by Sarah Vowell
Winthrop is clear in his journal that the court consulted the ministers, Cotton included. In Williams’s published “Mr. Cotton’s Letter Examined and Answered,” Williams claimed one of the court’s assistants confided in him—in tears—that the court never would have issued the verdict of banishment “had not Mr. Cotton in private given them advice.” His point? Ministers in general are too influential in civil justice, and John Cotton in particular makes grown men cry.
In 1643, seven years after his banishment, Roger Williams writes a book, A Key into the Language of America. Written by the light of “a rude lamp at sea,” Williams was on his way back to England to acquire a legal charter for Providence. He worried that he would lose his Algonquian language skills abroad, skills that “I had so dearly bought in some few years of hardship and charges among the barbarians.” (If the term “barbarian” seems a tad indelicate, Williams reports that the natives have an equally pejorative though more colorful name for the English: “knive-men.”)
Basically, A Key is a souped-up dictionary arranged in chapters devoted to such subjects as sickness, fish, and the seasons of the year. There are stretches of Algonquian words and phrases arranged on the left side of the page, matched up with a column of English equivalents on the right. In between vocabulary lists, Williams makes observations about the native way of life. He ends many chapters with terrible poems in which “righteousness” rhymes with “wilderness,” and “sinned” with “wind.”
Though A Key was written long after Williams was forced out of Massachusetts to live amongst the Narragansett, it reads almost like a memoir of his banishment, giving clues about what Williams’s first few months on the lam were like. Given the Algonquian words and phrases he imparts years later—such as “Sit by the fire,” “Come hither, friend,” and “Welcome, sleep here”—the Narragansett come off as a collective godsend. “In wilderness, in great distress,” he writes, “these ravens have fed me.”
Williams admits that within a two-hundred-mile radius of his home, various Algonquian-speaking tribes’ “dialects do exceedingly differ, yet . . . a man may, by this help, converse with many thousands of natives all over the country.” Apparently, that was still true into the twentieth century. According to Howard M. Chapin’s introduction to the Rhode Island Tercentenary edition of A Key, published in 1936, William Brooks Cabot carried Williams’s book in his knapsack as he tramped around northern Canada, wandering “the lonely wastes of Labrador with Indians who are unacquainted with the English language,” and who were “Algonquians and of the same linguistic stock” as the Narragansett. In Cabot’s 1912 book In Northern Labrador, he declares, “My objective was Indians,” echoing the statement Williams made in his first surviving letter to John Winthrop way back in 1632, pining that “the Lord grant my desires . . . what I long after, the natives’ souls.”
Williams intends for A Key to help missionaries spread the gospel to American Indians, hoping “it may please the Father of Mercies to spread civility and . . . Christianity; for one candle will light ten thousand.”
We will get to the Christianity spreading shortly. As for civility, Williams avows it is hardly unknown in New England’s back country. “There is a favor of civility and courtesy,” he says, “even amongst these wild Americans, both amongst themselves and toward strangers.”
After teaching how to say “first eat something” and “bring hither some victuals,” Williams writes, “If any stranger come in, they presently give him to eat of what they have.” Recall that when Williams was banished he had next to nothing. He goes on, “Many a time, and at all times of the night (as I have fallen in travel upon their houses) when nothing hath been ready, have themselves and their wives, risen to prepare me some refreshing.”
There is real and plain warmth in Williams’s tone when he talks up Indian generosity. Relating knowledge he learned by experience, compared to the biblical minutiae he acquired by hitting the books at Cambridge, A Key is Williams’s best writing—modest, gripping, and down to earth.
Indians make good listeners. “A deep silence they make,” he writes, “and attention give to him that speaketh.” Unlike some people, who throw you out of their colony just for talking.
One side effect of Williams’s admiration for the natives is that they make Englishmen, including the Boston variety, look bad. That is frequently his intent. For example, in this hospitality poem, he sings,
I have known them leave their house and mat
to lodge a friend or stranger,
When Jews and Christians oft have sent
Christ Jesus to the manger.
