Continued from
Coming home to Budleigh:
A visit to my old village
home
The village of East Budleigh in Devonshire County
is remote by British standards – a four-hour train ride from London to the
medieval city of Exeter and then due south to the edge of the sea. Exeter is home
to one of England’s great cathedrals, a soaring gothic glacier of local
sandstone and chalk, the pride of Devon. The afternoon I passed through, the
city was in a minor state of grief: a fire the night before had torn through a
row of buildings across from the cathedral and burned England’s oldest hotel to
rubble and ash. And so time devoured another morsel of history.
I traveled there from the U.S., via London,
to visit an ancestor. At Exeter station I rented a car and drove south along the
wide, slow river Exe glowing white in the late afternoon winterlight. Devon is
a land of rolling hills and grey-green mist-strewn heaths; gnarled ancient oaks
presiding over stone Saxon churches beneath a sky the hue of bruised tin. Famously,
it is a landscape of ghosts.
I was brought there for a very brief few
days seeking one particular ghost: a pilgrim father and salter of fish who had left Devonshire in 1623
aboard a ship that two months later made land at what is now Salem, Massachusetts
– a man who happened to be my ancestor.
I’ve traveled to dozens of countries,
usually on some mission or other, but this journey was different – a literal
pilgrimage to the farthest reaches of my bloodline, at least as far as recorded
history goes.
From Exeter I drove anxiously, unaccustomed
to driving on the left side of the road and the right side of the car. I
entered the first traffic circle as I would in the U.S. and faced a barrage of
angry horns before I emerged, rattled, onto the straightaway. A short drive
south from Exeter the highway shrank to winding lanes sunken between ancient
hedgerows that make you feel as if you are literally driving down into the
stony British soil.
The deeper in the country I drove, the
smaller the lanes became until I was sliding down a one lane rabbit run just
wide enough for a small car to navigate between earthen embankments that framed
a narrow strip of sky. I emerged at the very humble-looking resort town of Budleigh
Salterton, where the English Channel swells up against long beaches of rounded
stones in the pastel shades of Easter eggs. When I parked the car and stepped out,
I nearly fell to the ground, overcome with emotion – whether from setting my
feet on this storied earth after a long approach or from surviving the short left-handed
drive, I’m not sure.
Budleigh Salterton is a small town of shops
and beachy houses that lets onto a pair of smaller villages, Otterton and East
Budleigh, tucked a few miles further inland. (The fact that West Budleigh is
dozens of miles away in the North of Devon is a local joke.) It was from these
little coastal villages that my ancestor Roger Conant had flung himself in a
cramped vessel four hundred years ago to become one of the first English
settlers of the quote unquote New World.
I found my way to the King’s Arms Inn in Otterton,
a well-touristed remnant of sturdy whitewashed cob houses plastered and thatched
in the Devonshire style, just as they were centuries ago. The lanky fellow who
registered guests at the Inn appeared surprised to have an American tourist
come through the door in the off-season dark of November.
“Come to see
the beaver?” he asked me.
I shook my head.
“The beaver?” I asked.
“Sorry,” he
said. “I assumed you were a naturalist, come to see the beaver.”
He explained that thanks to the work of
local ecologists, beavers had returned to the Otter River estuary after a
500-year absence. In fact they’d been absent not just from the marshes of
Devon, but from the British Isles altogether. So the beaver’s return to this
bosky haunt in the quaint English countryside was national news. And I’d
arrived not long after.
In the morning I left the Inn and walked
through the village streets shivering in the milkteeth of winter. The sun-struck
sparks on the lime whitewash of the cob houses flashed as if each house were
constructed of freshly packed snow. I found my way to an old mill built over a
narrow stretch of the river, and from there to an old Saxon-built stone bridge
from where the landscape widened out in a panorama. Below the bridge a path
meandered through sheep pastures and hillocks along the river that over the
course of a mile or two widens into a tidal marsh and then yawns out flat and
muddy and spills into the roiling Atlantic.
Devon is famous for walkers – mystics,
poets and old men who journey there to walk the fabled ley lines; trekkers who
hike the ochre cliffs of the Jurassic coast seeking fossils; history buffs
seeking out the ancient iron age hillforts sculpted into the landscape by
tribal people long ago. I was there to walk, too, with the idea that just
walking through this landscape where my ancestor had trod would perhaps jostle
free something centuries old that would somehow illuminate everything around
me.
Soaked in a chill fog, the path traveled
over little hills topped with lean, whispy scotch pines and ancient sycamores
and greened with wild nettles and blackberry, bracken fern and spiked holly
bushes. From the salt marshes of southern New England where I grew up I
recognized the winter plants and the diffuse light and the skittering water
birds, the purple-green mud that reflects the sky and the thick, nose-clogging
salt smell of low-tide. The estuary felt hauntingly familiar. It was a Saturday
morning and I was joined on the trail by dog walkers, bird watchers, and the
occasional muttering eccentric looking out among the reeds that poked from the
muddy shallows. More than once I was asked if I were looking for the beaver. The
familiarity of the damp British earth and all the excitement about the beaver gave
me the feeling that somehow the beaver’s return and my own were part of the
same prophetic event.
This is a place people have inhabited for a
long time – before the British there were the Saxons, the Angles, the Romans,
the Celts, and for millennia before that, the Dumnonii, a tribe of iron age,
stone age, old age people. All of these people inscribed their stories in the
land, and the land inscribed its stories in them. “There is hardly a copse,
stretch of lane or fecund outcrop that lacks a name and a story,” writes the
wily storyteller Martin Shaw, who lives just over the River Exe at the edge of the
wild heath called Dartmoor. “Most of the tors,” Shaw writes of the outcrops and
standing stones that dot the moor, “were originally people.”
