The main African-American character in the series is a little boy, later given the name Arthur Stuart, who is the son of a southern plantation owner and an African slave woman. After she gives birth to this “mix-up boy,” the slave woman decides to run away. She makes a poppet, an image of herself, out of wax and breast milk and spit. She then gets feathers from a blackbird and sticks them on to the poppet:

Very strong thing, this poppet with her own milk and spit in it, blackbird feathers on. Very strong, suck all her life out, but boy-baby, he never kiss no White Boss feet, White Boss never lay no lash on him. (Chapter 2)

The power of this magic allows the woman to turn into a blackbird and fly away, carrying her baby away with her. But it does indeed suck all the life out of her; she barely makes it into northern territory and finds a home for her baby before she dies. Later on, Arthur Stuart tries to explain to people what happened to his mother, although they cannot make sense of what he tells them: “My mama was a blackbird. She flew so high but then the ground caught her and she got stuck and died” (Chapter 17). For Arthur, the supernatural events surrounding his birth are somehow, mysteriously, a part of his own conscious memories.

Although Arthur Stuart is adopted by a loving family up north, the Fugitive Slave Treaty puts him at risk of being returned to his former owner. There are Finders who hunt down the runaway slaves, identifying them by means of a cachet of hair or nail clippings supplied by the slave’s master. As one of the Finders explains, “It’s our knack. Who knows how it works? We just look at it, and we — it’s like we see the shape of the person we’re looking for” (Chapter 18). The same invisible power inherent in the body which allowed the slave woman to turn herself into a bird and escape is, ironically, also what leads to her son’s capture by the Finders.

In order to rescue Arthur from the Finders, Alvin  realizes he has to change Arthur from the inside out, so that the cachet can no longer identify him. Using his own powerful knack, Alvin is able to look inside the boy’s body and see “that tiny signature that marked every living bit” of Arthur Stuart (Chapter 18). That “tiny signature” is something we would call DNA, although obviously Alvin cannot use such a term. Alvin then changes the “living bits” of Arthur Stuart — or, more precisely, he calls upon those bits to change themselves — so that he can replace a tiny piece of Arthur’s signature with a bit of his own signature:

I’m dealing with these living bits, and each one of them is alive; maybe I can tell them all what they ought to be. […]  I can just say — Be like this — and they’ll do it. (Chapter 18)

In this way, Alvin manages to summon the “living bits” of Arthur’s unique personal signature from every cell in his body and rearrange them in a slightly new way, making him unrecognizable to the Finders.

As a result of this transformation, Arthur is no longer the person that he was before. Outwardly he looks the same, but he has lost the magic power, the “knack,” that was his own remarkable talent: perfect mimicry. Previously, Arthur had been able to transform his own voice in order to mimic the voice of any other person, male or female, young or old, black or white. As Alvin altered Arthur’s inner signature, he unwittingly erased part of Arthur’s inborn genius:

He still had the near-perfect memory of what others said — he still had all the words. But the voices were gone; only his own seven-year-old voice remained. (Chapter 18)

Like his mother, Arthur has had to change his identity in order to escape from slavery. It is not just a disguise that he puts on and can take off again later; it is a more radical and magical transformation, and it comes at a cost — although the price that Arthur pays is not as high as the price paid by his mother, who gave up her life in order to bring her child to freedom.

In telling this story of Arthur Stuart’s escape from slavery, Orson Scott Card adds an important new dimension to the picture of an imaginary America that he had begun to sketch in the previous two novels. We see an America of different peoples — Indians, Europeans, and Africans — who all wield their own distinctive magical powers. With its subtle combination of magic and science, fantasy and fact, myth and history, the “Alvin Maker” series follows in the ancient tradition established by the authors of the Bible or the singers of the Homeric songs, who likewise synthesized myth and history into an imaginative whole.

In this series of articles about magic in the world of Alvin Maker, I have focused on the first three books in the series: Seventh Son, Red Prophet, and Prentice Alvin. Card has published an additional three books — Alvin Journeyman, Heartfire, and The Crystal City — with a seventh book, Master Alvin, forthcoming. I have not said much in these articles about the memorable characters and suspenseful plots of the novels — with a masterful writer like Card, you know you can count on great characters and plots. What makes the Alvin Maker books truly remarkable, I think, is the way that they embrace the invisible and supernatural dimensions of our country’s history, providing both warnings and wisdom for the questions we face today, drawing upon the legacy of our variegated past.  Who were we, who are we, and who will we become? You will find surprising new ways of thinking about those questions by journeying with Alvin Maker through Card’s imaginary America, and I would welcome your comments and thoughts about the series. Meanwhile, I’ll be back with one more article as soon as Card publishes what he promises will be the final book in the series, and we can see to what destination he will have brought us in the end.

References

• Card, Orson Scott. Prentice Alvin. New York: Tor Books, 1989.

