"Forge": Friendship and Fire

Ten minutes into Laurie Halse Anderson's YA novel Forge, I'd laughed out loud four times, gasped and cried. Those reactions mix in about that same proportion throughout the novel, along with "awwws" and some outrage. Comparing this to Chains, its predecessor in Anderson's trilogy Seeds of America, I find the same skillful manipulation of her story to fit with events of the War for Independence, with more playfulness and a whole lot more fart jokes.

[Image:   Laurie Halse Anderson. Forge. New York: Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2010.]

The jokes are a guy thing, natural to Anderson's narrator Curzon. In Chains, the intense story of Isabel, a girl enslaved, Curzon was comic relief, with his ridiculous floppy red hat, an earring, military garb too big, and a mouth on him. Even at the end of that story, sick and starving in a military prison, he's making jokes. Now he's "almost 16," meaning 11 months short of his birthday, enrolled in the Continental Army, longing to reunite with Isabel.

Friendship leavens Curzon's suffering from the elements, privations, and hostility from a few of the other teenaged boys in his company. Foremost among his allies is Ebenezer "Eben" Woodruff, the young soldier that Curzon saves early in the novel. Eben's gratitude is as boundless as his chatter, expressed often with arm-numbing punches to Curzon's shoulder.

A gulf opens between the two friends in a passage that anticipates how the "seeds of America" in 1777 will grow through Civil War to Civil Rights to those today who pit "law and order" against "systemic racism." When Eben argues that runaway slaves break the law, Curzon counters, "Bad laws deserve to be broken," just as the King's decrees are being rebuffed by the colonies. Eben asserts that "running away from their rightful master is not the same as America wanting to be free of England." Curzon falls silent a moment.

I almost told him then; told him that I and my parents and my grandparents had all been born into bondage, that my great-grandparents had been kidnapped from their homes and forced into slavery while his great-grandparents decided which crops to plant and what to name their new cow. (66)

If they'd had the phrase "white privilege," Eben still wouldn't understand. When Eben counters that bondage is "God's will," Curzon walks away: "You're not my friend." The ugly and painful chapters that follow make the friendship, when it returns, all the more deep and sweet.

To fit the arc of Curzon's story to a day-by-day account of events in 1777-1778, Anderson paces her chapters to make the personal coincide with the historical so that jaw-dropping surprises don't feel random. Instead, for example, we think, "It makes sense they would be there!" Anderson shows off in a playful way, meting out highpoints to fall on significant dates. There's peace-making and good will on Christmas, very bad luck on Friday the 13th, something having to do with the heart -- no spoilers, here -- on February 14th, and, for May 1st, more than one reason to think that our narrator has Maypoles on his mind. The way Anderson plays with her material to hit these marks adds another pleasure to the novel.

Anderson plays with the title, too. When my seventh graders read Chains, there's always a bubbling up of energy as the kids realize how many ways the title appears in the text, relating to story and themes. That game continues, as Chains are made at a Forge. Much of the novel takes place at Valley Forge. Curzon, who once worked for a blacksmith, makes himself a black "Smith" when he enlists with an alias. The hardships of military life are a "forge," says a fellow soldier, to be "a test of our mettle" (121). Lead antagonist James Bellingham has forged a metal collar for his slave. By training during the spring, ragtag soldiers are "forged" into an army. Then, forged notes are part of Curzon's escape plans.

Of course, there are no forges, no chains, without fire, and a singular passage about fire and chains confirms the strength of the fire that burns in Curzon.  He tells of hearing a story from Benny, the runt of the company whom Curzon admires for courage. It's little Benny who shames a bully to tears for shirking (140).  Curzon bites his tongue to keep from laughing when Benny, trying to fit in with the big boys, cusses "like a granny," Oh, foul, poxy Devil! (95).  Curzon, who cannot read, listens intently when Benny tells stories to his mates. 
The story of the Titan Prometheus, chained to a rock for sharing fire with the needy, comes to Curzon's mind at a moment of intense hopelessness.  Bellingham has outmaneuvered him: since Curzon is inured to pain, Bellingham threatens to punish Isabel for any misstep by Curzon.  Moments later, Curzon stares into a fireplace and recalls the story, though not the name, of a "fellow ... chained to a rock where an eagle ate out his liver, which grew back every night, and so on through eternity."  Curzon reflects,

When Benny finished his story... I did not know what I would have done if somebody shackled me to a mountain and sent an eagle to eat my insides, day after day after day.

Now I knew.  I would fight the eagle and the chains and that mountain as long as I had breath. (199)

This inner fire is important to Laurie Halse Anderson's trilogy.  In education forums and in public discussion of novels and movies, people this year have questioned whether white authors should be writing about the experiences of people of color.  Anderson, a white woman, gives us in her epigraphs samples from primary sources to show us how close she comes to real lives and real voices of the time, black and white.  She has given her black, male, teenage protagonist an appealing voice and strong agency in his own salvation; there is no White Savior, here.

Anderson's other works include memoirs of her own experience with abuse.  When she writes about Curzon's despair and anger under someone else's absolute power over his body, she writes with authority.   In Chains, both Isabel and her nemesis Madam Lockton suffer arbitrary decrees and physical beatings.  In Forge, it's different. As Isabel fills Curzon in on a particularly violent slave trader, she stops talking.  Curzon is mystified:

I was overcome by an unsettling sensation, as if some giant had picked up the whole of the earth and tilted it.  She'd been hurt, scarred on the inside of her spirit, and I did not know how to help her.  (189)

Curzon lacks our culture's generic phrase sexual abuse for what Isabel experienced.  But Curzon knows it when he sees Isabel forced to lather Bellingham's face while the odious man soaks in a tub. Giving orders, the man casually pets Isabel.  Curzon barely contains himself, thinking

Take your hand off her, you foul whoreson.
"Of course, sir," I said.   (207)

Though victimized, Isabel is no victim.  When she and Curzon make risky plans, Curzon says, "We should wait... for our luck to turn" (270).  He observes, with admiration, that others, female and male, would have "blubbered" and "backed out":

Not Isabel. The reverse side of her pigheaded stubbornness was unshakable courage that was worthy of a general.
"If our luck does not turn for the good on its own," she said, "we'll make it turn." (270)

For the finale, Anderson whips up action, humor, surprises, poetic justice, and a perfect conversion of her major themes, forge, freedom, and guys. As the story ends, Curzon is once again laughing, "walking out of Valley Forge the way I walked into it, with friends."

[See my response to Ashes, concluding book of the trilogy, 06/2020]