The Scream Over The Water

The moonlight cut into the room; three small shadows sat together on the floor. Children. Dirty cheeks, trembling hands, hair tangled into a chaos of knots. (s. 35 i Remember the Ladies!) The oldest child is Charlotte Sofie Nilsen. Her parents emigrate to America in 1882. Without Charlotte. She learns “how to become invisible”—like the invisible girl in the picture book by Gro Dahle and Svein Nyhus. Snill (2002).

Charlotte moves to Bergen and finds love. In 1899 she marries Carl Fredrik Vik. Charlotte Vik and her husband have four children together and run a gardening business in Årstad.

“Her children will never know what she has experienced. They will know only love and safety.”
(s. 37)

Charlotte dies in 1930, at the age of 51. But her daughter, Ruth Charlotte Vik, carries her mother’s—and her father’s—name forward into the next generation and into the future.

^{In the days leading up to Christmas, we meet one of the book’s ten Norwegian women each day. They represent a large and diverse group of female voices that are only now, at the 200th anniversary of Norwegian emigration to America, beginning to be heard.}

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