Whether you work your fingers to the bone operating a quern, starve yourself until you are skin and bones, or turn to cannibalism and gnaw meat to the bone when the tuckahoe is gone, Alena Bruzas’ book To the Bone captures all of these idioms. Writing in the historical fiction genre, Bruzas retells the harrowing times of 1609-1610 at James Fort when the colonists find themselves suffering.
To tell her tale, Bruzas features two teens: Jane Eddowes and Ellis Folk. Jane—full of spark, vitality, wit, and defiance—loves to draw and to pursue adventure. Ellis finds herself drawn to Jane. Because she lost her parents—her mother to death and her father to a different Fort, Ellis is indentured to Master Henry and Mistress Blythe Collins. Ironically, Ellis occasionally enjoys the feeling of being owned by Henry. Because she is afraid of being a burden or of being unwanted, she says: “I want to be owned. I want to belong to somebody, the way I used to belong to Papa and Mama” (65).
Although the two girls realize that venturing beyond the walls of the Fort carries some danger since the country folk don’t want the white Europeans invading their land, the pair craves “all this beauty. All this light. All this freedom” (80). Not only for her disobedience but for wanting to kiss Jane, Ellis considers herself wicked: “It feels wicked to think about being free, owning land. It is wicked to want it. But I do” (80-81). Believing that it is wrong to behave or to love outside the boudaries of respectability and normativity, Ellis punishes herself for her desire by repeatedly pulling hairs from her head.
Gradually, Ellis trades her hope for despair as she learns about the wrongs committed by the settlers and about her employer’s own wickedness, not only targeting her but his pregnant wife. Even her friend Rowan, who loves adventure and running in the woods with his dog Spider, soon doesn’t want to remain in Virginia. “Before, there was adventure and there was food and there was hope, but now it’s all bleak and sad and I’m always hungry and I wish I wasn’t here anymore” (128).
Along with these three, others are similarly trapped since, even if there were a ship to take them to another place, they don’t have the money to pay for passage. And when conditions grow so dire that starvation sets in, death surrounds them.
- Donna