Reverend Conant said we might have been the freest people in all the world, yet the colonies were viewed the way kings and nobles have always viewed the common man. Not as people, but as profit.
“It is time we put an end to the idea that people are made for their rulers,” he told Deacon Thomas one evening at dinner, and we all nodded, every head bobbing like we understood the historical significance of such a statement.
“If we do not exist for the king, what do we exist for?” I asked. I was not sitting. I was serving, carving the meat from the roast that I’d turned on a spit all day. I thought I’d done a fair job of it, but the family was seated and hungry, and I was not confident my efforts would be well received. The cat swiped a piece and scampered away before I could grab it back. She ate it, licking her lips, and I shrugged, putting the platter on the table and taking a bevy of orders—a cup of milk, another bowl of butter, a knife to cut the bread.
“The governors are appointed by the Crown, and their loyalty is to the Crown, not to the people they have authority over,” Deacon Thomas said, ignoring my question. “We see these things as simple rights, but the governors claim they are concessions to be revoked at whim.”
“The Lords of Trade have become threatened by the liberty that fills our lungs,” Reverend Conant said, and I resisted the urge to interject again. John Paterson had told me all about the Lords of Trade. They looked on the colonies as landed estates and the colonists as laborers working those estates. I imagined them in black robes and white wigs, doling out freedom or favor, collecting their gold, with no knowledge of the people whose lives they affected.
“If we do not exist for the king, what do we exist for?” I asked again. I was not ill-treated, but I was not free. And I did not know my purpose, beyond work. “If we aren’t governed by King George or the Lords of Trade, who will we be governed by?”
“That is the question, isn’t it, Deborah?” Reverend Conant answered, chasing his peas around his trencher. But nobody answered it.
3
ONE PEOPLE
Though I was only five when he left, I had very clear memories of my father, and they weren’t pleasant. I looked like him. His eyes were the same hazel and our hair the same hue as the wheat in the fields he hated. My father did not like farming, he did not like Plympton, and he did not like me or my siblings. He fretted endlessly, and my mother was always seeking to soothe him, though she had five children hanging from her skirts. I did not hang. It was crowded around her feet.
It was his departure that precipitated my being sent to live with Cousin Fuller with nothing but my name and Mother’s stories to remind me who I was. Mother moved in with her sister, and the house we’d lived in before Father ran off was occupied by someone else.
Instead of a farmer, Father thought he’d try to be a sailor or a sea captain—the story often changed—or a merchant of trade. Mother told us for the longest time that he would return. Or maybe that’s just what she told me, the few times I saw her. My sister Sylvia and my brothers, Robert and Ephraim, all whom were older than I, were sent away too. Mother kept the baby. Her name was Dorothy, and Mother called her Dot. She died of croup sometime after our family ceased to be.
I don’t remember Dorothy at all. She was a faceless cry, a little dot on the landscape of a truncated life. Perhaps Mother should have given her a different name. Every Dorothy in the family tree had a tragic end.
I never saw my siblings again, and I have no notion of what they were told, but I assume Mother drilled their identity into them like she did to me. Mother taught us our heritage.
I learned to read from William Bradford’s journal and to write by copying his words into the dirt. The journal I read was not the original. His descendants had made painstaking copies so the record wouldn’t be lost. The version we had was printed in my mother’s handwriting, giving his sentiments an almost feminine flair, like it was Mother experiencing his trials and triumphs. His story was woven through every early memory I had of her. I think her pedigree was the only thing of which she was proud.
Like I had done with the catechisms, she recited line after line of her great-grandfather’s writings and wonderings. His life filled our bedtime stories. One of the first letters I received from her after moving in with the Thomases was a desperate summation of his life, like she couldn’t bear for me to forget the details. She wrote:
My great-grandfather, William Bradford, was born in 1590 in Yorkshire, the son of a wealthy landowner, but his life would not be that of a cherished son. His father died when he was but a babe, and he was orphaned at seven years old when his mother too passed away.