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Midwives (Oprah Book Club Series) by Chris Bohjalian
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(Paperback)
- Pub. Date: November 1998
- 372pp
- Sales Rank: 15,769
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Product Details
- Pub. Date: November 1998
- Publisher: Random House Inc
- Format: Paperback, 372pp
- Sales Rank: 15,769
- Series: Oprah's Book Club Series
- ISBN-13: 9780375706776
- ISBN: 0375706771
Synopsis
The trial of a midwife in 1980s Vermont. Sybil Danforth, with several hundred deliveries to her name, claims the mother was dead when she opened her to save the baby. The prosecution claims the mother was alive and the operation was illegal. The story is narrated by Sybil's daughter, portraying the trial as another round in the persecution of midwives by the New England medical profession. -- Synopsis copyright Fiction Digest
Annotation
This compulsively readable novel explores what happens when a woman who has devoted herself to ushering life into the world finds herself charged with responsibility in a patient's death.
People Magazine
Superbly crafted...powerful. It will thrill readers who cherish their worn copies of To Kill a Mockingbird.
More Reviews and RecommendationsBiography
Perhaps the San Francisco Chronicle said it best: "Bohjalian's hallmark: ordinary people in heartbreaking circumstances behaving with grace and dignity." Since the selection of his dark novel Midwives for Oprah's Book Club back in 1998, Bohjalian has enjoyed mainstream success as one of today's most poignant novelists.
More About the AuthorCustomer Reviews
- Reader Rating:
- Ratings: 64Reviews: 45
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Very Disappointingby Anonymous
Reader Rating:
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September 15, 2009: I picked this up on a whim but when I saw "Engrossing" on the cover, I figured it would be a good read. I realized it took me almost a month and a half to read this book...that's how boring I found the slow moving plot. Some paragraphs seemed endless and most seemed very unimportant. I wanted to find out if the jury agreed with me but was so univolved with the characters that I didn't really care one way or another. The plot, character depth and expansion was non-exsistent for me. I did not feel sympathetic to any of the characters even after 372 pgs with them and considering one was on trial for murder and the other was a teenage girl who could lose her mother, I think that speaks volumes.
I am very disappointed that the author never fleshed out what could have been a very moving and touching story.All in all, I wanted to see the outcome but I was just not that involved with the characters.genericby levly
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June 13, 2009: This book was not original. Although the topic is dramatic, I found the book to be lacking in any real depth. Perhaps because it is being told from the point of view of a young teen it seemed too generic. Had the story been told from the point of view of a woman who had given birth or even the midwife there may have been more emotional tension in the book. This book left me unsatisfied.
Fact File
Name:
Chris Bohjalian
Current Home:
Lincoln, Vermont
Place of Birth:
White Plains, New York
Education:
Amherst College
Awards:
Anahid Literary Award, 2000; New England Book Award, 2002
Biography
It was March 1986 when Chris Bohjalian made a decision that would have an incalculable impact on his writing. He and his wife had just hailed a taxi home to Brooklyn after a party in Manhattan's East Village when they suddenly found themselves on a wild and terrifying 45-minute ride. The crazed cabbie, speeding through red lights and ignoring stop signs, ultimately dropped the shaken couple off... in front of a crack house being stormed by the police. It was then that Bohjalian and his wife decided that the time had come to flee the city for pastoral Vermont. This incident and the couple's subsequent move to New England not only inspired a series of columns titled "Idyll Banter" (later compiled into a book of the same name), but a string of books that would cause Bohjalian to be hailed as one of the most humane, original, and beloved writers of his time.
While Bohjalian's Manhattan murder mystery A Killing in the Real World was a somewhat quiet debut, follow-up novels (many of which are set in his adopted state) have established him as a writer to watch. A stickler for research, he fills his plotlines with rich, historically accurate details. But he never loses sight of what really draws readers into a story: multi-dimensional characters they can relate to.
The selection of his 1997 novel Midwives for Oprah's Book Club established Bohjalian as a force to be reckoned with, igniting a string of critically acclaimed crowd pleasers. His literary thriller The Double Bind was a Barnes & Noble Recommends pick in 2007.
