by Bryan Sykes
Our meeting with “Terry Malloy” was to take place outside Boston, so Richard and I hired a car and set off for Cape Cod. That is where “Terry” had been born and raised and where, by the sound of it, all of his ancestors had lived since they arrived in the seventeenth century. I wanted to see, if only very briefly, the replica of the Mayflower anchored near Plymouth and the reconstruction of the original settlement, the Plimouth Plantation, which retains its original spelling. Plymouth is on the way to Cape Cod, so we took a day away from the comfortable elegance of the society headquarters and headed off down Interstate 93. So many of the historic sites in Boston had a very familiar feeling about them because, of course, they were originally English and resembled similarly preserved examples back home. However, this illusion of architectural familiarity lasted only until we hit the highway. Once we had turned off to the little town of Plymouth, it was almost as if we were visiting a prosperous part of southern England we had not seen before. Almost, but not quite, as the gray-painted wooden houses were rather too elegant, and wooden houses in England are unusual. Even so, we were wrapped in the warm blanket of familiarity as we pulled up for a cup of coffee on the main street. Any sense of home was soon shattered by a nearby placard. It read “Ammo Special 7.62×39. $350 a case. Assault Weapons in Stock”. We were not in a sleepy Devon town after all. We hurried past the Mayflower and the original Plymouth Rock beneath its protective cover, and on to Plimouth Plantation.
Despite my reservations about reconstructions I was impressed by Plimouth Plantation, where about thirty thatched wooden cottages lined two sides of a broad sandy street on a gentle slope heading toward the sea. Long tendrils of wild wisteria wound themselves around the green-leaved shrubs, and waving beds of cat-tail reeds lined the Eel River. Inside the cottages actors played the parts of the first settlers with immaculate conviction, never once betraying through language or action that they were anything but authentic colonists. I met the rather rakish Myles Standish, who told me he had come here from Holland, as he considered the Dutch too tolerant of Catholics. In another smoke-darkened interior Constance Snow was waiting for her husband to return from England, fearful that he may have been captured by French or Turkish pirates who preyed on the fragile transatlantic traffic supplying the colonies. In another, William Brewster explained how he he had been asked to conduct the daily services though he could not give the sacrament at Holy Communion as he was not ordained.
Far less convincing were the occupants of the reconstructed Wampmanoag homesite nearby. The bark-covered winter houses were just as interesting as the cottages but, by comparison to the enthusiastic role-playing by the English, the Indians, or “Native People” as a sign informed vistors they preferred to be known, were surly and reticent. The delicate relations between the two communities that I was to experience many times on my journey were already there in what was, after all, only a tourist destination, reinforced by notices asking visitors to avoid harmful stereotypes and not to ask any questions.
We pressed on toward Barnstable, where “Terry Malloy” and his wife had invited us for lunch. The woods grew thicker and the roads narrower. Enormous houses, mostly empty, stood back from the road. These, I later learned from “Terry,” were the summer residences of the wealthy who spent the rest of the year in Florida. A few lawnmowers hummed as retainers kept the grounds in shape ready for the return of the summer visitors from the South, but overall it was silent, beautiful, and forlorn. The sun dappled through the trees, already golden-leaved, and every now and then we could glimpse the ocean. Inlets crowded with yachts sealed up for the winter came and went as we passed Falmouth, Sandwich, and finally Barnstable, all seaside towns in England but here disposed in unfamiliar juxtaposition. After losing our way several times we eventually found “Terry”’s house, in deep woods a mile or so off the main road. This was not one of the empty shells we had passed on our way but a neat, lived-in, one-story home. As soon as we got out of the car I could hear unfamiliar birdcalls, rich and strange, coming from the dense canopy of pines. A bright golden yellow bird, a kind of finch I think, landed on a branch close by then darted back into the undergrowth. In bleak comparison, our goldfinch back home has just one yellow feather on each wing.
