Brian Moore’s Black Robe

2,002 words

Brian Moore’s 1985 novel Black Robe thankfully slipped through the cracks of political correctness. It tells the story of French missionary Paul Laforgue, who travels to the Canadian wilderness in the early seventeenth century to bring Christianity to the indigenous Savages of North America. Yes, Moore capitalizes that term when describing the Indians because, according to his research, this is the very term (les Sauvages) the French used back then. Moore explains this in his author’s note, along with the circuitous manner in which he stumbled upon this fascinating subject (from Graham Greene’s Collected Essays, to Francis Parkman’s The Jesuits of North America written in 1867, to The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, a 73-volume collection of letters written by the Jesuit monks themselves when living among the Savages in North America).

Laforgue seems to be based on Isaac Jogues, a young French initiate at the Society of Jesus in Roen, France who trekked to the New World in 1636 with the expressed purpose of becoming a martyr. Where some true-believing crusaders may have sought immortal glory in battle against the infidel Saracens, these Jesuits sought a similar glory in sainthood while converting and baptizing the godless heathens. Moore does not shy away from showing how easily sainthood could be achieved by an unarmed priest — known as blackrobes by their hosts — who sought cohabitation with the Algonquin Indians. We should keep in mind that this was back when Quebec was a mere fort of huts and palisades, a hub in the newly-established fur trade.

Aside from extreme weather, wild animals, endless toil, and nauseating living conditions, so-called friendly Indians could become not-so-friendly at any moment, for any reason. Meanwhile, the downright unfriendly — and inhumanly cruel — Iroquois were always lurking in the forest somewhere. They were at war with the white man and the Algonquin, which meant that if they found you, a rosary and crucifix were not going to save you from a long, torturous death.

Moore’s novel is a masterwork of documentary narrative. All historical fiction must bring us back in time and invite us to inhabit a world both familiar and strange — and make it so we don’t want to leave. Black Robe certainly accomplishes this, being about history while not reading like a history book, but keeping it real nonetheless. Having read John O’Brien’s Saints of the American Wilderness, an excellent history of this very topic, I can attest that the details of Indian life during this time are portrayed correctly and never glossed over. The Indian’s superstition, cruelty, mendacity, squalor, cannibalism, promiscuity, and vulgarity, as well as his peculiar honor and virtue — it’s all there. This breezy, 250-page story is probably the most entertaining introduction one can find to this underreported chapter of history.

Moore does indulge in a few hackneyed bestseller tropes to move his story long, and he asks us to suspend our disbelief a bit too much in places. He could have also worked harder to resolve subplots and fleshing out themes. Small portions of the story get gratuitously pornographic as well. As far as novels go, Black Robe has its limitations, but this shouldn’t discourage fans of historical fiction — or bestsellers — from getting a lot out of it.

Laforgue is being sent on a 1,500-mile journey upriver with a band of Algonquin to replace a priest who has recently died in a remote village. Accompanying him is Daniel, a young, spirited non-believer who is roiled in a lusty romp with Annuka, the beautiful daughter of the Algonquin elder Chomina. Daniel is supposed to aid Laforgue while training to become a priest himself, but prepares to ditch the blackrobe if he is forced to choose between him and his sexy cinnamon girl. What he doesn’t know is that Chomina is torn between accepting him as a son in-law or burying a hatchet in his head.

Meanwhile, the cynical and bigoted Indian chieftain Neehatin plans to ditch Laforgue regardless, despite all the gifts the commandant gave him back in Quebec in return for Laforgue’s safe passage. Neehatin does not particularly care for white people — whom he dismissively refers to as “Normans” — even though they are technically Algonquin allies against the hated Iroquois. Wiser is Chomina, who sees Neehatin’s double cross as dishonorable and self-defeating, but at the same time despises the whites for their greed and selfishness. He also cannot understand how the blackrobe can eschew the divine nature of dreams and the vengeful spirits of the forest for a distant God who can only help you after you’ve died. Is this Christianity a mere sorcery of death?

The mischievous and cunning hunchback Mestigoit is the tribe’s sorcerer, technically a demon “who had entered a woman and had been born through her cunt.” He probably doesn’t believe all that magic forest mumbo-jumbo the others believe, but in any event sees Laforgue as competition and would like nothing better than to goad him into committing some kind of faux pas which would get him cast out or killed.

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For his part, Laforgue struggles with his faith — not only in God, but in these pagan savages he must tempt death to convert. Is it all for nothing? Or if a missionary wishes to convert these people, must he allow them to convert him in some way as well? For example, should he become as much a medicine man or shaman who can predict the weather or cure disease as a man of God offering forgiveness and salvation? This would accrue more converts, certainly. But wouldn’t it also make the missionary less Christian and the Indians hardly Christian at all?

This is essentially the novel’s setup. Without divulging any spoilers, I can say that Moore uses these disparate characters and the conflicting themes they represent to effectively fuel the plot’s urgency as the group paddles upriver and deals with disease, the elements, treachery, and – terrifyingly — the Iroquois.