Good to Know
Bohjalian's fascination with the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald extends beyond the author's prominent influence on The Double Bind. In an interview with Loaded Shelf.com, Bohjalian estimated that he owns "at least 42 different editions of books by or about F. Scott Fitzgerald."
. Two of Chris Bojalian's novels have been adapted into critically acclaimed TV movies. An adaptation of Past the Bleachers with Richard Dean Anderson was made in 1995, and a version of Midwives starring Sissy Spacek and Peter Coyote debuted in 2001.
In our interview with Bohjalian, he shared some fascinating and fun facts about himself:
"I was the heaviest child, by far, in my second-grade class. My mother had to buy my pants for me at a store called the "Husky Boys Shop," and still she had to hem the cuffs up around my knees. I hope this experience, traumatizing as it was, made me at least marginally more sensitive to people around me."
"I have a friend with Down syndrome, a teenage boy who is capable of remembering the librettos from entire musicals the first or second time he hears them. The two of us belt them out together whenever we're driving anywhere in a car.
"I am a pretty avid bicyclist. The other day I was biking alone on a thin path in the woods near Franconia Notch, New Hampshire, and suddenly before me I saw three bears. At first I saw only two, and initially I thought they were cats. Then I thought they were dogs. Finally, just as I was approaching them and they started to scurry off the path and into the thick brush, I understood they were bears. Bear cubs, to be precise. Which is exactly when their mother, no more than five or six feet to my left, reared up on her hind legs, her very furry paws and very sharp claws raised above her head in a gesture that an optimist might consider a wave and guy on a bike might consider something a tad more threatening. Because she was standing on a slight incline, I was eye level with her stomach -- an eventual destination that seemed frighteningly plausible. I have never biked so fast in my life in the woods. I may never have biked so fast in my life on a paved road."
"I do have hobbies -- I garden and bike, for example -- but there's nothing in the world that gives me even a fraction of the pleasure that I derive from hanging around with my wife and daughter."
Feature Interview
In the fall of 2003, Chris Bohjalian took some time out to talk with us about his favorite books, authors, and interests. What was the book that most influenced your life or your career as a writer?
I'm actually going to pick a single period in my life, rather than a single book, because I believe it's the most honest way to answer this question in my case.
When I was 13, my family moved from a suburb of New York City to Miami, Florida, and we moved there the Friday before Labor Day weekend. I started school the following Tuesday, and then, that afternoon, went to see my new orthodontist -- a sadist, it would turn out, if ever there was one.
He gave me some orthodontic headgear that looked like the business end of a backhoe, and I had to wear said device for four hours a day when I was awake.
Since I couldn't (well, wouldn't) wear it during school, I had to wear it after school. It was inevitable, but I couldn't speak when I was wearing it.
And so I couldn't meet any kids in my neighborhood, and make new friends. What did I do that first autumn and winter -- winter, such as it is, in South Florida?
I went to the Hialeah Miami Lake Public Library. And I read.
I read the sorts of things any adolescent boy was likely to read in the mid-1970s. I read William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist, Thomas Tryon's Harvest Home, and Peter Benchley's deceptively fine novel Jaws.
Also, in all fairness, I read a somewhat higher caliber of literature as well -- Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird and Joyce Carol Oates's Expensive People.
I read those books in the library as well as in the den in our new home, and from them I learned a very great deal that would help me profoundly as an adult writer. I learned the importance of linear momentum in plot from Blatty and Benchley and Tryon; I learned about the importance of voice -- and the role of person in fiction -- from Lee and Oates.
I learned on a level that may not have been fully concrete yet -- but that did indeed adhere -- that the narrator in a first-person novel is a character, too, and every bit as made-up as the fictional constructs around him or her.
What are your ten favorite books, and what makes them special to you?
I feel guilty limiting the list to a mere ten, given how many books that are indeed special to me. I have, however, always enjoyed that game in which you have to pick a few books or movies to have with you on a desert island, and so here's a group that I've read multiple times -- the ultimate compliment, I believe, one can bestow upon a book.
Incidentally, the list has 11 titles. I couldn't possible delete any one of them. Mea culpa.
