OLD NEW WORLDS
Review by CarlaJean Valluzzi
In Old New Worlds (Green Place Press), Judith Krummeck weaves a
seamless narrative that crosses generations, crosses oceans, and crosses cultures to arrive on the shore of a collective experience. Krummeck’s work illustrates a struggle shared not only between members of her own family, but common to many of those who decide to leave the familiarity of home, community, language in search of something more — something better.
Sarah Williams (née Barker) was Judith’s great-great grandmother. The wife of George, a missionary sent forth from England to South Africa in the early 1800s to “serve” the Khoikhoi people, the path of her life is forever marked by decisions made by and for others. As a young girl, she feels abandoned by her mother, sent to livewith relatives following the death of her father. As a young woman, she works in service alongside a childhood friend in the house of a wealthy reverend in London. She marries a near-stranger after a mere two weeks of engagement, and three days later, they board a stagecoach destined for a harbor, a ship, a voyage into the utter unknown. For the first time, as her new husband slips his hand into hers, she feels “an intimacy she hadn’t even guessed was possible.” Sarah comes to understand herself in a completely new way: she is now “part of someone” and this feeling “makes her thrum with contentment.” It seems akin to a kind of hope that spurs the passions necessary in many an immigrant to keep striving, keep moving forward.
Their voyage is fraught with illness, raging storms, and even an attack by American pirates. It is aboard the Alfred that she learns she is carrying their first child, the news of which brings tears of joy when shared with George. They’d already been at sea for three months, with conditions continuing to worsen and provisions running low, when finally the mountains of Africa finally comes into view.
The first thing George and Sarah see with clarity is Table Mountain rising out of Cape Town. 182 years later, the first things Judith sees when she arrives in America via Cape Town are the man-made monoliths memorializing presidents Lincoln, Washington, and Jefferson; “the spires of Georgetown,” the dome of the Capitol. Although she wished to travel across the sea by ship, when informed that her port of call would most likely be Houston, Texas, she chose instead to fly.
She speaks eloquently of the ways one falls in love with a country: “no different, really, from falling in love with a person.” Sarah must come to understand the entirely new sound of the Cape Dutch spoken by the locals of her new home, as well as her place within the established culture of the Khoikhoi (who in turn must adapt to the everyday life of the mission). Theopolis evolves, beginning to resemble more closely the English villages ever present in Sarah’smemory, though the “scrubby vegetation, the smell of the earth, the feel of the subtropical air, the haunting bird cries” keep her grounded in her new reality. Sarah comes to understand that an immigrant child has no “tradition of place.” She strives to create a sense of belonging for her own children.
Krummeck includes letters faxed to her in South Africa from her husband Douglas in their soon-to-be-shared home in Virginia. Penned during an interlude of forced separation preceding her immigration, we hear echoes of the love present in letters sent from George to Sarah on his trips away from the mission station. In doing so, she lovingly expresses the very real needs of her husband’s keening to “be of use,” having accepted the role of passenger on the journey, balanced with her own trepidations.
During her citizenship ceremony, the judge instructs Krummeck to “never lose the unique cultures that you have brought from your countries. They contribute to the rich tapestry of America.” Later in her narrative, Krummeck notes the “strange dislocation of displacement, the sense that…we are always an other.” In detailing the process of obtaining citizenship, Krummeck points out that the rigors of the process often result in new citizens having a firmer grasp on American history than those of use who passed through the U.S. education system.
Krummeck graciously admits confusion with regard to American currency, the dollar bills “so confusingly alike” and the dime being more valuable than the larger nickel, and a guileless idealism not necessarily common to all citizens, be they naturalized or born. The rise of xenophobia following the tragedies of September 11, 2001, and the disappointing results of the 2016 presidential election tarnish the shine on her adopted country, but these events also harden her resolve to heed the judge’s words, to never let go of her own past. This desire is the driving force of Krummeck’s words and is elegantly rendered in both Beyond the Baobob and Old New Worlds. The latter begins and ends, in essence, on the back of the hadeda ibis, whose “raucous call” signals both a departure and a homecoming for its author.
