in a derelict lobster canning factory in New Hampshire, the team interviewed an elderly woman residing here in Passamaquoddy. She said her great-grandfather told a story about transporting people to Canada—mostly women—on a fishing boat. He’d even kept a map of the area that the great-granddaughter gifted to us, saying she was about to throw out that old junk so no one would have to tidy it up after she was dead.
I’ll just bring up a slide of this map.
Using the laser pointer, I will now trace the most likely route taken by our two young refugees: by car to here, by bus to here, by pickup truck to here, by motorboat to here, and then on the Nellie J. Banks to this beach near Harbourville, Nova Scotia. From there they appear to have been airlifted to a refugee processing and medical centre on Campobello Island, New Brunswick.
Our team of students next visited Campobello Island, and on it the summer home built by the family of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the nineteenth century within which the refugee centre was temporarily located. Gilead wished to sever any ties with this edifice, and blew up the causeway from the Gilead mainland to prevent any land-based escapes by those hankering after more democratic ways. The house went through some rough times in those days but has since been restored and is run as a museum; regrettably, much of the original furniture has vanished.
Our two young women may have spent at least a week in this house, as by their own accounts both were in need of treatment for hypothermia and exposure, and, in the case of the younger sister, for sepsis due to an infection. While searching the building, our enterprising young team discovered some intriguing incisions in the woodwork of a second-storey windowsill.
Here they are on this slide—painted over but still visible.
This is an N, for “Nicole” perhaps—you can trace the upstroke, here—and an A, and a G: could these refer to “Ada” and “Garth”? Or does the A point to “Agnes”? There is a V—for “Victoria”?—slightly below it, here. Over here, the letters AL, referring possibly to the “Aunt Lydia” of their testimonies.
Who was the mother of these two half-sisters? We know there was a fugitive Handmaid who was an active field agent with Mayday for some years. After surviving at least two assassination attempts, she worked for some years under triple protection at their intelligence unit near Barrie, Ontario, which posed as an organic hemp products farm. We have not definitively excluded this individual as the author of the “Handmaid’s Tale” tapes found in the footlocker; and, according to that narrative, this individual had at least two children. But jumping to conclusions can lead us astray, so I depend on future scholars to examine the matter more closely, if possible.
For the use of interested parties—at the moment, an opportunity available only to symposium attendees, though, depending on funding, we hope to extend it for the benefit of a broader readership—my colleague Professor Knotly Wade and I have prepared a facsimile edition of these three batches of materials, which we have interleaved in an order that made approximate narrative sense to us. You can take the historian out of the storyteller, but you can’t take the storyteller out of the historian! (Laughter, applause.) We have numbered the sections to aid in searches and references: needless to say, no such numbers appear on the originals. Copies of the facsimile may be requested at the registration desk; no more than one each, please, as supplies are limited.
Travel well on your journey into the past; and while you are there, ponder the meaning of the cryptic windowsill markings. I will confine myself to suggesting that the correspondence of the initial letters to several key names in our transcripts is highly evocative, to say the least.
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I will conclude with one more fascinating piece of the puzzle.
The group of slides I am about to show you portrays a statue located at present on the Boston Common. Its provenance suggests it is not from the Gilead period: the name of the sculptor corresponds to that of an artist who was active in Montreal some decades after the collapse of Gilead, and the statue must have been transferred to its present position some years after the post-Gilead chaos and subsequent Restoration of the United States of America.
The inscription would appear to name the principal actors cited in our materials. If this is so,