Vermont is the only state in the country with a cartoonist laureate, which is a lot like the poet laureate (45 states have one of them), but for fun. In 2023, Tillie Walden became the fifth cartoonist to earn this honor, and at age 26, the youngest cartoonist to receive the award, following such giants as Alison Bechdel (“Fun Home”) and the late New Yorker cartoonist Ed Koren.
One week into his tenure, the executive director of Vermont Humanities Came to Walden with an assignment. There were two women, Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake, who lived in Vermont in the 1800s, and he wanted Walden to write a graphic novel about them.
The size and suddenness of the request took him by surprise. “I’ll draw a 16-page comic for you,” she told him, “but I won’t write the book.”
The cartoonist soon began reading the pair’s poems, letters, and journals, which were stored nearby Henry Sheldon Museum, And read Rachel Hope Cleves’s 2014 biography “Charity and Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America.”
She was tied. Two centuries before same-sex marriage was legalized in the state, Charity and Sylvia devoted themselves to each other for 44 years, living and working together in their shared home in rural Vermont—a home just an hour and a half from where Walden lives and works with his wife, a cartoonist. emma hunsinger.
“They were two women with the same job, my wife and I are two women with the same job,” Walden said. “They lived on a dirt road, we live on a dirt road. They struggled economically, we’re struggling economically.”
The 16-page minicomic became the intensively researched and beautifully rendered “Charity and Sylvia,” believed to be the first graphic novel about a 19th-century couple. The book, coming from Drawn & Quarterly on June 16, is one of the few biographies about gay couples in 1800s America, let alone graphic novels.
What’s even more remarkable is that the couple, both seamstresses, did not hide their relationship from friends, family, or even their pastor, and were welcomed as beloved mentors, aunts, and Sunday school teachers in their small, close-knit community of Weybridge, VT. William Cullen Bryant, distinguished American poet and nephew of Charity, described their union as “For them it is no less sacred than the bond of marriage.”
On a recent afternoon, Walden was in her Vermont home, battling a “kid cold” that she probably got from the couple’s two-year-old son, Walter, and wearing an oversized Joe Burrow T-shirt that she definitely got from her father-in-law, who is a fan of the Bengals quarterback. “I can’t tell you anything about Joe Burrow except that my father-in-law loves him,” she said.
By the age of 30, Walden had written and illustrated a dozen books, two of which won Eisners – the comic book world’s equivalent of a National Book Award, her first award when she was only 22 – and three Ignatz Awards. Her works include “Spinning”, a best-selling graphic novel about her years on the synchronized figure skating team; two YA queer fantasy comics; and a “Walking Dead” spinoff series.
But “Charity and Sylvia” is her first historical graphic novel.
“I didn’t go to college, so the last essay I wrote was probably in 12th grade,” she said. “And I’m no historian, so I had to figure out how to do it.”
For the book, Walden drew heavily from original source material (the couple’s poems and business papers; writings of family members; Cleves’ biography), while also wrestling with things that could never be known (what the two looked like; anything they chose not to write about).
In an early scene, a group of busy people from Charity’s hometown in Massachusetts share what they think of their unconventional neighbor.
“I believe she looks a lot like a man,” says one.
“My mom says he has a lot of women,” says another.
Walden looked to historical novels of the time for dialogue style (Samuel Richardson’s “Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded,” Hannah Webster Foster’s “The Coquette”), and based the sentiments of the messages – the exact words, of course, have been lost to time – on known details about Charity’s life. “Charity actually had a lot of girlfriends before Sylvia,” Walden said.
To the eccentric faces of worried farmers and bonnet-wearing fugitives, Walden looked, secretly, to his own neighbors for help. “I had to do a lot of research on historical clothing, but then I honestly just looked at people around my town,” she said. “I live in a town where there are a lot of elderly people and farmers, so I just stole some faces and then put them into really gaudy bonnets.”
For a love scene early in the book, Walden imagined the two being intimate in a small rented room above a mill, which “smelled of tallow, sawdust, and rain.” Charity and Sylvia never wrote explicitly about their physical relationship in letters or journals, Walden said, but one can speculate. “They shared the same bed for 44 years,” he said. “And a lot has been written about the feeling of sin in the context of the body. I don’t know whose body else they could be talking about.”
The two come together as a group of drunks who sing down “Yankee Doodle”, an erotic song about wielding his extremely large gun, “as big as a log of maple”.
Walden said, “I didn’t want to tell another precious gay love story.” “These women weren’t like that. They were struggling to survive every day, and their favorite person in the world was Jesus Christ.”
Biographer Cleves agreed. He said, “Religion was very central to Charity and Sylvia’s lives, and it is extremely unrelatable to many modern readers.” “I’m impressed by the fact that Tilly is writing a popular book meant to speak to a wide audience, yet she treats religious themes so honestly in her story.”
One of the couple’s few indulgences in life was a double silhouette portrait they bought early in their relationship, and later decorated with locks of her hair intertwined into a single heart. While researching and drawing the book, Walden picked up the painting “several times” and stared at it for inspiration. “This photograph is my biggest gripe, because I basically have a photograph of him, but no description,” he said.
Still, Walden was sure they were both beautiful. He said, “The question is why a literary, more affluent girl like Charity would like a poor peasant girl like Sylvia.” “Sylvia probably had to be really attractive.”
Throughout the book, Walden incorporates historical moments into the narrative. 1811 German coast rebellion (the largest rebellion by enslaved people in American history), and the War of 1812.
“Charity was born in 1777, so she grew old with America and died shortly before the Civil War,” he said. “I thought his connection with American history was too juicy to ignore.”
For Walden, one of the most disturbing things about that period was its frighteningly high death rate. In a pause in the book’s action, she reflects on several family deaths in the same decade, creating disturbing, often horrifying mini-views of what some of the siblings of both women might have gone through.
He said, “It must have been terrible to see five of his siblings die for no reason, and he certainly never got used to it.” “Based on his journals and letters, it devastated him every time, so he basically got devastated, like, once a year or so.”
In one of the book’s final chapters, and one of its most poignant scenes, Charity and Sylvia, now older, sit quietly around their fireplace and sadly toss Charity’s magazines into the flames.
There is no way to know for sure whether this actually happened, but Charity wrote instructions to friends and ex-lovers to burn her letters after reading them, and often felt that her writing was not worthy of public viewing. Sylvia also wrote about keeping a journal for the charity, but never found one.
Walden titled the chapter “The Journals of Charity Bryant” and included the bittersweet parenthesis “What I Have Never Read.” This fact still pains and angers him.
“The charity clearly believed that part of it was embarrassing, but it didn’t need to be that way,” he said. “His magazines would have been celebrated. They would have been appreciated.”
Walden continued, “When I did that parenthesis, it was my way of reaching back in time and shaking it up and saying, I wanted to read this.” “I wanted to know everything about you. But she wouldn’t let us see it.”
