When the voice of an 18th-century French Jesuit missionary came into Molly McNett’s head, she didn’t know exactly what to do with him. How would he fit into the novel she was beginning to weave, a piece of fiction inspired by historical captivity narratives set in the colonial Americas? But the more she researched and wrote, the more this Catholic priest began to feel like one of the most integral parts of the story she wanted to tell. 

The voice would become Simon Floquart, S.J., a central character in McNett’s 2025 novel Child of These Tears. Father Floquart’s perspective is featured alongside narration from the young voice of Constance Baker, an English girl abducted by members of the Mohawk tribe, as well as several other figures who shape her world, including Constance’s English parents and the Mohawk tribe members who take her in. 

Real people with stories like that of Constance Baker and her mother, Sarah, first sparked McNett’s interest in writing a book like Child of These Tears. While in school, she had read primary-source captivity narratives like that of Mary Rowlandson, an English colonial woman who had recorded the story of her capture in 1676 by Native Americans in The Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson. The intensity of these stories, and their unique literary format, stayed with McNett for years. Eventually, she began to think about how to adapt this genre in her own writing. 

McNett delved into research, determined to develop a meaningful understanding of a historical era in which she was not an expert. One major resource was the 1994 historical nonfiction book The Unredeemed Captive, written by the historian John Demos. The book offers a detailed account of the raid by Mohawks on the English colony of Deerfield, Mass., in 1704. In a video-call interview with America, McNett described The Unredeemed Captive as a “point of departure” for the story that would become Child of These Tears. 

The Unredeemed Captive focuses on the plight of a girl named Eunice Williams who was captured by Native Americans along with members of her family and community. Williams assimilated into Mohawk culture with guidance from a French Catholic priest. When given the opportunity to return to her surviving biological family members and her English community, Williams—who by that time was known by the name Marguerite Kanenstenhawi—decided to stay with her Mohawk community. 

Like the historical Marguerite Kanenstenhawi, Constance’s identity becomes complicated throughout the novel as her name and language habits evolve with time. She adopts the name Skentsiese and then also Marie-Ange, titles given to her by the Mohawks who adopt her and the Catholic priest who ministers to her, respectively. 

As her stay with the Mohawks in French Canada lengthens, so too does her receptivity to Father Floquart’s Catholic teachings grow. Toward the end of the book, the young girl is caught between the desires of the Puritan community, which wants to take her back to their colony, and those of her own heart, which urge her to stay with the Mohawk people who have become her family. As she struggles with feeling lost, torn between cultures and identities, the young girl experiences a distressing dream in which she struggles to “find her way home.” It is the presence of Father Floquart in her dream, holding a golden monstrance, that brings her comfort and allows her to realize she need not worry because she is “already home.” 

Missionary Records

In comparison with the voice of Constance, which McNett described as “the hardest part of the book for me to write,” she said Father Floquart came to her most easily. “Sometimes when you’re writing, you feel like something’s just given to you,” she said. “You don’t have to struggle for it. It just comes.” 

But McNett also consulted sources that helped ensure that Father Floquart would be a realistic representation of the Jesuit priests of his time. She described reading and enjoying much of the Jesuit Relations, a published compilation of French Jesuit missionary reports from the 17th- and 18th-century colonial world. 

It wasn’t necessarily the holiness of these missionaries that struck her, she said, but rather their profound humanness. “[There are] a lot of requests for comfort and things that might make life there more palatable,” in the correspondence, she said. “So you have these men who are very devout and who’ve given their lives over to these missions. And yet at the same time, they’re not completely comfortable in [their] setting. And they’re wrestling with that.” 

Similarly, she said, the missionaries often expressed their irritation with the Native people they were sent to minister to. “[The priests] aren’t afraid to show their humanness, their minor irritations,” she said. “I might have thought, before I read them, that these letters would be written to make [the priests] look good, to say ‘I did this, and I converted this many people.’ And they did say that, but they were also very frank about their human feelings.” 

In particular, she cited the writing of the real Jesuit named Joseph-François Lafitau, who published a work called Customs of the American Savages, Compared With the Customs of Ancient Times in 1724. The account is based on Lafitau’s own experience working as a missionary in French Canada in the early 18th century. McNett said reading Lafitau’s work offered a “feeling of security” about the accuracy of Father Floquart’s character, since Child of These Tears is set “right near the time period that he wrote about” and because “he did write about the Mohawk.” 