What are some of your favorite films, and what makes them unforgettable to you?
Three of my favorite films are actually adapted from three of my favorite novels: Sophie's Choice, The English Patient, and To Kill a Mockingbird. Each is not merely faithful to the integrity of the novelist's vision, it broadens the story in wondrous and unexpected ways. Sometimes this is the result of the actor -- think of Meryl Streep in Sophie's Choice -- and sometimes it's due to a brilliant bit of cinematography: Recall that moment in The English Patient when Hana is viewing the frescoes inside the chapel by candlelight, suspended high in the air on the ropes Kip has rigged for her.
I also, in truth, like a lot of the very same movies my nine-year-old daughter likes, (again, in many cases, movies that happen to have been adapted from novels). I thought Freaky Friday was a howl this past summer, and the two of us have probably watched About a Boy together a half dozen times.
And then there is the little boy in me that can savor any movie about the Mercury or Apollo space programs (The Right Stuff and Apollo 13) or any film that has John Belushi or Bill Murray in it. My wife and I have seen Groundhog Day together at least as often as my daughter and I have seen About a Boy.
What types of music do you like? Is there any particular kind you like to listen to when you're writing?
Actually, I need complete silence when I write.
These days, because my young daughter is a young thespian, I listen to a lot of musicals. My favorites at the moment? The Secret Garden, West Side Story, and Once on This Island. And I will always have a soft spot in my heart for Ellen Green singing "Suddenly Seymour" from Little Shop of Horrors.
What are your favorite kinds of books to give -- and get -- as gifts?
Novels. They are my favorite to get and my favorite to give. People seem to read so much more nonfiction than fiction, and so it always gives me great pleasure to introduce a friend or family member to a novel I believe they'll cherish but might not otherwise have thought to pick up and read.
Do you have any special writing rituals? For example, what do you have on your desk when you're writing?
I am frighteningly compulsive when it comes to the library in my house in which I write. It is very clean. And orderly. The books are alphabetized; the pens are lined up in their cases. At night, I put a dust cover on my computer.
I actually have two desks. One holds the computer on which I write rough drafts. Along with the computer and printer, it has on it photographs of my wife and my daughter, and two small sting rays made of polished stone from Grand Cayman (an island I love because of the scuba diving and snorkeling) that my daughter gave me. The other desk is smaller, and on it I edit my rough drafts. It has a lamp built from an Art Deco planter of a black panther, and most of my favorite pens.
Both desks have glorious views of Mount Abraham, the third-highest mountain in Vermont, and I watch the sun rise over the mountain as I work.
Many writers are hardly "overnight success" stories. How long did it take for you to get where you are today? Any rejection-slip horror stories or inspirational anecdotes?
When I was a sophomore in college, the writer-in-residence was a novelist whose work I cherished. She was teaching a creative writing seminar in the spring semester, and I wanted very much to be among the anointed she was going to choose to be in it. That meant submitting a short story in December, which she would read over the holiday break.
In January, I was summoned to her office in the brick monolith that housed the school's English Department, and there I met her for the first time. She was seated behind a desk the size of a putting green.
When she saw me, she adjusted her shawl, fixed her eyeglasses, and said, "You're Chris. I'm not going to try to pronounce your last name."
I nodded, a little apprehensive now. Then she slid my short story across the expanse of desk as if it were a piece of profoundly disagreeable roadkill.
"Well, Chris I'm-Not-Going-to-Pronounce-Your-Last-Name," she continued, "I have three words for you."
This clearly wasn't going to be good, but I am nothing if not optimistic. And so I waited. Then it came: "Be a banker," she said. And we were through.
What tips or advice do you have for writers still looking to be discovered?
Read lots. Have a thick skin. And write often -- and write about things that interest you passionately. Writing teachers often encourage young writers to write about what they know -- or, conversely, to write about things that are foreign to them. I think neither should be a cardinal rule. Instead, you should write about things that interest you, regardless of whether you know anything about the topic when you start, or you're among the world's foremost experts. The key is to care so deeply about the subject – -- find it so extraordinary -- that you are willing to give up a year or two of your life to it. If you bring that level of enthusiasm to the story, it certainly increases the chances that you will create something of interest to strangers browsing in a library or bookstore.
