The Wordy Shipmates (17 page)

In that letter, Williams attempts to answer a series of queries posed by Winthrop in a sort of post-banishment follow-up questionnaire. Winthrop wants to know what Williams has gained by his “newfound practices.” Williams answers that he has traded in such things as “friends” and “esteem” for the “honor” of being one of Christ’s witnesses, that he is “ready not only to be banished, but to die in New England for the name of the Lord Jesus.” If Winthrop was hoping that a few months in exile had made Williams rethink his questionable opinions, he would have been disappointed with Williams’s response, especially since Williams beseeches Winthrop to remove himself “with a holy violence from the dung heap of this earth,” by which he means the Boston church. Even so, Williams is cordial toward Winthrop, addressing him as “worthy and well beloved,” acknowledging that Winthrop poses his questions in the spirit of healing their rift, “as a physician to the sick.”

The tone of Williams’s letters and tracts addressed to John Cotton, on the other hand, is accusatory. Even Williams admits, “Some letters then passed between us, in which I proved and expressed that if I had perished in that sorrowful winter’s flight, only the blood of Jesus Christ could have washed him from the guilt of mine.”

Naturally, the most esteemed theologian in New England is unaccustomed to being accused of attempted manslaughter. “As if,” Cotton writes Williams soon after his banishment; Williams claims to have gotten the letter in the “time of my distressed wanderings amongst the barbarians.” This is the letter someone, probably Williams, published later, without Cotton’s consent. In it, Cotton beseeches Williams to halt his accusations, “as if I had hastened forward the sentence of your civil banishment; for what was done by the magistrates . . . was neither done by my council nor consent.” Not that Cotton has a problem with the verdict: “I dare not deny the sentence passed to be righteous in the eyes of God.”

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.

 

 

 

I
n 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,

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.”