Eugenics and Racism Theme Analysis

MATTHEW DIAMOND PUNCTUALLY arrived at his summer home in Foxden, visible right across the channel, on the evening of each June 20th and signaled his coming to the islanders by raising a U.S. flag up a pole in his yard the next morning at dawn.

Bernard Richardson happened to be in the store one day and saw the postcards made from his photographs. He demanded Art Dunlop remove them.

Those are my pictures, they’re portraits of those people—and official documents, he said. They’re not for you to turn into a bunch of dirty jokes.

Art Dunlop stood behind the sales counter adding figures on a pad. He looked up and said, I guess you’re free to buy the lot if you care to. At retail.

Well, you don’t have my permission to—

Otherwise, you’re just about trespassing if you say anything more about it.

An animal Mr. Hale at first glimpse thinks must be a young doe trots into view along the drive near the servants’ entrance to the kitchen. But the animal does not move like a deer and, as what Mr. Hale instinctively thinks should be the case is replaced by what he in fact sees, the animal changes into a person, the person into a girl, and the girl into the servant, Bridget. The innocent trotting when she was a doe discolors and deforms into haste and guile and indecency as she hurries, now obviously away from the mulatto’s bed in the barn, to the servants’ entrance, which, although still in shadow, Mr. Hale knows she unlocks, opens, passes through, and closes behind her, to quickly gather herself in order to appear a spotless lamb by the time he rings for his tea and toast.

You do not need your paints anymore, Mr. Hale says. Leave them there and come with me.

Matthew answered, Yes, certainly, a well would do wonders, new, sounder cabins would help with the cold, woodstoves, too. I know two men here who are marvelous carpenters, and I am half decent myself. A bridge would help the islanders feel more connected to the town, and help people on the main come here with their washing or fishing lines that need mending. They could have horses and wagons, even, perhaps. They could even attend a proper church. Well, I, perhaps not right in town, then. There’s a Negro meeting house—church—the—it’s called the Abyssinian Meeting House—in Portland—they could get to more easily.

You have to leave the island.

This section of the State University’s exhibit commemorating the 100th Anniversary of the eviction of the settlers on Apple Island is devoted to the artwork of Ethan Honey. Honey was one of the last generation of native-born islanders (ca. 1897). He left behind dozens of competent—and informative—drawings of the people on the island and of daily life there at the end of its settlement. On loan from the estate of Ms. Phoebe Hale, of Enon, Massachusetts, where Honey briefly resided and practiced, are drawings of the summer hay mowing in July of 1913, the workers, the landscape, and the only three surviving paintings Honey made in oil: a large landscape depicting haystacks at sunset; a small, whimsically colored piece depicting a sop of green hay in an otherwise dry bale; and a portrait of a teenaged girl identified by Ms. Hale as Bridget Carney, an Irish immigrant who worked for the family as a domestic servant and Ms. Hale’s nanny for two years.

Candace grabbed blindly in the surf and caught the man who had punched her around the waist, as much to raise herself up as to stop the man from punching her again, but the man took it to mean that she was fighting back so he boxed her on the ears and punched her on the side of the head again, near her brow, and split the skin open over one of her eyes.

While the girls helped Bridget, Eha circled a length of rope around Esther’s middle, threading it in and out of the chair’s backrest splats.

Zachary turned away and walked across the island toward where his house and the others were nearly done burning. The men from the mainland had missed Zachary’s tree so he went to it and got inside. He closed his eyes and ran the pads of his fingers across the carvings as if to decipher them by touch. He opened his eyes and followed the radius of each band of pictures. Really, they were crude. Most of the intricacies and nuances of expression and gesture and architecture and decoration had been those of his thoughts while he’d carved. Very little of the finesse of his ideas had made its way into the wood, he saw now. He gathered his candle and cross. He knelt and cupped up a cone of wood shavings and set it burning with his flint and steel. Smoke rose into the darkness of the hollowed trunk then refluxed and began pulsing from the opening. Zachary watched the fire grow until he was certain it would not smother, then headed for the water.

As the light left the sky, John Thorpe saw Zachary Hand to God wading away from the island across the channel, chest-deep in the water. Zachary held what looked like an old faded and patched flag bundled and knotted together by the corners above his head. His silhouette cut through the invisible current of the tide and to Thorpe he looked like a threadbare angel abandoning the wrecked ship over which he’d once been guardian, light fanning across the water behind him as he pushed against the incoming flood.