Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All

by Christina Thompson

  He had signed on at one of the local clubs where they gave each of the members a ranking and booked partners for them at the appropriate level. Seven, being a novice, was added to a doubles group consisting of three middle-age women. I can only guess what they thought when they saw him coming—with his long black ponytail and his powerful dark arms and his gleaming tennis whites. But, after he nearly knocked his partner out with a badly aimed forehand to the back of the head, he was never matched with that kind of group again.

  Eventually, Seven became quite a good tennis player. One year he even took first place in the doubles tournament on the Fourth of July. The prize was a plastic water bottle with the words Suburban Tennis League printed on the side.

  “I’m going to take a picture of you with that,” I told him, “and send it to your brothers.”

  “Ha ha. Very funny,” he said.

  16

  Thieves and Indian-Killers

  Just before we left New Zealand on our way to the States, we had gone with a bunch of Seven’s brothers and sisters to the pub in Kerikeri where Seven and I had first met. I was feeling a little nostalgic and, under the influence of a couple of beers, I confessed to one his brothers that I was concocting a plan.

  “You know what I’m going to do?” I said to him.

  “What’s that, Sis?”

  “I’m going to write your family story.”

  “Write your own first,” he said without missing a beat.

  I thought about this when I got back to America. For years I had been obsessed with Seven’s history—or, more properly, with the history of the Maori people—but I had never given my own history much thought.

  By a strange coincidence, not six months after we arrived in Boston, a slim bound volume came unexpectedly in the mail. Titled The Descendants of George Abbott of Rowley, Mass, in the Single Line to Everton Judson Abbott, Followed by All the Abbott Descendants of the Twentieth Century, it was a genealogy of my mother’s family, compiled by one of her cousins in Minnesota. The story of the family’s origins in England and their arrival in the American colonies was a confusing one, involving obscure parliamentary records, false interments, and missing wills. But there was one point that leaped out at me: the eponymous American ancestor, George Abbott of Rowley, Yorkshire, had taken possession of a house lot of two acres in Rowley, Massachusetts, in 1642.

  This fact, when I discovered it, set off a clanging in my head. What are numbers? Accidents, symbols, ciphers—they are meaningless in themselves. And yet, there it is: an American beginning and, in perfect synchronicity, a Maori end, as though history, like electricity, leaped across the breach from one conductor to another.

  The Yorkshire Abbotts were dissenters, but they seem to have been a cautious lot, not given to precipitate gestures. Still, they no doubt watched with growing concern as England gradually emptied of their brethren. George Abbott, I imagine, followed the fate of the reformists closely as, parish by parish, they packed their things and set out for America in the hope of “laying a foundation for the advancement of the Redeemer’s kingdom” in those wild and inhospitable regions. News came back across the sea: the New England settlements prospered. At last he made up his mind and, putting behind him all that was familiar in life, he joined the trailing end of the Great Migration, shipping for the colonies just as England lurched toward civil war.

  There is much to be said for the daring of emigrants, but one wonders whether any of these tradesmen and shopkeepers and farmers fully realized where they were going. Rowley, Massachusetts, in 1642 was a place in which chairs were uncommon, china and porcelain not to be had, and tea the rarest of luxuries. Men lived to an average age of forty-three and children often succumbed to contagious diseases. Accidents were not uncommon: people drowned and froze and were scalded and got lost in the woods. Fires consumed houses; barns were struck by lightning and sometimes maliciously set alight. One might be publicly whipped for shooting fowl on the Sabbath Day or have one’s ears cut off for seditious speech. The possession of any books at all and more than three sets of clothing was a sign of affluence.

