Clarion Books, 2004
Hardback, $15; paperback $6.50
224 pages
Tragedy and Light
Humiliation, shame and friendlessness mark Turner Buckminster III’s first day in the coastal Maine town of Phippsburg in 1911. And then life gets worse for this 13-year-old boy whose father has uprooted the family from Boston to become the First Congregational Church’s new minister. Blunders and mistakes, including a fistfight with the deacon’s son, trigger wrath and disappointment from the minister, who’s also stinging from public humiliation thanks to Turner’s conduct. Unable to escape the prison-like confines of “acting” like a minister’s son, Turner is powerless to counter the jeers and taunts from local boys and his loneliness mushrooms palpably.
Enter 12-year-old orphan Lizzie Bright Griffin of Malaga Island, located about 400 yards across the New Meadows River. Lizzie’s ailing grandfather and sole caregiver is also a minister. But even though she’s responsible for providing the family’s food, Lizzie is free in ways Turner cannot imagine. Honest, cheeky and wise, she’s under no pressure to be anyone except herself, and her grandfather adores her. She’s also the first black person Turner has ever seen.
Their lives, communities and responsibilities as different as land and sea and skin color, Lizzie and Turner form a bond that significantly — and, at times, harshly — alters their lives as well as the lives of other characters. Their friendship is welcome on Malaga while forbidden in all-white Phippsburg, where plans to destroy the island community are afoot.
Free of its multi-racial population and the sight of their “shacks” from the mainland, Malaga will be needed to support the tourist industry, which church and town officials hope will be Phippsburg’s economic salvation against the waning shipbuilding trade. Rev. Buckminster, unknown to him, was hired to cast the removal of the “squatters” as God’s will to churchgoers.
Like the actual tragedy upon which this excellent fiction is based — the state-sponsored eviction of Malaga Island’s black, white, and bi-racial community in 1912 — there are no ribbon-tied happy endings. Good men, women and children are abducted and dumped in the state insane asylum, nice people die, and island houses are burned to prepare for a financial boon that never arrives.
Unlike the actual Diaspora at Malaga, this drama dips into some lamentable crevices of human nature before it finds light.
Despite a slow start and the absence of a much-needed “PG” rating stamp due to subject matter and the number and manner of deaths that occur, this book is sad, funny, poignant, powerful, allegory-rich, topical and thought-provoking long after it’s read.
It won both Michael L. Printz and Newbery Honors recognition in 2005.
The sense of viewing several holograms that are lashed together best illuminates the depths, dimensions, contrasts and allegories Mr. Schmidt has painstakingly crafted. This book holds so much more than a period story about racism, forbidden relationships, love and loss, and the destruction of a community for financial gain. Indeed, one or more of these themes occur every day in this country and others, which renders Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy valuable in the classroom, book clubs, and at the family dinner table. But inside these layers — lined with biblical references and backdropped by Charles Darwin’s The Origin of the Species — lie other provocative and topical themes, such as the power of groupthink and silence, the power and persuasiveness of civil and church leaders and, most strikingly, the very subtle power of a seemingly powerless child to improve the morality, heart and courage of a parent.
Regrettably, another cautionary “stamp” seems necessary on an otherwise brilliantly-layered fiction: The “Author’s Note” — a factual explanation about Malaga’s population and their mass eviction — suffers from factual errors including, but not limited to, the oft-reported tale that former slaves populated the island.
The families of Malaga Island, who along with their descendants deserved a fact-checker at Clarion Books before publication, bore no connection to slavery and had lived on the islands and coastal communities of Casco Bay for generations. One Malaga resident, however, did fight during the Civil War in the 54th Massachusetts Colored Regiment, featured in the film “Glory,” and was wounded.
Deborah DuBrule’s story about Malaga, “Evicted,” appeared in Island Journal in 1999.