with gratitude and memories, help to light my way.

 

 

Dog stuff

 

Sunrise over Northport from New Bohemian Cafe

Waukazoo Street was quiet on the Tuesday after the Northport Dog Parade. The reason was not hard to find: New Bohemian Café was taking a well-deserved break. The crew was back at work on Wednesday, however, and I was a near-sunrise customer, treating myself to breakfast (and sharing with Sunny) before we went for our weekly early morning agility lesson. In the photos below, Sunny is just exploring and warming up before our teacher arrives. When the real lesson started, we worked too hard for photographs. 

Sunny is jumping the hurdles at 20 inches now and getting more comfortable with the teeter-totter (set lower for her than in this photo when she was only exploring it). We have even started the first exercises that will eventually lead to weaving, the hardest equipment for dogs to master, as it’s like nothing they would have to do in nature. Agility work, as I see it, is not an alternative to social skills but perhaps an adjunct, in that my dog and I have to work as a team, and she has to look to me for guidance. We need to work more directly on that social stuff, but we’ll get there. She is a good dog. And, as I sometimes tell her, “We’re stuck with each other.”

 

First-Ever "Books in Northport" Book Giveaway!

I've never done this before on my blog. It's the first time. Two people will receive free copies of the new novel Caleb's Crossing, by noted author Geraldine Brooks, and you can be one of those people by reading the Q&A below, leaving a comment demonstrating your interest in the book and sending an e-mail to dogears at netonecom dot net to alert me to your comment. Fun! Of course, I welcome comments from more than two people, also--the more, the merrier. Who knows? If it's lively enough, there may be a "next time" in future.

Q&A with Geraldine Brooks, author of CALEB’S CROSSING:

Caleb Cheeshahteamauk is an extraordinary figure in Native American history. How did you first discover him? What was involved in learning more about his life?

The Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head/Aquinnah are proud custodians of their history, and it was in materials prepared by the Tribe that I first learned of its illustrious young scholar. To find out more about him I talked with tribal members, read translations of early documents in the Wopanaak language, then delved into the archives of Harvard and the Massachusetts Bay Colony, especially the correspondence between colonial leaders and benefactors in England who donated substantial funds for the education and conversion to Christianity of Indians in the 17th century. There are also writings by members of the Mayhew family, who were prominent missionaries and magistrates on the island, and John Cotton, Jr., who came here as a missionary and kept a detailed journal.

There is little documentation on Caleb’s actual life. What parts of his life did you imagine? Do you feel you know him better after writing this book, or is he still a mystery?

The facts about Caleb are sadly scant. We know he was the son of a minor sachem from the part of the Vineyard now known as West Chop, and that he left the island to attend prep school, successfully completed the rigorous course of study at Harvard and was living with Thomas Danforth, a noted jurist and colonial leader, when disease claimed his life. Everything else about him in my novel is imagined. The real young man—what he thought and felt—remains an enigma.

Bethia Mayfield is truly a woman ahead of her time. If she were alive today, what would she be doing? What would her life be like with no restrictions?

There were more than a few 17th century women like Bethia, who thirsted for education and for a voice in a society that demanded their silence. You can find some of them being dragged to the meeting house to confess their “sins” or defending their unconventional views in court. If Bethia was alive today she would probably be president of Harvard or Brown, Princeton or UPenn.

The novel is told through Bethia’s point of view. What is the advantage to telling this story through her eyes? How would the book be different if Caleb were the narrator?

I wanted the novel to be about crossings between cultures. So as Caleb is drawn into the English world, I wanted to create an English character who would be equally drawn to and compelled by his world. I prefer to write with a female narrator when I can, and I wanted to explore issues of marginalization in gender as well as race.

Much of the book is set on Martha’s Vineyard, which is also your home. Did you already know about the island’s early history, or did you do additional research?

I was always intrigued by what brought English settlers to the island so early in the colonial period...they settled here in the 1640s. Living on an island is inconvenient enough even today; what prompted the Mayhews and their followers to put seven miles of treacherous ocean currents between them and the other English—to choose to live in a tiny settlement surrounded by some three thousand Wampanoags? The answer was unexpected and led me into a deeper exploration of island history.

You bring Harvard College to life in vivid, often unpleasant detail. What surprised you most about this prestigious university’s beginnings?

For one thing, I hadn't been aware Harvard was founded so early. The English had barely landed before they started building a college. And the Indian College—a substantial building—went up not long after, signifying an attitude of mind that alas did not prevail for very long. It was fun to learn how very different early Harvard was from the well endowed institution of today. Life was hand to mouth, all conversation was in Latin, the boys (only boys) were often quite young when they matriculated. But the course of study was surprisingly broad and rigorous—a true exploration of liberal arts, languages, and literature that went far beyond my stereotype of what Puritans might have considered fit subjects for scholarship.

As with your previous books, you’ve managed to capture the voice of the period. You get the idiom, dialect, and cadence of the language of the day on paper. How did you do your research?

I find the best way to get a feel for language and period is to read first person accounts—journals, letters, court transcripts. Eventually you start to hear voices in your head: patterns of speech, a different manner of thinking. My son once said, Mom talks to ghosts. And in a way I do.

May 2011, Tiffany Smalley will follow in Caleb’s footsteps and become only the second Vineyard Wampanoag to graduate from Harvard. Do you know if this will be celebrated?

In May Tiffany Smalley will become the first Vineyard Wampanoag since Caleb to receive an undergrad degree from Harvard College. (Others have received advanced degrees from the university’s Kennedy school etc.) I’m not sure what Harvard has decided to do at this year's commencement, but I am hoping they will use the occasion to honor Caleb’s fellow Wampanoag classmate, Joel Iacoomis, who completed the work for his degree but was murdered before he could attended the 1665 commencement ceremony.