by Mac Griswold
Nathaniel’s florid penmanship suggests a striving for gentility; the belabored salutations and closing phrases of letters to his longtime correspondent and social superior John Winthrop Jr., which are deferential even for that period, make him come across to my ear as somewhat stiff, maladroit, and ill at ease. In his element at sea, or in rough foreign ports—and tough and fit enough to make the stormy crossing to Newport in a dinghy—it’s doubtful he was cut out to play the mannered lover. He probably wore a sword, like almost every other gentleman. (When he became a Quaker, he and Coddington may have continued to do so for a few years, along with a number of other very early Friends, until the Peace Testimony of 1660.) But if he dressed the way he wrote, he’s unlikely to have exuded the nonchalance—“weareing your cloathes in a careless, yet a comelie forme”—advised by contemporary books of manners.
In England and on the Continent during the first half of the seventeenth century, men’s clothing devolved from the tautness and exposure of earlier styles to an elegantly draped amplitude. “Skin-close” breeches passed from fashion, as the Puritan divine Samuel Purchas noted approvingly. Gone from view were the polished thigh, the tight knee, the smoothly modeled derrière of an earlier century. Nathaniel probably appeared in Newport looking presentable enough but baggy in an outfit of handsome dark plush. Black cloth was fashionable throughout the first half of the century for Puritans and Cavaliers alike, in part because expensive black dye showed off the wearer’s worth. It is difficult to imagine Nathaniel or Coddington in the yards of braid or lace, the rows of gold or silver buttons, or the bunches of ribbon that some fellow Parliamentarians sported in England at the time, but respectability called for a modicum of show even in New England. Take the Pilgrim leader William Bradford: after his death in 1657, his estate listed an “old Violett Coullered cloak,” a red waistcoat, and a “stuffe [worsted] suite with silver buttons & a coate.” For a New England woman, it was neither immodest nor ungodly to quietly call attention to a fine figure with a close-fitting velvet “wastcoate.”
The young woman who stepped into the Coddingtons’ Newport hall to greet Nathaniel would have hoped to mirror the seventeenth-century ideal of beauty that New England’s Reverend Seaborn Cotton described in his commonplace book under the heading “For to Make a Hand som Woman.” Cotton’s ideal had “light brown hair, a high, straight brow, narrow black eyebrows, round hazel eyes, pure vermilion cheeks, a small mouth and coral lips, the underlip a little fuller than the upper, a pretty long white neck, a small waist, middle-sized hips, small legs and feet, and long hands, and ‘to be rather taller than shorter.’”
Between the reigns of Elizabeth I and Charles I, women’s fashions changed dramatically. The wasp figure of the old queen, with its stinger of a bodice pointing downward to a rigid farthingale, faded from sight. Women’s bodies appeared to swell into muffins. The bunch of heavy pleats massed and dropping from a slightly raised (but still corseted) waistline enhanced the belly and pushed it forward, making a ledge where a woman could fold her hands. Sometimes a gown or a coat was hiked up in back for easier walking, or pinned into a soft bustle, emphasizing the buttocks. Bare necks and forearms and escaping curls held a new erotic charge.
For Englishwomen of the Brinleys’ rank, fashions changed more slowly than in aristocratic circles. So, in general, the costume historian Aileen Ribeiro’s observation about English dress in the 1640s applies to the early 1650s as well: “Women of the gentry and the middle class continued to wear the tightly laced open gown (black for Sundays and special occasions).” A 1645 portrait of Hester Tradescant, John the younger’s second wife, depicts her pulling aside the edge of her black silk skirt to show off a white petticoat embroidered with flowers in russet thread. Both Hester Tradescant and Grizzell Brinley would have worn thin, lace-edged linen neckerchiefs or “whisks,” pinned around the neck with the points dropping halfway to the waist. However, an etching titled Autumn, one of a set of the four seasons by Wenceslaus Hollar, shows how a sudden movement, or the wind, could displace a woman’s kerchief to expose the curve of her pushed-up breasts above the low neckline beneath.
Hester wears a black beaver hat atop a lace-trimmed linen cap. Beneath such a cap, Grizzell probably dressed her hair in “spaniel’s ears,” with the sides loosely falling almost to the shoulders and the rest gathered up into a lustrous knot. This hairstyle, combined with the kerchief that makes shoulders look as if they were sloping, creates, as Ribeiro writes, “a kind of submissive modesty.” Grizzell, as she shyly advanced toward Nathaniel in the Coddingtons’ hall in Newport, may have looked like Hollar’s drawings of a young Englishwoman in side and back views, with her drooping curls, downcast eyes, eyebrows slightly lifted, and a string of beads or pearls around her neck. If there is anything sexy about Hollar’s tender drawing, it’s the exposed nape of the young woman’s neck.
Beneath her bodice and stays, under his doublet and shirt, Grizzell and Nathaniel wore white linen shifts, their sole undergarments, which were cut to a shapeless unisex pattern. When made from the finest bleached linen called lawn, a shift’s whiteness evoked innocence and virginity, but its near-transparency revealed the flesh beneath. A shift was the only article of clothing either Grizzell or Nathaniel would have changed and had laundered regularly. Outer clothing stiffly kept its owner’s shape and smell for decades. Between 1347, when the bubonic plague first struck Europe, and about 1750, physicians opined that the best defense against pestilence was an impermeable skin with pores safely sealed by an encrustation of dirt and sweat. Bathing left the body defenseless.
The flax from which linen is spun was believed to absorb excess dirt and perspiration, and the middle and upper classes spared no expense for keeping linen white. Early seventeenth-century views of London show laundry laid out to dry and bleach in the fields beyond Clerkenwell. In Newport, Grizzell would have become familiar with the Coddingtons’ washing routine, which relied on fresh water from the nearby town well. Nathaniel would have been careful to wear a clean collar band and shirt when he came courting.
