Kaleidoscope Eyes
Page 14
promised I would, I say a prayer for Janis Joplin
—and Denise.
I take my kaleidoscope off the shelf,
look through the little hole at the end
of the cardboard tube;
I turn and turn and turn and turn,
letting the crystals shift into strange
and beautiful patterns, letting the pieces fall
wherever they will.
Although this is primarily a work of fiction, the following is a list of places and people in the story that were drawn from real life:
Willowbank, New Jersey: This fictional town is a composite of the many small South Jersey boroughs that, as a child, I remember passing through on our family’s annual pilgrimage to the shore. Today, many of them still experience a several-mile backlog of weekend traffic as tens of thousands of visitors make their way to the beach from New York and Philadelphia.
Tuckahoe, New Jersey: This actual South Jersey town lies about ten miles northwest of Ocean City, New Jersey. It has a rich history dating from the time of the Lenape Indians, who named it for one of their favored foods, a breadlike vegetable substance that they found at the base of trees (see www.tuckahoenj.com/history.html).
Brigantine, New Jersey: Formerly known as East Atlantic City, Brigantine lies several miles northeast of Atlantic City on its own island. Its lighthouse, which was built to attract tourists, is well known as a New Jersey Shore land-mark. The Brigantine Beach Historical Museum & Society established in 1992 provides a wonderful Web site (see bibliography) and information on the town’s history, including pirate anecdotes and legends. The scenes that take place in the Brigantine Historical Society in this book, however, are largely fictional and are based on my visits to various archives, libraries, and historical societies in the course of my research for biographies and novels.
Mullica River: If you look at a New Jersey map, you will discover this river flowing southeastward across the lower portion of the state before emptying into the Great Bay, just north of Atlantic City. The Mullica’s tributaries include about two dozen smaller creeks, which join it throughout thousands of acres of rich wetlands. The river provides drainage for the extensive Pinelands region of southern New Jersey, is easy to navigate, and remains popular today with fishermen, kayakers, and canoeists.
In this story, however, I was inspired by an incident that occurred in the mid-1800s on the Missouri River, which I’d first read about in Smithsonian magazine (December 2006). The article described how, in 1987 and 1988, a father and son located and excavated a steamship loaded with valuable cargo, which they believed had sunk in 1856 after hitting a submerged tree. Over the years, as the Missouri River shifted course, the steamship Arabia became buried under a Kansas cornfield (see the bibliography for more on this). I became fascinated with the idea of buried treasure and shifting rivers and incorporated both of these motifs into Kaleidoscope Eyes.
Princeton, New Jersey, and Princeton University: This lovely, history-rich town and its outstanding university do, of course, exist, and McCormick Hall currently houses the Art & Archaeology Department. Professor Trent Taylor and the scenes in this story that take place at Princeton are fictional, however.
Janis Joplin: Born and raised in Port Arthur, Texas, Janis Joplin rose to fame as a singer-songwriter in the early 1960s. As the lead singer of the blues-rock group Big Brother and the Holding Company, Janis performed in concert halls and at music festivals across the country from 1963 to 1970. Like her songs, Janis was intense and rebellious, qualities that endeared her to her fans and made her an entertainment icon of the sixties. Sadly, Janis developed a serious drug and alcohol problem, which she couldn’t overcome. She died of a heroin overdose in 1970, at age twenty-seven.
Captain William Kidd: The main biographical information in this story regarding the captain is accurate. Kidd began his career as a respectable ship’s captain, then became a privateer (commander of a private warship sent out by the government to attack enemy vessels) and finally a somewhat reluctant pirate who had hopes of returning to his quiet family life after several years of plundering. While I found no evidence that he ever sailed up the Mullica River with his first mate and a treasure chest (see above under “Mullica River”), there is a legend that he buried treasure along the East Coast. According to the Brigantine Beach Historical Museum & Society, Kidd did come ashore there (about twenty-five miles from the treasure in this story) to bury treasure in the late 1690s, and he is reputed to have killed his first mate, Timothy Jones, after doing so. That treasure has never been found. Because pirates were secretive, most left little or no written record of their various journeys and activities. The ship’s-log entries in my story are therefore fictional, even though the historical facts of Kidd’s life are not.
An amazing discovery was made about Captain Kidd while I was writing this book. In December 2007, the wreck of Kidd’s ship the Quedagh Merchant was discovered in shallow water off the island of Catalina in the Dominican Republic. It appears that Kidd left the Merchant, which he and his crew had stolen from a powerful nobleman off the coast of India, in the care of his crew in the Caribbean and took a lighter, faster ship up the east coast of America (which was still in its colonial period) to try to clear his name and return to his family.
