Ashes

“What manner of sister was I that I could not remember her face?”

Isabel’s experiences as an enslaved person lead her to reflect on questions of identity and family. In a system that denies the humanity of slaves, Isabel must keep a firm hold on her own sense of self to survive. However, the dehumanizing power of the system that separated her from her little sister works on her anyway. This forgetting of her sister’s face foreshadows the trouble she’s going to have reconnecting with Ruth.

“‘She was my sister when she was little’—Ruth lifted her chin and looked right through me with sorrowful eyes—‘but she’s not my sister now.’ She set the crate on her hip. ‘Go home, Isabel.’” 

Ruth’s rejection of Isabel is devastating not just because Isabel has suffered for so long to find her sister, but because Ruth tells her to do the one thing she can’t do. Isabel has believed that she is doing exactly what Ruth tells her: going home, to the only home she has, her little sister. However, Ruth has had to form her own sense of where she belongs, and accepting Isabel back is at first too painful a reminder of the past.

“When I was little, I once watched the slaughter of an enormous ox. The powerful beast was strong enough to kill the butcher, so the man entered the pen armed with a sledgehammer, as well as a long knife. He went straight to work without a word, raising the heavy hammer high in the air, then bringing it down on the animal’s huge head. The ox stood, quivering, for a moment. It looked at me, wet eyes stunned with pain and confusion. Then it collapsed in the mud.” 

Isabel’s metaphor here suggests the body-blow she feels at Ruth’s rejection. When Ruth turns away from her, Isabel feels it as a physical attack—and one that she could never have expected. In connecting herself to a slaughtered animal here, Isabel suggests that this rejection strikes not just at her feelings, but at her very life force.

“‘You been too strong,’ she said firmly. ‘I know about that. Strong starts out being the right thing. Your hands grow strong enough for your work. Your back strengthens under your burdens. Soon your mind becomes strongest of all; has to be to get through the hard days. You were mighty strong to come so far after our Ruth. That is a blessing indeed. But you haven’t cried like that in a long time, have you?’” 

Serafina counsels Isabel that strength takes on many forms, and that one of the greatest is to preserve one’s softness in the face of horrible trials. As Isabel suffers through increased moments of strange disconnect and dissociation from her surroundings, we get the sense that Serafina is on to something. If Isabel is going to stay human, not merely survive, she needs to hang on tightly to her capacity to feel.

“Ruth’s heel was cut open with an ugly, festering wound. The foot and the ankle were swollen and hot. Injuries such as this could be as fatal as musketballs and cannon fire.”

Anderson’s depiction of the children’s long journey takes seriously the suffering and struggle of their predicament. This is not a jolly adventure in the countryside: This is a life-and-death struggle with real consequences. Ruth’s infected foot also has a symbolic weight. The danger of keeping pain to oneself, her gangrenous wound suggests, is that it might go to rot, hurting worse than the original injury.

“I set a fresh pot of water on the fire to warm, then unlaced Ruth’s right boot. It refused to slip off as easily as its mate had. In fact, it was necessary to fully loosen the laces and tug hard as I could. Before I could wonder at the cause of this, the boot finally came off. I dropped it with a gasp and clapped my hand over my mouth in horror. The stench of death filled the air.” 

This passage ends Chapter 11, and is a good example of Anderson’s style. Here, she leaves the reader on a cliffhanger by showing what’s inside Ruth’s boot, not through a visual image, but through an ominous stench. Isabel and the reader share a moment of horrified incomprehension, knowing something is very wrong but not able to take it all in at once.

“Ruth regarded the creature with a practiced eye. ‘His name is Thomas.’ ‘Thomas Donkey?’ I suggested. ‘Don’t be silly,’ Ruth said. ‘Thomas Boon.’” 

Ruth’s generosity of spirit especially embraces the animal world. Her respect for Thomas Boon the donkey demands that he be known not just as an animal, but as a blessing. This all-embracing kindness will have a slow effect on Isabel’s heart.

“The street bustled with horse-drawn carriages and oxen pulling wagons filled with barrels, firewood, and supplies for the army. The smells of roasting meat and fresh bread made my belly grumble. The tang of the burning charcoal of the blacksmith’s forge and the stink of freshly deposited horse dung could not compare. Men and women hurried along the sidewalks on their errands ot the print shop, the market, taverns, and coffeehouses. Those who bothered to take notice of us saw what they wanted to see: two slaves on a master’s errand, one leading a mean-eyed donkey, the other riding a cart held together with pine tar and hope.” 

Here, Anderson evokes the bustling everyday world of a small Revolutionary era American town. Slavery is a part of that everyday world. Isabel and Ruth, independent freewomen striking out on their own, are concealed within this normalcy, seeds of a different kind of world to come. 

“‘If we can defeat Cornwallis, it could well mean the end to the war. Now that the French are openly helping us, King George fears he’ll lose his islands in the Caribbean, as well as America. General Washington needs all the skilled soldiers he can get.’ He threw back his shoulders. ‘Like me.’ I snorted. ‘Where was the good general when the army handed you over to Bellingham? Did His Excellency intervene because of your fine soldiering skills? Of course not. He owns hundreds of slaves himself. The Patriots fight only to be free of British taxes. They don’t care a whit for your freedom, nor mine.’” 