“Terry,” tall and lean with close-cropped gray hair, was waiting with his wife to greet us on the porch. Once inside, and seated comfortably in the living room, he began to tell me about Cape Cod, his ancestors, and himself. He was both laconic and content. “My life is not all that exciting,” were his opening words in a slow, gravelly voice. “Oh, really,” I thought to myself. He was retired now but had been an engineer, graduating from Brown University and specializing in electronic control systems. I was frankly dazzled by the projects he had worked on. Starting his career designing automatic pilots and instrument landing systems, he had graduated to control systems for supersonic wind tunnels, steel mills, submarine tankers, and radio-telescopes. “Submarine tankers?” I asked. “What are they?”
Pausing to collect his thoughts and take another sip of coffee, he recalled the project, now long abandoned, to load oil from the Alsakan fields at Prudhoe Bay onto huge submarines that would then travel under the ice to the North Atlantic and the east coast ports of America. It was to be, quite literally, a submarine Northwest Passage. The insuperable difficulty was not how to build these giants, but of transferring the oil, which had to be done underwater. To maintain depth the tanks had to be flooded with seawater as the oil was off-loaded, then flushed before taking on the next cargo. This simply could not be done without causing significant pollution, and, with the industry reeling from the Exxon Valdez disaster, the project was halted.
I could tell from the twinkle in his eye that “Terry”’s proudest achievement was his work on the radio telescope at Greenbank, Virginia. It had a diameter of 140 feet, yet had to be able to hold its position against the stars to within five seconds of arc as the earth rotated beneath it. That was the specification, but “Terry” built it to keep the alignment to within one second of arc routinely and to within one-tenth of an arc-second in good conditions.
Like many people, “Terry” began to be interested in genealogy after he retired. He wishes he had started earlier, before his father had died and taken so many family secrets with him. But fortunately the Sturgess Library in Barnstable had a fine genealogy section that gave him a good start. Then a chance meeting in Florida unearthed more history on Barnstable families, and as “Terry” worked his way through these, he found he was related to almost all of them. He had traced his patrilineal ancestors back to Edward, who arrived with four boys in West Barnstable in 1626. The next record was when one of the boys, another Edward, married Margaret Lombard in 1649. More ancestors peppered the intervening centuries, all of them from Cape Cod and mostly from the little corner near Barnstable. There was his great-great-grandfather Nathaniel, who had gone insane around 1800. His great-great-great-grandfather a generation earlier had been the captain of a coastal schooner that used to collect ice from Maine and take it to New York. He built a house on the water’s edge so that, as “Terry” wryly suggested, he could land, start another baby, and be off to sea again on the next tide. It seemed to have worked, as his wife produced five daughters and five sons. “Terry”’s great-grandfather, a housebuilder, had put up the first house in Hyannis and also built the Wampanoag Meeting House in Mashpee, where he was later married. Every one of his ancestors had stayed within a few miles of where the first immigrant Edward had landed in 1626. The wide-open spaces of the West did not lure “Terry”’s ancestors to move away. They did not seek their fortunes in the California gold rush or in the money houses of New York City. They just stayed where they were.
“Terry” and his ancestors were completely enmeshed in Cape Cod, a point that was amplified when we drove the few miles to a local restaurant for lunch. “You see that house over there?” “Terry” said as we passed through a small township. “The one with the blue door? That belonged to my grandfather.” T
hen, a mile or so farther on: “That house, the white one, was where I was brought up. It was built by my uncle, then my father built the smaller house next door, where he lived with my mother up until he died.” As we wished them good-bye and drove back to Boston through the woods, I knew we had really touched the spirit of the place. Not extravagant, nor overambitious, just regular hardworking folk who loved their piece of America even more than their ancestors had done when they stepped ashore all those years ago.