When Red Prophet begins, we find ourselves cast back in time, prior to the events of Seventh Son, as we meet the character who will become the Shining Man in Alvin’s vision, Tenskwa-Tawa. Tenskwa-Tawa is an actual historical figure, also known as “The Prophet” or “The Shawnee Prophet.” He was the brother of the famous Shawnee warrior Ta-Kumsaw (Tecumseh), and he founded the Native American settlement called “Prophetstown” at the juncture of the Wabash and Tippecanoe rivers in Ohio territory (modern-day Indiana). This is where the so-called Battle of Tippecanoe took place in 1811, when troops led by William Henry Harrison, future President of the United States, burned Prophetstown to the ground in a bloody victory that earned him the nickname “Old Tippecanoe.”

As Card weaves the story of Alvin Maker into these historical events, Alvin learns from the Indians Tenskwa-Tawa and Ta-Kumsaw  that his knacks are not some kind of personal prowess, but instead derive from the powers of the living land itself. When the Europeans practice their knacks in ignorance of this fact, they are stumbling in the dark, not even aware of what they are doing. This makes the Europeans and their knacks contemptible in the eyes of someone like Ta-Kumsaw, who lives his life in full awareness of the natural order:

These White men with their weak little knacks. These White men with their hexes and their wardings. Didn’t they know their hexes only fended off unnatural things? If a thief comes, knowing he does wrong, then a good strong fending hex makes his fear grow till he cries out and runs away. But the Red man never is a thief. […] To the Red man a knack is like a fly, buzz buzz buzz. Far above this fly, the power of the living land is a hundred hawks, watching, circling. (Chapter 2)

With the help of Ta-Kumsaw, Alvin is able to deepen his understanding of his own powers, going far beyond the tricks he had learned to do with his knacks. As a result, Alvin is able to perceive the greensong and feel a connection with the land itself, much as Ta-Kumsaw and the Prophet are able to do.

At a certain point in the novel, Ta-Kumsaw and Alvin must make their way on foot to Fort Detroit, 200 miles, which Ta-Kumsaw planned to travel in a single day. How could that be possible? The Indians are able to travel that distance by calling on the power of the land itself:

The Red man called on the strength of the land to help him. The ground pushed back against his feet, adding to his strength. The bushes parted, making paths, space appeared where there was no space. […] Ta-Kumsaw’s hunger to arrive at Fort Detroit was so strong that the land answered by feeding him, giving him strength. (Chapter 11)

These are powers which Ta-Kumsaw has known all his life, but he did not expect that Alvin would be able to keep up with him, and he planned to carry the boy. Instead, much to Ta-Kumsaw’s surprise, Alvin was able to hear the greensong of the land and keep up with Ta-Kumsaw, pace for pace, in their 200-mile journey. Prior to this journey, Alvin did not know that he had this power, this connection to the land. It is the first of many lessons that he will learn in his journeys with Ta-Kumsaw.

These magical powers which Ta-Kumsaw and the Shawnees use are part of the natural order; they are what you could call perfectly natural powers, with nothing supernatural about them at all. To the White men, however, the Indians’ powers appear to be supernatural simply because the White men’s magic is itself an act against nature, something that stands outside the natural order and violates the limitations that keep that ecology in balance. Indeed, the entirety of White civilization is seen as an assault on the natural order of things, and Ta-Kumsaw and his brother Tenskwa-Tawa are struggling to drive the White men from the land before it is utterly destroyed:

Hack and cut and chop and burn, that was the White man’s way. Take from the forest, take from the land, take from the river, but put nothing back. The White man killed animals he didn’t need, animals that did him no harm; yet if a bear woke hungry in the winter and took so much as a single young pig, the White man hunted him down and killed him in revenge. He never felt the balance of the land at all. (Chapter 2)

The ecology of magic turns out to be about the ecology of nature itself, and the balance of the living ecosystem. When Alvin leaves Ta-Kumsaw and returns to his family’s home at the end of the novel, he still hears the greensong around him:

At night in his own bed, Alvin listened to the distant greensong, still warm and beautiful, still bright and hopeful, even though the forest was getting so sparse, even though the future was so dim. (Chapter 19)

Of course, this is just the end of Book 2 in what will be a seven-book series, with much opportunity still for Alvin to struggle towards a brighter future, even after the tragedy at Tippecanoe.

The themes of magic and environmentalism are beautifully entwined in this book, providing a new dimension to the ethical moralism of Alvin’s vow in Seventh Son. Alvin had recognized that there were moral limits which limited his magical knacks, but in Red Prophet he begins to learn how those magical powers are part of a larger natural order which depends not just on individual righteousness but on the principle of balance, and the limitations which are needed to sustain that balance. In my next article, I’ll turn to the third magical stream which flows through Card’s imaginary America — African magic — to see what it has to teach us about magical powers, and about their limits.

