Witch of Blackbird Pond

Elizabeth George Speare’s The Witch of Blackbird Pond shows the maturation process of a young girl from Barbados. Kit’s life in Barbados is shattered when her grandfather dies. As a result of his death, Kit is forced to leave the island and her carefree lifestyle. She travels to Connecticut to find her only living relatives.   Once she reaches Connecticut her persona evolves from an island girl, to hard worker, and finally to wife.


        Kit is a young island girl who is running away from her problems. She is escaping from the only home she has ever known and leaving behind her soon to be lover, Nat in order to get away from a man she does not wish to marry. Kit tells Mercy that she does not want to marry him because he is much older then she is,   “He was fifty years old, and he had pudgy red fingers with too many rings on them. You see Mercy why I couldn’t write” (pg 47).   She makes up her mind and runs to a family whom she has never met, without even writing to them. Once she reaches Connecticut, Kit is disappointed at the first sight of land,   “The bleak line of shore surrounding the gray harbor was a disheartening contrast to the shimmering green and white that fringed the turquoise bay of Barbados which was her home.” (Pg 7)


        Once she reaches her aunt and uncle’s house it is a huge culture shock for her.   In Connecticut everyone does his or her part and helps with the housework, where as in Barbados, there are people who do that for you.   Kit must learn how to be of some use to the family. “By the end of the day the word useful had taken an alarming meaning.” (Pg 42) She also has to attend Puritan meetings regularly, something that she never had to do before. “The puritan service seems to her as plain and unlovely as the bare board walls of the meeting house” (pg 52). While at meeting she is called upon by a wealthy young man, William Ashby; once again in an...