This Other Eden is based upon the real events at Malaga Island, off the coast of Maine, in 1912. The epigraph to the novel outlines the whole story succinctly, so I will quote it here in full:

Malaga Island . . . was home to a mixed-race fishing community from the mid-1800s to 1912, when the state of Maine evicted 47 residents from their homes and exhumed and relocated their buried dead. Eight islanders were committed to the Maine School for the Feeble-Minded. “I think the best plan would be to burn down the shacks with all of their filth,” then Governor Frederick Plaisted told a reporter [at] the time . . .

[In 2010], the Maine legislature passed a resolution expressing its “profound regret.”

- Maine Coast Heritage Trust

For those interested in reading a fuller account of Malaga Island and this incident you can visit a website hosted by Maine State Museum which you can access by clicking here. There is also a PDF file you can access from the same site containing photographs of the settlement and its people that you can access by clicking here.

Paul Harding’s novel is an imaginative recreation of these events. Instead of Malaga Island, Harding tells the story of Apple Island, settled by Benjamin Honey and his wife, Patience, in the late eighteen century. Benjamin brings with him a cache of apple seeds and, after initial failure, manages to grow an orchard on the island. As such, Benjamin Honey feels like a pioneer reminiscent of Johnny Appleseed, his orchard on Apple Island characterising the island as a representation of early America. But despite underlying problems on the island – sometimes incest, rape and even murder – it presents as a haven for equality and relative peace, free of the inequalities that were to undermine the greatness of the American promise: class division, racism and slavery.

This Other Eden is primarily the story of descendants of Benjamin and Patience Honey, as well as other islanders in the period leading to and including the eviction of the islanders. The islanders, like the Malaga residents of history, represent a range of racial features across a spectrum of skin tones from dark to white. Most have no official legal identity: they have no birth certificates; they pay no taxes. They are free in the purest sense, it appears, outside a system of official government, their social contract existing each to each within the island community.

The novel is uncharacteristically gentle in its approach to its subject, which is essentially the story of systemic violence by means of the eviction. The Biblical allusion in the title is not accidental and is obvious. Apple Island is a kind of Eden, albeit a somewhat qualified one. It exists beyond the boundaries of modern civilisation. Its links to the mainland are limited. It receives some support from a relief society, but the society has little understanding of what the islanders actually need. Useless roof slates are sent and the islanders burn them. And mission teachers like Martin Diamond try to educate the children, but his presence is also changing the long-standing relationship of the islanders with the mainland.

The islanders use their skills at gathering, fishing and building to maintain their separate existence on the island. The McDermott sisters do laundry for clients on the mainland, a short distance away. But their presence is deemed unwelcome in the Maine community. There are instances of incest on the island, there are concerns about the welfare of some islanders, as well as ideas related to morality and the then-favoured doctrines of eugenics which prompt intervention by authorities. Martin Diamond, the well-intentioned school teacher, understands there are students of real talent. Emily Sockalexis shows exceptional mathematical skills which soon outstrip his own; Tabitha Honey gains an advanced understanding of Latin, to the point that she can compose Latin verse; while Ethan Honey is a talented artist, both as a sketch artist and a painter. However, it is only Ethan whom Martin will attempt to help before the evictions occur. Martin persuades Ethan’s family to send him to live with his friend, Thomas Hale, where he will have an opportunity to develop his talent. For the rest of the islanders there is little plan for their future. Where they go, how they will survive, is barely considered. The agenda of the committee that arrives on the island, unannounced to assess the islanders, is evident in the interests and expertise of its group: a doctor as well as a specialist in phrenology and brain disorders, along with councillors, a reporter, a photographer and a man with a gun. With little preamble they go about trying to measure the craniums of islanders, even as they attempt to go about their business, while the threat of force is used to make them comply. The point about Ethan – the thing which makes him worth saving beyond his talent – is that he can pass as white. For others on the island with darker skins, there is no defined space for them within America, at large.

The beauty of the novel is in its writing and the way it humanises the islanders. It is easy to feel sympathy for a simple child like Rabbit Lark, born to an incestuous brother and sister, or Esther Honey, now the matriarch of the island, who has herself endured the pain of incest, and raising her brother/son. But we are not encouraged to simply sympathise with victims. Harding imbues his characters with a humanity that transcends their victimhood and normalises their lives. While Rabbit Lark tragically suffers the consequences of incest, other children on the island show immense talents, while other residents like Eha Honey and Zachery Proverbs show great pride and ingenuity in building their own homes. The islanders are a mostly cohesive group with a shared history and mythic understanding of their place in the world. By humanising them, Harding makes their tale more powerful and the effects of violence, when it comes, more shocking, because we understand the worth of these human beings, unlike the corrupt sexton who is commissioned to exhume their dead and treats their remains like rubbish.

