It was raining outside. I squinted through the parlour window to see steady fall. When would this rain cease? It was late January. We have had such strange weather. The dampness of November persisted to mid-December when the air should have been crisp and the first snow should have appeared. We have had a shorter season of snow than usual and then the rain returned. Rain instead of snow; it made no sense. The weather was mocking us. There has been so much rain that both rivers and roads flooded. With the constant rain, the dampness returned. Clothes and food, especially the rye bread has gone mouldy. It was unpleasant and everything felt cloggy. It was very cool now, especially in the mornings, so the fire in my parsonage was blazing. I stood as close to it as I dared.
I heard two sharp knocks on my door. I called out to Tituba but it was Betty who ran and opened it and showed Dr Griggs in.
‘It’s good to see you.’ He was a very particular man with the neatest beard I had ever seen. I pushed my hand into my own hair pondering about whether I had combed it properly. My fingers traced my greying side burns. We sat down in front of the fire. I called to Tituba to bring in tea.
‘Pastor, I just felt like some conversation. I can only stay a while. I’m on my way to see a patient. Are you well?’
‘It is good to have company. I have just been wallowing in my memories.’
‘What memories are they?’
Tituba came in with a silver tray on which balanced two white china cups and saucers, milk jug and sugar bowl. She proceeded to pour us tea. Betty came in and murmured something in my ear. ‘Speak up, child.’
‘Abigail and I are going for a short walk.’
‘In the rain? Take care.’
They left.
‘Betty usually spends a lot of time with Tituba and enjoys giving her assistance.’
‘Tituba is a good slave, isn’t she?’
‘What you say is true, Doctor, yes. But Tituba is far more than a slave. She is part of the family.’
We two looked at each other, then at the fire. We moved our chairs closer to it. I wanted to be close to another adult.
I wanted someone to listen to me.
‘Doctor, you do look cold. Get closer to the fire. It was never cold in Barbados.’
Dr Griggs looked up with interest.
‘When my father died in London, I, as youngest son, received some money and his smallest plantation on Barbados. Previously, I had studied theology at Harvard but interrupted this study to visit my late father’s plantation of twenty acres.’
‘What was the house you lived in like in the tropics?’
‘The home was adequate, solid but not elegant yet my wife never complained.’
‘How did it compare with this parsonage?’
‘It wasn’t that the plantation house was bigger, which it was, but where the house was situated. The air was warm, too warm sometimes. I saw flowers I had never seen before, with strange angular shapes and colours in purple and orange. I was enchanted in the evenings listening to the pounding of the waves.’
‘And was your wife enchanted too?’
‘My wife missed London where she was born. She did not care for the warm weather. But she did enjoy the sound of the sea. She said that the sea was different in Barbados. It didn’t smell salty but sweet and this always puzzled her.’
‘You must miss her now.’
‘Doctor, I do.’
The truth was I often felt hollow. I sometimes thought that Betty was closer to Tituba and Abigail than me. I felt so alone in this village. Had I made a mistake in coming to this wretched village?
‘Tell me more about Barbados,’ said the Doctor.
I smiled at him. ‘I remember the first time I visited Barbados as a young boy. I saw the ketches in the Bridgetown bay. I remember it being so hot. I clawed at my clothes to free them from my body. But when I saw the beaches, my heart soared. I had never seen a sea so blue; greeny-blue, interrupted only by white froth or a beach so long. What a wondrous island to a boy.’
‘But what was it like as a man?’
‘Well, I had to work hard on the plantation my father had left me. There were still a few Spaniards there, with their darker skin and black eyes that sometimes looked right through you. They brought over Africans to use as slaves. I looked with wonder at these people with their black skins, white teeth and tight curly hair. There were also natives from America with their proud faces and slim bodies and a skin colour that was different to all others.’
‘My, what experiences you have had. You’ve always been a man who kept his past to himself. I had heard rumours. But I didn’t know whether to believe them or not.’
‘I had fifteen slaves including Tituba. She was a young girl then and pleasant to look at. She did all the cooking and took charge of the affairs of the house.’
‘She is still comely.’
I nodded. We both looked into the fire. I fidgeted on my chair. I looked at Dr Griggs’ face, which revealed nothing.
‘I brought my fair wife with me. She found nothing to do and grew listless. Her skin burnt and blistered. The heat robbed her of her vigour. I still remember the screams tearing at the clammy air when Betty was born. Silence reigned then; a silence that was deafening.’
Dr Griggs’ face began to soften. His eyes twitched and then looked solemn. ‘That must have been heart rending. There were no doctors there, I think.’
The doctor has some feeling but does he know what it is like to lose a wife in a foreign place where there is no one to console you?
‘Tituba took over for she loved Betty, Dr Griggs. She was with child herself then and had enough milk for my daughter, who sucked from her black breasts. Betty later followed Tituba like a duckling after a mother duck.’
Dr Griggs smiled.
‘She played with Tituba’s son. I remember their smiles and my heart began to gladden. The tie between Betty and Tituba grew stronger after her own little one died after the rains. He had trouble breathing and after he took his last breath Tituba was inconsolable. She did no work; she screamed and shouted and clawed the air. It was Betty who kissed her forehead and ran her tiny hands in Tituba’s dark hair so that Tituba began to heal. After that Betty and Tituba clung together.’