But the tales embedded in a landscape don’t
give themselves up in a weekend, and I had set foot in the Otter River estuary
and the winding lanes of East Budleigh for just long enough to get a noseful of
earth, to have a few conversations, and to jot down some notes on the stories
that did appear. Vikings had settled here and culled salt from ancient salt
pans they’d carved into the rocks; spices and Turkish jewels were smuggled in by
boat from France and hidden in the false rooves of local homes. And then there
were the religious wars: an uprising of Catholics in the 16th century had been massacred along
the River Exe by the troops of Henry VIII for refusing to pray in the common
tongue. A century later an uprising of radical Dissenters demanded that each
local church should govern itself and that a man’s relation with God was not an
affair for Kings and Bishops to oversee. A young Roger Conant was driven by
piety to join the reformers.
The Dissenters gathered in congregations to
resist the crown and the Church of England. When their congregations came under
attack, they teamed up with a new breed of merchant adventurers and set out for
uncharted lands to plant their faith and reap their fortune. The new religion
that threw England into chaos in the seventeenth century conjoined with an
emergent seafaring mercantilism would send my ancestor across the ocean, one of
a million sparks that, through no intention of their own, would set the New
World aflame for centuries.
What did it take for a young man, his wife
and their young child to launch out across the dark swollen sea to a land empty
of all comforts and inhabited by a people they saw as monstrous, heathen savages?
I like to think it was something deeper even than religion and politics – some
old Celtic blood that drove Conant to seek out mysteries across the western
waters. But that may be sheer fantasy. Was Conant a marauding ideologue driven
by religious dogma like the famous Puritan Myles Standish, with whom he fought on
the bluffs at Rockport Massachusetts? Or was he a gentle soul with a
fascination for the ‘noble savage,’ like the iconoclast Thomas Morton, who’d
founded Merrymount, the ill-fated egalitarian commune north of Boston whose
destruction was carried out by the Puritans of Plymouth and Salem. It seems he
must have been some of both, or something else entirely; whatever the case, he
was a man of vision and boldness thoroughly in service to a higher power.
But trying to divine the intentions of a
man centuries gone is likely to have as much success as turning the granite tors
of Dartmoor back into living flesh. What is undeniable is that the adventure of
the English Dissenters was a seed of what became, far beyond their own
reckoning, one of the most awful episodes the world has known: a stone thrown in the pond of time, whose
ripples are genocide.
**
It would make for a great comedy sketch:
William Bradford and the men of Plymouth company make land in 1620, hungry and
afraid. At first they encounter no people on these wild shores, just “isles
planted with corn, groves, mulberries, savage gardens and good harbors.” After
some days of striking out around the land, they find fields and “new stubble,
of which [the Indians] had gotten corn this year, and many walnut trees full of
nuts, and a great store of strawberries, and some vines,” and then sandy pits
in the earth filled with earthen pots, “a bow and, as we thought, arrows, but
they were rotten…”
They recognized
these pits to be both graves and food stores. And what did they do?
“They
found two of the Indians’ houses covered with mats, and some of their
implements in them; but the people had run away. They also found corn, and
beans of various colors. Those they brought away, intending to give them full
satisfaction when they should meet with any of them.”
The Wampanoags and Massachusetts and
Naragansetts had been devastated by disease just before the pilgrims landed;
when the pilgrims arrived, the Indians, so-called, were vastly diminished, hungry
and afraid. And the very first thing the pilgrim fathers did was to dig out and
make off with the natives’ food stores.
Bradford justifies the action when he notes
that six months later the natives “came and made their peace and full
satisfaction was given by the settlers to those whose corn they had taken.”
By “satisfaction,” Bradford suggests that
the pilgrims repaid the Indians’ corn. But the pilgrims, who’d never seen, let
alone grown, corn, could hardly have produced a crop in six months to pay back
what they’d taken. And even if Bradford’s tale is true, what kind of peace was
established by the paying of the corn-debt to a hungry people? From that ignoble
beginning, the settlers went on to incur more debt – blood debt – through
centuries of brutal plunder and conquest.
The pilgrim fathers, we’re told, were
steadfast, possessed of courage, humility, vision, piety, and a fortitude that
is at once human and superhuman. Belief in their sturdy character underpins the
notion that God Himself opened the New World to them, to sow and harvest and to
bring under their dominion, because of their fortitude, their courage, their
devotion.
To the natives
they must’ve seemed like hostile, frightened, desperate savages.
Conant wouldn’t arrive until two years
after Bradford’s initial corn-thieving incident, and his band, which formed the
Massachusetts Bay Colony, had, it seems, a somewhat different ethics from the
Plymouth Colony. So I don’t know if my ancestor shared William Bradford’s sense
that “these savage barbarians when they met us were readier to fill our sides
with arrows than otherwise!”
All of the accounts I find of Conant tell
of a fair-minded, kind and gentle man, but relations of the early American
colonies are notoriously untrustworthy. Even a cursory reading of Bradford’s
history of Plymouth Plantation makes it clear that Bradford, whose writings
serve as the foundational story of the English settlement, presciently took as
his task the establishment of a narrative that would serve to justify the violence that would
come later.
Just like the Spanish conquest of the
“Indies” a century before, the English settlement of New England was driven
both by religious ideology and by economic adventurism. Conant’s trade as a
fisherman made him a hand in the economic engine of the North Atlantic – the
limitless cod fisheries of the Grand Banks that stretched from Newfoundland
south almost to Boston. The expansionist economics of the nascent British
empire, as much as anything else, brought him to what became Massachusetts
three years after William Bradford’s band of pilgrims had made their storied
landing at Plymouth Rock. Hired by a wealthy businessman to lead an expedition
to New England, Conant made the sea journey with his wife, brother, and young
daughter. They’d sailed from Devon – from Exmouth or Plymouth or Dartmouth – on
a ship that carried both pious dissenters fleeing the English Church and
merchant adventurers seeking fortune, as well as the indentured servants who
worked for them both.