References

• Card, Orson Scott. Red Prophet. New York: Tor Books, 1988.

In this series of articles, I will examine the rules for magic in a variety of fantasy and science fiction novels, what you might call “the ecology of magic” which these modern storytellers create for their imagined worlds. I will begin with the alternate America imagined by Orson Scott Card in Seventh Son, the first novel in his “Alvin Maker” series. (Seventh Son was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1988, but did not win; Card had won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1986 for Ender’s Game, and in 1987 for its sequel, Speaker for the Dead.) So far, Card has published six books in the “Alvin Maker” series; The Crystal City was published in 2003 and the final book, to be titled Master Alvin, should be published soon.

The world that Card creates for Alvin Maker is recognizably our own world, but radically altered. Card draws on the history of early 19th-century America as it really happened, including many famous characters and events, while re-inventing that America in entirely new ways. For my purposes here, what is most important is that America in Seventh Son is full of magical powers, or “knacks.” Card’s imagined America has become a land particularly strong in knacks, because the Protestant authorities in his alternate Great Britain, in their effort to stamp out witchcraft, have been in the habit of banishing people with impressive knacks to the colonies. When the character named Taleswapper (none other than the mystic and visionary William Blake) meets up with the seven sons of Alvin Miller, he finds out that they each have their knacks: Calm has a knack for music and dancing, Measure can see things from far off, the twins Wastenot and Wantnot have a knack for sensing trouble, and so on. Taleswapper himself is a keen observer of knacks, having lived with America’s greatest “wizard” and master of many knacks, Ben Franklin, before deciding to venture out west, where he meets the pioneering Miller family.

The seventh son of Alvin Miller, Alvin Junior, has a bit of every knack, as it turns out. In fact, Alvin is a “maker” — the first true maker born into the world since “the one who changed the water into wine,” as Card cagily explains. Yet Alvin has a problem: there is no teacher to help him learn to use his knacks. Worse: the Presbyterian minister who runs the local school believes all knacks to be the work of the devil, a sinful sort of self-delusion. Without guidance of any kind, Alvin is not sure what to make of his powers — until one fateful night when he has a vision that both teaches him about his powers and also prompts him to take an oath voluntarily limiting those powers.

The evening had begun with typical childhood shenanigans: Alvin has played a trick on one of his sisters, and they have paid him back by putting pins into his nightclothes and bedsheets. Ouch! Alvin decides he will get revenge by sending all the roaches from his room into his sisters’ room (for those of you who have read Ender’s Game, the presence of insects here will come as no surprise). Previously, Alvin had made an agreement with the roaches: if they didn’t climb into his bed, the roaches could have whatever they found on the floor, and Alvin promised never to stomp on them. As a result, there were more roaches in Alvin’s room than anywhere else in the house. So, he uses his knack to make the roaches think they will find food by crawling into his sisters’ bed. Don’t be afraid, he tells them; it’s safe. The roaches swiftly head off into the girls’ room and climb up into their beds. The girls start screaming, of course, and they stomp on the roaches, killing most of them. The final result is just what Alvin thought he wanted: the girls are furious, and he has gotten the last laugh.

But then, in the night, Alvin has a vision. A Shining Man comes to him, and that Shining Man makes Alvin see what happened through the eyes of the roaches. The roaches had trusted the peacemaker, and had gone to the other room, but there was no food there, only the “hard sharp crushing agony of death, each small trusting life, betrayed, crushed, battered.” Alvin is horrified at the consequences of what he has done. Wordlessly, the Shining Man then leads Alvin to see that both good and evil can come from “his knack for making things go just where he wanted […], for understanding how things ought to be and helping them get that way.” Alvin finally realizes that he did wrong to use his knack selfishly, for his own benefit and pleasure alone (emphasis mine):

He had a knack, and he’d use it, but there was rules in things like that, rules that he would follow even if it killed him. ‘I’ll never use it for myself again,’ said Alvin Junior.

This vow against selfishness will indeed put Alvin’s life in danger before the end of the book, and he still has many lessons to learn. This is not his last encounter with the Shining Man, and it is not the vision that will ultimately give Alvin his quest in life, building the Crystal City. Yet when Alvin sees in his vision the world as the roaches see it, he realizes that he must place limits on his own power; learning how to use his powers consists also of learning how not to use them.

In my next article, I’ll look at the second book in the series, Red Prophet, to see what other questions Card poses for us about the rules of magic, as Alvin crosses paths again with the Shining Man, and with the Shining Man’s brother, the Shawnee warrior Tecumseh. Together the Shining Man and Tecumseh reveal to Alvin a different understanding of the magical world, a Native American “ecology of magic” which deepens Alvin’s perception of the otherwise invisible world, and adds to his powers.

References

• Card, Orson Scott. Seventh Son: Tales of Alvin Maker, Book 1. New York: Tor Books, 1987. All quotes come from Chapter 7 of the book.