Poverty in early 1800s Cape Ann, Mass., was an equal-opportunity affliction, according to novelist and freelance journalist Anita Diamant. In “The Last Days of Dogtown,” poor folk of all shapes, colors and sizes populate every page, first turn to last.
Inspired by a pamphlet she found in a Gloucester bookstore not far from where the fictional Dogtown would be found, Diamant’s third novel (she also wrote “The Red Tent” and “Good Harbor”) begins with three women – Judy Rhimes, Black Ruth and Easter Carter – who are, according to the pamphlet, amazingly diverse and real.
Perhaps most interesting of all is the romantic dreamer quietly embodied in the dear, Judy Rhimes. Devoted but never married to her lover, Cornelius, a freed black slave who worked the docks in Gloucester, the matronly white woman has kept their love a secret to protect herself and the man she loved – not to mention her ramshackle town.
Black Ruth is one of the Cape’s “new Africans”; a black woman who dressed as a man and preferred to be called John Woodman. Working as a stonemason, she rented a room from Dogtown’s mother figure Easter Carter. Like so many citizens of this dying, New England town, Black Ruth was a mystery, destined to wither and fade.
Easter Carter kept feral dogs and the biggest house in Dogtown – a home with high ceilings and a fireplace vast enough to cook a side of beef or warm a house full of winter mourners. We grasp Easter’s welcoming spirit in the first pages of the novel, as characters gather to grieve the quirky suicide of patriarch Abraham Wharf. Nearly all wonder how he could have slit his own throat.
So begins this historically detailed, story of class struggle, disappointment and long suffering – with a wake heavily populated by eccentric citizens in need. So many characters, in fact, it is a challenge in the first 20 pages to keep all the names and identities separate and clear.
Fortunately, as Diamant’s story moves forward, so does reader clarity. The characters are transformed into beloved (and sometimes hated), familiar friends, though it can be painful to realize, through Diamant’s thoughtful plotting, how hard it is for each new friend to even survive, much less escape or excel. But that may be precisely the point.
On her website, Diamant said she wrote “The Last Days of Dogtown” to remember the easily forgotten, the prostitutes and witches and castoffs polite society refuses to see or absorb.
“I set out to imagine the lives of people who have been left out of history,” she said, “the poor, widows and spinsters, orphans, New England Africans, both enslaved and free. Marginal and voiceless, these folks fascinate me because so little is known about them.”
Their anonymity presented both a challenge and an opportunity for Diamant. She had to do near endless research on period dentistry and clothing, geography, social habits and more. But once she understood the parameters under which her characters lives might have unfolded, she was freed by the mystery to create composites she saw as lifelike and real, even in fiction.
Diamant deftly met the challenge, though “The Last Days of Dogtown” is not a work likely to leave you feeling uplifted or proud. You may feel, instead, like you’ve spent hours peeping through the open window of human desperation. But you will be glad, once you close the book, to be living in a different, more forgiving place and time.
Kelly Milner Halls is a freelance writer in Spokane, Wash.