  The boundaries of Rowley town lay eight miles from the meetinghouse in any direction. Beyond that was wilderness: to the east a tangle of salt marshes, to the west the forest primeval, filled not only with moose and bears but with wolves in such numbers that a bounty was offered for every head nailed to the meetinghouse wall. Above all, there were Indians—Agawams, Pennacooks, and Pawtuckets—whose uncanny ability to appear and disappear, along with their shifting and uncertain loyalties, kept the colonists in a state of perpetual nervous tension. The town’s public institutions reflected the settlers’ hopes and fears, being about evenly divided between the functions of life and those of death, with a grist mill, saw mill, and meetinghouse on the one hand, and a watch house, powder house, training ground, and cemetery on the other. It would be years before they could even think about a school.

  George Abbott was granted a house lot in the first distribution on the corner of Kiln Lane and the High Way, next door to Sebastian Briggam. Like other settlers, he received a wood lot, a meadow lot, and a planting lot from the common lands. He built a wood-frame house with clapboard sheathing and erected a fireplace made of stone. He planted rye, peas, beans, and corn, and a small apple orchard, which he laid out on the slope that ran down behind his house. There he lived with his wife and four sons until the early winter of 1647, when, in the course of repairing his chimney, he fell from the roof of his house and died. His effects at death included a satin cap, thirty books, and two black gowns, which showed him to be a man of some consequence in the colony. Despite his premature death, his descendants married well and prospered, numbering no fewer than twenty-three in the second generation.

  The land on which the town of Rowley was established belonged, as did all the land lying between the Merrimack and Bass rivers, to Masconnomet, Sagamore of Agawam. No payment was made for the title—beyond the eight hundred pounds paid to some settlers of Ipswich and Newbury who had previously laid claim to acreage that was now within Rowley’s boundaries—until sixty years later, when three of Masconnomet’s grandsons sued for compensation. The basis of their claim was a deed to the neighboring town of Ipswich, signed by their grandfather in 1638, in which he had relinquished “all the right and interest I have unto all the havens, rivers, creeks, islands, huntings, and fishings, with all the woods, swamps, timber, and whatever else is, or may be, in or upon the said ground to me belonging” in the Bay of Agawam (later known as Ipswich) for the sum of twenty pounds.

  The relationship between settlers and natives waxed and waned as rumors swirled in the unstable atmosphere of the new colony. Reports circulated among the colonists of Indian conspiracies to murder them in their beds. Warrants went out for the arrest and disarmament of Indian leaders, only to be rescinded when they proved unfounded or impossible to effect. A set of military watches and alarms was established in every township, and men were ordered to furnish themselves with powder and shot and to keep their muskets ready. A sense of anxiety hung over the general population. John Winthrop records a chilly night in September 1642 when a traveler, having lost himself in a swamp and hearing the howls of wolves in the distance, cried out for help in the darkness. A nearby settler heard the cries, but believing that Indians were torturing the man, he dared not go to his rescue. Instead, he fired his musket in the air, setting off alarms from Dorchester to Salem.

  But although the colonists feared and even hated the Indians, they were confident of one thing: in the long run the natives would disappear. Settlers spoke of the terrible epidemics that swept the coastal region even before the Pilgrims had landed at Plymouth, describing these outbreaks as mysteriously providential. “It seems God hath provided this country for our nation,” one wrote, “destroying the natives by the plague, it not touching one Englishman, though many traded and were conversant among them.” In some places “the Contagion hath scarce left alive one person of an hundred,” wrote another, w
hile elsewhere the plagues “utterly consumed man, woman and child, so that there is no person left to lay claim to the soil which they possessed.”

  My mother was fond of saying that we were descended from pickpockets and thieves and, more recently, from Indian-killers. The “pickpockets and thieves” was a backhanded reference to the family’s early arrival in the colonies and to the fact that every settler society contains its share of rogues. The “Indian-killers,” on the other hand, was a direct reference to her great-uncle Colonel Henry Hastings Sibley, who led the campaign against the Santee Sioux, which ended in the mass hanging of thirty-eight Indians at Mankato, Minnesota, in 1862, the largest mass execution in U.S. history.

