Mistress Bradstreet (3 page)

Endecott’s idea suited Winthrop and Dudley, who were eager to put some distance between their own party and the squalor of Salem. Although Anne must have been relieved as it gradually became clear that they would not have to stay in the depressing settlement, the idea of continuing their journey only raised more questions. What would they find farther south? Charlestown was a vague, shadowy place. While Winthrop and Dudley finalized their plans to go farther down the coast, Anne, her mother and sisters, and their friends soon discovered that peeking out of the undergrowth were wild strawberries. When they ventured a little way from the great house, they found that the ground was carpeted with the fruit and with the white flowers that promised more.

To the women, this bounty seemed to have sprung out of the earth unbidden. But here was another example of the industry of the Indians, who had followed an ingenious agricultural rotation of fields, clearing more land than they needed so that some of the earth could stand fallow. As a result, almost no soil erosion had occurred; the earth was rich with nutrients. Since the epidemic that had reduced their numbers, the Indians had left the ground untilled for a number of years, giving the wild fruits of the region the freedom to multiply.
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The women spent the rest of their afternoon in a paradise they had not anticipated. The weather was warm, the air was gentle, and as the daylight glimmered into evening, they rejoiced not only in the sweet fruit but also in the simple pleasure of being on shore. Maybe Eden was not so far off. But in case any of the berry pickers had forgotten they were not in the calm of the English countryside, as night fell, an unfamiliar pest began to swarm around their necks, ears, and eyes. Mosquitoes. There had been no such insects back in England. English gnats were small and persistent, but they were nowhere near as fierce as these American insects. No amount of swatting could clear away the ruthless clouds, so the women hastily headed back to shelter.

When they had reached the safety of Endecott’s great house, however, Anne and the others encountered a group of strange-looking men standing near the fire inside the old governor’s dwelling. The first Indians Anne had ever seen had come to investigate the arrival of the new English boat. Even from a safe distance, Anne could smell the bitter odor from the herbs they had painted on their skin to defend against insects, various diseases, and the white man. And they were almost completely bare. Their chests and legs were shiny, hairless, muscled, and lean. They wore their hair long and loose like a woman getting ready for bed; a few even had on ropes of shell necklaces.

Englishwomen were not allowed to gaze upon naked men—if indeed these Indians were entirely male. To the English, the Indians seemed a confusing mix of male and female, smooth and hard, warrior and girl, and such confusion was unacceptable. Indeed, English society was grounded in the distinctions between the sexes. Anne’s own roles in life—dutiful daughter and loving wife—were predicated on these assumptions; the Indians’ apparent disregard for everything that she had been trained to value was deeply disturbing.

After a series of awkward exchanges, characterized by the incomprehensible formality of the Indians and the short bursts of translation by one of the old planters who spoke a little of their language, it soon became clear that the Indians would like to examine the
Arbella.
It was at this point that Anne, her sisters, and the other women appear to have made their first independent decision of the day. Winthrop reported that the ladies elected to stay on land and camp out with the colonists.
¹⁰

Despite the welcome novelty of finally sleeping on land again, for Anne and her companions there was no escaping the fact that this new country was more unpleasant and far more strange than anyone had realized it would be. As she tried to go to sleep, the distant howls of wild animals shook the night air, and Anne wondered how long she would be able to endure this terrible new country.

Unfortunately, her fears were well founded. Between April and December of that first year, more than two hundred of the one thousand immigrants died. Two hundred more fled back to England on the first available boat. One colonist, Edward Johnson, reported that “almost in every family lamentation, mourning, and woe was heard.”
¹¹

But good fortune lay ahead, too. Against all odds and in the midst of unthinkable hardships—privation, freezing cold and blistering heat, hunger, disease, loneliness, and self-doubt—Anne would raise eight children to adulthood, help found three different towns, and run the family’s busy household. Even more remarkably, she would find the strength and the time to write verse, diligently and fiercely, until finally in 1650 she had compiled enough poems to publish a book,
The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America.
To her surprise, her words would catch fire and she would become the voice of an era and of a new country. Having composed the anthems of a faith, she would be famous.

