Molly McNett. Child of These Tears. Slant Books, 2025. $19.00 (pb). 212 pp.
In February of 1676, during King Philip’s War, a brutal Native American attack on the town of Lancaster, Massachusetts resulted in the capture of Mary Rowlandson and her three children. Severely wounded during the attack, one of the children would die in the subsequent days. Then Mary and the two surviving children would be held in separate locations until ransomed back eleven weeks later.
Astonishingly, we know about these events through Mary’s own words—when released, she wrote a detailed captivity narrative. Published in 1682, A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson became an instant bestseller, undergoing four printings in that first year alone. The narrative reveals clearly and unflinchingly the brutal treatment of the civilians in the initial attack in which Mary was captured—the indiscriminate slaughter of her neighbors and relatives, and then the suffering that befell the survivors, whom their captors marched off in harsh weather conditions and offered them very little food.
Yet no less striking in this narrative—perhaps especially so to modern readers—is Mary’s no less unflinching Puritan faith. Firmly convinced that Providence has ordained all of this—the good, the bad, and the worst—Mary trusts God’s plans for her life and the lives of her children, quotes Scriptures, and believes in the power of prayer. “Oh, the wonderful power of God that I have seen, and the experiences that I have had!” she reflects towards the end of her narrative. “God’s power is as great now as it was to save Daniel in the lions’ den or the three children in the fiery furnace,” she adds.
Her gratitude and relief for this outcome is understandable, as we consider that it was in no way guaranteed. Other captives weren’t so lucky. Some of them never returned, whether because they died along the way or because they were absorbed into Native American communities. What was it like to live—and, especially, wrestle with God’s will for one’s life—for those who found themselves in circumstances they never expected to face? In her new novel Child of These Tears, Molly McNett undertakes these questions, focusing on the fate of one particular child, the eight-year-old Constance Baker.
At the most obvious level, here too we have a captivity narrative, this one during Queen Anne’s War. In a brutal attack on the Massachusetts hamlet of Hartfield Falls in the winter of 1703/1704, a mother and a daughter, Sarah and Constance Baker, are captured and taken north to Canada, whereas Constance’s two brothers are killed along with a number of their neighbors and relatives in the attack itself. The disconsolate family patriarch, John Baker, is left behind, ridden with guilt for not having protected his family well enough to avert this disaster. While Sarah is eventually ransomed, Constance is absorbed into a French-speaking mission in Canada, adopted by a Native American family, and never returns to her family for a set of complicated reasons that become a focus of the novel’s later portions.
But this overview of the plot premise doesn’t do justice to what McNett sets out to do in this book. Weaving multiple genres and perspectives, alternating voices in each brief chapter, the artistic and emotional power of this book lies in the persuasive character development that results. In Sarah Baker’s captivity narrative, modeled on that of Mary Rowlandson, we get to know this distraught mother, who is mourning her two lost sons and is afraid of getting separated from her one surviving daughter. During the horrific forced march through the harsh winter conditions, without adequate clothing or shoes for this weather, she is deeply afraid for Constance’s well-being—a fear that proves justified when Constance suffers extreme frostbite and fever, coming closer to death. Yet through it all, Sarah’s concern repeatedly is more spiritual than physical; her faith remains secure. When Constance asks her during their “Eighth Remove” where they are going, Sarah responds, “God has made them to preserve our lives thus far; He will not quit now.”
Meanwhile in the snippets of John Baker’s scholarly Commonplace Book we see the less practical and more encyclopedic side of this man, whose love of books and knowledge went (to his wife’s concern) too far outside the Bible at times, ranging from reflections on beasts, real and mythical, to theological queries. Following his wife’s capture, we see his book entries grow more chaotic, reflecting his distress and powerless sorrow. In a section titled “Election” at one point in the midst of the ordeal in trying to get his wife and daughter back, he writes: “I pray for a sign, O Lord, whether you will defeat the enemy and return these loved ones to me, or if it pleases you to chasten me in anger. And if you chasten me, tell me O Lord, what then must I do? For I cannot sleep.”
In the case of Constance, we get a third-person narrator’s reflections of her innermost thoughts. In her Puritan home, she desperately wanted to be a good child but always seemed to fall short in her playfulness. Later, absorbed into a Native American family, she eventually finds a delight in both playing with other children and in helping with women’s work, like gardening or fishing with her bare hands. But most significant for Constance is the personal and spiritual influence of Father Simon René Floquart, who is the main priest of the French-speaking mission where she ends up in Canada.
The reader gets to know this last major character through his journal intime, as well as letters to ecclesiastical superiors on his work at the mission and requests for needs—a new hat, a better winter blanket, more (and better) warm clothing to replace items that wear out. He will prove to play a large role in Constance’s fate, beginning with his new role as her spiritual adviser, when this Protestant (and, therefore, unconverted in his eyes) child arrives at the mission. Over time, he develops an attachment to this child that is more akin to a father than a mere spiritual adviser, and this affection troubles him, to the point of wondering whether to transfer her spiritual care to a colleague. Constance, in turn, while suspicious of him at first, grows attached to him as well, as her knowledge of French grows—and the linguistic barrier separating them shrinks.
Ultimately, suffering—bodily and spiritual—is the thread connecting all persons and events in this book. How do we face great suffering that upheaves our lives? In going through minor trials, it is easy to wish for the end of the trial and a return to “normal.” But what if “normal” will never exist again, all through cataclysmic events like wars, over which we have no control at all, but upon whose waves all human beings have too often been unwillingly borne? Those untimely dead will not be brought back to life; the suffering will not be undone; the pain will merely dull, never depart fully.
But faith will still remain, McNett gently insists in examining her characters’ spiritual state in response to what befalls them. And yet, perhaps it doesn’t have to be only a Puritan faith. It does not own a monopoly on souls. It could look, rather, more like the quiet and sometimes exasperated faith of Father Floquart or the joyful faith of Constance.
Augustine’s mother longed for her “child of these tears,” John Baker reflects towards the end of the book. He does as well. Parents cannot help this longing for their beloved children—a longing to keep them nearby, with us, always, or at least for as long as they are so small and fragile. But like Monica, we are not in control, no matter how much we pray or do or dream.