Isabel and Curzon’s argument frames the special difficulty of their position as disenfranchised and formerly enslaved people in a chaotic world. Isabel is skeptical that the idealized “freedom” that Curzon sees in the Patriot cause is anything like what it says it is. By the end of the book, Isabel and Curzon will have to acknowledge that their conflicting perspectives are both, in their way, correct.

“If we’d had this conversation the previous winter, I might have added that I wanted him at my side. I might have confessed that he’d make a fine husband for me, and that I would be a fantastical good wife. But between us now lay a poisonous swamp of misunderstandings, arguments, hurt feelings, and sadness.”

Isabel here makes the error that she must repeatedly learn to overcome over the course of the book. Seeing disagreement, pain, and anger as insurmountable obstacles leaves her paralyzed, and more than once almost separates her from those she loves. In fact, that “poisonous swamp” can be navigated with trust and vulnerability. It’s notable that Isabel uses the “swamp” metaphor here: She and Curzon have already made it through any number of literal swamps.

“I began to hope that the coming battle might continue to be postponed. I cared not what would cause this; wet gunpowder would suffice, or an outbreak of the bloody flux suffered by both armies. If the American and French would stay content in Williamsburg, and the British holed up ten miles away in Yorktown, for just a few more months, winter would arrive. Armies rarely fought once the winter winds began blowing. We would benefit from such a circumstance, Ruth and me.”

Isabel’s calculations here show the extent to which she’s gotten used to thinking on the small, hard scale of survival. Her desire for the postponement of the battle emerges only from her pragmatic concern for herself and Ruth. This moment recalls Serafina’s earlier speech about the dangers of toughness, and sets Isabel up for the realization she’ll soon have about Curzon’s ability to consider the world on an intimate and a grand scale at the same time.

“‘They don’t fight for us,’ I insisted. ‘Neither army does.’ ‘Now you’re just talking foolishness,’ he said. ‘You and Ruth need to join me, you do. When we win, we gonna sail to Scotland. Gonna find the city what’s got the same name as me, like in that newspaper you showed me.’ His eyes were filled with dreams of glory, an affliction common to boys who had never been soldiers.”

Aberdeen’s combination of idealism and cynicism brings complexity to Ashes’ moral landscape. Here, his starry-eyed daydreams about a glorious future underline how very young he is—and make it clear what a raw deal he received. Aberdeen isn’t some noble cipher, but a normal fourteen-year-old boy trying to make a life for himself in a world that won’t acknowledge his humanity.

“A great column of red dust rose in the sky to show me the path to safety. Near twenty thousand soldiers on the march, plus their wagons and horses, threw up such a gigantical red cloud that King George over in England could have spotted it himself.”

The image of the guiding cloud of red dust is laden with powerful symbolism. In the Biblical book of Exodus, a divine column of smoke leads the suffering Israelites, recently escaped from slavery in Egypt, through the desert. Isabel’s vision of the pillar of dust coming from the army on the move suggests that she’s learning how she’s caught up in the forces of time and history.

“It seemed as if a bold of lightning had illuminated the truth. Ruth thought that I’d sent her away all those years ago, and she thought that I’d taken her away from Serafina and Walter and that I could abandon her at any moment. She had been carrying more fear in her heart than I could even imagine. So much fear that it threatened to drown me.”

Isabel represents her sudden realization of Ruth’s feelings with metaphors of lightning and flooding, images of exactly how dangerous one’s inner world can feel. Part of imagining what Ruth is going through involves having a flash of an emotional experience like that which Ruth has endured. Empathy, here, is represented as a powerful and even dangerous bodily experience, not just an intellectual exercise. It takes real courage to face this inner weather.

“Momma used to say that all things were possible in the new of the morning. Never had I understood that sentiment so well. I awoke when the birds started singing, and lay content snuggled next to Ruth. By the time her eyes fluttered open, I had developed a plan. We had an old friend in this camp, and I was certain he would try his best to help us. But first I had to listen to Ruth’s dream, which was filled with butterflies that drank cinnamon nectar from flowers as big as butter casks.” 

Ruth’s dream on the night after her reconciliation with Isabel is both sweetly innocent and meaningful. The giant flowers and butterflies are familiar images of renewal, but the “cinnamon nectar,” with its smell of the candy-shop, has in it a hint of something more human: The love the sisters rediscovered wasn’t just a natural blossoming, but a human effort, like cooking. The fruits of their shared labor turn out to be sweet.

“He cleared his throat. ‘We spent a lot of time looking for her,’ he said. ‘Ruth, I mean. I want you to know...I need to say...I didn’t mind it, the looking for her. And—’ ‘Back to worth, Private Smith!’ called a gruff voice. When Curzon spoke again, his mouth was quite near to my ear. ‘And I do love you, Isabel Gardener.’”

Curzon confesses his love for Isabel in the aftermath of a shell blast, when both their ears are ringing. The couple’s slow progress toward this declaration mirrors the movement of the book. Anderson suggests that it sometimes takes a time of chaos, fear, and struggle to bring about good, truthful change.

