Caleb’s Crossing

Caleb’s Crossing follows Bethia Mayfield, the daughter of a strict Puritan minister on Martha’s Vineyard, and Caleb Cheeshahteaumuck, a Wampanoag boy whose education takes him into the English colonial world. Their friendship is shaped by language, religion, gender, class and the pressure placed on Indigenous converts in seventeenth-century New England. The novel uses Caleb’s historical achievement as the first Native American graduate of Harvard to explore the cost of cultural crossing for both Indigenous students and colonial women.