Anne Bradstreet’s work would challenge English politics, take on the steepest theological debates, and dissect the history of civilization. She would take each issue by the scruff of the neck and shake hard until the stuffing spilled out; no important topic of the day would be off-limits, from the beheading of the English king to the ascendancy of Puritanism, from the future of England to the question of women’s intellectual powers. Furthermore, she would shock Londoners into enraged attention by predicting that America would one day save the English-speaking world from destruction. Hers would be the first poet’s voice, male or female, to be heard from the wilderness of the New World.

What would draw people to her was not just the glitter of her words but the story that lay behind the poems, a story that began in England long before
The Tenth Muse,
and long before the day she set sail on the first boat of the Great Migration to America. Not that Anne could have imagined such an extraordinary future for herself when she was growing up back in England, a well-bred gentleman’s daughter. If she wanted anything back then, it was to stay in one familiar place and learn to be a good Christian wife and mother.

Chapter Two

Lilies and Thorns

I
N
1620
A TERRIFYING JOURNEY
across the Atlantic would have seemed impossible to eight-year-old Anne. The sort of travel she was accustomed to was the fifteen-mile road to St. Botolph’s Church from her home at Sempringham Manor in Lincolnshire. This dirt wagon trail made its way through marshlands of reed beds and scrub, the black earth damp from the frequent drizzle, the sky teeming with waterbirds, warblers, and terns. Travel here was almost always slow and difficult; depending on the condition of the horse, the wagon, and the road, it could take three hours or longer, especially in foul weather, when the ground was slick with layers of mud. Worst of all, with few trees on this vast, flat plain, there was no barrier to protect travelers from the bitter winds that swept across the low-lying county, even in the summer.

Naturally, none of these hardships bothered Dudley, and so it was on this blustery path, which had become the most well-traveled thoroughfare in the county, that Anne and her family began their Saturday pilgrimages to hear the popular minister John Cotton preach. For most young girls, such an uncomfortable journey might have been unbearable, but for Anne it quickly became a hallowed routine. Their destination was well worth the unpleasantness of the trip, and the wearisome hours she spent in the open wagon gave her plenty of time to think. Bundled in her thickest wool cloak, she could lose herself in her ideas, huddling close with her mother and younger sisters for warmth, while her father and her brother, Samuel, sat in the high driving seat, prodding the horse on.

The proximity of St. Botolph’s was one of the benefits of Dudley’s move to this region of England in the first place. Anne’s father had instilled a sense of Botolph’s sacred importance in all of his children, so that all week long, Anne impatiently awaited sitting in the grand nave of the most beautiful church in the county. It was here that she listened to the sermons of her beloved minister, the man who was the pillar of the tightly knit Puritan community in Lincolnshire. In fact, from the windows of her new home at Sempringham Manor, Anne had a splendid view of the fens and of St. Botolph’s in the distance, a comforting reminder of Cotton’s steadfast presence in her life.

At 280 feet tall, the tower of the minister’s church was impressive, with an octagonal lantern at the top, known as “the stump,” dominating the landscape for thirty miles around and looming over the town of Boston, where the church was built in 1341. Sailors depended on St. Botolph’s as their guide as they braved the voyage over the stormy North Sea from Holland. For Anne and her family, the yellow stone was also a reassuring beacon during the tumultuous years of the 1620s; it pointed them toward their wise minister and his vision of a redeemed England, a country that would finally be cleansed of what Cotton called “great blasphemies” and “desperate deceit and wickedness.”
¹