One more thing: Have fun and avoid a mean spirit. I've never felt a writer needs to be tormented to succeed in this business.
From the Publisher
"Superbly crafted and astonishingly powerful. . . . It will thrill readers who cherish their worn copies of To Kill A Mockingbird." --People
With a suspense, lyricism, and moral complexity that recall To Kill a Mockingbird and Presumed Innocent, this compulsively readable novel explores what happens when a woman who has devoted herself to ushering life into the world finds herself charged with responsibility in a patient's tragic death.
The time is 1981, and Sibyl Danforth has been a dedicated midwife in the rural community of Reddington, Vermont, for fifteen years. But one treacherous winter night, in a house isolated by icy roads and failed telephone lines, Sibyl takes desperate measures to save a baby's life. She performs an emergency Caesarean section on its mother, who appears to have died in labor. But what if--as Sibyl's assistant later charges--the patient wasn't already dead, and it was Sibyl who inadvertently killed her?
As recounted by Sibyl's precocious fourteen-year-old daughter, Connie, the ensuing trial bears the earmarks of a witch hunt except for the fact that all its participants are acting from the highest motives--and the defendant increasingly appears to be guilty. As Sibyl Danforth faces the antagonism of the law, the hostility of traditional doctors, and the accusations of her own conscience, Midwives engages, moves, and transfixes us as only the very best novels ever do.
People Magazine
Superbly crafted...powerful. It will thrill readers who cherish their worn copies of To Kill a Mockingbird.
People
Superbly crafted...powerful. It will thrill readers who cherish their worn copies of To Kill a Mockingbird.
Boston Globe
The courtroom settings provide...ample suspense....A writer of unusual heart.
Washington Post Book World
An 'astonishing' suspense bestseller about a woman on trial for murder that 'will keep readers up late at night until the last page is turned.
Washington Post Book World
An 'astonishing' suspense bestseller about a woman on trial for murder that 'will keep readers up late at night until the last page is turned.
Washington Post Book World
An 'astonishing' suspense bestseller about a woman on trial for murder that will keep readers up late at night until the last page is turned.
Washington Washington Post Book World
An 'astonishing' suspense bestseller about a woman on trial for murder that 'will keep readers up late at night until the last page is turned.
Publishers Weekly
Among the many achievements of this gripping, insightful novel is the remarkable fullness with which Bohjalian (Water Witches) writes about both the physicality and the spirituality of childbirth.
OB/GYN physician Connie Danforth looks back on the events of a wrenching summer when she was 14 and her mother, Sibyl, a Vermont midwife and ex-hippie with a "distaste for most traditional and institutional authority," was on trial for murder. Sybil has successfully home-delivered more than 500 babies, but one freezing March night, the phone line down and the roads impassable, the laboring woman she is attending suddenly suffers what appears to be a fatal stroke. Sibyl saves the child with an emergency C-section only to find herself arrested after her assistant tells police that the operation was performed on a still-living woman. Is there, in fact, blood on Sibyl's hands? Or is she just a target of the hostile New England medical community, whose persecution of midwives dates back to the 17th-century expulsion of Anne Hutchinson from the Massachusetts Bay? As Connie wrestles with increasing doubts about whether or not her mother acted correctly, the Danforth family struggles to remain intact in the face of community ostracism and unrelenting media scrutiny.
Readers will find themselves mesmerized by the irresistible momentum of the narrative and by Bohjalian's graceful and lucid, irony-laced prose. His warm, vivid evocations of child-bearing capture the wonder and terror of bringing a baby into the world. With acutely sensitive character delineation, he manages to present all the participants in this drama, from the family members to the grieving widower, as complex, fully realized individuals. This is a story with no obvious villains or heroes, which only renders the tragedy all the more haunting.
Library Journal
When a bomb decimates a Havana nightclub on New Year's Eve, 1957, King Bongo looks for the culprits-and his showgirl sister. With a seven-city author tour. Copyright 2003 Cahners Business Information.
