Mistress Bradstreet (19 page)

The fourteener was also the meter employed by most Puritan writers, including the local minister. John Wilson had penned a long religious poem (“A Song, or Story, For the Lasting Remembrance of Diverse Famous Works, Which God Hath Done In Our Time”), and although it was neither beautiful nor particularly skillful, it was a comprehensive history of Protestantism and so was highly prized by Dudley and the pious colonists. If Anne could make it clear that she admired Wilson’s work, she would be able to demonstrate her loyalty to the New England way of thinking, and to Massachusetts Bay Puritanism in particular. Because her literary efforts would be regarded as exclusively religious in nature, she could then work on developing her technique without raising eyebrows.

The poem succeeded. There was no greater honor than emulation, and Wilson was not immune to this kind of flattery. He would forever be one of Anne’s fans. In addition, Anne’s allusions illustrated that she knew Scripture and many poems of the “right” sort, according to the Reformed way of thinking. Better yet, she seemed well aware of the proper verse conventions for a pious writer. There were, however, some surprising elements in this modest composition. Despite her religious intentions, Anne introduced herself to her readers with an ambitious flourish that seemed to have nothing to do with Puritanism or proper feminine decorum.

When she penned the Latin words “
Anno.
1632.
Aetatis Suae,
19” after the title, Anne hinted that she was regarding this first poem far more seriously than she should have according to Puritan teachings. Although many devoted souls in New England wrote poetry, few were capable of using Latin, or even knew that
“aetatis suae”
meant “her age.” Not that Anne herself was a Latin scholar; in fact, this would be the only such phrase she would use in her work. But this highly self-conscious literary manner gave the poem a “learned” feel; it also made it sound as if it were the first of many she planned to write, for an audience far larger than simply her family and friends.

Perhaps this was not so remarkable after all. Even though Anne had been taught to think of poetry as another form of prayer, Dudley’s restless blood ran in her veins. Her father had trained her too well for Anne not to aspire to more than dutiful religious verse. Fame was on her mind, whether she realized it or not, despite the lectures she had heard about the vanity of such ideals and despite the propaganda against women—or men, for that matter—overreaching their bounds.
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If Anne was aware of her own aspirations, however, she kept them hidden; it was, after all, unthinkable for any Puritan to entertain dreams of worldly success, let alone a Puritan wife. Her duty was to be humble, not ambitious, to direct her attention toward heaven, not earth. It is astonishing, therefore, that she revealed any aspirations that were not purely religious in nature.

But perhaps Anne felt that the devout theme of her poem made up for any whiff of ambition in the title. “Twice ten years old, not fully told . . . lo, here is fatal death” she began in a conventional way, emphasizing her youth in an attempt to capture not only her narrow escape but also, perhaps, the deaths of countless young people in the colonies. On she went, citing the supremacy of God’s will and how death would usher in the good pilgrim’s salvation and the blessing of eternal life. These sentiments were in accordance with her religion, as were her laments about her own suffering. “For what’s this life but care and strife,” she declared, quoting a Puritan truism about the earthly “vale of tears.”
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Whatever Anne’s intentions on composing this first poem, it does seem clear that the act of writing offered her a way of coping with the hardships she had to tolerate. She transformed her loneliness, disappointment, and profound disillusionment into verse, drawing on what she had learned not only from her most recent illness but also from the voyage and the first year in America. In so doing she discovered the tool that would allow her to endure and make sense of her experience in the wilderness. Only through “pain,” she declared, did she stand a chance to grow.
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That summer, however, Anne’s initial compositional experiments abruptly ended. At last she was pregnant. To her this turn of events did not seem coincidental. Later she would write that this baby was the result “of prayers, of vows, of tears”; she had no doubt that God had “heard’st me” and “gav’st him me.”
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Her illness had spurred her toward a spiritual awakening, which had inspired her to express her devotion to the Lord in a poem. Now her womb was filled with life. Clearly, poetry writing had ushered in a baby.