‘Betty is such a sweet girl.’
My mind went back to losing my wife. ‘I worked hard to forget my pain. I could not make a great deal of money as the holding was quite small. By then, there were some very large holdings. But my plantation made some money.’
I paused in my memories.
‘The hurricane came. Roofs floated away; sugar plants were ripped from the ground; the wind howled, whined and roared. It was a monster. I clung to the bedhead and wept for the second time in Barbados.’
I looked at the doctor’s face for some sympathy.
‘All those with smaller holdings left. Some returned to England; I returned to Boston and their haughty faces.’
Dr Griggs started to laugh but put his hand to his mouth and hid it with a cough. ‘Forgive me, Pastor, but I know what you mean. I feel more comfortable here than in Boston with those swaggering merchants.’6
‘I found lodging in the town. With salty sea again in my lungs, I bought a wharf and two warehouses. I saw the number of brigantines in the bay with their square-shaped sails, and thought how could I go wrong? I still had money. Did I not come from a family of merchants? But my warehouses were only ever half full at the best of times. The Bostonians looked to their own people for business.
‘They knew about my Barbados venture and had already branded me a failure. They looked down on me.’
‘Is that why you left?’
I became pensive. ‘I had come to a turning point. I returned to the work my original study had prepared for me.’
I was tiring of talking to the doctor’s impassive face with his clipped responses. I might as well have dwelt in my own thoughts. I remembered entering Harvard to study for the Ministry, then Barbados, the business failure in Boston, and finally the call from Salem. I dallied long with my decision.
‘It was a whole year before you came, wasn’t it?’
His question gave me a jolt from my thoughts.
‘Yes, I would rather have gone to Maine, a more isolated place, away from merchants who sniggered at me. I am a good preacher, am I not?’7
Indeed you are, Pastor, indeed you are.’
The doctor left to see some ailing person. Did he really believe that I was a good preacher or was he just placating me? My mind went back.
I had come here just three years ago on a salary of sixty pounds a year. The village had ousted three former pastors, one of them Deodat Lawson, refusing to have them ordained, believing them inadequate to the task. I was given this post.
The old men could not decide whether to accept me or not, but the younger men, anxious to do something to resolve the issue, agreed to my eight conditions, including free fire wood. I suppose I should think it an honour to be sent to this litigious, seething community, divided between those who loved God and those who loved money. I thought I was making good progress.
Footnotes
6 By the late 1640s, young men sat jauntily in the congregation with their hats still on. As time passed, men began to hanker after wealth and trade began to flourish in the Bay. People chose to wear better clothing. It happened incrementally. How different from their humble beginnings. Charles 1, on becoming King of England in 1625, sought to suppress Puritanism. In 1633 his churchman friends, amply rewarded by him, deprived Puritan ministers of their pulpits and moved the Church of England further towards Rome. Return
By 1630, over a thousand Puritans escaped to New England to set up a puritan settlement. *John Winthrop, governor, wrote to his wife, ‘I prayse God, we haue many occasions of comfort heer, and doe hope, that our days of Affliction will soon haue an ende and that the Lord will doe vs more goode in the ende, then we could haue expected, that will abundantly recompense for all the trouble we haue endured.’ * John L. Blum, Bruce Catton, Edmund S. Morgan, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Kenneth M. Stampp, C. Vann Woodward, The National Experience, A History of the United States, Second Edition, Harcourt, Brace and World Inc, 1968, Page 22.
During the next ten years, fifteen to twenty thousand followed. These Congregationalists settled in diverse places: Dorchester, Roxbury, Watertown, Newtown, Charlestown and Boston. They believed that no general organisation had authority over individual churches. They also held that only people who gave visible evidence of their Christian beliefs could receive church membership. The settlements had been formed by the Massachusetts Bay Company, a commercial company through which the company members would have full control over the government under which all would live. This had been facilitated by a charter from the King Charles 1. But Puritans saw England, particularly under the reign of King Charles1, as veering towards decadence and opulence for the wealthy.
7: Then the colonies faced economic depression. But the hardy inhabitants took to catching fish, breeding cattle, cutting lumber and building many ships. New England ships prowled both the Caribbean and the Mediterranean seas, peddling wares and bringing home the profits.
Many bemoaned the fact. The pulpits throughout New England trembled with lengthy jeremiads in the face of growing worldliness, fornication, drunkenness, creditors, usury, profit taking, the wearing of fancy clothes and wigs. By the sixteen-eighties, life in the puritan colonies became more complex. Ideals had been spurned by an increasing number. The Reverend Increase Mather swearing, cock fighting, rudeness from the young, profits from fortune telling, holding Christmas celebrations and there were even rumours that there was a brothel in Boston. There were people in the holy commonwealth who were like dogs returning to their vomit.
Perry Miller, The New England Mind, the Seventeenth Century, Beacon Press, Boston, 1968, (first published, 1939), pg. 472. Return