  It was a bitter joke because, although we understood the truth of it, none of us could say with complete honesty that we wished it had been any other way. Privilege comes at a cost and it was the Dakotas and Pennacooks and Pawtuckets who paid the price of our family’s prosperity. This, of course, was true of everyone on the leading edge of a colonial frontier. But the unhappy irony that my mother’s wealth was directly linked to the dispossession of America’s natives, while my husband’s poverty was directly linked to an identical and simultaneous act of dispossession by people exactly like us who had simply set out in the opposite direction became inescapable once I finally focused my attention on our side.

  The story of my mother’s family had always seemed to me rather glamorous when I was growing up. There were things in our house that had belonged to her relatives: a small silver box with an enameled lid that had been given to one of her aunts as a party favor, a Georgian coffeepot with a wooden handle, a set of gold encrusted goblets, a writing desk with secret drawers. These objects suggested the sort of world that, as a child, I’d read about in books, a world in which girls and boys were orphaned and sent to live in big houses with people they hardly knew, a world of nannies and parlor maids, of coded behavior and strict decorum, a world in which appearance and reality seemed, at least to a modern child, to mask each other in mysterious ways.

  My sense of this world was wholly imaginary and therefore much more elemental than that of my mother, whose feelings about her family were mixed. She had made a concerted effort to escape them, marrying a Californian with no money, moving away to the East, pursuing a modern, cosmopolitan lifestyle. And yet she belonged inescapably to them and often talked about her relatives, recalling their provincial grandeur and self-conscious refinement with a mixture of horror and pride.

  In recent generations, the Abbotts had belonged to the haute bourgeoisie of St. Paul, Minnesota, a middle-western capital settled by Yankees who retained an aura of gentility that was presumed to have come directly from England itself. St. Paul society at the turn of the twentieth century consisted of a cluster of families—Ramseys and Archers and Sibleys and Steeles—who managed big houses on private incomes and gave parties and traveled and occasionally worked. None of the Abbotts had done much of anything for two generations by the time my mother came along, and the fabric of the family was already unraveling. Her parents were entirely preoccupied with their own problems and could not be bothered with their children, whom they farmed out to various members of the clan.

  My mother was sent to live with her grandmother and three maiden aunts in a large house on Grand Avenue in St. Paul. They dressed for dinner and had breakfast in bed and were waited on by Irish girls who ironed the antimacassars and used a different entrance to the house. It all took place long before I was born, but my mother carried with her into the twenty-first century a set of habits and customs, many of which no longer had any practical application. When the finger bowl is placed before you, lift the bowl and remove the doily from the plate. Place the doily to the right of your table setting, then place the finger bowl on it. This will leave your plate free for dessert. She told me once about a foreigner who thought the water in his finger bowl was a clear kind of soup and drank it, eating the gardenia petals as a garnish.

  Her grandmother Abbott was an ample woman who had raised five children without ever changing a diaper or cooking a meal. Once a year she would descend to the kitchen and have an apron tied about her by one of the maids. Then she would stand in front of the stove with a long wooden spoon, stirring a great pot of jam. “Mama is making the marmalade,” they would say. One of her sons was a doctor like his father, the other, my grandfather, was dissolute. None of the daughters ever married, though the eldest was vivacious and gay and was said to have been disappointed. Why the second never married I don’t know, but the youngest and prettiest of the three was hurt in an accident as a child. Racing downhill on her bicycle, she got her skirts caught in the spokes and fell, hitting her head on a granite curbstone. She was deaf after that, as well as odd, and it was a queer kind of justice that permitted her to live longer than anyone else and to use up, in a highly eccentric fashion, a sizeable chunk of the family money.