The mythic qualities of the characters and this story is achieved through Biblical allusion, blending stories in the Bible to create a personal mythic understanding of identity and purpose. Central to this is the story of the Flood in Genesis and Gilgamesh. The island children exhort Esther Honey to again tell them the story of the 1815 flood which almost wiped out the early settlement. It is a harrowing tale, recalling how their descendants were only spared the destruction of God’s waters by seconds as they huddled in a large tree. Some of them are almost drowned. The flood is a part of their history, but in Esther’s retelling of the events it comes alive as a contemporary tale that defines the islanders as she inserts herself into the story; telling of the desperation as the flood waters rise, followed by the final reprieve as Esther recalls that she (for it is so in her story) flew the flag she has stitched together that defines their community. The waters recede. It is a cleansing flood which is imagined in the context of the Biblical Flood, but at the same Esther imagines it as conferring freedom, like the waters that close upon Pharaoh’s soldiers as they pursue the Israelites across the Red Sea. Implicitly, the islanders are a chosen people.

While incest occurs on the island, it is abhorred as much by the islanders as anyone. But the story of the flood makes it clear that the island is not a social backwater, but a microcosm of humanity, just as the story of Noah does: “Noah had his ark. The Honeys had Apple Island.” The mythology of the islanders sets them apart from the modern world, in an imaginative conception of their place as a new people of God, as speckled and variegated as Noah’s own people.

Martin Diamond senses this and tries to appeal to the islanders:

And we know, too, by their very names . . . that the sons of Noah ranged in skin color from black Ham to coppery Japheth to fair Shem. Yet they were brothers, all their father’s and their mother’s sons.

But Diamond’s reimagines the Flood myth, as understood by the islanders and informing their identity, within a literal Christian paradigm.

I remember the story of the flood in Gilgamesh from my studies at the seminary and I watch the Israelites revise it, populating the ark not with a royal court but a single family, of which every soul since is a member, every saint and drunkard, every hermit, cutpurse, prostitute, factory owner, every wayward milkmaid you aunt, your sister. Not a hero and his entourage aloft on the waters. Not a king and his court. But a family, a wife and her husband, two parents and their children and their children’s beloveds . . . I imagine those shepherd priests around the fires at night changing the Babylonian stories they knew so well to bear witness to humanity as a single family, and I am nourished by the feast that is the Word of God.

Diamond is torn between his personal repulsion black people inspire in him and his Christian belief in the diversity of God’s creation: “Although there is nothing about it in Scripture, I have come to believe that those men’s wives were a mixture of dark and paler complexions as well.” Ironically, in trying to imbue a sense of the islanders’ place as part of God’s humanity, he also senses he has offended them. Unfortunately, Diamond’s literal reading of the scripture only serves to remind the islanders of the pain of incest, since everyone is descended from Noah and his family, and therefore related. Young Ethan may be excited by the prospect of the comparison Diamond draws, but for Esther, who has suffered incest, the comparison is painful. She cannot like Diamond. He reminds her of her father.

Of course, Diamond is also an unwitting conduit for mainstream white ideology. His raising of an American flag to announce his arrival reminds us that the islanders already have a flag that defines them. Thus, his presence has a smell of colonialism, as do the ideologies associated with race and eugenics which will characterise the islanders as possessing “polluted blood” liable to breed “moronism, mongolism, lunacy, feeble-mindedness, idiocy [and] imbecility”.

There is a lyricism in Harding’s writing which evokes a sense of place, the dignity of its subjects and the import of what happens to them. When the authorities come to remove the islanders we sense that this is a story about race, about the ideal of freedom, and of the reductive tenets of former scientific ideologies that gave rise to eugenicist experiments. While the islanders live harmoniously in all their variety of racial colours, their very existence is an affront. Thomas Hale, who billets Ethan Honey so that he might study art, is morbidly repulsed by the stories of Ovid, whom he reads incessantly. As he reads he thinks of Bridget, his servant girl, and he realises,

It is upsetting to think of her being subjected to any of the situations in these stories, and even more so to imagine any dreadful scenario in which she involved herself willing.

What is upsetting to Hale is the notion of change and impurity. White men like Hale are repulsed by the idea of miscegenation, and the island represents a racial melting pot that undermines the identity of white America. Woven into the fabric of the novel is the unspoken story of America told through the hybrid mythology of the islanders. When Moses led his people through the Red Sea they were protected by God from the Egyptians. But the new Egyptians are the American authorities and what is at stake is a world predicated on freedom and dignity, despite the human failings of Harding’s protagonists. The water between the island and the mainland can no longer protect them. Pharaoh will win. This Other Eden tells a story of America in microcosm, and it is as beautifully rendered as its ending is shocking.