We spent the rest of the week in Boston interviewing an eager succession of volunteers and taking DNA samples for chromosome painting. Many arrived with sheaves of documentation logging their ancestry back through the geometric progression of predecessors, doubling at every generation. Some, like “Atticus Finch,” had been fascinated by genealogy from an early age, while others, like “Terry Malloy,” had taken it up seriously only once they had retired. For some the passion went much further than mere enthusiasm. “Rose Sayer” told me she had spent fourteen hours a day, every day, for the past three years compiling her complete ancestry back seven generations, at which point the arithmetic meant she had 27 or 128 ancestors. She had tracked down 126 of these—and I mean “tracked down,” with birth, marriage, and death certificates. As you can imagine, she was busily seeking the final pair to make her ancestry complete.
Quite a few of the society’s members had already used genetics to overcome the “brick walls” that every genealogist comes up against at some point—those times when the crucial records cannot be found anywhere. By establishing a genetic link between two branches, usually through finding a Y-chromosome match, they could leapfrog the gap in the records and be confident that a connection existed where before they could only assume. By the end of the week I was left dazed by the sheer time and effort that the members had invested in their search for their roots. There was never a whiff of concern about enlisting DNA to assist them. Several members knew more than I did about the latest classification systems for particular branches of the Y-chromosome tree, which I thought a fine development.
All the volunteers so far had been European Americans, as I had intended in New England, but toward the end of the week a society staff member, “Harry Lime,” asked if I could include a friend of his who lived in the same apartment house. His friend, who soon became “Virgil Tibbs,” was an African American, and when we met in the society boardroom, he had a very different story to tell. “Virgil” worked as a history teacher in a school in Brookline, a well-to-do predominantly white town in Norfolk County on the outskirts of Boston. He had been to high school there as well, thanks to the busing program run by METCO, the Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity, which took him to school every day from his home in the inner city. I found our conversation over an hour and a half absolutely riveting, letting me glimpse a world I had never known. Whereas it was quite easy for me to imagine the lives of my other New England volunteers with their jobs in engineering or business, listening to “Virgil” as he very articulately described the everyday life of inner-city African Americans was absolutely gripping.
However, “Virgil” had not come to see me to give me a tutorial on the sociology of race relations in twenty-first-century Boston, but to explore a very specific family myth. He and his family had lived in the Boston area for a long as anyone could remember, and he had heard his grandmother say that she (and therefore “Virgil”) was descended from King Philip. Fortunately I had read enough about early New England to know that King Philip was the son of Massasoit, the Wampanoag chief who had helped the Mayflower Pilgrims survive the winter of 1620 and negotiated a peace treaty with them in 1621. Massasoit lived for another forty years of largely peaceful alliance between the colonists and the Wampanoag. He sold land to Myles Standish and helped Roger Williams after he had been banished from the Massachusetts Colony on his way to found his own at Providence, Rhode Island. After he died in 1661, his sons Pometecomet, or Metacomet, and Wamsutta requested English names from the colonists. Metacomet was duly named Philip, and his elder brother Wamsutta became Alexander. Metacomet became the leader of the Wampanoag on his brother’s death the following year.
Although he strove to continue the good relations with the colonists that his father had forged, increasing demands from the English finally turned Metacomet against the colonists, and he determined to stop any further expansion on their part. He attacked the Plimouth Plantation in 1675 but was decisively defeated by the colonists, and took refuge in swampland in Rhode Island. He was hunted down and shot the following year, his wife and child sold as slaves. In a final grisly reminder of the brutality of war, King Philip’s head was mounted on a pikestaff at the entrance to the Plymouth Fort where it stayed for twenty years.
Five thousand Indians and 2,500 colonists were killed in the war. “Virgil” was hazy about his precise line of descent from Massasoit and King Philip, and although he did have some documentary evidence that his great-grandmother had received an annuity granted to descendants of Massasoit, it had been disputed by another family. “Virgil”’s cousin had a specific reason for wanting to establish his descent from King Philip, which was to support his application for membership of the Wampanoag Nation. The reason he gave was that he wanted the reinforcement of the feeling of connection to the place where he lives that an ancestor among the Wampanoag would give him.
