When Kit arrives in Wethersfield, Connecticut to live with her Aunt Rachel and Uncle Matthew Wood, she immediately feels like an outsider. Disheartened by the bleak landscape and surrounded by strict Puritans, Kit misses vibrant Barbados, where she was raised by her beloved and now-deceased grandfather. Kit struggles to feel at home with the Woods, who require her to do chores for the first time in her life. Kit also has a hard time adjusting to Puritan culture, which she finds restrictive after a childhood of “running free as the wind in a world filled with sunshine.” So, all in all, Kit feels dissatisfied with her new life—until she comes across the Great Meadows, whose “sense of freedom and space and light […] spoke to her of home.” As she falls in love with New England’s natural beauty, Kit also sparks a friendship with Hannah Tupper, a kindly old woman whom Kit feels she can trust with her thoughts and feelings. As the plot develops, Kit continues to build ties, both with the land she lives on and the people she learns to love, from Hannah to the Wood family. Most importantly, Kit falls in love with a sailor named Nat Eaton—she knows that, so long as she can be with Nat, “it wouldn’t matter where [she] went.” With this, the book suggests that home isn’t necessarily tied to a particular location or set of people—regardless of where a person ends up, they can feel at home by forming meaningful relationships with the people and places around them.
Initially, Kit feels homesick for Barbados and misses her grandfather. After the warmth and brilliance of Barbados, New England feels grim and cold to Kit. Not only does Kit miss Barbados’s natural beauty, but she misses vibrant towns as well—Wethersfield is more of a barren settlement than a city. In addition to missing her birthplace and childhood home, Kit misses her grandfather, whom she loved dearly. She looks back on their “happy days on the island,” which were full of reading, conversing, and swimming—none of which she can do in Wethersfield. She associates these fun, freeing activities with Barbados, and she feels homesick for them. Living with the Wood family is very different than living with her grandfather, in part because they expect Kit to work around the house. No one in the family—especially Matthew—pampers or spoils Kit the way her grandfather did in Barbados. Far from the carefree life she knew in Barbados, Kit feels constricted in New England.
But by forming meaningful connections with the people and places around her, Kit begins to feel more at home in New England. The key turning point in Kit’s journey is when she comes across the Great Meadows, an expansive stretch of land in Wethersfield. The Meadows’ beauty enchants her, and their “sense of freedom and space and light […] [speak] to her of home.” This liberation and comfort are what Kit needs to feel at home, and as a result, she begins to feel attached to New England. At the same time, Kit develops friendships with various people in Wethersfield, particularly with Hannah Tupper. With Hannah, Kit feels loved and supported, emotions she has missed since leaving Barbados. Kit’s friendship with Hannah gives her the comfort she craves, and she feels at home in Hannah’s little cottage—so much so that she feels “a pang of homesickness” after an angry mob burns it down. Kit also becomes very attached to the Wood family, especially her cousin Mercy. After Mercy falls ill, Kit chooses to stay behind when Nat offers to take Kit back to Barbados, because she wants to be by Mercy’s side until she recovers. Kit even comes to respect her strict Uncle Matthew and sees him as family as well. But the person Kit loves the most is Nat; the two have a somewhat tumultuous friendship, but they are always loyal to each other. When Kit is with Nat, she often feels “[l]ight as air,” which is “the way [she] used to feel in Barbados.” Their relationship makes her feel free and joyful, the feelings she associates with home.