Library Journal
In this new tale from the author of the acclaimed Water Witches, a New England midwife is accused of murder.
Mademoiselle
A thoughtful combination of ethical angst and courtroom drama.
Chris Bohjalian
[His books are about] everyday people dealing with the complex moral ambiguities that fill this world....What is most important to me is that my narrator's voice is believable and that, though it is clearly an absolute fiction, it has the emotional resonance of memoir. -- Interviewed in Publishers Weekly, January 4, 1999
Washington Post Book World
An 'astonishing' suspense bestseller about a woman on trial for murder that will keep readers up late at night until the last page is turned.
Washington Wash. Post Book World
An 'astonishing' suspense bestseller about a woman on trial for murder that 'will keep readers up late at night until the last page is turned.
Kirkus Reviews
Bohjalian (Water Witches, 1995, etc.) blends some provocative moral, medical, and political issues into a classic coming-of-age story in this To Kill a Mockingbird like reminiscence of the murder trial of a midwife, as witnessed by her teenaged daughter.
From the day back in the '60s when Sibyl Danforth stepped forward in an emergency to help a pregnant friend give birth, she fell in love with the birthing process and dedicated herself to a calling as a lay midwife in rural Vermont. But as her obstetrician daughter, Connie, points out, Sibyl never bothered to obtain certification from the American College of Nurse-Midwives. Still, neighbors who wanted to have their babies at home felt comfortable calling on her. Among Sibyl's patients in 1981, the year Connie turned 14, was a minister's wife named Charlotte Bedford, a fragile woman whose incredibly difficult labor led to a stroke and what appeared to be Charlotte's death. Prevented by a heavy snowstorm from getting Charlotte to a hospital, Sibyl frantically tried to save the baby's life by performing an emergency cesarean on the presumably dead woman. Only after Charlotte is carted away does the question arise: Was the woman actually dead when Sibyl cut her open? In a strong, ruminative voice, Connie re-creates that terrible year when the state's attorney, Charlotte Bedford's family, the local medical community, and even members of the Danforths' small hometown seemed to conspire to put not just Sibyl but the entire practice of home birthing on trial. Connie, fearing witch-huntstyle reprisals, eventually broke the law to protect her beloved mother's freedom. But the question remains: Did Sibyl kill Charlotte for the sake of her baby?
Rich in moral ambiguity, informative to a fault on the methods and politics of childbirth, and perceptive regarding the whipsawing desires and loyalties of a perfectly normal teenaged girl: a compelling, complex novel and the strongest yet from the talented Bohjalian.
Loading...Product Details
- Pub. Date: November 1998
- Publisher: Random House Inc
- Format: Paperback, 372pp
- Sales Rank: 15,769
- Series: Oprah's Book Club Series
- ISBN-13: 9780375706776
- ISBN: 0375706771
Table of Contents
Interviews & Essays
Q: How do you react when you hear your book being compared to Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird?A: It's tremendously flattering, since To Kill a Mockingbird is a magnificent novel: It is deeply moving and beautifully written, and it offers one of the more wistful and lovely voices in modern literature. Moreover, I have cherished the book for almost a quarter century now: I read it first when I was 13, and I had just moved from New York to Miami. I didn't know a soul, and that book was part of a precious group that kept me company my first autumn in Florida. Today it remains one of a small handful of books I've read again and again.
Q:A: Literary influences, I presume. And certainly Harper Lee is one because of her extraordinary novel. When I read her book as a 13-year-old, I first realized the power of the first person in fiction. Until I read To Kill a Mockingbird, I'm not sure I had ever been cognizant of the role voice plays in narrative. Others? John Irving, because he writes fiction that is rich with moral ambiguity, yet never allows a story to drift beyond his characters' reach. And Joyce Carol Oates, because she simply writes and writes and writes -- and never seems to shy away from a risk in perspective or plot or subject matter.
Q: I see that you worked briefly for a New York City advertising agency. What was that experience like?
A: It wasn't unpleasant, and I never minded going to pricey restaurants with clients for lunch. I was an account executive. Of course, I also left New York advertising when I was 25 years old in 1986, so I escaped before anyone had dared to give me any real responsibility. And so while there are certainly novelists in this world who can point to successful and famous (or successful and annoying) ad campaigns on which they'd worked...I'm not one of them.