“‘Don’t worry,’ Henry quickly added. ‘The officers don’t know, nor shall they. In this war for freedom the people who are able to liberate themselves and the ones they love deserve the praise and support of all of us.’ ‘Why would he tell you our secrets?’ ‘That’s what friends do,’ Henry said gently. ‘They lift each other up, help carry burdens. He told us so that we could be the best sort of friends to you, to be your brothers, in the event you should ever need us.’” 

Here, Henry spells out one of the book’s developing themes: the linkage between internal and external independence, internal and external revolution. “Liberation” here means not just the escape from slavery, but the moral courage it takes to imagine such an escape. Liberation also means the freedom to take the risk of sharing and connecting: Friendship is as necessary to liberty as personal power.

Here, Henry spells out one of the book’s developing themes: the linkage between internal and external independence, internal and external revolution. “Liberation” here means not just the escape from slavery, but the moral courage it takes to imagine such an escape. Liberation also means the freedom to take the risk of sharing and connecting: Friendship is as necessary to liberty as personal power.

Isabel’s new understanding of Curzon’s heart is also a reflection of her growth. Seeing Curzon’s dedication to love on both the grand and the small scale brings Isabel a step closer to loving this way herself. In this moment, paying careful attention to a single other person opens the door to caring for people more generally.

“I’d been so afraid to admit love, terrified that my affection would be scorned. To love someone leaves you vulnerable. To admit love opens the door to the possibility of pain and sorrow. However, to ignore love, to pretend that it does not exist, though you feel it every waking moment, guarantees not only pain and sorrow, but a withering of your very capacity to love, blaspheming the holy purpose of our days on this earth. I must tell him. No matter what comes of the confession, I must tell him.” 

Isabel’s new understanding of how love works uses two powerful metaphors. Love can “wither,” like a plant, and ignoring it is “blasphemy,” an insult to a holy thing or a god. These images recall the complexity of Ruth’s earlier dream of the butterflies drinking cinnamon nectar. Here as there, love is both a powerful natural force and a dependent living thing that must be tended to and cultivated.

“At the tail of the British forces, walking without weapons or uniforms, came their women and children, near one hundred by my count. Many of our soldiers had left the road as soon as the last of the defeated enemy’s forces had passed by, so the women and children attached to the British forces were accorded little notice. Our band of lasses stood with respectful attention. We understood their sacrifice.”

In this moment, when Isabel draws our attention to the forgotten women and children at the tail of the army, Anderson also draws our attention again to the subject of her book. The forgotten lives of those people whose portraits don’t make it into the history books are here put on display, both through Isabel’s eyes and in her character.

“I opened my mouth to explain that she wasn’t making sense, that the chicken was long dead, the donkey likely stolen, and Aberdeen...I closed my gob just in time. Ruth was building a story that would let her keep loving all those critters and people. If she held tight to it, she might be able to survive their loss.” 

The question of how to love and remember what is dead and lost is at the center of this book. Ruth’s storytelling about her lost loves is one answer to this question. Here, what Ruth is doing mirrors what Anderson is doing: trying to lovingly reconstruct the story of people who otherwise might never be remembered.

“‘The real revolution is the black and Indian men of the Rhode Island regiment. It’s you and Isaac and Tall Will fighting alongside Hamilton and Lafayette in the redoubt. It’s Ruth and Sibby and me and all the other black women of the army doing our share and being accorded the same respect and earning wages, just like Annie and Cristena. It’s Ebenezer, who was ignorant when he met you, but who became your friend and opened his heart to people who didn’t look like him and his.’ ‘That’s not enough.’ He turned his head away from me. ‘Of course it’s not, fool. It’s not enough and it’s not right and it’s not fair. But it’s what we have. Think on Serafina and Walter. They couldn’t run, but they made sure a whole passel of people could. Think on the fellows in our company. Imagine if we all settled close to one another after the war. Imagine a town of veteran soldiers and their wives and children, all folks who understand the struggle and believe in the same kind of freedom.’”

This passage might be read as a sort of mission statement for Ashes itself. Revolution, here, is the intersection of the personal and the political, the allegiance to hope in trying and unsatisfying circumstances, and the ability to share the gifts one has. There’s a paradoxical union of realism and idealism here that also reflects the new understanding between Isabel and Curzon, who have come to appreciate each other’s ways of seeing. 

“The stars wheeled to the west, and the first birds of morning began to call up the sun. As our friends huzzahed and bowed to me, and clapped my husband on the back, and celebrated our union with dreadful coffee and not-quite-dreadful corn bread, I watched the kind ghosts gathering in the mist at the edge of the woods. Momma used to say that the best time to talk to ghosts was just before the sun came up. That’s when they could hear us true. That’s when they could answer us.”

During their time on the road, Isabel often must reassure Ruth that there aren’t any ghosts. Now, she’s come to a different understanding of what “ghosts” might mean. The ghosts she refers to here are neither menacing nor make-believe, but a way of staying connected to the past. Isabel has learned not to fear what’s lost, but to bring it into the future with her.