As “Virgil” explained to me, black people don’t feel that they have roots. They may be living in Harlem or Chicago or Tallahassee or San Francisco, but that is not really where they are from. Even in the South, that isn’t really where they are from either. I asked him what he felt about African Americans who had reinforced their links to Africa, with or without a genetic test of the sort Rick Kittles and Gina Paige had developed. He told me that his grandmother had gone back to Senegal, where she thought her ancestors might have been from, but for “Virgil” the slave trade was a long time ago, “sort of hollow,” and it was time to move on. “Everyone makes a big deal of race, but now we are all just Amazon-shopping, Big Mac–eating, Gap-clothed Americans.” But to be a descendant of a Native American, a people who had been in this country for thousands of years before any European or African had set foot in the place—that was really something. Richard passed him a glass of water, “Virgil” filled the tube with saliva to the line, and the DNA that might hold the answer was soon on its way to the lab.
“Virgil” had been our last appointment in Boston. What a difference a week makes! What started as a rainy weekend facing a seemingly overwhelming and terrifying prospect of getting nowhere, ended in a slow walk back from Newbury Street to our hotel across Boston Common on a warm early autumn evening. The welcome we had received from “Atticus Finch” and the other members of the New England Historical Genealogy Society, the willingness of the volunteers to part with their DNA and to tell us about themselves and their families, could not have been surpassed. Richard and I sat down on a bench in the sun close to Swan Lake. He had sat in at every interview, worked the voice recorder, brought glasses of water to parched volunteers, and coaxed them to fill the sample tubes when the talking was done.
As we sat there after a very full week, I was contrasting the warmth of our reception in Boston to the time I traveled a hundred miles to give a lecture to a genealogy society in Northhampton, England. After I talked for an hour and answered questions for a further thirty minutes the organizers came round with a very welcome cup of coffee and a plate of cookies. I picked up a Rich Tea biscuit and my hand moved toward a Jammy Dodger on the other side of the plate. Before I could pick it up, the plate was whisked away. “Only one biscuit I’m afraid,” came the stern admonishment.
I never again accepted a lecture invitation from an English genealogy society. On the bridge about a hundred yards away from where we were sitting, a saxophonist was playing. Low sunbeams illuminated hundreds of mayflies that were performing their mating dance, rising in columns, then falling back toward the water. Then something remarkable happened. The saxophonist
let out a loud blast, and every one of the mayflies responded by flying upward much higher than before. It was as if they were dancing to the music.
13
Heading West
The California Zephyr crosses Colorado en route to Denver.
As the week in Boston passed and we became more and more immersed in old New England, I could not disguise my excitement and anticipation of the next stage of the journey. Our hotel was opposite the Tufts University Medical Center, about a mile from South Station. In the dead of night when the wailing sirens bringing emergencies to the hospital had quieted down, I caught the distant sound of a train. Quite unlike the frenetic adrenaline-bursting shrieks of the ambulances’ “Get out of my way!” “Get out of my way!” the train sounded mournful, almost apologetic, a two-note harmony in a minor key: “Excuse me, but I must get through.” “Excuse me, but I have to get to where I’m going.”
When departure day came, our suitcases bulging with kind gifts of books and personal genealogies, we crammed everything into a taxi for the short ride to South Station. The large metropolitan stations in America are still quite wonderful, even though—or perhaps because—most of them were built for an era long gone, before planes broke their monopoly. Quite unlike the tearing hurry of airline terminals, the pace is slower and, if you arrive with time to spare, relaxing. We settled down at a table on the stone concourse and ordered a couple of hot drinks. Tea for Richard, coffee for me, and then nuts and fruit for the journey ahead. We got out our train map and looked at the route. It seemed a very long way from Boston to Chicago, Denver, Salt Lake City, and finally Emeryville on San Francisco Bay. Even Chicago, which I had always thought of as about halfway across America, suddenly looked much nearer the East coast than the West. Which of course it is.
