"Ashes": Seeds of America Trilogy Concludes

In the conclusion to Laurie Halse Anderson's The Seeds for America Trilogy, the narrator Isabel at last can attempt to rescue younger sister Ruth from enslavement years after Madame Lockton split the siblings. At the same time, General Washington and his French allies are closing in on the British Army at Yorktown. Isabel resents that her old friend Curzon seems more interested in that action than in helping her. As the title Ashes and the first chapter's epigraph suggest, this will be a novel of "blood and ashes." We see an odious slave overseer, stomach-churning disease, and gruesome carnage.

Yet the overarching question of the novel gives it the energy and delight of a romantic comedy: Will Isabel and Curzon ever realize that they love each other?

My friend Susan started reading this third book while I was still enjoying Forge, which is narrated by the young man Curzon (see "Friendship and Fire," 06/2020). I expressed my hope that Curzon's affable narrative voice might continue in the final book, or at least alternate chapters with Isabel's more intense voice. Susan made an interesting comment: "The narrator has to be Isabel, because she has more to learn."

I agree. When Curzon wants to re-enlist with the Continental Army, Isabel tries to dissuade him:

"I am my own army," I said. "My feet and legs, my hands, arms, and back, those are my soldiers. My general lives up here" -- I tapped my forehead -- "watching for the enemy and commanding the field of battle.... Neither redcoats nor rebels fight for me. I see no reason to support them." (126)

Curzon asks, "What do you fight for, then?" She answers that she wants only to get away from fighting. But, weeks later, she comes to understand an essential difference in their approaches to life:

He favored the larger stage, the grand scale at which folks sought to improve the world. I had chosen to focus on the smaller stage, concentrating myself only with my sister's circumstances.... I realized that Curzon did not care more for his army than me, or even feel that there was a choice to be made. His heart was so large, it could love multitudes. And it did. (242)

Isabel learns from Curzon. She speaks to both the larger and smaller "stage" when, following victory, Virginians re-enslave blacks in the camp and in the ranks. When Curzon expresses bitterness, she pours seeds into Curzon's hand, the ones from her late mother's garden that Isabel and Curzon have preserved through all their years together. A garden has to begin with something, she explains. As the seeds sprout and bloom, you can tend and shape the garden. Echoing the very first words of the series, a quote from Thomas Paine, Isabel says, "Seems to me this is the seed time for America" (271).

We know that one of the seeds is oppression of dark skinned Americans. But we're still free to make of the garden what we will.

There's so much else I want to remember from this book. There's a boy named Aberdeen who's "sweet" on Ruth; a donkey that Ruth names "Thomas Boon" in a scene both light-hearted and heart-warming; the re-appearance of Curzon's old friend Ebenezer; an emotional reconciliation (174); and, of course, the answer to that question, Will they ever realize they love each other?

Laurie Halse Anderson. Ashes. Conclusion to The Seeds for America Trilogy. New York: Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2016.