There was nothing peaceful about the
pilgrims’ arrival. In the years just prior to their landing the Wampanoags and
Narragansetts had been decimated by disease carried by other Europeans who’d
come to fish the cod and trap the beaver. By the time the Mayflower arrived,
the natives’ villages lay empty, their fields abandoned. The Mayflower party
themselves arrived ridden with pestilence, starvation, dissension and disease.
Conant’s party a few years later most likely arrived in a similar state.
The relative peace of 1620 was short-lived.
The natives had good reason to believe that everything the English touched was
marked by death and disease. By 1637, the Pequots to the south began to rebel (Bradford
called them “unruly”) and the settlers made war upon them and slaughtered
hundreds – a massacre that the Plymouth colonists came to celebrate with a great
feast day that may be the origin of our Thanksgiving. Roger Conant was 45 years
old that year. He could not have known that the Pequot War, which began as an
effort by the Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth Colonies to establish a trading
post on the Connecticut River Valley and ended with the complete extermination
of the Pequots as a people, would become the archetype for every brazen assault
on native peoples across North America for three centuries to come.
By the 1670’s – a generation later, after
thousands more settlers had arrived – the Narragansetts, Massachusetts and
Wampanoags had ample evidence that the English planned to exterminate them too,
and they launched an open rebellion. The settlers responded with an
ever-escalating war that bloodied the salt marshes and clotted the estuaries
with corpses. Known to the settlers as King Phillip’s War and as Metacom’s War
to the natives, the killing almost erased both the settlers and the Wampanoags
from this continent.
By other names,
the same war continues to this day.
**
I was welcomed at East Budleigh by a small
group of local history enthusiasts. They’d met other Conants over the years,
and had stories and documents and a warmth for sharing them that in my
heightened mindset I found wonderful, almost miraculous. Unsurprisingly, they
were all on the older side, retirees who met for lunch from time to time at the
Sir Walter Raleigh Pub at the heart of the village. (Sir Walter Raleigh, the
benighted pirate who established the Virginia colony and famously taught Queen
Elizabeth the habit of smoking tobacco, had been East Budleigh’s other, more
famous resident.)
One of my hosts was a Dutch woman who had
come to inhabit the village with her British husband, now deceased. Her name
was Hanneke Coates. As it happened, she lived quite close to Sir Walter
Raleigh’s house, and was a docent and keeper of artifacts at the local church,
as well as an illustrator and a proud amateur historian. She must have been
close to seventy years old, and was kind, and spry, with an easy smile, and
short. In her stature she represented an older generation of Dutch, unlike the
Dutch people of today who are on average the tallest people in the world.
East Budleigh is a very small village: two
pubs, a shop, a school, and in the center of town, just up the small inclined
high street from the Sir Walter Raleigh Pub, the All Saints Church stands over
it all. Hanneke and her friends bought me lunch at the pub and walked me to the
church, where she led me and the others on a private tour. She was fascinated
by the church, and rightly so. Sir Walter Raleigh’s step-mother was buried beneath
the flagstones and his portrait hung in the nave. There were angels in the
architecture and a lone green man, the vegetable-faced wild god of old, carved
in a cornice.
Hanneke was most delighted by the pew-ends:
each wooden pew, a half millennium old, belonged to a family dating to the
sixteenth century, and they had at their ends oaken slabs carved with stories
and symbols. Some of the pew ends
were the coats of arms of the gentry; some were folk images of the trades: a
man wielding sheep shears, a woman roasting a chicken. Some were carvings of
mythical creatures and foliage: dragon-like fish that may have been visited
upon by a sailor fishing the Grand Banks; a Turk with a long mustache and his
hair wrapped in a turban; a man with thick lips holding a plant that might have
been Indian corn or, less likely, a banana.
The Conant family pew was there, ancient
polished red oak, with a water serpent entwined beneath a shield and a stag
standing, passant. I recalled my
father tracing the same stag at our kitchen table some time long ago; seeing
the image again in its ancient setting tied the present to the past in a way
that feels deeply mysterious.
The pew-end that most fascinated Hanneke
was the one she called “the red Indian.” It was a man’s head in striking
profile with sharp eyes and a pronounced nose and cheeks, a long braid and a
crown of leaves, or feathers. It wouldn’t have been out of place set outside an
American cigar store. “It’s the absolute likeness of a red Indian, wouldn’t you
agree?” she enthused. I did agree, though was compelled to tell her that I knew
people with similar features who, this far into the 21st century,
would not appreciate being called “red Indians.”
Another of my hosts, Michael Downes, a
retired French teacher and lay historian, recounted the local debate around
this pew-end: was the image a red Indian, or was it a unique aspect of England’s
pagan Green Man? A pamphlet he wrote links the face to the “‘wodewose’ or ‘wildman of the woods,’ a
figure often known as a Green Man with ancient links to natural vegetative
deities in cultures from earliest times in places around the world.” East
Budleigh may not be unique among British villages in its plethora of pamphleteers,
and another pamphlet suggests that the carvers were “influenced by the
threatening mythical creatures of the Dark Ages, including such examples as the
wodewose and boggarts or malevolent spirits of the fields.”
In an essay on the
sacred groves of Devon, British naturalist Roger Deakin visits with the Green
Man, echoing older thinkers like John Ruskin in calling him “both playful and
terrible”: “if the Green Man often looks deathly at the same time as
overflowing with life, that is because paradox is his very nature.”
And so in this
half-millenia old church pew you have a double paradox – a figure that may be a
spirit native to the local fields and woodlands or may be an exotic from the
Newe Worlde introduced at the time of Walter Raleigh; and he may be “malevolent”
as the British pamphleteer says, or “savage” as William Bradford would say – or
he may be “playful,” as Ruskin and Roger Deakin have it. Whatever the case, he
is a spirit that in his mystical and chthonic nature is antithetical to church
doctrine, but which remains fully present carved in granite and oak in churches
across England.
***
Such paradox is
helpful in thinking about my own ancestral boggart, the Puritan Roger Conant.
Figures like the Green Man and the red Indian are never one dimensional – and
thinking them so diminishes us even as it pushes them farther into oblivion
where they are more likely to become malevolent ghosts who haunt us than to become
the instructors or guides we need them to be.
