IN HER OWN WORDS

Charmaine Craig…

In Her Own Words

The Good Men was inspired by the inquisition waged by the medieval Catholic Church against heresy. While time and place separate me from the villagers on whom I have based my characters, the religious persecution they faced is a subject that is not foreign to me. I was raised on tales of ancestors spurned, incarcerated, or made to flee for their religious beliefs. My father, the storyteller of our family, instilled in my brother, sister, and me a sense of mystery and greatness about the past, and a pride in our ancestors who had fought and suffered for the sake of religious liberty.

My father's grandfather, twelve generations back, was William Bradford, who sailed on the Mayflower and served as governor of Plymouth colony and its historian. Governor Bradford and other Separatists from the village of Scrooby in the English Midlands were a radical strain of Puritans. They wanted to secede from the Church of England and believed that each congregation should function independently. Their government in Plymouth was based on the idea that people could make covenants under the eyes of God without the sanction of a higher authority-a concept not so different from that preached by the Good Men in the Pyrenees of the early fourteenth century.

According to family legend, Governor Bradford's great-granddaughter, from whom my family is descended, married a man whose own forefathers had fled France because of religious persecution. Called heretics, or Huguenots, these forefathers had been members of a church established by John Calvin in France. They believed in the right of the individual to interpret Scripture, and the ability of men and women to achieve salvation without the mediation of the Church. "Heresy is in our blood," my father has often told me.

Fascinated as my father is with the rebelliousness of his own ancestors, he is even more passionate about the history of my mother's family. Her father came from a line of Sephardic Jews who, during the sixteenth century, fled the Inquisition in Spain and Portugal for the tropical port town of Cochin, on the Malabar Coast in India. One of my grandfather's ancestors, a doctor, is said to have saved the life of the local raja's son. In return, the raja deeded him and his progeny a plot of land next to his palace, where they went on to build a synagogue and thrive for centuries.

My mother's father was born into a community of Jews in Rangoon, orphaned at an early age, and sent to Calcutta to be raised by an aunt, who sent him to a local Church of England boarding school to be educated. Always a romantic, my grandfather fell in love with the hymns sung in the chapel and with the mystery of the Christ story. Although both of his grandfathers had been rabbis, he converted to Christianity at age fourteen and was soon cast out from his own outcast family, who uttered death prayers on his behalf and stripped him of his Jewish name.

In time, my grandfather went to work for the British customs service as an officer in Burma, then a province of British India. In a seaport town, he fell in love with my maternal grandmother, similarly a member of a religious and racial minority. Burma is, and was, predominantly Buddhist and ethnically Burman, and surrounded on three sides by mountain regions where minority groups-including the Karen, my grandmother's race-have lived and escaped the racial discrimination that has long marked the country's history. The Karen are traditionally animist, but in the early 1800's, the famous American Baptist missionary Adoniram Judson penetrated the jungle and converted a significant number of Karen to his faith. My grandmother was a product of the marriage of animism and Christianity; she believed in the spirits of the earth and the divinity of Christ.

I am certain that part of what brought my grandparents together was their shared minority status in Burma, a status that subsequently caused them much suffering. During World War II, and then later, during the Burmese civil war, in which the Karen battled not only to obtain equal rights but also to preserve their race (a war that continues to this day), my grandfather was repeatedly imprisoned and tortured. Later, my mother's first husband, a Karen brigadier general, was assassinated during "peace talks." My mother went on to command his troops before marrying my father and leaving for America.

I have lived with these stories all my life, and the voices of the deposed medieval villagers of the Pyrenees have seemed closer to me in consequence: more resonant, more personal, reaching beyond the barriers of language and culture and time.