In one of her Reith Lectures for the BBC, novelist Hilary Mantel observed, "We carry the genes and the culture of our ancestors, and what we think about them shapes what we think of ourselves, and how we make sense of our time and place."
Shrewsbury poet Joan Aleshire looked to her ancestors for inspiration for her first novel, an imaginative expansion of a shred of family lore. The main character of Belfield is based on one of Aleshire's forebears: artist Charles Willson Peale (1741-1827), who is still acclaimed for his resplendent portraits of George Washington, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson.
Aleshire was born in Baltimore, Md., studied film and Russian at Massachusetts' Radcliffe College, and first moved to Vermont after her 1960 graduation. She received an MFA from Plainfield's Goddard College in 1980 and became interim director of its graduate program when it moved to Warren Wilson College in North Carolina in 1981, then served on its low-residency faculty until 2013. She published six volumes of poetry between 1982 and 2019, most recently Days of Our Lives.
Peale is a superlatively compelling basis for her debut novel's main character. Orphaned at 13, then apprenticed to a saddle maker, he fought in the War of Independence and served as a postrevolutionary legislator in Pennsylvania. In addition to his presidential portraits, he painted especially human renderings of Alexander Hamilton, John Hancock, the Marquis de Lafayette, Indigenous leader Joseph Brant (Thayendanegea) and a formerly enslaved Muslim American named Yarrow Mamout.
Peale was also a farmer, inventor, naturalist, museum curator and (in word if not always in deed) abolitionist. Over his long life, he continued to paint while starting new ventures, gaining skill in carpentry, dentistry, optometry, shoemaking and taxidermy.
In Aleshire's narrative, "Charles Willson" (as he's always called in the novel) is ever in motion: a brilliant autodidact and a lusty, enthusiastic patriarch. Married three times and father to 16 children, he's always willing to welcome into his home someone adrift or in need, including his elderly mother and her unmarried niece, an orphan girl named Mag who has a "partial hand," a young woman with no arms and only one foot (who is nevertheless a gifted artist), and a wayward nephew.
When a neighbor short of cash pays for a portrait by giving Charles Willson a family of three enslaved people in trade, he has a serious quandary. As a liberal champion of freedom, he refuses to call Scarborough, Lucy and their son "slaves," though others do. He treats them as professional servants, insisting they join the family meals as "guests," despite the awkwardness and bewilderment this causes them.
The novel's setting is a transitional time in American history, 50 years before the Civil War, when enslaved people coexisted in a state such as Pennsylvania with free Black people who had their own homes, businesses and guaranteed rights. Our nation delayed for decades honestly facing the consequences of such contradictions.
Eventually, Charles Willson frees Lucy and Scarborough through legal manumission but retains their son, Moses, in his service. He rationalizes that the law allows him to do so until the boy, who is a talented apprentice artist, reaches the age of 27.
In Aleshire's re-creation, the Peale household, known as Belfield, bustles with constant comings and goings and projects under way. Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson make cameo appearances, and Charles Willson's children — who have outlandish, aspirational names, such as Rembrandt, Titian, Raphaelle, Rubens, Angelica and Sophonisba — grow into adroit young artists.
The historical Peale children in fact became influential artists and museum curators, and the young Moses Peale (later Moses Williams) was among his era's finest "profile cutters," fashioning portraits as precise cut-paper silhouettes.
In the book's strongest passages, Aleshire provides the kinds of sensory detail that can bring a far-off place and time close by. The sights, sounds, smells and tastes of the rambunctious Peale homestead give urgency and immediacy to settings and scenes.
Aleshire has chosen to use a close third-person mode of storytelling, in which an omniscient authorial narrator leans into the sensibility of characters, giving the reader glimpses of their perspectives and feelings. The point of view shifts frequently, sometimes in the middle of a paragraph:
When he's alone, Scarborough watches the way a glass looks like the water that's made it; he's always been worked too hard to go to midnight school on the plantations he was bound to, and has picked up only a few words of written English. Charles Willson's latest Philadelphia Enquirer lies folded on the table; Mag isn't taking it in with his breakfast these days, after seeing it on his tray untouched. One day she notices it folded in a different way, and closer to Scarborough's chair; another day she finds it in his lap: "Trying to figure this out," he says with a rueful grin and a shrug. "Reading is hard," she agrees, but doesn't presume he'd want her to help him.
When this works, Aleshire's quick leaps among vantage points give readers an exciting sense of the many ways the lives of Belfield's residents are entwined, their existence both personal and communal. Yet in other places, the novel's point of view seems wobbly, which this reader found disorienting.
The middle of the book loses the earlier chapters' clear focus on the complicated, effervescent Charles Willson and somber, insightful Scarborough. Both are shunted aside in favor of descriptions of the romantic compulsions and competitions of Belfield's adolescents and young adults. Moreover, the language spoken by the youngsters resembles that of people today. Is it important in a historical novel that characters speak "historically"? This is a question of sonority — tone and diction and atmosphere. It's jarring when one of Peale's sons shouts, "Get the fuck out of the way."
Later, the story returns to the aging Charles Willson, whose moral predicament again takes primacy as he struggles to let go of Moses, a protégé and, in some ways, another son. In the novel, and true to history, he eventually appeals to the state assembly to permit Moses' release, but only one year early.
In an illuminating afterword to the novel, Aleshire explains that as a child she saw in her grandparents' home a stern portrait of Charles Willson's daughter Angelica, her grandfather's great-grandmother. Aleshire's own daughter chose to dig deeper into the family's lineage, and when she told her mother that she'd learned the Peales owned slaves, Aleshire accepted a challenge to open up this old story for reflection and recounting.
In her BBC lecture, Mantel argued for the power of historical fiction to teach us about our past, saying that "if we want to meet the dead looking alive, we turn to art." With her artful novel, Aleshire has given us a memorable fictional realization of a history-making person and place. Belfield is less constrained by the documented facts than a conventional biography, but it is also more fleshly, more vibrantly particular, and more anguished in its dramatization of momentous human acts and choices.
He wants to never finish this portrait and fears that once he puts on the last brushstroke; once Hannah looks at what he's made of her, she'll feel diminished, or worse—he's come to have this sense of her modesty—feel he's falsely flattered her. Heart in his throat, he puts down his brush and steps away from the easel: "I hope I've done you justice."
She is as delighted as he could hope she would be; without exclaiming or showing obvious enthusiasm, without taking unseemly pleasure in her own appearance, she says: "It's a very good likeness, I think, although I can't really see myself," and puts her hand on his arm.
"A speaking likeness, would you say?"
"Yes, yes. I wouldn't have thought of it that way, but yes..."
"It's what I try for in a portrait," he answers, comfortable now to speak of his art instead of her appearance or the dangerous ground of his emotion.