They are, after all, our ancestors, and we should
learn from them, not be haunted by them.
Over two afternoons, Hanneke showed me the
historic sights of East Budleigh. She walked me past Vicar’s Mead, a group of sturdy
whitewashed buildings where Conant would have received his education in Latin,
and down a country lane flanked by pollard sycamores and fields in corn stubble
to Hayes Barton, the plantation where Sir Walter Raleigh was born in a rustic
cob farmhouse whose original glass windows remain intact. Hanneke more than
indulged me, enjoying the game of imagining what these lanes would have looked
like in the days when Walter Raleigh was a young man of great ambition and
Roger Conant a young boy who would have admired him, and eventually sailed in
his wake to America.
As we walked into the early darkness of the
descending winter evenings, Hanneke’s own story began to reveal itself. As a
young child, I learned, she’d survived a Japanese concentration camp in what
was then the Dutch East Indies during World War II. I was struck by this,
because my father served with
the U.S. Marines in the Pacific in 1945, and so had some connection to
Hanneke’s story, remote as it was from this Devonshire village. When allied
forces liberated the East Indies, they sent the young Dutch girl back to Europe
where she would eventually meet her British husband and, later in life, move here.
Somehow it was as if the Mobius strip of time had entwined my fate with that of
Hanneke Coates, as we strolled the cobbled lanes of little Budleigh.
“I was very little, 4, 5 years old, and we
were moved from one camp to another,” she told me. “The camps were barbed wire
prisons set up to intern European civilians, mainly Dutch, as ‘Guests of the
Emperor’. Those of us who ended up there experienced what can only be
called hell on earth.”
“The most lasting effect,” she said as we
walked the quiet lanes, “was the relentless humiliation the Japanese inflicted
on us. We were day and night screamed at and publicly disgraced. We had our
hair hacked off with blunt knives and we were lashed with long whips. Most died.
I was one of the lucky ones.”
Hanneke, I discovered, had recently returned
from a peacemaking visit to Japan, and had become something of a celebrity,
touring England to speak about her experience. “For my whole life, when I heard
Japanese voices, the hairs would stand up on the nape of my neck. I hated them.
And then, with all the wars I saw over the course of my lifetime, I realized it
wasn’t the Japanese. It was any young men in any nation on earth, whipped up
into hatred by war. It’s taken a long time, but I’ve finally forgiven them.”
***
The Wampanoag, the people of the dawn
lands, have been mostly extinguished, though some remain and are reviving their
language and culture on Massachusetts’ north shore. Most U.S. Americans know
the word Wampanoag, if at all, from the recklessly untrue story of the first Thanksgiving.
They themselves, I learned from Haartman Deetz, a Wampanoag man active in their
cultural revival, would have celebrated thirteen thanksgivings – one at each
full moon as the earth offered up a different gift. There was the herring
thanksgiving, when the estuaries ran thick with herring to fill their nets and
their stores for a full year. What was left they returned to the earth to feed
the summer corn. There was the strawberry thanksgiving, when they feasted on strawberries
in every way you can imagine; there was the cranberry thanksgiving, and the
pumpkin thanksgiving, and the green corn thanksgiving, and the thanksgiving for
the return of the geese.
When the goose migrates she brings the
seasons in her wake. When the sky is festooned with great miles’ long ribbons
of geese flying south, their raucous shouting and fluid symmetry in flight,
they bring the winter winds at their tail. When they return north the warm balm
of summer pushes them along. In the thanksgiving moon of spring, the Wampanoag
would shower the geese with offerings of beads ground and polished from the shells
of white and purple quahog clams. The geese might have gobbled up the beads as
food to supply their gizzards with grit. These same shell beads, called Wampum,
were strung on thick belts that told the peoples’ stories in ceremony, and were
brought as messages to the neighboring Narragansetts, Pequods, Wabanaki and
Quinipiac. Later the Dutch and English merchants turned the Wampum into money,
and it was no longer given in offering to the geese. Sometime after that, the
great ribbons of geese no longer filled the sky, as the cod no longer roil the
sea.
It is the nature of empire to erase all
memory of the conquered until they are safely stowed away beneath the earth. Another
imperial practice is to erect monuments to the conquerors to keep the ghosts of
resistance – and the resistance of ghosts? – at bay. In Salem Massachusetts, a
lofty greened copper statue of the windswept pilgrim father Roger Conant stands
on the town Common, keeping the ghosts at bay. My father would have told me
about the statue, and may even have taken me to see it sometime in my early
childhood: the childhood memory is fuzzy, if a memory at all.
So the first time I know for a fact that I
laid eyes on my ancestor, was during college, when I took the train from Boston
up to Salem to visit the Roger Conant statue. It must have been a Saturday or
Sunday in autumn, in the mid-nineteen eighties.
I arrived early in the day on the train
from North Station, Boston. I was in the bloom of my late teenage liberation,
having left home maybe a year or two before, and in order to sanctify my
adolescent pilgrimage to meet my ancestor I’d brought with me a small plastic
bag of psilocybin mushrooms. (My first experience with psylocibin had imbued me
with the profound impression that all human history and all human knowledge
were available to me in my own mind, an epiphany of James Joycean majesty that
has never fully worn off, though it has dulled around the edges a bit. Maybe
you know the feeling?)
Arriving in Salem, I bought a cup of Lipton
tea at a corner market and drank it as I chewed down the mushrooms, their twisted
blue stems tough and bitter as boiled leather as I walked toward the center of
town. The statue stands in a broad traffic circle between Salem Common, the
town’s central park, and the Salem Witch Museum, the town’s principal tourist
attraction. Larger than life-size and mounted on an uncarved granite boulder,
the figure of a weathered patriarch with blowing cape and high pilgrim hat is
easily mistaken for a witch himself – a coincidence that seems almost
intentional.
