Character Analysis
Misery Loves Company
Our narrator meets Catherine Weldon in an unconventional way: across time, through the pages of a book. He's actively questing for characters while nursing a broken heart during a bitter New England winter. She seems like the perfect girl for him, giving him exactly what he needs at that desperate time—a story that's much worse than his own:
When one grief afflicts us we choose a sharper grief
in hope that enormity will ease affliction,
so Catherine Weldon rose in high relief
through the thin page of a cloud, making a fiction
of my own loss. I was searching for characters,
and in her shawled voice I heard the snow that would be blown
when the wind covered the trails of the Dakotas (XXXV.iii.181)
In Weldon's life experiences—as an activist for the Native American Indian community and companion/secretary to Sitting Bull—Walcott finds ultimate suffering. She loses several marriages and a young son, and witnesses the destruction of a culture she's tried desperately to save. Her empathy for the Native American community further isolates her from society, while the Wounded Knee Massacre leaves her without beloved friends.
While Walcott draws parallels between the violent experiences of Native Americans with those of various African tribes in the "New World," Weldon and her companions represent a kind of despair that Walcott and his characters only flirt with in this text. The cultural devastation and loss of personal and tribal identity that threatens the African community has actually come to pass for Native American Indians in this text.
Interestingly, this ultimate suffering is what draws Walcott's inward gaze out into the world. Weldon's letters, her story, and Walcott's empathetic imagination send him on a journey through the Deep South and across the world, where he hears and sees her sorrow in other cultures. By witnessing Weldon's devotion, Walcott is reminded of the true motivation for his poetry: love for his people.
Catherine Weldon's Timeline