Cotton invoked Botolph’s dramatic architecture frequently in his sermons, pointing up to “the stump” and telling his parishioners to “let the name of the Lord be your strong Tower.”
²
They must steer their lives in the direction of the true God, he said, just as they directed their journeys by the sighting of his church. Anne took her minister’s lessons so seriously that she “could not be at rest ’till by prayer I had confessed [my sins] unto God.”
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Riding to Boston alongside her prattling younger sisters, Patience, Sarah, and Mercy, who in Anne’s opinion were remarkably untroubled by the significance of what lay ahead, she was often overcome with anxiety. As they drew nearer to the church, she grew increasingly “beclouded . . . with fear,” certain that she had fallen short of her spiritual ambitions yet again. With each jounce of the wagon, she silently counted her various misdeeds—“lying disobedience to parents”—feeling she was in what she called “a great trouble” and had been “overtaken with evils.”
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It was not that Anne was a morbid child by nature, but Dudley had taught her that “doubts and feares” could be gratifying evidence of what her family considered a “true faith” in God. Anne was already an exceptionally bright, perceptive girl who had begun “to make conscience” of her ways at age six.
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She was used to hearing her parents and their friends lament their wickedness, a practice the Puritans paradoxically saw as virtuous. One family friend, the minister Thomas Shepard, reflected, “I saw my evils and resolved with more care to walk with [God].”
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Consequently, Anne understood that it was her duty to know precisely what behavior was sinful and what was not. Her parents, Thomas and Dorothy, were two of Cotton’s most devout followers and among the most respected Puritans in the county. Indeed, there was nothing Anne desired more than to measure up to their rigid if slightly contradictory expectations of her, particularly her father’s.

Anne admired Dudley more than anyone else on earth, but her father was an imperious man and could be intimidating. Born in the quiet backwater village of Yardley Hastings in 1576, Dudley had been orphaned at age twelve and taken in by a fellowship of Puritan “brethren.” Attracted to the staunch conviction of the ministers and their warm, affectionate community, he was converted to their faith before he was twenty.

These Protestants based their lives on the close study of Scripture and were dedicated to evoking a passion for God in their followers. They held that God had already predetermined who was chosen for heaven and who would suffer the torments of hell. But the paradox of Puritanism was that, damned or not—God’s choices were inscrutable—one still had to strive to fulfill His commandments. Without any certain hope of reward, one had to try to rid oneself of sin and follow Him with a pure and lively heart. To Dudley the challenge of serving God with all of his being, when he might in fact be doomed, was strangely appealing; he spent his life pursuing seemingly unattainable goals. It also suited his ambitious nature to join a group whose members sought to triumph over “the dead, heartless, blind works” of most congregations and instill emotion and idealism in the Church of England as a whole.
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Thomas Dudley’s unbridled enthusiasm for Puritan theology, which emphasized the scholarly tools of reading and writing for the study of the Bible, only served to deepen his innate love for literature. Intelligent and widely read, Dudley had taught himself Latin, wrote learned poetry, and pored over the Elizabethan poets Sidney and Spenser, as well as Raleigh’s
History of the World;
Burton’s philosophical text,
Anatomy of Melancholy;
and Bacon’s exploration of the new scientific methods in his
Essays.

Among the most educated men of his milieu, by all accounts Dudley was arrogant and used to getting his own way. Socially ambitious, he loved the well-mannered company and educated conversation of the highly born. As an astute financial manager, he also had to reconcile his desire for earthly fortune and fame with the Puritan idea that his ambition, as his daughter wrote, “lay above.”
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But Dudley, at least in his own mind, had little difficulty being true to his Puritan beliefs. He had been taught by his ministers that his task as a father was to ensure that his son and daughters understood their essential sinfulness and helplessness in the face of God’s almighty will. If any of his children dared to forget a section of their daily catechism, neglected their study of Scripture, resisted scrutinizing their conscience, or simply appeared, as Anne wrote in later years, to scorn God and “too much . . . love” the world and all of its temptations, Dudley did not hesitate to shame and chastise them. His punishments could be so severe that Anne called him “a whip and maul,” but Dudley was convinced, and his children were supposed to understand, that this was the stern nature of true paternal love.
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To feel the glory of God’s might, the good Puritan needed to be aware of his own deficiencies. So, as a good father, it was Dudley’s job to make sure his children knew how flawed they were.