While I must have spent hours tripping
around Salem that day – perhaps absently touring the Witch Museum and Hawthorne’s
House of Seven Gables and sitting on the Common smoking cigarettes and writing
in my journal – the memory that is etched into me is of a moment when, having
climbed over the low iron fence enclosing the statue from the street, I mounted
the boulder on which the statue stood. I must have been fully in the mushrooms’
power because at a certain moment I was pressed full body against the cold form
looking up into Conant’s copper face with its pronounced Gallic nose, its
strong chin, its weathered cheeks and deep brow, enraptured by the sense that
this man from four centuries ago bore the precise image of my father, who was
then beginning the decade-long descent into the illness that would eventually
kill him. Just at the height of my psychedelic communion with my Puritan
ancestor, a police cruiser slipped into the traffic roundabout and into my
awareness, causing me to climb around the statue in a clownish effort to hide
in plain sight.
Suddenly in the broad daylight of a
Saturday afternoon in the busiest intersection in town, I was high on mushrooms
acting like a character in a Pink Panther cartoon. Thanks to a small dose of luck
and a large dose of white boy’s privilege the police didn’t notice me and I
climbed down and slunk out from the intersection, the vision of Conant’s stern
wind-burned face etched into me.
When I revisit that day, I imagine my
hijinks as an attempt to both get close to my ancestor and to mock him. With
the mushrooms, of which no Puritan would approve (with the possible exception
of the apostate Thomas Morton of Merrymount), I was reaching for an effect something
like that caused by the ergot of rye that drove the young women of Salem mad in
the winter of 1692, leading to the charges of witchcraft. (It is another
curious trait of the imperial mindset that it will erect a museum to the
victims of its excesses, centuries after the fact.) In this sense my first
visit to the Roger Conant statue in Salem was an early attempt to foray into
the Otherworld and see what was there.
I’ve since had numerous glimpses of the
Otherworld, many guided by native shamans using native plants: I’ve drunk ayahuasca
and tobacco juice with Kichwa shamans in the Amazon; chewed Holy peyote in the
vast, spiny desert of northern Mexico; trekked across thundering Andean
waterfalls on the juice of the San Pedro cactus. In these journeys I met tiny
green men with the bulging eyes of frogs whose sting set my spinal cord aflame;
I rode astride a flying serpent that devoured Manhattan; I sang all night to the
Pastaza River and crawled through a teeming jungle swamp at dawn. But I believe
I’ve never had a vision as enduring as the close-up of my English forebear’s
rough, pointed face beaten out of green copper, weathered by a century of
Nor’easters, and looking for all the world like my dying father.
“All the wounded of Europe sail west,”
writes Martin Shaw, describing the old belief that when you sailed west you
sailed into the Otherworld. “It’s where they go to dream and to die.” In some
sense, I’ve come to believe, Conant’s journey west across the sea to a fateful
encounter with the Wampanoag, the People of the Dawn Lands, was also a reaching
down into the depths of his peoples’ old beliefs, the mythic journey across the
waters to the land the Irish call Tir Na
Nogh, to Atlantis, to the Islands of the Sun. This is not the usual way the
Pilgrim fathers’ story is told, but weren’t they, after all, religious seekers,
enraptured by a myth of a new land given unto them by God, across the ocean to
the west?
Maybe it’s the hallucinogens talking… but if
I’m any indication, Conant’s people have continued journeying west ever since.
***
In every churchyard in England there is a
yew tree. They say the yew that
looks over the Sir Walter Raleigh Pub from the yard of All Saints Church in East
Budleigh is as old as the church itself – over a millenia. There’s nothing
about its size that tells you this. It’s the shagged gray bark drawn over its
boney trunk and the needles like the
iron chin hairs of dwarves that give the tree the appearance of an old winter
god. The yew withstands centuries of bitter wind, nourished and made mighty by
the cold and the damp. They say the yew – an Otherworld tree if ever there was
one – lives for millennia because it simply doesn’t know about dying.
Sometime in the ninth century human hands
had planted the yew at All Saints Church. Seven hundred years later, Roger
Conant, a boy in breeches, would have passed under its branches every Sabbath
until he left to apprentice with a fish salter in London. One evening in
Budleigh I sat on the churchyard wall under a cold misty rain, swinging my feet
out into the air and watching the sky grow dark over the Scotch pines on the
hills around, trying in some way to inhabit the body of this boy before he
brought me to America. In a sense this visit to Budleigh was a continuation of
my Otherworld journeys. But this time the journey, without the assistance of
entheogenic plants, was to go back across the ocean and down into time, to
delve toward my origins.
“Connection to where we come from is starting
to matter,” Martin Shaw writes. From popular products like Ancestry.com and mail-in
DNA tests to the arguably self-indulgent impulses like my own to journey to
Budleigh, you could say genealogy is in fashion. Our perennial alienation from
our history, from the land, from the bedrock of stories that form our bones, is
clearly breeding a hunger for our origins.
But genealogy is a fraught and hazardous
undertaking. Depending on how you use it, such delving back can serve to shore
up or tear down family mythologies, ethnic histories, racial categories and the
privilege or pride or dignity or shame that come with. It can indulge an
irrelevant and inflated personal narcissism, or guide us in interpreting
history in ways that are fundamentally political, and purposeful; it can breed
revenge fantasies as much as reckoning, can drive an insular monomania or deliver
personal communion and collective liberation. A tracing of genealogy can serve
to aggrandize a bloodline by tracing it to some imagined source where it runs
“pure,” or contrarily, when the route traced goes back further than any notion
of purity can survive, it can undo the intergenerational wounds wrought by that
presumptive notion of purity.
