The Names of Ships
It was wagons that carried them across the plains. They had a leader. And they wrote everything down. Not just the stories, but the names and dates. The births and deaths. They kept records.
Still, it is hard to separate the stories I was told growing up from the old westerns on tv. I like to think that I can conjure the sound of the wooden wheels moving slowly across the overland passage to the valley, but I know that is only because I’ve seen those movies too many times.
My great-great-grandfather led the 7th handcart company, most of whom spoke only Danish, the 1300 miles from Iowa City on foot. They walked halfway across the continent. They had to get over the mountains before the snow or they would perish, like many before them in the first companies had. The hunger and fear, it was unimaginable. But they kept going because there was no going back. They had been violently driven out of their home by a murderous mob. The journey was God’s test, and they were pioneers of faith and fortitude. Their leader had consulted with trappers and Jesuit priests, and they trusted him. There was safety in numbers. They walked out of Iowa City, the end of civilization, and into the unknown.
Then they went back for more. 10 years later my great-great-grandmother, Marie, a widow, would make the arduous journey from Copenhagen with her young daughter, Antomine. As my father tells it, their ship took them and hundreds of other emigrants across the rough North Sea to Hull, England, where they boarded a train to Liverpool. After a 10-day wait for ship repairs, they embarked on the steamer named Manhattan for the transatlantic voyage, arriving in New York harbor. To get to the edge of the frontier you then needed to take a boat then a train then a boat again then a train again. That took you to North Platte, Nebraska—at that time the Union Pacific’s farthest western point. The only way westward now was by wagon train, but when Marie and Antomine got there, there were no wagons, even though they had paid in advance. They too, were instructed to walk the 600 miles to Utah territory. Somewhere along the way in Nebraska, the little girl got the measles and took ill so swiftly that my great-great-grandmother did not even have time to wipe the dough for the bread she was making off her hands as her daughter called out for her from the back of a wagon. She died and was buried alongside the trail. No time to mark the grave, they had to keep moving.
Didn’t the wind on the prairie as it tickled the tall grass sound just like the sea from the ship’s deck? Why does the past seem closer to me now than it did before?
There are places in Oregon and Missouri and Nebraska where you can still see the tracks in the earth left from the wagon wheels. Somewhere beside the traces of the wagon tracks left in the Nebraska ground, the bones of a small girl, my great-aunt Antomine, lie.
A line etched in the ground, west to get lost. A line darts north to be free. A line that stops and starts again so slowly the trail almost disappears. Tracks disappear in the snow.
100 years after the ship becomes a wagon, the ship called the Forest Monarch that brought the first Danes becomes a float in a parade down Main Street. Everyone loves a parade. The Danish name of my grandmother’s people had long since been changed to sound more American. Twenty years later the ship is a blue Datsun 710 station wagon driving back across the prairie, retracing the line. The line changes its mind. The girl sits in the back of the wagon again, but this time her fever breaks. She’s hungry. Smoke from her mother’s cigarette hangs in the air. Again, they set up camp, build a fire and listen carefully for sounds of danger in the night. They needed to get back across the prairie before the days get short again.
Maybe the line is a circle. Sometimes the circle is a carousel, and sometimes the circle is a centrifugal force ride, but it never stops moving. Hold on to your bonnets.
Marie and Antomine before they left Denmark for America
On a rainy summer day in August, I walked into a graveyard in Newport, Rhode Island looking for my mother-in-law’s stories in the Irish names on the headstones. The night before, Mary had been in rare form at the dinner table, telling stories over a cup of tea and a slice of her eldest daughter’s pie, about the Providence Rhode Island folk that marked her childhood. She doesn’t know exactly how or if they were related, just that their families were intertwined forever. She doesn’t know the name of the ship that brought her grandparents to North America. Mary only knows that they were called Fever Ships because along with thousands of Roman Catholic Irish refugees fleeing famine and the religious intolerance and cruelty of the British, the ships carried typhus. So horrific were the conditions on the Atlantic crossing for many of the Irish refugees that if they managed not to die at sea, they were not allowed off the ship, and were accused of bringing pestilence to America. Coffin ships. Once the British had outlawed slavery in their colonies, their shipping industry began to lose money and so the slavers’ ships were put to use sending the Irish to America.
She says they arrived in Providence, Rhode Island, but like many Irish, they came by way of Newfoundland, which is the easternmost point of North America and closer to Ireland than it is to Miami. They were quarantined in St John’s Newfoundland before they eventually made it south to Providence and New York. Mary said that her kin and those like them were called Two-Boaters, a familiar slur in Boston and Providence.
A thousand hands clutching papers. Documents with more lines; Columns and rows, names, and dates. The paper and the soil are in conflict. The name puts you in danger and you want to disappear so you change the lines to form new shapes, which make new sounds. These shapes make a more American sound. A line is crossed out and rewritten. A journey that finds the edge, and then the line is lost forever to the sea.
