A Wire of Freedom

The timeless theme of freedom meanders through Emily Arnold McCully’s trilogy about Mirette and Bellini. In the first book, Mirette on the High Wire (1993), her young protagonist feels free when walking the wire. Perhaps she’s freed from the grueling domestic work she does in her mother’s boarding house. We never see Mirette at school or with playmates. She’s confined in a time and place.

In the second book, Starring Mirette and Bellini (1997), Bellini is imprisoned. He’s carted off to jail for encouraging an oppressed population to persist in their fight to be free. Mirette saves him, and again, the high wire represents freedom. McCully makes the metaphor explicit when Mirette exclaims, “‘. . . we must keep walking the wire and showing people that everything is possible!’”

In Mirette & Bellini Cross Niagara Falls (2000), the pair assist an orphan, Jakob, in entering the United States in search of opportunity. They’re all crossing the Atlantic on the SS Magnifique. Mirette and Bellini travel in style; Jakob is below with the other steerage passengers. Bellini and Mirette follow him to Ellis Island.  Jakob’s uncle does not appear to claim the child, so Bellini signs papers claiming Jakob as his assistant. Freedom is fragile, isn’t it. We see this when a competitor sabotages the wire Bellini and Mirette are walking.

I borrowed the third book from the library. It had a book jacket, unlike the first two (which I bought at library sales). The book jacket states that “. . . Bellini has always been inspired by the real life nineteenth-century daredevil Blondin, who, when he crossed Niagara Falls, had not only to contend with an impostor, but with sabotage as well.” Emily Arnold McCully carefully crafted her stories to describe what it takes to put together a high wire performance. And she hints at other herculean human challenges.