I don’t believe I’m burdened by any such
notions of purity. Nevertheless, I’ve spent fascinated hours tracing the
origins of my family name – an activity that feels both vitally important and absurdly
self-indulgent – a form of navel-gazing that verges on the sort of pride my
ancestor might have reckoned a sin. From what I gather the Conant name is
either the Breton form of the old Celtic word Conn, meaning “mighty,” related
to the Germanic tribal word that comes down to us as Koenig, king; or it’s of
Scottish origin going back the Picts – the indigenous peoples of ancient
Britain – and means “little hound.” Both are good, but the Breton seems more
likely, as many Breton Huguenots – French Protestants – fled France for Devon
in the century preceding Roger’s birth, and settled precisely in the area
between Exeter in the north and Plymouth in the south.
If taken with a reasonable lightness,
scanning our genealogy can be a not-so-complicated effort to recover memory of
how we became what we are, and to pick back up some of what was lost along the
way. We should know that most of what we might take for personal landmarks on
the trail are the remnants of larger movements of earth, landslides that provide
cover for deeper veins of truth.
In my case, my immediate family, a suburban
middle class white family, had failed massively in giving me any sense of where
I – where we – came from. Like most white US Americans, my primary inheritance has
been the ease and privilege of forgetting: forgetting who I was, and where I
came from, and why, and of the consequences of my peoples’ sea journey here
centuries ago and of what came after. It comes also with the privilege of never
having to inquire where other people have come from, or why, be it through the
Middle Passage or the Treaty of Guadelupe Hidalgo or the Vietnam War or the
Contra War or the Gulf Wars, through slavery or starvation or mere
self-preservation. The willful amnesia of institutionalized whiteness is a
privilege that sooner or later turns to grief, and loss, and even to
hopelessness and rage. I have no doubt that this forgetting is the driver of so
much suicide, so much depression, so much shame and anger and isolation – and
also, in the drive to consume and forget, the driver of so much economic
activity that has drawn the world into a maelstrom of apocalyptic destruction.
So the discovery in the churchyard at East Budleigh
of a yew tree old enough to have sheltered my ancestor from a drizzling rain in
the seventeenth century was, for me, a small gesture of homecoming.
****
Sometime in the late 1990’s during a summer
teaching job in Boston, I returned to Salem, without the benefit of
hallucinogenic mushrooms. This time I visited Old Salem Village which I’d either
not seen on my first visit, or if I had, the memory vanished in the fog of
time. Old Salem Village is no village, but a reconstructed historical site
built to attract tourists, right on the place that the Wampanoags called
Naumkeag. The spot is right where Conant arrived in 1623 and built first a
wigwam style house and then a proper English timber frame home. Though he was a
salter of fish by trade, he was also a planter, and was among the first
Englishmen to plant gardens of Indian corn, winter squashes, and tobacco. After
establishing the colony, Conant was very quickly shuffled out of Salem by the
merchant men who took it over – that’s another story for another time – but for
centuries after his descendants lived mostly within a few leagues of that
place.
I too grew up nearby, and within a few
hundred miles of where both my mother and my father’s people landed when they
hit America – both places with Indian names: Manhattan and Massachusetts. But
so little of their ancestral cultures remain, I might’ve been raised on the
moon.
And it was a full decade after dropping in
as a tourist to Old Salem Village that I visited East Budleigh. These
occasional visits, once a decade, it seems to me, are gestures in an
exploration of a fundamental question: how to braid oneself to history in a way
that communes us with our ancestral responsibilities – a way that makes us
accountable for the acts of our relations without driving us to revenge, or to
self-hate, or to suicide. Somehow, I believe, if we can braid ourselves to our
ancestry we can braid ourselves back into the living world from which we’ve
been so violently torn.
Like so many of us, I am at large on the
face of the earth, a generational vagrant, set adrift for good when Conant
sailed away from Devon in 1623, or a few generations earlier perhaps, when his
forebears sailed from Bretagne or wherever it was they had last set roots. And
so I know that whatever was to be found in the Devonshire earth, would be
buried too deep for me to sniff out on a weekend junket.
Martin Shaw tells the story of a visitor to
Devon’s Dartmoor who gets himself killed for trying to excavate a mystic treasure.
The visitor learns in passing a bit of local lore: legend has it that any man
who proves able to burgle an ancient set of sheep shears from a grave high in
the crags above the moors, to bathe the shears in a deepwater creek at midnight
until the waters run bloody, and then, in the darkest hours of the night, to
approach a circle of stones that turns back into a bleating, grazing flock of
sheep on the warm night of midsummer, and shear the sheep, will find the
fleecings turned to gold by morning. The visitor is entranced by the tale and
makes a go of it, but he makes a few slovenly mistakes – signposts to the
spirits that he’s not up to the task – and he ends up dead, crushed beneath a
dolmen. The locals shake their heads and things go on as before.
I too am a visitor, attempting to sheer
fleece of gold from dead stones by stepping into the twilight of the ancestors
– but I’ve lived long enough to know the limits of what can be accomplished in
a brief visit, and I’m careful not to take what doesn’t belong to me. Unlike
the treasure seeker in Shaw’s Devon tale, I’m not willing to go all the way
without a guide. And fifty years into my time on earth, no guide has yet
appeared.
In my Amazonian vision quests I was guided
by shamans – men who had made the journey many times and were anointed with the
task of taking others along to the Otherworld. These journeys were also
father-journeys – lone descents into remote jungles guided by men who took me
as a son, fed me medicine, sang to me, stroked my back as I vomited on the floors of their huts
– and so they partook of the same flavor as my ancestral searchings.
My own father did try to impart to me
something of my blood history – an early childhood visit to Salem, a discussion
of the medieval family crest, any number of fatherly attempts to talk that I
rejected at the time and have long since forgotten – but for the most part he
was a white American man of his time: remote to the point of absence. No doubt
he was gravely wounded by his war experiences and by returning to a culture
unable to engage in the healing that such wounds demand. And I was a typical American youth of my own
time: rebellious and dismissive and short of attention and ready to move on. My
relationship with him left me little but a sense of loss, and a grief that I
have come to recognize as the grief of being a man.
Strange, then that I was guided around East
Budleigh by a tiny old woman who was a victim of the same war as my father, but
who had managed to live long enough to see her wounds mostly healed.