Among his many commendations: The Narragansett enjoy a low crime rate. Natives commit “fewer scandalous sins than Europe.” One “never hear[s] of robberies, rapes, murders.” Also, “they never shut their doors, day nor night, and ’tis rare that any hurt is done.” Plus, “Their wars are far less bloody, and devouring than the cruel wars of Europe; and seldom twenty slain in a pitch field.”
Such enlargement toward others, making others’ conditions their own, entertaining each other in brotherly affection—Williams’s description of the Narragansett way of life sounds a lot like Winthrop’s ideal of a city on a hill (just without Jehovah).
While A Key is the first substantive book devoted to deciphering the Algonquian language, William Wood, most likely one of the early settlers who accompanied John Endecott to Salem, had published New England’s Prospect, a guidebook for would-be settlers, in 1634. Wood included a short glossary of Algonquian terms. Wood’s descriptions of native culture generally agree with Williams’s portrayal. Which is to say that Wood’s interpretations of Indian society also echo Winthrop’s utopian yearnings in “Christian Charity” for a caring community rejoicing and suffering together. Wood writes, “As he that kills a deer sends for his friends and eats it merrily, so he that receives but a piece of bread from an English hand parts it equally between himself and his comrades, and eats it lovingly.” Wood continues, “They are love-linked thus in common courtesy.”
Wood’s and Williams’s appreciation for the civility of New England Indians rubs off on the reader, but not as some treacly ode to noble savagery. Williams is especially interesting—and refreshing—because he regards the natives in his midst as people. In one of the goofy little poems he sprinkles throughout A Key, he writes, “Boast not proud English, of thy birth & blood, / thy brother Indian is by birth as good.” And by “as good” he means equally deplorable, unworthy, and disgusting in the eyes of God as any of the swells in Europe: “Nature knows no difference between Europe and Americans in blood, birth, bodies, etc. God having of one blood made all mankind . . . and all by nature being children of wrath.”
I can admire the inherent friendliness of native culture, just as I admire the inherent bookishness of Puritan culture, without fantasizing for one second about living in either world. I’m an indoorsy, urban woman partial to my cozy little desk job and the odd night on the town. I tend not to romanticize traditional societies—some people just aren’t cut out for that way of life. In fact, when I was forced, as a child in Oklahoma, to help out picking potatoes on what was left of my Cherokee grandfather’s Indian allotment land, one day it was so humid my sweat turned the dirty field around me to mud. So I made a solemn, silent vow then and there that when I grew up I was going to buy my potatoes in a store.
In A Key, it’s obvious, at least to me, that being a native woman in seventeenth-century New England was tough, way more difficult than being a white person or Indian man—which is saying something.
For starters, being female was literally isolating. In the chapter “Of the Family Businesses,” Williams gives the words for “knife,” “spoon,” “wash this,” and “house,” along with the phrase “a woman keeping alone in her monthly sickness.” The latter being a handy translation given that, in his introduction, Williams notes that during menstruation, native women are quarantined “in a little house alone by themselves four or five days, and hold it an
irreligious thing for either father or husband or any male to come near them.”
Indian women grind their corn by hand. Williams points out, “ They plant it, dress it, gather it, barn it, beat it, and take as much pains as any people in the world, which labor is questionless one cause of their extraordinary ease of childbirth.” In other words, these women’s lives involved such constant, backbreaking toil and pain that delivering a baby does not faze them.
In the chapter devoted to “Eating and Entertainment,” Williams points out that tobacco is the only plant tended by men, with “women managing all the rest.” I.e., all nonsmok able agriculture is performed by women. In New England’s Prospect, William Wood actually writes that while native women are “very industrious,” native men “had rather starve than work.” Williams doesn’t entirely share Wood’s dismissal of the Algonquin division of labor. Probably because Williams tags along with native men on their often harrowing hunting and fishing trips. Sounds like the former Cambridge scholar isn’t exactly God’s gift to the canoe. Grateful to his Narragansett lifeguards, he admits, “When sometimes in great danger I have questioned safety they have said to me: Fear not, if we be overset I will carry you safe to land.”
