Beheld

Beheld (#898) by TaraShea Nesbit deals in novel form with the first murder of a white colonist by another colonist in 1630 Plymouth Plantation.  Told from a number of viewpoints, it chiefly narrates the story through the perspectives of Alice Bradford, the wife of  Governor William Bradford, and Eleanor Billington, a former indentured servant and an Anglican.

Though the Puritans came to America seeking religious freedom, they denied it to anyone in the colony who was not a dissenter, as they preferred to call themselves.  If you only think of the Pilgrims as godly people dressed in sober clothes and intent on doing right by their neighbors, read this book and think again.  If only the writings of the literate colony leaders survive, who gets to tell the real story of what happened in the bleak wilderness in which the Mayflower put to shore in 1620?  It wasn't what the laborers in the expedition had signed on for, and they felt tricked and betrayed by those at the top of the social scale making the decisions.  The question might be better asked about why it took so long for that first English-on-English murder to occur given the tensions besetting the settlement.  And what really did happen to William Bradford's first wife Dorothy?

Ms. Nesbit sets the scene well in this atmospheric novel.  If you've ever visited present day Plimouth Plantation, you will appreciate how much she gets right, and how it might have felt to have been one of the underclass there.