While the plot is perfectly serviceable, what the novel has going for it beyond its impeccable research and detail is an ethnocentric heart. At all times, whites and Indians are very different. Yes, there are some whites in Black Robe who go native, like Daniel. And yes, Chomina evinces a noble universality of thought which is completely foreign to the other Indians in the story. But there’s never any real hope that one people can become truly like the other. Thus, political correctness is entirely absent in Black Robe. Laforgue serves as a prism that distorts the light coming from both directions so that true rapprochement becomes impossible. His tradition is Christian, but his perspective is purely European and civilized. He fears that he could never raise these people out of the muck.

It turns out that the muck might be more suitable for them after all. Chomina, the most sympathetic Indian in the story, says it best when Laforgue promises him paradise after death:

“What paradise? A paradise for Normans?”

“No. For you. For all who are baptized.”

“But my people are not baptized with this water sorcery. Therefore, they are not in your paradise. Why would I want to go to a paradise where there are none of my people?”

Towards the end of the story, Laforgue and another monk the Indians call Andehoua attempt to convert a number of Indians during a plague, and have the following conversation with two Indians named Aenons and Ondesson:

“We cannot do these things,” Aenons said. He looked at the other Blackrobe. “Andehoua, I thought of you as my friend, but fuck it, don’t you see? If we do these things, and if we give up our belief in the dream, then the Huron life, the way we have always known, will end for us.”

“You will have no need of your former life,” the Blackrobe said. “You will have a new life, as Christians. You will worship the true God and forget these childish notions which now fill your heads. When you die you will go to paradise.”

“I want to live, not to die,” said Ondesson. “And I do not want to have a wife like a burden on my back when I no longer wish to live with her. You are Normans. Your ways are not our ways. Why do you not respect that we serve different gods and that we cannot live as you do?”

Later, this Aenons offers some race-realist wisdom to Laforgue:

“Shit, man, I was a good friend to Andehoua, and it grieves me that he was killed. But listen, Blackrobe. I am speaking against you today. You and your god do not suit our people. Your ways are not our ways. If we adopt them we will be neither Norman not Huron. And soon our enemies will know our weakness and wipe us from the earth.”

This is downright prophetic, because it was essentially what happened to the Huron vis-à-vis the Iroquois during the seventeenth century. It was also the same conclusion I drew while reviewing Saints of the American Wilderness:

Yes, there were Indians — Hurons especially — who responded to the call of Christ and behaved impeccably. And good for them. But in Saints of the American Wilderness, these were always in the minority — and they could never resist non-Christian tribes when their hackles were up and the chips were down. This hints at something beyond O’Brien’s text which may be of greater importance than what is in his text: namely, that perhaps the Jesuits did more harm than good to the Huron by Christianizing them. Perhaps by offering them the niceties of Western Civilization, they softened the Huron and introduced traits which would prove maladaptive in the American wilderness. Perhaps because of this, the Huron were less able to compete with the Iroquois in the state of nature when life is, in the famous words of Thomas Hobbes, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

To his immense credit, Moore gives an account of exactly how nasty, brutish, and short life gets once Laforgue, Daniel, Chomina, and his family get captured by the Iroquois. After slaughtering Chomina’s youngest child like a pig and then dismembering him,

[t]wo of the warriors at once seized and held Laforgue. Kiotsaeton took from his belt a razor sharp clam shell. Taking Laforgue’s left hand he pulled on the index finger; then, using the clam shell like a saw, cut to the bone. He sawed through the bone and pulled the skin and gristle free. He held up the finger joint. The crowd roared and cheered. He threw the piece of finger into the cooking kettle. In excruciating pain, Laforgue fell to his knees and then, in a scene so terrible that it surpassed horror or pity or forgiveness or rage, he saw three older women take from the cooking kettle the limbs of the dead child and pass them, parboiled, to the warriors who had captured Chomina’s party. The warriors paraded up and down before Chomina and his daughter, eating up the flesh as though it were succulent meat. The girl vomited on the ground.

The torture depicted in Saints of the American Wilderness gets far worse than this. But it is no worse than what Kiotsaeton promises will happen to Laforgue and the others over the next few hellish days — that is, if our protagonists cannot find an ingenious way to escape.

In representing the Indians in their own savage milieu so accurately, Moore makes them sympathetic even in their barbarism, simply because they cannot help being who they are. With vanishingly few exceptions, these people did not eat to live, they lived to eat. This is how God made them, and it marks their greatest difference with the whites, who could produce such broad-minded and disciplined individuals as Father Paul Laforgue. Despite this, it is the zealous Christian missionaries such as Laforgue who appear foolish when they try to alter God’s plan as if they know better. That Laforgue begins to realize this as the book concludes makes Black Robe much more than the mere bestseller it attempts to be.