Flight of the Sparrow (44 page)

AUTHOR’S NOTE

The
characters in this novel are based on real people who lived in Massachusetts Bay Colony in the seventeenth century. The broad outlines of their lives are consistent with historical records. However, those records are sparse and sometimes contradictory. Thus, I have freely interpreted their personalities and interpersonal relationships, adding details, events, and encounters to serve the needs of the novel.

Mary White Rowlandson was the fifth of nine children of John White, owner of the largest landholding in Lancaster, Massachusetts. She was born about 1637 in England and emigrated to Massachusetts Bay Colony with her parents and older brothers and sisters in 1639. The family first settled in Salem, then moved to the new town of Wenham. Her mother, Joane West White, joined the Wenham church pastored by John Fiske, whose journal provides a fascinating and myth-busting window into the life of a congregation in Puritan New England. John White again moved his family—this time to Lancaster around 1654. A few years later, Mary married Joseph Rowlandson; at about the same time he was ordained pastor of
the Lancaster church. They had four children, the first of whom died at age two.

In August of 1675, a small group of natives attacked a section of Lancaster and killed eight people. The following February, a massed group of warriors under the leadership of the Nashaway sachem, Monoco, attacked Lancaster again, burning houses and barns and taking captives, including Mary and her three living children. Her son, Joseph, and daughter Mary (whose names I have modified for clarity) were separated from her. Her youngest child, Sarah, died of wounds eight days after the attack. The Indians marched Mary and other captives through western Massachusetts, then north into southern Vermont and New Hampshire before returning to central Massachusetts. She was ransomed back to the English in early May, and reunited with her husband in Boston. Soon after, their two living children were released.

Largely dependent on the generosity of their new neighbors, the Rowlandsons lived in Charlestown and then Boston for nearly a year before Joseph was called to pastor the church in Wethersfield, Connecticut. He died suddenly in November 1678, about a year and a half after the move. The church elders pledged Mary the rest of her husband’s annual salary and allowed her to remain in the parsonage.

In August 1679, Mary married Samuel Talcott, a militia captain and lawyer who helped administer her husband’s estate. Samuel had eight living children by his first wife, Hannah. In 1682, a book in which Mary recounted her experiences in captivity was printed by Samuel Green in Cambridge under the lengthy title
The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, Together with the Faithfulness of His Promises Displayed
,
Being a Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson
. Her husband’s last sermon was bound with it. The book sold out, forcing demand for a second and third edition.

Mary turned up briefly in court records in 1707 when she
posted bond after the arrest of her son, Joseph, for having sold his brother-in-law as an indentured servant. She died in January 1711, at the age of seventy-four.

Her book, which quickly became famous, is considered the first “best-seller” in English America. She is widely regarded as the originator of the Anglo-American “captivity narrative.”

•   •   •

T
here is less information on James Printer, also known as Wowaus. He was a Nipmuc Indian who came from Hassanamesit (“place of small stones”), established by John Eliot in 1654 as a Praying Indian village, located on land that is now the town of Grafton, Massachusetts.

When he was about five, James was taken to Cambridge to serve in the home of Henry Dunster, minister and president of the new Harvard College. James likely enrolled in Elijah Corlett’s Cambridge Grammar School, but there is no documented evidence of his presence in Cambridge after 1646 until he is listed as a printer’s apprentice to Samuel Green. His apprenticeship coincided with the publication of John Eliot’s Indian Bible, and it is likely that James helped Eliot and other Indian assistants in their translations. Eliot himself gives credit to James for being the one man who was able to compose and “correct the press with understanding.”

James fled his apprenticeship to join his family in Hassanamesit and was living there in 1675 when the war began. In early November, Nipmucs allied with Philip came to the praying town and captured all but one Hassanamesit family. The same group participated in the attack on Lancaster three months later and took Mary Rowlandson captive.

James acted as a scribe for the sachems during negotiations for Rowlandson’s release, and historians generally agree that he wrote the gloating message nailed to the bridge after the attack on Medfield.

After the war, James came in under the English amnesty and returned to his job as a printer’s apprentice, where he was the typesetter for the first edition of Mary Rowlandson’s book in 1682. In the same year, the colonial government partitioned the “empty” Hassanamesit land for English settlement. James and twenty-one other Nipmucs (only two of whom were originally associated with Hassanamesit) signed a deed, which allowed them to retain their claim to the village.

In 1698, the Hassanamesit Indians were finally permitted to leave Natick. No more than five Indian families returned to Hassanamesit. Among them were James and his family, including his sons, Ammi and Moses. In less than three decades, most of that land had been sold to English proprietors.

James was apparently still alive in 1712. His date of death is uncertain, though it is sometimes listed as 1717.

A four-and-a-half-acre “reservation” in Grafton, Massachusetts, is all that remains today of the once vast Nipmuc lands.

•   •   •

T
here is no record of Mary Rowlandson ever acting on behalf of Native Americans or African-Americans. John Eliot, however, donated seventy-five acres of land in 1689 to support a school in the Jamaica Plain district of Roxbury. A condition of the donation was that the school would educate Native Americans and African-Americans as well as colonial English children.

The site of Mary’s ransom back to the English is preserved as Redemption Rock, a one-quarter-acre historic site in Princeton, Massachusetts. The granite ledge where she was released in 1676 overlooked a vast meadow (now forested land) where the Indians camped.