But children do not usually have the same effect on poems, at least not at first. For the next six years, Anne did not pen another word, although she did not complain about not being able to write. Nothing was more important than being able to bear Simon children. Many Puritan wives worried that if they were barren, their husbands would desert or abuse them, and everyone had heard such stories through the local rumor mill. Though it would have been entirely out of character for the genial and even-keeled Simon to distance himself from her, let alone cast her out of the house, in Anne’s mind he would have had every right to spurn her if she could not provide him with a family.

It was a relief, then, to feel her stomach slowly begin to distend. It was even a pleasure to experience the telltale nausea of the early months, especially as the older women reassured her that the more sick she was, the healthier the baby would be. There were even those who whispered that if the mother was very ill, the baby was surely a boy. There were other odd bits of lore: If one had conceived on a certain day of the week or in a certain cycle of the moon, the infant would be born female, or strong, or with blue eyes. Above all, Anne prayed for a successful delivery and a healthy baby.

Practically speaking, she had some points in her favor. At twenty, she was stronger physically than when they had arrived in America. Thanks to the efforts of her father, brother, and husband, New Towne had grown into a recognizable little village with ample food and resources, and more homes were being built every day to house those fleeing the impositions of the king and his bishops.

Since Anne and Simon were among the richest of the settlers, they had managed to fortify themselves admirably for the approaching winter, but this also meant that Anne faced more than the average amount of work to keep track of their raw materials—a job that demanded the foresight of a general supplying an army. In October Anne had to have a sense of what her household would need in February and to regulate the family’s use of corn, dried fruit, root vegetables, salted meat, and dairy supplies accordingly. If she were not careful, their food would go bad before it had gotten used. But if she allowed the servants to rush through their store, there would be nothing left to eat in early spring.

Simon had purchased large bags of English barley, oats, wheat, and rye, and they were stockpiled in their loft, where they had to be protected from rats, insects, damp, and mildew. Anne had to create a weekly regimen that included making bread and cakes from the wheat and rye, cooking the oats into porridge or “flummery”—a jellied dish spiced with herbs and dried fruit—and manufacturing malt out of the barley so they would not have to rely exclusively on the dark salty water of New Towne Creek.
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With the help of the women in her household, by early fall Anne would have preserved most of the fruit and vegetables from the summer, the berries boiled into jams and jellies, the vegetables that had not been eaten dried or pickled. The root vegetables had to be protected from rot and stored for eating that winter. Usually it was best to leave them in the ground as long as possible and dig them up as needed. Anne also had to make sure that the servants harvested and prepared her herbs correctly, drying them by hanging them in bunches from the ceiling ready to be pinched for cooking or for therapeutic uses. Rosemary could be used for a stew, burdock root for an aching shoulder. Once she was in labor, she might need chamomile, catnip, mint, feverfew, hyssop, tansy, or sage.
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Outdoors, some of the most important of the Bradstreets’ “supplies” scratched for food in the gravelly dirt of New Towne and ranged around the commons. Their livestock was the family’s insurance against hunger that winter. Fall was traditionally the slaughter season and, although Simon and the other men usually killed the cows and larger hogs themselves, it was typical for a woman to kill the smaller pigs, holding the “hinder parts between her legs, and taking the snout in her left hand” while she “stuck” the hog in his heart with a sharp, enormous blade.
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Naturally, Mistress Bradstreet would not have been expected to actually slaughter a pig, but she did have to make sure her servants did not make any dangerous mistakes. The first step was to choose the pig that should be killed, and then the strongest woman in the household would stab the animal and hold it until it stopped bleeding. Only then was it time to plunge the carcass into a kettle of boiling water.

