2 of 5

But Jip, who knows his lessons as well, will not allow the sacrifice, and so escapes to Canada where he meets none other than Ezekial Freeman. He too has learned his lessons and takes Jip into his household, thus, as Katherine says, "completing the circle of Lyddie's gift to him." But the charity does not end here: Jip resolves to return to join the Negro regiments being formed in the Union army. Thus he expands his circle of charity to a world of people.

"People say to me that Jip is too good to be true," Katherine explains, "but he isn't to me. I know people pure of heart, and to me Jip came as a boy without guile; that sweetness about him is very much his nature. Even so, he sometimes gets into trouble because his goodness is not always wise." Katherine speaks slowly and thoughtfully here, and considers now a moment before proceeding. "Good characters are notoriously hard to make believable. Maybe there is so much sin on our own hearts that they are hard to see."

But she has seen this one, and we speak of him together in the present tense, a character who is as real as either of us sitting in that cottage room. When Lyddie first came out and I fussed at Katherine about an ending in which Lyddie seems to refuse happiness even when it is finally, lovingly offered to her, Katherine responded, "Oh, but she does marry Luke. She goes to college, comes back as a teacher, and marries Luke Stevens." I had wondered then how it could be that an author did not seem to remember the ending of her own novel, but I saw that, for her, the novel is only a small part of a much larger and fuller life whose boundaries are not contained within 200 pages. I remember that now as we talk about Jip.

If there is a single theme that imbues Paterson's work, it is the theme of hope, what she calls the radical biblical hope, the hope that marks Moses and all of his spiritual descendents. "I want to be like Joshua and Caleb," she announced in the speech accepting the National Book Award for The Great Gilly Hopkins (1978). "I want to be a spy for hope."

In Jip: His Story, this theme is suggested by Put's confident hymn, "All Is Well":

Weep not, my friends, my friends weep not for me,
All is well, all is well!
My sins forgiv'n, forgiv'n and I am free,
All is well, all is well!
There's not a cloud that doth rise, To hide my Jesus from my eyes.
I soon shall mount the upper skies,
All is well, all is well!

The lines are moving as Katherine repeats them; unlike the similar lines of Julian of Norwich, they assert that all is well in the present—something sometimes difficult to see in a Paterson novel.

These lines suggest to me that this novel is her most explicitly Christian yet, but she shakes her head. "Novelists write out of their deepest selves," she says. "Whatever is there in them comes out willy-nilly, and it is not a conscious act on their part. If I were to consciously say, 'This book shall now be a Christian book,' then the act would become conscious and not out of myself. It would either be a very peculiar thing to do—like saying, 'I shall now be humble'—or it would be simple propaganda."

next page... |  2 of 5

share this page