Williams, however, is not a joiner. Considering that he is such a Separatist he won’t worship with other Puritans who refuse to repent for worshipping at Anglican churches back in England, it stands to reason that he opts out of native religious ceremonies. In A Key, he admits that he acquired most of the facts for the chapter “Of Their Religion” by asking natives, not by observation. He tried it once and won’t be doing that again: “Once being in their houses and beholding what their worship was, I durst never be an eye witness, spectator or looker on, least I should have been partaker of Satan’s inventions and worships.”
The man who was such a Ten Commandments stickler that he raised a stink about taking God’s name in vain when Winthrop and the other magistrates administered oaths to nonbelievers, must have wanted to gouge out his own eyes looking upon what he believed to be Indians engaged in actual devil worship—a textbook violation of “You shall have no other gods before Me.”
Probably one of the most useful, or at least the most telling, Algonquian phrases Williams translates in A Key is Mat nowawtau hetté mina—“We understand not each other.” Also helpful: “You trouble me.”
The Massachusetts Bay Colony talked a big game by putting that Indian pleading “Come over and help us” on its official seal, but few Puritans actually got around to converting Indians (much to the natives’ dismay, I’m sure). Williams was the rare Englishman to take that charge seriously. But in order to talk the Narragansett into Christianity, he had to talk them out of their own religion, which he found baffling and dangerous, but nevertheless well-established and complex.
Williams notes that one of the natives’ most important gods resides in the Southwest. “At the Southwest are their forefathers’ souls,” he writes. “To the Southwest they go themselves when they die; from the Southwest came their corn and beans.”
For these beliefs, Williams concludes that “they are lost.” His only hope is that a few of them “shall be found to share in the blood of the Son of God”—a very few. In a pamphlet he writes two years after A Key, titled Christenings Make Not Christians, he dismisses the idea of mass conversions of natives because he doesn’t believe in mass conversion of any sort. For all his eccentricities, Williams is a conventional Calvinist regarding salvation—it’s predetermined before a person is born. There is an Elect amongst Algonquian-speakers, just like there is an Elect amongst Anglophones. In the pamphlet, he points out that Jesus “abhors . . . an unwilling spouse, and to enter into a forced bed: the will in worship, if true, is like a free vote.” Thus, imposing Christianity on American Indians (or anyone else) is, to Williams (and, according to Williams, Jesus) a rape of the soul. “A true conversion (whether of Americans or Europeans),” he writes, “must be by the free proclaiming or preaching of repentance and forgiveness of sins.” Only then will the believer be born again, as “God’s new creation in the soul.”
Williams tallies up at least thirty-seven native gods—the fire god, the house god, the moon god, the sea. He even compares the natives’ polytheism to the habits of “papists,” who pray to such “saint protectors as St. George, St. Patrick, St. Denis, Virgin Mary, etc.”
Some of the vocabulary lists in A Key read like transcripts of Williams’s conversations:
How many gods be there?
Many, great many.
Friend, not so.
There is only one God.
You are mistaken.
Apparently, some of Christianity’s more unusual articles of faith prove to be a bit of a hard sell. Williams informs one native about Christ’s resurrection: “When I spoke of the rising again of the body, he cried out, ‘I shall never believe this.’ ”
If anything, though, the New England Indians seem strangely similar to the New England Puritans. In both societies the supernatural seeps into every single facet of life on earth. Just as Massachusetts whipped up a parable of good triumphing over evil thanks to the fluke of a mouse outsmarting a snake, and John Cotton accused Roger Williams of ignoring the divine “shushhh” of his bout of laryngitis, the Narragansett also interpret their own luck as messages from their deities. One phrase in his dictionary that’s equally useful in Boston or the wilderness is: “God is angry with me?”