Irish crossing the Atlantic
My eyes softened in the light of the Island cemetery, so green and cool, far away from the bleached and terrifying western sky. If I were a ghost I could stay here forever, darting around the graves of Irish, Italian, Scottish, Portuguese and English names. Americans. Thoughts of the journey of my mother-in-law's family swirled in my head. I walked past baroquely carved wings of angels casting shadows on the path, past the resting place of union soldiers, past the bones of countless women who died in childbirth, to the humble graves of Africans who were free men in the north. What is the chronology of a graveyard? Do you wander here and there through the telling of the story like flipping through the pages of a magazine, or do you begin at the end where you can pick up the line. Does time exist here only where grief still resides? Or is this place a palimpsest of stories buried one on top of another, where the faintest etching on a piece of slate stuck in the ground 300 years ago happens to catch the light, and sparkle in the New England summer rain?
Over time the tracks left in the ground from the wagons going west disappeared as the railroad expanded and rains washed them away. An etched line exists by the process of cutting into the surface. The deeper the carving the deeper the shadow, and the more the line stands in stark contrast to the light of the surface. Here lies the distance between the past and the present, gradually diminished by the wind’s caress, and the Braille reading of its retelling.
If I were a ghost, well, but I am here with the living and my time is short. As I walked further into the fields of markers, the stones got lower to the earth; tilted and rounded at the tops, they rose from the ground like rows of crooked teeth on the x-ray of an infant’s skull. A page of Braille for a sightless god.
I went looking for my husband’s story in the graves of Newport, Rhode Island, but instead, I walked into my own.
The story of early New England is chaotic, monstrous, and full of contradictions and hypocrisy. The puritans who accused women of witchcraft and condemned them to death begat abolitionists who provided safe havens for enslaved people, who in turn begat the men who burned the churches and homes of Catholics all up and down New England. A puritan midwife and proto feminist who was made to stand trial for heresy while pregnant with her 15th child begat a lineage that includes an American religious movement whose covenant encouraged plural marriage and whose leadership today supports some of the most conservative and misogynist policy and legislation in America.
Sometimes, the line is long and unbroken. The ship that brought my mother-in-law Mary’s kin across the Atlantic in the 19th century must have passed by the ghosts of many ships, including the Griffin, which was the name of the ship that brought the mid-wife Anne Hutchinson and her 10 children from England in 1634, seeking religious freedom from strict Anglican doctrine. Banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony by the other puritans for her outspoken interpretation of the scripture, she and her followers traveled south and founded the Portsmouth Rhode Island colony. When, after her trial at the age of 45 her fifteenth child was stillborn, her persecutors declared she had given birth to a demon. Fleeing her persecutors in Massachusetts Bay once more, she went further south to the Dutch settlement on Long Island, where in 1643 she and 5 of her children, along with several other adults, were attacked by Siwanoy native people and brutally massacred where they had set up camp. A sixth child, a young girl named Susanna who managed to remain hidden during the massacre, was found and taken hostage by the Siwanoy people and held for 5 or 6 years before being traded back to the English, where she remained in Rhode Island throughout her life. My father’s father is a descendant of the sole surviving child of the massacre. Her name was Susanna Hutchinson Cole.
To say that I had no knowledge of Anne Hutchinson’s connection to Rhode Island almost sounds disingenuous now, but sometimes ignoring my own connection to America’s past in favor of others’ around me is preferable to the burden and weight of my own. A heavy line. Wandering in the graveyard in Newport that day I took photographs randomly, a dizzying kaleidoscope of beautiful lichen-covered slate glistening in the rain, ancient 17th-century somber designs amid barely legible names and dates of colonial Rhode Island. Later that evening back at my mother-in-law’s home south of Newport, I read about Anne Hutchinson, her story, and her lineage. The name of one of her descendants stood out to me; hadn’t I just seen that name somewhere? I looked at the photos that I had taken that afternoon at the graveyard in Newport. I zoomed in on a picture I had randomly taken of a small slab of stone with a winged effigy carved at the top, the words on the marker had all but disappeared. “Here lies Sarah, wife of Peleg Sanford, died 1726.”
Peleg Sanford was a great-grandson of Anne Hutchinson, the proto feminist whose descendants spawned the first Mormon pioneers, from whom I descend.
I left New England a few days later and returned home to the west, flying thousands of feet above the last vestiges of tracks left in the prairie by the wagons’ wheels.
Sometimes the line is a circle. Sometimes the circle moves slowly like a carousel and sometimes it moves with centrifugal force. A storm gathering over the ocean and coming to shore.
Perhaps it was the ghost of Anne Hutchinson gently nudging me towards the colonial grave markers; perhaps those pilgrims were right, she really was a witch. Or maybe it was just a cool breeze coming in off the Atlantic.
**Dedicated to my great-aunt Antomine who died on the prairie, and to all the human beings who suffered the wretched tyranny and oppression of the British Empire and all that it has wrought, and to those who crossed the Atlantic and landed on the cruel shores of North America, whether in bondage or despair or in hope.
September 11, 2021
I want to hear from you. Submit post ideas to me via email. Stories about your family’s journey to becoming American are needed now more than ever. How do you feel about your roots? How does your family paw through its myths? My hope for this blog series is that many verses, many voices, and many insights and personal experiences will be explored here. Let’s talk about food, music, culture, invasive species, and even family trees if you can make that interesting in 500 -1000 words.