***
England in Conant’s time was in upheaval,
and nowhere more so than in the far-off corner of Devon and Cornwall. In 1549,
a generation before Roger Conant’s birth at East Budleigh, 600 Devonshire and
Cornish rebels were cut down at a river crossing when they refused to adopt the
prayerbook of the reformed Church of England. Why?
Perhaps they wanted to retain the down
country ways that flowed of old in their Saxon and Celtic blood, that were
perhaps even coded into the Catholic liturgies, just as pagan green men were
sculpted into the church architecture. It was after all the Catholic monks
who’d best preserved the lore and languages of the Devonians and Cornish, as
they’d done with the druidic religion in Ireland. Or perhaps they couldn’t
stomach the monarchy with its new claim on God and its claim on the forests and
the harvest of the fields; or perhaps for all of these reasons. The country had
been riven over this for a hundred years, and would be riven for a hundred
years more. If you dissented from the Monarchy and the Anglican Church, it was
a good time to get out. And anywhere you went would be a New World.
From there a long history unwinds, that we
know as the history of the United States of America – a history of violence and
invention, a colonial expansion that began with a few pilgrims and ended in
world domination. Roger Conant had died by the 1670’s as Metacom’s War
threatened to push the colonists off the continent altogether. It’s not known
what role Conant and his children played in that war, or in the Pequot War. Nor
is it known by this writer what role Conant’s children might have played in the
Salem Witch Trials of the 1690’s, a century after Conant’s birth, when the
great European femicide infected Massachusetts. The witch trials that have cast
a shadow over Salem for centuries were also a killing off of the pagan,
womyn-centered earth religions of the past. As historian Sylvia Federici wrote,
the destruction of female knowledge, female values, and female power that the
Calvinists found so threatening was a pre-requisite for the establishment of
North Atlantic imperial capitalism. (Curiously, the last execution of witches
in England took place in Exeter just a few years before the infamous events in
Salem; and a century earlier, a suspected witch had been burned not a mile from
the King’s Arms Inn in Otterton, at the crossroads with sleepy little East
Budleigh.)
A small anecdote: the morning I left London
for Budleigh everything was running behind. I tried to get a subway to
Paddington Station, but the trains were suddenly shut down. Breathless from
running through the Baker Street tube station, I flagged down one of those black
London cabs they call a Hackney carriage and asked the driver to get me to
Paddington Station as fast as he could.
“Where you off to?” the cabbie asked me
with a friendly cockney lilt.
“Uh, Exeter, in Devon.”
“What you doin’ ‘air?” he inquired.
Still catching my breath, I said, “I’m from
America, and I’m tracking down my ancestry in Devon.”
“Oh yeah? Very good,” he said. “What year’d
they go to America?”
“1623.”
“1623? Must’a been slaves. Indentured
slaves.”
Fascinating. “Why do you say that?”
“Loads a slaves shipped off to America at
‘at time.”
I told him, as it happened, that I knew a
few details, and my ancestors were not shipped as slaves.
“Well, den dey were de masters an’ dey ‘ad
slaves wid’ ‘em,” he said.
And so they did, though it’s near
impossible to find anything on it in the history books. Bradford’s On Plymouth Plantation does mention that
the Mayflower pilgrims brought “servants,” and it’s well known that the first
centuries of English colonization were undertaken by Scots-Irish enslaved and
press-ganged by the British. Historian Peter Linebaugh in The Many Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the
Revolutionary Atlantic tells stories of slave uprisings, mutinies, and
rebellions that posed the alternative to the westward expansion of capital
during those years, and elaborates how the enslavement of poor Brits, Scots,
and Irish was slowly replaced by Africans, as the British government found
reason to prevent any unholy alliances between the indentured Irish and the
Africans being hauled in chains across the Atlantic in ever greater numbers. It’s this history that has trained us, by and large, to think of
the African chattel as “slaves” while the whites who came in forced labor were
dignified as “servants.” So there was something about getting the unbridled
truth from a London cabbie – the ease with which he informed the American
tourist who stepped into his Hackney that he was the descendant either of
slaves or of slave owners – that, like the return of the mythical Otter River
beaver, gave an edge of historical drama to my humble three day junket into
deepest Devon, England.
***
I no longer disdain the memory of Roger
Conant, as I did in my twenties, in my thirties, into my forties. I revisit my
psychedelic adventure with his statue in Salem and see a private act of
rebellion tinged with a hint of contempt for Conant’s religion, for his status
as a patriarch, for the fact that he very much did look like my own remote and
often bloodless father, and for the centuries of holocaust that followed his
arrival. That’s all perfectly reasonable: each of these aspects is a powerful
fact for a young man to confront – combined, they are all but unforgivable. But
an older man, having confronted each of these aspects, comes to see a statue of
beaten copper, hollow and old, stuck with false grandeur in a suburban traffic
circle. And it is, after all, good to keep memory alive.
A memory of my father comes to me: each
summer for a few years of my childhood he would host a New England clam bake in
our backyard. Neighbors and friends would gather in the swampy yard behind our
Connecticut clapboard house or on the back deck (years later that deck would
collapse under the weight of neglect as the family itself collapsed), and would
enjoy the harvests of high summer: quahog clams, lobster, steamers and mussels
steamed in a seaweed-lined pit in the ground, steamed corn on the cob, hot dogs
off the grill. My memories of these parties are almost magical: my father the
beneficent patriarch, my mother laughing with a drink and a cigarette perched
in her hands, my friends and I chasing each other laughing through the tall
grass. But the feelings there were obliterated by what came next: my father’s
years of smoking and quiet anguish that ultimately took him, my mother’s
alcoholism that bloomed into early dementia, the house fallen into disrepair
and rot as if reclaimed by the swamp. I grew up and headed west, chasing a
taste for the Otherworld.
