Gilead

Jack is Boughton’s prodigal son. With his black hair and high color, Jack is physically the “spitting image” of Boughton (93). Jack returns home to Gilead at the age of 43 after being gone for 20 years. Despite his checkered past and the embarrassments and disgrace Jack brought on the family, Jack is welcomed back with open arms by his father and his sister Glory. Jack has a deceptively quiet voice and “preacherly” demeanor (which John grumps he did nothing to earn). On first meeting Jack, Della believed he was a man of the cloth.

For most of Gilead, Jack’s characterization is colored by John’s low opinion of him. John describes him as “weary,” “sly,” “tired,” and “lonely” (172, 182). John doesn’t understand Jack’s loneliness because even as a young boy, Jack was unconditionally loved by his large family; “his brothers and sisters would stand up for him no matter what” (183). Yet John sensed a “sadness in the child” (182). Throughout his youth, Jack played pranks—sometimes malicious ones—on John that later escalated to joyriding and stealing liquor.

Jack views John as a kind of surrogate father, going to him for help and counsel because he cannot talk to his own father. Despite growing up in a religious household, Jack says he could never believe a word his poor old father said, and while not an atheist, Jack is in a state of “categorical unbelief” (170)—a concern for Della and her minister father. Jack wishes he could have been like his father and wants to believe he can change. Lila senses that Jack isn’t so “comfortable with himself” (154).

John’s father is a pacifist. He preaches about the lilies of the field, and his favorite verse of scripture is Isaiah 9:5, which commands burning up the armor and garments of warriors for “fuel of fire” (80). He believes that “peace is its own reward. Peace is its own justification” (84). His father’s righteous advocacy of violence for a good cause is anathema to him. Despite the anger he holds toward his father, John’s father is compelled to find his grave and seek forgiveness. He regrets his anger, and in a long final prayer he “asks for the Lord’s pardon, and his father’s as well” (14).

John’s father is disappointed in Edward, who despite—or perhaps because of—his advanced education becomes an atheist. John’s father begins reading Edward’s radical atheistic books “as if he wanted to be persuaded” (177). John’s father is disappointed in John as well, for staying in Gilead, for not making more of himself, and for holding on to old notions, including his faith. John’s father’s own faith diminishes, and he sides with Edward in his opinion about John.

Robinson modeled the character of John’s grandfather after the real-life Congregationalist minister John Todd. Reverend Todd lived in Tabor, Iowa, in the 1850s, and his house served as a station on the Underground Railroad and a storehouse of weapons and supplies for militant abolitionist John Brown.

A vision of the Lord inspires John’s grandfather to be an abolitionist, and he was active in aiding John Brown. He believes that using violence to overturn slavery is sanctioned by the Lord because it is a worthy cause. At the pulpit in a bloody shirt with a pistol in his belt, John’s grandfather whips up his congregation and, John notes, “preached his people into the war” (101). Though John’s father disapproves of the grandfather’s methods, he does give him a back-handed compliment, calling him a “fine preacher in the style of his generation” (46).

John’s grandfather is generally “wild-looking.” He appears to John “stricken and afflicted, and indeed he was, like a man everlastingly struck by lightning” (49). Even his clothing seems ashen. The grandfather lost his right eye in the Civil War, but his remaining eye is “ten times an eye” and makes young John feel “poked by a stick” just from the grandfather’s gaze (31). John feels that his grandfather is full of anger, frustration, and “thwarted passions” (34). The old man has “nowhere to spend his courage, no way to feel it himself” (47). Lacking the patience for fancy interpretations of commandments, the grandfather takes them literally, especially “To him who asks, give” (31), which allows him to steal things to give to those in need.

Lila and John marry when he is 67 and she is “well into her thirties” (136). She comes to John’s church on a rainy Pentecost Sunday and witnesses John baptizing some infants. Lila begins attending services and bible study regularly and asks John to baptize her, which becomes one of John’s dearest memories.

Shy, serious, and soft-spoken, Lila has a “quiet presence” (207). After helping the ladies of the congregation care for John’s house and gardens, she asks him to marry her. John is passionately in love with Lila, rhapsodizing, “That there should be such a voice in the whole world and that I should be the one to hear it, seemed to me then and seems to me now an unfathomable grace” (209).

Lila’s past is a mystery. John suspects that Lila has endured a deep sorrow. She has no family, does not talk about herself, and doesn’t admit to any past grief. John says that is her “courage, her pride” (137). Because John knows that so much courage usually points to past pain, he urges his son to honor his mother with great kindness and gentleness. He compares Lila to Mary Magdalene and senses she has a greater acquaintance with the world than he does (30). Lila shares a little of her prior, more worldly life in a conversation with Jack. She admits that she would like the cigarette he offers, though she doesn’t take it, knowing it is not “seemly” (199). Lila alludes to being broke and looking for work in St. Louis and many other places. She explains that the one thing she always wanted was a settled life (200). Perhaps speaking from experience, she assures Jack that “everything can change” (152).

The role of minister’s wife is a challenge for Lila. John comments that Lila is an “unlikely” (30) preacher’s wife:

 “I never knew anyone in my life with a smaller acquaintance with religion than she had when I first knew her. An excellent woman, but unschooled in Scripture, and in just about everything else, according to her, and that may be true” (67).

Lila works to correct her poor grammar and lack of education by studying and reading books that John recommends, so she can be a good teacher and role model for their son when John is gone.

Young Ames is six years old. He shares his mother’s serious, proud nature, so much so that the old men call him “Deacon” (8). John describes a look his son sometimes gets—like when he was three and trying to fix a broken crayon—that John’s only ever seen on Lila and his grandfather, a look of “half sadness and half fury” (8). The boy has straight dark hair and fair skin. He is “shy of other children” and is often alone, spending his time watching other kids play (29).

Despite his shyness, John’s son makes friends with a Lutheran boy named Tobias. Together they stomp around in the sprinkler, have a sleepover, throw rocks at things, and play war. He enjoys playing with his cat, Soapy, and playing catch with Jack. He loves it when Jack calls him “little brother” (92). We never learn the son’s name.

Robert Boughton is John’s best friend from grade school through seminary and into their old age (38). John fondly remembers their baseball games and the youthful pranks they played. Boughton is a Presbyterian minister, though he hasn’t preached in 10 years. John is a Congregationalist, yet he and Boughton enjoy discussing religious questions and issues (66). Boughton was best man at John’s first wedding and later married John and Lila. He christened John’s infant daughter and named his own son after John.

Even though he is younger than John, Boughton has aged less gracefully. Now a widower, Boughton suffers terribly from arthritis, which makes him cross. He has trouble moving around, and his health is failing. His daughter Glory believes that “he can’t be long for this world” (237).

Jack’s arrival lifts Boughton’s spirits even as it irritates John. Boughton is thrilled to have his prodigal son, “the one his heart yearns for” (242), home. Boughton loves Jack above his other children and forgives him of everything, unconditionally. Yet Boughton doesn’t know much about Jack’s life. He worries about Jack and knows he’s “not right with himself yet” (211). He is frustrated that Jack hasn’t told him or Glory why he came back to Gilead and jealous that Jack opens up more to John and Lila. John is afraid that if he told Boughton about Jack’s family, it would be too much for his fragile state, that he would kill himself trying to follow after, understand, and protect “that one son whom he has never known, whom he has favored as one does a wound” (238).