Afterward the dead pig would be coated all over with rosin to strip off its bristles; then its belly was sliced open. No part of the animal could go to waste. The organ meats were pulled out and cooked immediately. The intestines, on the other hand, had to be cleaned carefully, making sure not to poke holes in the lining, since they would be stuffed with bits of meat and spices to create the highly prized delicacy of sausage “links.”
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The meat itself needed to be sliced off in manageable hunks. Some of it could be roasted at once, but to Anne and her family, the specter of the winter dominated much of their thinking, and so they would probably have dunked a large portion of the pork into salt brine, where it would keep for months. The rest they turned into bacon, cutting the meat into “flitches” that they hung in the fireplace for smoking.
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All of these tasks were exhausting and messy, and yet there was no avoiding them; they were part of the seasonal toil for all new Americans. Anne was probably grateful that this year she was able to participate fully in her household duties rather than having to lie in bed while others slaved to complete her chores.

But as the fall days grew sharper and their third winter in the New World approached, Anne knew she faced a new reckoning. She was nearing the end of her pregnancy, and this was a dire time for a young woman. In fact, it was fortunate (although she would have disagreed) that she had not been pregnant when she was still weakened from the deprivations of the first year. It was best to be at the height of one’s physical strength before undergoing the ordeal of pregnancy, labor, and delivery.

CHILDBIRTH WAS THE CENTRAL EVENT
in a woman’s life. No one knew whether the mother would survive. And if the child lived, it would likely die before it was two years old. In response to these early deaths, parents regularly named their new children after ones who had expired, not out of callous disregard, and certainly not for lack of names, but in an effort to overcome the dread facts of mortality. There was really no better way to commemorate the child who had died, these parents felt, than passing on his or her identity to the one who flourished.
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For the pregnant woman, the time before birth was a period for reflection as well as frantic industry. Food had to be stored and prepared for the lying-in period after the birth, and also to feed the many women who would come to attend the labor and help the new mother. After his wife’s safe delivery, one colonist recorded, he served nineteen women a meal that featured “boiled pork, beef, and fowls; roast beef and turkey; and minc’d Pyes and cheese.”
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Bonnets, hats, mittens, and smocks had to be knitted and sewed, and many prospective mothers put hours of labor into embroidering the new arrival’s first clothing. Sadly, since the baby might die soon after being born, one of the most important creations in families like Anne’s was the christening blanket.

To the Puritan mind it was crucial that the infant be baptized as soon as possible after birth so that it would have at least a chance of being among God’s chosen. But although no Puritan theologian would have held with such an idea, the superstition remained among mothers that a glorious blanket could perhaps dissuade Death from taking the baby away prematurely. As a result, baptismal coverlets were often made of silk that pious women such as Anne embroidered with obsessive diligence; the Bradford family’s blanket in Plymouth, for example, was covered with copiously cross-stitched pink flowers six inches apart. If Anne had not inherited such a coverlet from Dorothy, she would have devoted herself to making her own, bordering the silk edge with lace or silk fringe and choosing a suitable scriptural text to embroider on the front.
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Since she was already prone to the contemplation of her own mortality and had had three significant illnesses that induced such reflections, the time before labor was particularly potent for Anne. Later in life she would take the time before the birth of one of her children to write a farewell poem to her husband, outlining her wishes in case she died. She was not alone. Other women also recorded testimonials and tearful good-byes to their families. Thus women entered their “travail” in the same spirit that men set off on long journeys or went to war.
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The last month of pregnancy was not only a time of making “Pyes” but also a time of making peace with the idea of approaching death.

Although the exact date of her delivery is uncertain, it seems likely that early in the new year 1633 Anne felt her first labor pains. Fortunately, her mother, sisters, and sister-in-law lived close by, and before long the other New Towne women would have streamed into her house. This was the time to serve the “groaning cakes” and “groaning beer” that Anne had prepared in the preceding weeks.
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Although there was not yet a midwife in New Towne, the combined experience at any birth was considerable. Most of the women present had had their own babies and had attended the births of their friends and sisters. In fact, this was a ritual ruled by women. The men of the house were usually relegated to the other room, or even to the house of a neighbor. Simon was banished from Anne’s side, and she was thrown entirely on the resources of her female neighbors and her mother.