The younger man, facing such anguish,
decides he needs to reject it. The older man, returning through the life events
driven by this rejection, decides he needs to examine it. Such an examination,
taken fully on, leads through the father to the ancestors. If we can braid
ourselves to our ancestry we can braid ourselves back into the living world
from which we’ve been so violently turned out.
Martin Shaw draws extreme importance to the
place-ness of a story, as stories, he insists, are not exclusively of human
creation, but emerge often from the wild forces of a local ecology, like
bog-iron from a fen or the itchy color of lichen on a rock face. “It’s unlikely
that a sixty-year old electrician from Budleigh Salterton will ever quite draw
the resonance out of a Miwok story that a California native will.”
When I would scratch around my childhood
yard with a shovel digging for artifacts, I often came upon old seashells and
bits of burnt charcoal, which I attributed to the Indians that had lived here
(and about whom I knew less than nothing, not even a tribal name). This is the
most wonderful quality of childhood – the child sees shells from the cook-out
tossed into the midden heap in summer, and when he uncovers them in winter he
is able to conclude without a shadow of doubt that they are centuries old
remains of tribal villages.
***
With only 48 hours to pass in South Devon,
after a second morning hoping in vain to spot the famous Otter River beaver, I
decided to go a bit further afield and down into history. I squeezed back into
my right-side, left-hand vehicle and scanned a paper map for the nearest
tumulus, or Neolithic hill-fort. The map was sprinkled with little topo circles
that signify these ancient dwellings with names like Castle Dyke, Woodbury
Castle, Farway Castle, and Blackbury Castle. I set off up the deep-dug warren
of lanes where winter crows and jackdaws attacked the roadside field stubble
and clustered in the ancient oaks above, picturing a rough-hewn rock fortress
decorated in mist. What I found instead when I arrived at Woodbury Castle was a
wooded park where high sloping earthen ramparts enclosed levelled ground, not a
structure in sight. Archeologists have found the remains of “wood-henges” –
circles of timber stakes driven deep into the ground to mark ritual space – and
have envisioned the thatched wattle-and-daub buildings that would have composed
dwellings. But to the casual visitor, the site is a lovely
earthwork-in-the-woods where one can halt and listen for ghosts among the
built-up ground, hear the wind whipping through the Scotch pines, and ponder.
How did a young man in the seventeenth
century perceive these landscapes shaped by human hands five thousand years
before? Or even, worshipping in 1610 in a church built by Saxon hands three
centuries before the Normans conquered Britain, what perspective might Conant
have had on the waves of invasions that had formed his own place? Or, assuming
his people had just crossed over from Brittany within a generation or two, how
did his French Celtic imagination couple with that of his adopted Devonian
Celtic cousins?
The poet Robert Bly in his book Iron John gives a nod to “the memory
culture that our ancestors lived in up till the time of writing.” Roger Conant,
growing up in East Budleigh walking along the Otter River estuary to the Roman
salt pans where he might have begun to learn his trade as a salter, would have
lived in such a memory culture – a society where most learning and most
communicating were done orally. There are preserves of some of what might’ve
been spoken – Martin Shaw has captured some in writing, as have others – but most
of it is gone, and unknowable.
It’s curious to consider the memory culture
that may have existed in Conant’s time, and its relationship to the culture of
books and writing that was evolving rapidly at the time. It was the moment of
the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer – royal, imperial projects
that put into English script stories and psalms that had previously been only
spoken, from a Latin that was mastered only by the priestly caste and the
elites. Not everyone agreed with these projects, and the conflict between
orality and script was central to the religious wars that led the dissenters to
flee. This was also the time of Shakespeare and Marlowe and Sir Walter Raleigh,
whose sonnets Conant would have known. I like to imagine a young Roger Conant
bucking Puritan mores to attend the Tempest, Shakespeare’s last play, staged at
the Globe in London in 1621, in the years between Raleigh’s beheading at the
Tower of London and Conant’s journey to Naumkeag.
I wonder, too, if in Conant’s blood ran
some Celtic tribal memory, some primordial impulse to move and keep moving. For
millennia the Celts, along with so many tribal peoples of old Europe, had been
driven west, each group knocking into the next like billiard balls, or atoms,
scattering tribes from the Danube to the Rhine to the Rhone to the Thames, each
collision driving seeds into the local soil, and each collision driving other
tribes onward, to the west. Amidst empires and religions, enslavement and war
and conquest, but in the absence of electric neon digital information how much
might a people’s memory have retained across these centuries?
On arrival in the land of the Massachusett
and the Wampanoag Conant’s dissenters find a memory culture still intact and they
hasten to destroy it. The only written accounts of the Wampanoags of Conant’s
time and before are the records of William Bradford, Thomas Morton, Roger
Williams (who even compiled a dictionary, A
Key Into the Language of America, in 1643) and a few others, and they
consist of these settlers’ observations. To my knowledge, we have nothing of
the Wampanoags in their own voice and so another morsel of history is consigned
to oblivion.
Neither is it possible to know what drove
Conant, or any of them, to make their sea journey to the Otherworld of the
West. Religious intolerance, political conflict, economic opportunity, divine
will – it’s all in the mix. That the Pilgrims’ arrival catalyzed the
catastrophe of genocide and colonization that would roil on for four centuries
and more is all part of it. Certainly they are not blameless: their attitude
and their religion dehumanized the native people, made them into “savages,” and
their mission to wrest the wilderness from these savages made the settlers into
murderers and mercenaries. Both their ideas and their actions were poison, and
the poison has not yet ceased to do harm. And so I curse the pilgrim father in
me – my inner Roger Conant with his stern, windblown cheeks and great Gallic
nose and his alien ideas. And with the same breath I bless and forgive him so
that he may rest once and for all, if such a thing is possible, in his traffic
roundabout on Salem Common or his family pew in All Saints’ Church, there
overlooking the Walter Raleigh Pub in East Budleigh, a few miles from where the
last witches were burned and the River Otter quietly spreads across fields of
pastel-colored pebbles out into the sea.
© Jeff Conant 2019
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