Williams recalls one Indian man whose child had died gathering his wife and the rest of his children around him. With “an abundance of tears,” the man hollered, “O God thou hast taken away my child! Thou art angry with me. O turn thine anger from me, and spare the rest of my children.” On the other hand, Williams notes, “If they receive any good in hunting, fishing, harvest, etc., they acknowledge God in it.”
The most intriguing Algonquian term Williams tries to explain is Manitou. Manitou isn’t a god per se. It’s more of a supernatural force that animates certain people or things. He writes, “There is a general custom amongst them, at the apprehension of any excellency in men, women, birds, beasts, fish, etc., to cry out, ‘Manitou,’ that is, a god.” He continues, “Thus if they see one man excel others in wisdom, valor, strength, activity, etc., they cry out, ‘Manitou.’ ” He notes that natives are in awe of English technology. “Therefore, when they talk amongst themselves of the English ships and great buildings, of the plowings of their fields, and especially books and letters, they will end thus: Mannittowock, They are gods. Cummanitoo, You are a god.”
A comedian I know, if he hears a joke that perfectly sums up some situation, comments, “You solved that.” Doesn’t the word Manitou solve the problem of accurately describing a certain kind of mysterious achievement? There’s no single English word that really gets at that moment in the 1997 NBA Finals when the game was tied and Steve Kerr of the Chicago Bulls scored the winning shot with five seconds left on the clock; or this herd of elk I saw once, appearing out of the mist at twilight on a golf course in Banff; or Elliott Gould’s performance in The Long Goodbye; or the catch in Ralph Stanley’s voice when he sings “O Death.”
Obviously, Williams would have his native friends exchange Manitou for its Judeo-Christian equivalent, divine providence. He writes of A Key that “this book (by God’s good providence) may come into the hand of many fearing God, who may also have many an opportunity of occasional discourse with some of these their wild brethren and sisters.” And so he offers a blow-by-blow translation of how to tell the story of Creation, from the book of Genesis, in Algonquian.
He explains how to insist that “one only God . . . made all things” in six days. “The first day, He made the light,” is followed by the creation of the earth and sea, the sun and the moon, the stars, birds, fish, on down to the sixth day, when “last of all He made one man of red earth and called him Adam.” Then “God took a rib from Adam . . . and of that rib he made one woman.”
Which is to say that Williams teaches white do-gooders how
to introduce American Indians to the inheritance of original sin. Williams boasts how he ruined the peace of mind of at least one native; he recalls visiting the deathbed of a Pequot friend named Wequash. Williams had previously witnessed to Wequash about the Bible. The brokenhearted Wequash cried out in broken English, “Me so big naughty heart all one stone!”
Honestly, the idea that all human beings are corrupt vessels of evil is oppressive enough when one is born into that way of thinking. I was exposed, from infancy on, to so much wretch-like-me, original-sin talk that I spent my entire childhood believing I was as depraved as Charles Manson when in reality I might have been the best-behaved nine-year-old of the twentieth century. But how jarring it must have been to be an adult Narragansett and this strange white man shows up out of the blue and shatters his lifelong peace of mind with what the stranger calls the “good news” that the native is in fact a wicked, worthless evildoer and so was his mother. So said native dies terrified by his big, naughty, unchristian heart of stone instead of, say, as the Shawnee Tecumseh would later advise, “Sing your death song and die like a hero going home.”
In A Key, Williams’s language cushions the blow of making the acquaintance of this new deity by translating “God” as “manit,” as in Manitou. But in 1663, when the Puritan John Eliot publishes his “Indian Bible,” a translation of the Bible into Algonquian, God is called “God.” Which is blunt. This God is different from the native gods, and Eliot does not pretend otherwise.
The irony of informing nearly naked people in a wilderness setting about the story of naked Adam and Eve eating the fruit of knowledge and inventing the fashion industry due to a sudden need for clothing to hide their shame is not lost on Williams. The natives “sleep soundly counting it a felicity,” he says, quoting a proverb, “that every man be content with his skin.”
