Vermont is the only state in the country with a cartoonist laureate, which is a lot like a poet laureate (45 states have one of those), but for the funnies. In 2023, Tillie Walden became the fifth cartoonist to earn that honor, and, at 26, the youngest, following such luminaries as Alison Bechdel (“Fun Home”) and the late New Yorker cartoonist Ed Koren.
A week into her term, the executive director of Vermont Humanities came to Walden with an assignment. There were two women, Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake, who had 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 her aback. “I’ll make you a 16-page comic,” she told him, “but I’m not gonna write a book.”
The cartoonist soon began poring through the pair’s poems, letters and journals, which were archived at the nearby Henry Sheldon Museum, and read Rachel Hope Cleves’s 2014 biography “Charity & Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America.”
She was hooked. Two centuries before same-sex marriage was legalized in the state, Charity and Sylvia had committed themselves to each other for life, living and working together for 44 years in a home they shared in rural Vermont — a home just an hour and a half away from the one Walden lives and works in with her own wife, the 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 supposed 16-page minicomic became the intensively researched and beautifully rendered “Charity & Sylvia,” the first graphic novel about the 19th-century couple. Coming from Drawn & Quarterly on June 16, the book is one of the few biographies, let alone graphic novels, about same-sex couples in 1800s America.
All the more remarkable is that the couple, both seamstresses, didn’t hide their relationship from friends, family or even their pastor, and were welcomed into their small, tight-knit community of Weybridge, Vt., as beloved mentors, aunts and Sunday school teachers. William Cullen Bryant, the revered American poet and Charity’s nephew, described their union as “no less sacred to them than the tie of marriage.”
On a recent afternoon, Walden was in her Vermont home, nursing a “toddler cold” she might have gotten from the couple’s two-year-old son, Walter, and sporting an oversized Joe Burrow T-shirt she definitely got from her father-in-law, who is a fan of the Bengals quarterback. “I couldn’t tell you anything about Joe Burrow, except my father-in-law loves him,” she said.
At 30, Walden has written and illustrated a dozen books, winning two Eisners — the comic book world’s equivalent of the National Book Award, her first when she was only 22 — and three Ignatz Awards. Her works include “Spinning,” a best-selling graphic novel about her years on a synchronized figure skating team; two Y.A. queer fantasy comics; and a “Walking Dead” spinoff series.
But “Charity & 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 not a historian, so I had to figure out how to do this.”
For the book, Walden drew heavily from original source material (the pair’s poems and business papers; the writings of family members; Cleves’s biography) while contending with things that could never be known (what the two looked like; anything they chose not to write about).
In one early scene, a gaggle of busybodies from Charity’s hometown in Massachusetts share what they think of their unconventional neighbor.
“I believe she looks much like a man,” says one.
“My mother says she has far too many ladies about her,” says another.
Walden looked to epistolary novels of the time for the 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, are lost to time — on known details about Charity’s life. “Charity really did have a lot of girlfriends before Sylvia,” Walden said.
For the singular faces of the concerned farmers and bonnet-wearing fussbudgets, Walden looked to her own neighbors, albeit surreptitiously, for help. “I had to do a lot of research on historical dress, but then I honestly just looked at people around my own town,” she said. “I live in a town with a lot of elderly people and farmers, so I just stole some faces and then put them in really garish bonnets.”
For a love scene early in the book, Walden imagined the two becoming intimate in a tiny rented room above a grist mill that “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 surmise. “They shared a bed for 44 years,” she said. “And there’s a lot of writing about a feeling of sin referring to flesh. I don’t know who else’s flesh they would be talking about.”
The two come together as a group of drunken louts sing “Yankee Doodle” downstairs, lustily belting out off-key lyrics about shooting off their exceedingly big gun, “large as a log of maple.”
“I didn’t want to tell another precious queer love story,” Walden said. “That wasn’t who these women were. They were struggling to survive every day, and their favorite person in the world was Jesus Christ.”
Cleves, the author of the biography, agreed. “Religion was so central to Charity and Sylvia’s lives, and that’s deeply unrelatable for a lot of modern readers,” she said. “I’m impressed by the fact that Tillie is writing a popular book to speak to a broad audience, but still treated the religious themes in their story with such integrity.”
One of the couple’s few indulgences in life was a double silhouette portrait they purchased early in their relationship, and later adorned with locks of their own hair entwined in a single heart. Walden held the portrait “many times” while she researched and drew the book, staring at it for inspiration. “This silhouette is my biggest agony, because I basically have a drawing of them, but there are no details,” she said.
Even so, Walden was sure they were both pretty. “There’s a question of why a literary, more well-off girl like Charity would like a poor farm girl like Sylvia,” she said. “Sylvia had to probably be really attractive.”
Throughout the book, Walden weaves historical moments into the narrative, including the 1811 German Coast uprising (the largest revolt by enslaved people in U.S. history), and the War of 1812.
“Charity was born in 1777, so she aged alongside America, and died a little ways before the Civil War,” she said. “I thought their alignment with American history was just too juicy to be ignored.”
For Walden, one of the most jarring things about that period was its horrifyingly high mortality rate. In a break in the book’s action, she reflects on a number of family deaths from a single decade, creating disturbing, often gruesome mini-scenes of how some of the brothers and sisters of both women might have passed.
“To have to watch five of your siblings die for no reason must have been horrible, and they certainly never got used to it,” she said. “Based on their journals and letters, it devastated them every time, so they were basically devastated, like, once a year or more.”
In one of the book’s final chapters, and one of its most moving scenes, Charity and Sylvia, now old, sit around their fireplace slowly and sadly feeding Charity’s journals into the flames.
There’s no way to be sure if this actually happened, but Charity did write instructions to friends and exes to burn her letters once they were read, and often felt that her writing was not fit for the public to see. Sylvia also wrote about Charity keeping a journal, but none was ever found.
Walden titled the chapter “The Journals of Charity Bryant,” and included the bitter parenthetical “Which I Have Never Read.” That fact still pains and angers her.
“Charity clearly believed that some part of her was shameful, but it just didn’t have to be that way,” she said. “Her journals would have been celebrated. They would have been adored.”
“When I did that parenthetical, it was my way of reaching back in time and kind of shaking her and saying, I did want to read it,” Walden continued. “I wanted to know everything about you. But she couldn’t allow us to see it.”
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