My favorite moments? Probably the brainstorming sessions for ScotTissue, when a group of intelligent adults would sit around a conference room table and try and figure out how to convince people to use more bathroom tissue.
And the fact is, I was always writing fiction -- even then. I would write from 5am to 7am, and then Monday and Tuesday nights after dinner. I wrote my first novel that way.
Q: How has your life changed since Midwives was picked as Oprah's November Book Club selection? A: I hope my life doesn't change -- at least not the nuts and bolts that comprise my day. I love my life. I live in a century-old Victorian village house in Vermont, and I have a wonderful family. I have breakfast every day with my kindergarten-aged daughter, and I meet her when she gets off the school bus in the afternoon. I have plenty of time to write.
But I love the idea that considerably more people than I ever imagined are now reading my work. I think most novelists are, on some level, exhibitionists: We write to be read. And so I'm thrilled with the increase in readership.
And what I find most interesting -- and more flattering than I can tell you -- is the notion that I'm on this select list with the likes of Toni Morrison, Alice Hoffman, and Wally Lamb. I never in my wildest dreams expected that.
Q: What is the best part of living in an 1898 farmhouse in rural Vermont?
A: I love the clapboard and slate that comprise the house, but more than that I love the community. My wife and I were in our mid-twenties when we arrived here, and we'd never owned a house. We came here straight from a 320-square foot co-op in Brooklyn Heights. We wouldn't have made it through our first winter here were it not for our neighbors. They took us under their wings and taught us what we'd need to get by: Everything from stacking wood so it would dry properly, to making sure we knew the library hours on those short, dark days in January.
Reading Group Guide
The questions, discussion topics, author biography, and suggestions for further reading that follow are designed to enhance your group's reading of Chris Bohjalian's Midwives. We hope they will give you a number of new angles from which to consider this enthralling and provocative novel, a gripping combination of courtroom thriller, domestic drama, and novel of ideas that adds up to a lyrical and suspenseful work of art.Forewords & Introductions
On a cold and icy winter night in rural Vermont, an experienced midwife named Sibyl Danforth struggles with a difficult birth. Forced to remain indoors because of the poor weather conditions, Sibyl can't call the hospital because the phones are down, and can't drive her struggling patient to the nearest hospital because the roads are slick with ice. After hours of unproductive labor, the pregnant woman appears to die from a stroke, and Sibyl has no choice but to perform an emergency cesarean, with a kitchen knife, to deliver the baby -- a healthy boy.Following this miraculous birth, a terrible question arises: What if the woman was still alive when Sibyl cut her open? There were two witnesses to the scene of birth and death. One was the pregnant woman's husband, the other, Sibyl Danforth's inexperienced apprentice. Shortly after the death, both witnesses claim that the midwife, not the birthing, took Charlotte's life. They believe that she was still alive when Sibyl made the decision to operate. Sibyl is subsequently accused of operating on a living woman and killing her own patient through hemorrhagic shock.
Seen through the keen and youthful eyes of Sibyl Danforth's 14-year-old daughter, Connie, Sibyl's fight to defend her choices that cold winter evening forces readers to question definitions of justice and legal culpability. Midwives is both a literary novel and a suspenseful courtroom drama that mesmerizes readers from beginning to end. Please join us as we welcome Chris Bohjalian, author of Midwives.
Read an Excerpt
Throughout the long summer before my mother's trial began, and then during those crisp days in the fall when her life was paraded publicly before the county--her character lynched, her wisdom impugned--I overheard much more than my parents realized, and I understood more than they would have liked.Through the register in the floor of my bedroom I could listen to the discussions my parents would have with my mother's attorney in the den late at night, after the adults had assumed I'd been sleeping for hours. If the three of them happened to be in the suite off the kitchen my mother used as her office and examining room, perhaps searching for an old document in her records or a patient's prenatal history, I would lie on the bathroom floor above them and listen as their words traveled up to me through the holes that had been cut for the water pipes to the sink. And while I never went so far as to lift the receiver of an upstairs telephone when I heard my mother speaking on the kitchen extension, often I stepped silently down the stairs until I could hear every word that she said. I must have listened to dozens of phone conversations this way--standing completely still on the bottom step, invisible from the kitchen because the phone cord stretched barely six feet--and by the time the trial began, I believe I could have reconstructed almost exactly what the lawyer, friend, or midwife was saying at the other end of the line.