John Hoar, the English emissary who secured Mary’s release, was a lawyer and a social maverick who fiercely protected a group of Praying Indians that he sheltered on his property in Concord,
Massachusetts. Nearly two hundred years later, Bronson Alcott, the Transcendentalist friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson and father to Louisa May Alcott, purchased the property. He renovated John Hoar’s house into the two-story, nineteenth-century home where Louisa wrote
Little Women
, and which is now a beloved museum.

Mary Rowlandson’s story would not have been possible to write without extensive research. The list of books and articles I relied on is much too long to include here. An indispensable source was Neal Salisbury’s edition of Mary’s narrative with related documents.
Other crucial sources included Diane Rapaport’s
The Naked Quaker,
which introduced me to the story of Elizabeth Parker and her lover, Silvanus Warro; Jill Lapore’s
The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity
, which thoroughly explored the riveting and tragic history of that conflict; and Dennis A. Connole’s
The Indians of Nipmuck Country in Southern New England, 1630–1750, An Historical Geography
, which provided detailed information and context about the Native Americans who lived in what is now central
Massachusetts.

About The Author

Amy Belding Brown
is the author of
Mr. Emerson’s Wife
. Her publication credits include
Yankee
,
Good Housekeeping
,
American Way
,
The Worcester Review
,
and other national, international, and regional magazines. Married to a United Church of Christ minister and the mother of four grown children, she currently teaches writing at Granite State College.

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A CONVERSATION WITH AMY BELDING BROWN

Q. Can you explain what originally inspired you to choose Mary Rowlandson as the subject of your second novel? Originally you wanted to call it “Redemption.” Why?

A. I wanted to write something set in the Puritan era in New England, partly so I could learn more about it myself. I became aware when I wrote my last novel about the New England Transcendentalists that they were reacting to the Puritan culture, which had dominated the area for nearly two hundred years. But, like most Americans, I didn’t know much about that time besides the Mayflower Pilgrims and the Salem witchcraft trials. I first stumbled on Mary Rowlandson’s narrative in a museum gift shop when I was doing research on
Mr. Emerson’s Wife
. When it came time to start a new novel, I turned to Mary’s story.

As I researched the novel, I kept encountering references to “Praying Indians.” This prompted me to investigate John Eliot and the fourteen villages of Nipmuc converts he set up in the second half of the seventeenth century. At the time, I was living in Grafton, Massachusetts, which was the site of Hassanamesit, one of those “Praying
Towns.” When I first moved to Grafton, I noticed a sign on the town common that mentioned James Printer and he struck me as an interesting person. When I started to dig into the history and learn about the Praying Towns and the Natives who lived in them, I was fascinated. I began to understand what a remarkable man James Printer was. Then I read a reference to him in Mary Rowlandson’s narrative and knew I had to include him in the book. He became one of my favorite characters, and central to the story I wanted to tell.

My working title—“Redemption”—related to the novel on several levels: the Puritan religious theme, Mary’s reentry into English life, the unfulfilled promise of restoration for Nipmuc peoples, and the impact that simple acts of kindness can have on a fellow human being. Also in my mind was “Redemption Rock,” the name of the historical site in Princeton, Massachusetts, where Mary was ransomed.

Q. What do you most hope readers will take away from reading
Flight of the Sparrow
?

A. I hope readers will come away with a sense of what it was like to live in Puritan culture and society, an appreciation of the importance and terrible cost of King Philip’s War, and an awareness of the complexity of English-Native relationships in the 1600s.

Q. Does Mary’s original narrative still exist, and did you consult it as part of your research? Can you give us a sense of her language? Do we know which words are hers and which were altered by Increase Mather?

A. Mary’s original narrative is in the public domain and available in many print and electronic versions. I consulted it many times throughout the research and writing of
Flight of the Sparrow
. I
found Neal Salisbury’s edition especially useful because of its informative introduction and additional documents that provide invaluable context to her experience.

Mary’s language is typical of seventeenth-century Puritan writing, so it takes some getting used to, not only because of when it was written, but also because her narrative is so full of biblical references and authorial asides. The more times I read the book, the more I saw three separate layers that I could pry apart fairly easily. The first is the straight story of her experience, which moves quickly from one event to the next. The second is a layer of cultural platitudes and moralistic conclusions that, interestingly, don’t always match the story itself. Third is a layer of biblical quotations and references, likening Mary’s experience to the trials of the ancient Israelites.

Most scholars agree that the preface was written by Increase Mather. But there’s no way to know for sure if Mary’s original text was altered, though many believe that it was at least “influenced” by someone other than Mary herself.

One problem I ran into as I read and reread Mary’s narrative was that many of her views offended me. While she points out that the Indians were unexpectedly generous with their food and sometimes even kind to her, much of her commentary is disparaging, judgmental, and even vicious. Overall, she comes across as a pious Puritan woman with a narrow and bigoted point of view. I didn’t like her until I read some scholarly articles that suggested the book may not have been entirely of Mary’s making. They pointed out that she likely wrote it under the guidance of clergy—either her husband and/or Increase Mather—and that it would not have been published if it hadn’t conformed to Puritan thinking. I took that possibility and enlarged it until I found a woman I could relate to.