As of 2009, the wreck is being explored, its contents protected and inventoried. For further information, go to www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/12/071213162036.htm.
About Captain William Kidd, Pirates, and Buried Treasure:
Bordewich, Fergus M. “Pay Dirt.” Smithsonian, December 2006.
Garwood, Val. The World of the Pirate. New York: Peter Bedrick Books, 1997.
Hawley, Greg. Treasure in a Cornfield: The Discovery and Excavation of the Steamship Arabia. Kansas City, MO: Paddle Wheel Publishing, 1998.
Platt, Richard. Pirate (Eyewitness Books series). London: DK Publishing, 1994.
Zacks, Richard. The Pirate Hunter: The True Story of Captain Kidd. New York: Hyperion, 2002.
www.brigantinebeachnj.com/history_pirates.html
www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/Scotland-History/CaptainKidd.htm
www.nationalgeographic.com/pirates
www.piratemuseum.com/pirate.html
www.pirates-of-nassau.com/home.htm
About the Vietnam War:
Clinton, Catherine. The Black Soldier: 1492 to the Present. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000.
Edelman, Bernard, ed. Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1985.
Isserman, Maurice. Vietnam War. New York: Facts on File, 2003.
The Vietnam War with Walter Cronkite (DVD). Marathon Music & Video, 2003.
www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/vietnam/antiwar.html
www.oakton.edu/user/~wittman/chronol.htm
About 1968 and the 1960s Culture and Music:
Holland, Gini. A Cultural History of the United States Through the Decades: The 1960s. San Diego: Lucent Books, 1998.
McWilliams, John C. The 1960s Cultural Revolution. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000.
The Sixties: The Years That Shaped a Generation (DVD). PBS Home Video, 2005.
This Fabulous Century: 1960–1970. Time-Life Books, 1970.
www.officialjanis.com
www.rockhall.com/inductee/janis-joplin
www.stg.brown.edu/projects/1968
I am deeply grateful to the following individuals for their guidance, support, and expertise:
Joan Slattery, senior executive editor at Knopf, and Allison Wortche, assistant editor at Knopf, whose keen sense of structure and scene helped me to shape the many threads of this story into a single historical mystery; Fergus M. Bordewich, whose wonderful article “Pay Dirt,” which I first read in the December 2006 issue of Smithsonian magazine, piqued my interest in modern treasure hunting; and Richard Zacks, whose meticulously researched and most entertaining book The Pirate Hunter: The True Story of Captain Kidd provided me with a thorough understanding of the life and times of the infamo
us sailor. And also to the following for their patient and generous assistance in clarifying the rules concerning museum acquisitions and abandoned-property rights: Greg Landrey, fellow Gettysburg College alumnus and Director of the Library, Collections Management, and Academic Programs at Winterthur Museum & Country Estate in Delaware; Beth Parker Miller and Onie Rollins, also of Winterthur; Mark Falzini, Archivist at the New Jersey State Police Museum & Learning Center; and Tim Decker, Collections Manager, New Jersey Historical Society. Maddy Oberholtzer’s artistic eye and Diane Gies’ research expertise were also very helpful. And finally, thanks to my husband, Neil, and to my daughter, Leigh, for putting up with my scattered rough drafts, my notes scribbled on napkins, my many piles of books, and my quirky imagination. I couldn’t do this job without you.
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical and public figures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical and public figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are largely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the largely fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2009 by Jennifer Bryant
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bryant, Jennifer.
Kaleidoscope eyes / Jen Bryant.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: In 1968, while the Vietnam War rages, thirteen-year-old Lyza inherits a project from her deceased grandfather, who was using his knowledge of maps and the geography of Lyza’s New Jersey hometown to locate the lost treasure of Captain Kidd.
eISBN: 978-0-375-85365-4
[1. Novels in verse. 2. Maps—Fiction. 3. Research—Fiction. 4. Buried treasure—Fiction. 5. Single-parent families—Fiction. 6. Vietnam War, 1961–1975—Fiction. 7. Family life—New Jersey—Fiction. 8. New Jersey—History—20th century—Fiction. 9. Mystery and detective stories.] I. Title.
PZ7.5.B792Kal 2009
[Fic]—dc22
2008027345
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