Because Kit is able to connect with people and places in New England, she decides that she doesn’t want to return to Barbados when given the opportunity. Her realization comes while in the Great Meadows. When she thinks of leaving New England, she feels heartbroken, for she “does not want to leave this place, after all. Suppose she should never walk in the meadows again?” Even though New England isn’t her homeland, Kit has become attached to the Meadows, and they make Connecticut feel like home to her. Furthermore, when Kit thinks about how she may “never sit in the twilight with Mercy, or see Judith in the hew house, or the girl Prudence would grow up to be,” she again feels reluctant to leave New England. Even though these aren’t the family and friends she grew up with, she doesn’t want to leave her new, chosen family behind. Kit’s love for Nat also pushes her to stay. She realizes that “it wouldn’t matter where [she] went”—she will always feel at home with Nat. This realization suggests that the idea of home may not stay the same forever—it isn’t necessarily tied to one specific place or group of people. Rather, where one feels “at home” can change throughout a person’s life, as it does for Kit. For Kit, home is where her loved ones are, and where she feels free, happy, and supported. And in the end, Kit chooses not to move back to Barbados, but to marry Nat, so that she will always be with the person she loves. And as Nat and Kit excitedly plan their future, Kit expresses her desire to have a house in New England, where she can see Hannah and the Woods. In other words, she chooses to stay where she feels at home.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Home and Belonging ThemeTracker
Home and Belonging Quotes in The Witch of Blackbird Pond
“But I thought the Dolphin was your home!”
“In the wintertime it is, when we sail to the West Indies. But I was born in Saybrook, and in the spring I get to hankering for my house and garden. Besides, I’d never let on to my husband, but the summer trips are tedious, just back and forth up and down the river. I stay at home and tend my vegetables and my spinning like a proper housewife. Then, come November, when he sails for Barbados again, I’m ready enough to go with him. ‘Tis a good life, and one of the best things about it is coming home in the springtime.”
“You mean that, just on an impulse, you left your rightful home and sailed halfway across the world?”
“No, it was not an impulse exactly. You see, I really had no home to leave.”
As they came out from the shelter of the trees and the Great Meadows stretched before them, Kit caught her breath. She had not expected anything like this. From that first moment, in a way she could never explain, the Meadows claimed her and made her their own. As far as she could see they stretched on either side, a great level sea of green, broken here and there by a solitary graceful elm. Was it the fields of sugar cane they brought to mind, or the endless reach of the ocean to meet the sky? Or was it simply the sense of freedom and space and light that spoke to her of home?
[Kit] looked about her. “‘Tis a pretty room,” she said without thinking, and then wondered how that could be, when it was so plain and bare. Perhaps it was only the sunlight on boards that were scrubbed smooth and white, or perhaps it was the feeling of peace that lay across the room as tangibly as the bar of sunshine.
“The river is so blue today,” [Kit] said sleepily. “It could almost be the water in Carlisle Bay.”
“Homesick?” asked Nat casually, his eyes on the blue strip of water.
“Not here,” she answered. “Not when I’m in the meadow, or with Hannah.”
As Kit watched, her uncle bent slowly and scooped up a handful of brown dirt from the garden patch at his feet, and stood holding it with a curious reverence, as though it were some priceless substance. As it crumbled through his fingers his hand convulsed in a sudden passionate gesture. Kit backed through the door and closed it softly. She felt as though she had eavesdropped. When she had hated and feared her uncle for so long, why did it suddenly hurt to think of that lonely defiant figure in the garden?
“Or you can go on to the West Indies with us.”
Barbados! The tears sprang to her eyes. “I can’t, Nat. I have to stay here […] ‘Tis Mercy,” she stammered. “She’s terribly ill. I couldn’t go, I just couldn’t, not knowing—”
“‘Tis true I did not welcome you into my house,” [Matthew] said at last. “But this last week you have proved me wrong. You haven’t spared yourself, Katherine. Our own daughter couldn’t have done more.”
Suddenly Kit wished, with all her heart, that she had never deceived this man. She would like to stand here before him with a clear conscience. She was ashamed of the many times—more times than she could count—when she had skipped off and left her work undone.
I shall tell him some day, she vowed to herself, when I am sure that Hannah is safe. And I will do my full share, beginning this very moment. I don’t even feel tired any more.
She tried to remember how it had felt to stand on the deck of the Dolphin and see before her the harbor of Barbados. The haunting joy eluded her; the dream shores were dim and unreal. Why had she closed her heart to the true meaning of the dream? How long had she really known that the piercing happiness of that moment had come not from the sight of the harbor at all, but from the certainty that the one she loved stood beside her?
If only I could go with Nat, she realized suddenly, it wouldn’t matter where we went, to Barbados or just up and down this river. The Dolphin would be home enough.
