The Witch of Blackbird Pond

Summary

The Witch of Blackbird Pond is a historical novel in twenty-one chapters set in Connecticut Colony in 1687 and 1688. Katherine Tyler, called Kit, is sixteen and has grown up in freedom and comfort on her grandfather's plantation in Barbados. After his death she sails alone to New England aboard the brigantine Dolphin, intending to live with her mother's sister, whom she has never met. When the ship stops at Saybrook, a little girl, Prudence Cruff, drops her doll overboard, and Kit dives into the river to fetch it; the passengers, above all Prudence's sharp-tongued mother, are shocked that a respectable girl can swim, since a woman who floats was once thought a witch. Nat Eaton, the captain's son and mate, teases Kit but likes her. At Wethersfield she arrives unannounced at the house of her Aunt Rachel and stern Uncle Matthew Wood, with their daughters, the beautiful, wilful Judith and the gentle Mercy, lame since a childhood fever. Kit's silk gowns and easy manners fit badly in a Puritan household of meetinghouse sermons and endless chores. Two young men seek the cousins: wealthy William Ashby, who courts Kit and begins building a house, and John Holbrook, a divinity student from the Dolphin who comes to study under the Reverend Gershom Bulkeley. Kit and Mercy open a dame school, which the schoolmaster closes when he finds Kit letting the children act out the parable of the Good Samaritan, then reopens. In the Great Meadows, Kit befriends Hannah Tupper, an old Quaker widow living alone by Blackbird Pond, shunned and called a witch. Hannah's cottage becomes Kit's refuge, and there she secretly teaches Prudence to read. Meanwhile Governor Andros comes to take Connecticut's charter, and the colonists hide it. Nat and two shipmates are put in the stocks and banished from the town for a prank with jack-o'-lanterns in William's unfinished house. John declares himself to Matthew, but the family mistakenly thinks he means Judith; John later goes north with the militia. In the winter a fever strikes the town, killing children and bringing Mercy close to death, and a mob sets out to burn Hannah. Kit gets her away to the Dolphin, where Nat hides her; the next day Kit herself is arrested for witchcraft, on the Cruffs' complaint. At her examination Nat brings in Prudence, who reads from the Bible to prove what Kit really taught her, and her father speaks for Kit; she is freed. John returns to marry Mercy, Judith accepts William, and in the spring Nat sails up the river as captain of his own ketch, named the Witch, to ask for Kit's hand. Houghton Mifflin published the novel in 1958, and it won the 1959 Newbery Medal.

Top Lessons

• Fear makes a scapegoat

  When children fall sick, the town looks for someone to blame and finds the old woman nobody understands. The novel shows how quickly suspicion of difference becomes cruelty, and how much courage it takes to stand by the accused.

• Learning to belong

  Kit arrives proud of her silk dresses and her freedom and feels nothing but strangeness in Wethersfield. Over a year she learns the worth of hard work, plain faith and family, while keeping her own warmth and courage.

• Reading as a gift

  Prudence's mother thinks her daughter is too dull to learn, but Kit teaches her to read and write, and in the end that skill saves Kit's life. Teaching someone to read gives them a voice.

• Faith in different forms

  The Puritans of the meetinghouse and the Quaker Hannah both live by faith, though they distrust each other. Kit sees real goodness in Uncle Matthew's rectitude and in Hannah's quiet love, and learns to honour both.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

The novel's climax turns on an epidemic. A fever passes through Wethersfield in the winter of 1687-88, kills several children and brings Mercy Wood near death, and the frightened townspeople, finding no natural cause, blame witchcraft and the solitary Quaker woman Hannah Tupper. The book is a clear picture for young readers of how communities before germ theory sought agents for disease and turned on outsiders, a pattern seen in many plague and epidemic accusations. Mercy's lameness from a childhood fever is a quiet portrait of disability in a household that needs every pair of hands. Historically, Gershom Bulkeley of Wethersfield was both minister and physician, as many New England clergy were, and John Holbrook comes to study with him; the joining of the clerical and medical roles in one man is a period fact worth noting. The novel does not name the disease, and any identification is the reader's own.

• Chapter 3 and following

  Mercy Wood, lame from a fever in childhood, does her work seated and with a crutch; the household takes her lameness as part of life.

• Chapters 18-19

  Fever spreads through the town, children die, Mercy lies near death, and a mob blames Hannah Tupper's witchcraft.

• Chapter 19

  Mercy's fever breaks on the night Kit returns from helping Hannah escape.