  They were not alone among their generation, my mother’s maiden aunts. There were girls like them in almost every family. In the years when they were young, there was a shortage of eligible men in places like St. Paul. Some of them died in the Great War of dysentery or mortars, some died of flu, some simply went away and never came back, having discovered New York or California. Meanwhile, the Misses Abbott stayed on in the big house with Mama, doing good works and visiting and gradually growing old. After their father died and their brothers married, it was just the four of them. Five, if you count Great-aunt Clara, Grandmother Abbott’s sister, who lived as a dowager in the Commodore Hotel and kept up a running dispute with her friend Mrs. Griggs as to which of them was the richest woman in Minnesota.

  It is hardly creditable how fast this society formed or how rigidly it was cemented, given that Minnesota had only just emerged from the pioneering period. Grandmother Abbott herself had come out to the territory as a girl on a flood tide of frontier settlement that swept the upper Mississippi in the 18 50s. At the start of that decade there were only 6,000 settlers in Minnesota, and a traveler heading to St. Paul might still have given the name “Pig’s Eye” as his destination. Ten years later the number of settlers had swelled to 170,000, the dream of statehood had become a reality, and the process of social stratification had well and truly begun.

  Meanwhile, the Indians were steadily retreating westward as treaty after treaty was signed ceding portions of their lands. They were known to themselves as Dakota but the white men called them Sioux. A hundred years earlier the French, who were the first Europeans in the region, were told by the Ojibwa (or Chippewa), with whom they traded, that the people to their west were “Nadouessioux,” meaning “little viper” or “lesser enemy.” They were “lesser” because, in Ojibwa eyes, the “greater viper” was the large and dangerous Iroquois confederation to the east. This name, shortened simply to “Sioux,” was picked up by British and American traders and then by the settlers who began arriving in droves in the mid-nineteenth century.

  Choctaw, Chippewa, Iroquois, Sioux—they were names to jump rope to by the time my mother was a girl. Among the ladies of her aunts’ circle were two sisters of whom it was said privately that they could never be married because they had Indian blood. But where the Indians themselves had gone to was no longer a question of much interest. I asked my mother if she had ever seen any Indians when she was growing up. She looked a little confused, as if it were a trick question.

  “They were a subclass,” she said.

  “But there must have been Indians somewhere.” I persisted. “Maybe not in St. Paul, but in the country, on reservations. Didn’t you ever see any Indians anywhere?”

  “We went to powwows sometimes, and we saw Indians there.”

  “What did they look like?”

  “They were dressed up—like Indians. You know, they danced and beat drums.”

  “Was that for the white people? Were they dressing up for you or for themselves?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did you give them money?”

  “
I certainly didn’t. But perhaps my father did. I just don’t know.”

  A few days later my mother added, “You know, I started thinking about the Indians and I remembered something else.”

  One summer when she was about fifteen years old, my mother went with her aunts to visit Mrs. Griggs at her summer compound, a vast estate of log-house buildings dotted along the shore of a lake. Mrs. Griggs had built a community center in the nearby town where films were sometimes shown on Saturday nights. On this particular night the movie was Cimarron, a popular western that had won the Oscar for Best Picture in 1931 and was described by a reviewer some decades later as delivering the social message that “Indians are people too.” The hall was packed with Indians, whom my mother remembered as “a lot of overweight women in housedresses and men in checked shirts.” The film was exciting and there was lots of cheering and laughter until suddenly the camera cut to a scene in which a train, shot head on, seemed to come hurtling out of the screen toward the audience. All the Indians shrieked and dove under their chairs.

  Seven was in the room when my mother told this story and, since I could sort of tell where it was going, I kept my eye on him to see what he would do.

  “You know,” he said equably, “I bet if the room had been full of Maoris, they’d have done exactly the same thing.”

  * * *

  It’s easy to be critical of pioneers, as easy as it was a hundred years ago to worship them. Where once we saw their bravery, their self-sacrifice, their intrepid spirit, we now see only their greed, their brutality, their cunning manipulation of the truth. But a frontier is not that simple. It is less like a line than a zone of shadow, an area of give and take. It evolves and changes and the people who are in it change too: how they think and what they say and what they mean when they say it.