Holy Suffering

One of the most frequently recurring themes in Father Floquart’s narrations is his fixation on the notion of holy suffering. “I think the priest really wants suffering, desires it,” McNett said. She explained: 

He has these examples of…martyrs who have suffered these terrible things and they’re famous by this time. So there’s stories of [people] having their tongues cut out and still praying and so on. These things are sort of a burden for him. Can he live up to this kind of sacrifice and suffering? He feels that perhaps his faith isn’t true until it’s been tested in this kind of way. So there’s this sort of craving for it. At the same time, he loves comfort, so he’s not sure that he would be worthy of it…but he desires it.

Father Floquart is not the only character in Child of These Tears who views suffering through a spiritual lens. Sarah Baker, Constance’s mother, suffers perhaps more than any other central character in the book, enduring her own capture, the loss of her children and concerns over her husband, John, who is emotionally and mentally drained by the destruction of his family. Sarah’s descriptions of her traumatic experiences, McNett explained, are highly colored by her Puritan attitude. “She certainly sees everything that happens as God’s will. This is her interpretation of everything: What does God want from me in this situation?” 

As McNett pointed out, there are moments when this unquestioning piety seems unbelievable, and perhaps in those moments “there might be some distance between what she’s saying and what she’s feeling,” such as when her child dies and she thanks God for “taking the child back into the fold.” But McNett said that this language came straight from real letters and Puritan writings. “It was common for children to die in childhood,” she said, speaking about the challenge of living as a Puritan colonist, “and this was very common, to talk about it in that way, to immediately give thanks for the death of the child because the child would now be taken back to the fold”—in other words, to heaven. 

Readers also get some glimpses of the Puritan faith and culture through the voice of John Baker, Constance’s father. The chapters told from his perspective mostly take the form of a “commonplace book”—a collection of thoughts, notes, advice and excerpts from other published texts. For John Baker, these often include ideas from famous philosophers, sermons from Puritan preachers and quotes from Scripture. In the final entry in his commonplace book, written after his daughter refuses to leave the Mohawks and return to the English colony, he cites a famous story about St. Monica and her son, St. Augustine of Hippo. At the time of the story, Augustine had not yet turned toward the faith, and was living “under the sway of the Manicheans.” 

As John explains, Monica went crying to a bishop, begging him to “win her son’s soul for the Lord.” The bishop told Monica that she had no reason to worry. John’s entry includes the famous exchange between the bishop and Monica: “Go your way, said he. It is impossible that the child of these tears should perish.” 

The title of McNett’s novel is lifted from this quotation. When asked about it, McNett connected this story with the plights of the characters in the book, pointing to the fact that when her story ends, Sarah and John Baker are grappling with the loss of their daughter. Although she is still alive, she continues to remain apart from them; so too is their hope for her “salvation” diminished, as she has accepted Mohawk ways and Catholic influence and, in the process, abandoned her Puritan catechism. 

Using this quote as the title was McNett’s “way of saying that no matter how it’s interpreted by Sarah or the other characters in the book, we can be assured that this child is safe.” She felt it represented John Baker choosing to accept this idea and attempting to release his worry and sorrow. “The problem is going to be solved on another plane,” she said, speaking of John’s reckoning with the situation. “That’s kind of what he comes to…. It’s not for him to figure out how [her safety] is possible, but for him to know that it is.” 

These questions of spiritual questioning and reckoning are central to McNett’s interest in characters like those featured in Child of These Tears. “I’m drawn to people of faith,” she said, “I’m drawn to people who are struggling with their faith, trying to define it for themselves, trying to live it in spite of their circumstances.” 

This is true in spite of her own lack of distinct religious identity. “You know, I’m not Catholic. I was raised Protestant, and my nuclear family is Jewish. But I love these Christian writings…. Why that is, I don’t know exactly, but I find I’m less and less interested in things that aren’t wrestling with [these themes].” 

Writing about these things, she said, offers a depth of meaning that she feels “secular ideas” often lack. “I think that this is my way of exploring faith too.” 

Brigid McCabe is America’s assistant editor for digital strategy. She was previously a 2025-2026 O’Hare Fellow.