I was always an avid parent watcher, but in those months surrounding the trial I became especially fanatic. I monitored their fights, and noted how the arguments grew nasty fast under pressure; I listened to them apologize, one of them often sobbing, andthen I'd wait for the more muffled (but still decipherable) sounds they would make when they would climb into bed and make love. I caught the gist of their debates with doctors and lawyers, I understood why some witnesses would be more damning than others, I learned to hate people I'd never met and whose faces I'd never seen. The state's medical examiner. The state's attorney. An apparently expert midwife from Washington, D.C.
The morning the judge gave the jury its instructions and sent them away to decide my mother's fate, I overheard her attorney explain to my parents what he said was one of the great myths in litigation: You can tell what a jury has decided the moment they reenter the courtroom after their deliberations, by the way they look at the defendant. Or refuse to look at him. But don't believe it, he told them. It's just a myth.
I was fourteen years old that fall, however, and it sounded like more than a myth to me. It had that ring of truth to it that I heard in many wives'--and midwives'--tales, a core of common sense hardened firm by centuries of observation. Babies come when the moon is full. If the boiled potatoes burn, it'll rain before dark. A bushy caterpillar's a sign of a cold winter. Don't ever sugar till the river runs free.
My mother's attorney may not have believed the myth that he shared with my parents, but I sure did. It made sense to me. I had heard much over the past six months. I'd learned well which myths to take to my heart and which ones to discard.
And so when the jury filed into the courtroom, an apostolic procession of twelve, I studied their eyes. I watched to see whether they would look at my mother or whether they would look away. Sitting beside my father in the first row, sitting directly behind my mother and her attorney as I had every day for two weeks, I began to pray to myself, Please don't look at your shoes, please don't look at the judge. Don't look down or up or out the window. Please, please, look at me, look at my mother. Look at us, look here, look here, look here.
I'd watched the jurors for days, I'd seen them watch me. I'd counted beards, I'd noted wrinkles, I'd stared beyond reason and courtesy at the way the fellow who would become the foreman had sat with his arms folded across his chest, hiding the hand disfigured years earlier by a chain saw. He had a thumb but no fingers.
They walked in from the room adjacent to their twelve chairs and found their seats. Some of the women crossed their legs at their knees, one of the men rubbed his eyes and rocked his chair back for a brief second on its rear legs. Some scanned the far wall of the courtroom, some looked toward the exit sign above the front door as if they realized their ordeal was almost over and emancipation was at hand.
One, the elderly woman with white hair and a closet full of absolutely beautiful red flowered dresses, the woman who I was sure was a Lipponcott from Craftsbury, looked toward the table behind which the state's attorney and his deputy were sitting.
And that's when I broke down. I tried not to, but I could feel my eyes fill with tears, I could feel my shoulders beginning to quiver. I blinked, but a fourteen-year-old girl's eyelids are no match for the lament I had welling inside me. My cries were quiet at first, the sound of a mournful whisper, but they gathered fury fast. I have been told that I howled.
And while I am not proud of whatever hysteria I succumbed to that day in the courtroom, I am not ashamed of it either. If anyone should feel shame for whatever occurred that moment in a small courthouse in northeastern Vermont, in my mind it is the jury: Amidst my sobs and wails, people have said that I pleaded aloud, "Look at us! Oh, God, please, please look at us!" and still not one of the jurors would even glance in my mother's or my direction.
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Order The Oprah Winfrey Show - 20th Anniversary Collection on DVD!
Hear our exclusive audio interview with Chris Bohjalian (12:04).
See our exclusive video interview with Chris Bohjalian (9:15).
From the Publisher: Hear author Chris Bohjalian talk about the inspiration for his novel The Double Bind (1:58).