Nathaniel and Grizzell wouldn’t have considered themselves unkempt or unclean; their grooming simply didn’t involve much water. People washed their hands, especially before eating, their faces, and sometimes their feet. They dug particles of food out of their teeth with toothpicks or knives; the fastidious cleaned their teeth by rubbing them with a cloth. The slightest move of a well-dressed body must have produced an acrid, revolting stench. Both men and women wore pomades and perfumes to mitigate the effect.
The cultural connotations of what is “clean” or “dirty” have always operated on various frequencies. When Robert Herrick’s Julia (whoever she was in real life) unlaces her stays, the poet writes, the air fills with the fragrance of musk and amber exhaled by her body. Her sweat smells like lilies and spikenard. Her lips are sweet and “cleane.” Either the poet believes his muse smells that sweet or he is trying to convince himself that she does. There’s room to believe that everything Herrick lovingly catalogues about Julia is precious to him, arouses him, because it is hers. If Nathaniel and Grizzell found each other “suitable,” they would have smelled delicious to each other for the same reason.
Startlingly enough, the moment they first heard each other’s voices would have been a homecoming. Their accents and speech patterns were doubtless very similar, despite their different origins and the wildly varying regional dialects of England. Nathaniel grew up in Amsterdam with a mother from Lowestoft and a father from Somerset, but he was taught how to speak correctly by schoolmasters, scholars, and preachers worried about preserving the Englishness of their expatriate charges. Grizzell’s London and Datchet childhood, and her father’s occupation, meant she conversed in the “best” spoken English. This, as early as 1589, was defined by a contemporary to be “the usuall speech of the Court, and that of London and the shires … about London within sixty miles.” From clues in variant spellings as well as metrical and rhyme evidence, modern linguistic experts at Plimo
th Plantation in Massachusetts have painstakingly (yet still tentatively, they insist) reconstructed various English dialects spoken by the Pilgrims for their costumed interpreters. They agree that “this ‘courtly’ speech … was taught in the schools, used by poets, men of letters and printers, and mimicked by the socially ambitious.”
John Kemp, the director of interpretation at Plimoth Plantation, assures me that present-day Americans would have understood Grizzell and Nathaniel, and that they would have understood us. Martyn Wakelin, an English sociolinguist who has helped steer Plimoth’s research, disagrees. He says that certainly if the site’s interpreters were to speak in the deepest seventeenth-century dialects, visitors would find it extremely hard to grasp their meaning. In a recording, Wakelin reads—with relish—a passage from William Bradford’s Relation (of the Pilgrims’ Atlantic journey and their hard landing on Cape Cod) in pure Somerset. Only because I’m familiar with the story can I follow along. Wakelin makes hooting, bonging, and bagpipe-drone noises; he pauses for strange interrogatory moments, and scampers up and down the tonal scale in a single sentence.
But I can understand a recording of two Plimoth interpreters, a man and a woman, speaking early modern Londonese. As I crudely transcribe it, the man says, “Is dis he which teaches you to speak French?” and then remarks that the teacher doesn’t look French. She says: “It is becaws he is so plainly clawth-ed. It is not de weave dat maaketh de mohn. Ahl dey dat ahr clawth-ed with silk and are braav [finely dressed] are not awlways de most sufficyent. Awftentames mahr larning is fawnd in one meanly apparelled dan in dem dat have auwtward braahvery … Mye mother … hath chawsen rether a man of understanding withawt silk then a silken man withawt understanding.” She ends by warning him to pay no attention to “megnefical sweggering.” Unsurprisingly, he says he can’t stay for a moralizing dinner.
Cawing Cockney Londoners, twanging Appalachian hillbillies, soft-voiced black Americans—I hear traces of them all in the interpreters’ voices, and I am touched by the possibilities of my ancient, ever-changing language. Kemp calls the vigorous medley of Pilgrim English “a musical instrument.” I assume that the particular music of early seventeenth-century London is what Grizzell and Nathaniel played together.
The Newport house of Governor William Coddington and his wife, Anne, Grizzell’s older sister, seen here in a much later sketch, was Grizzell Brinley’s home for the first two years of her American life, 1651–53.
The wedding probably took place inside the Coddingtons’ house. William Coddington may have married them himself, since Puritan marriages were secular contracts, covenants between bride and groom, not religious alliances. Grizzell’s sister Anne and twenty-year-old brother Francis were there, and no doubt there was a feast. Afterward, Nathaniel and Grizzell probably spent their wedding night in the scant privacy of a curtained bedstead in the Coddingtons’ ground-floor parlor room. “Sexual experience had not yet acquired the ceremonial sanctity of a separate setting,” writes Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. “Even if the notion had suggested itself, there was little possibility of segregating sex in the larger sense from the daily round of life. Procreation was everywhere, in the barnyard as well as in the house.”
“To Be at … My Said Wifes Dispossal for Ever”
Wills are a form of autobiography. Since in Grizzell’s case it is the only document in which we hear her own voice, it is worth a very careful read. Only by looking at the end of her life can we see its domestic beginnings, as well as the rights and possessions that would circumscribe her existence. Five years after the death of her husband, thirty-two years after her wedding, she walks through the rooms of her house planning the distribution of its contents to her sons and daughters. As a single woman over the age of eighteen and later as a widow, Grizzell counted under English law as a feme sole, a woman entitled to possess property in her own right and to enter into contracts. But the minute she married she became a feme covert, whose entire identity was “covered,” or merged with her husband’s.
In both England and New England, the land, cash, houses, goods, and chattels a bride brought to her marriage could legally be designated either as dowry or jointure. Anything classed as dowry automatically became her husband’s property. A jointure, however, preserved some of a married woman’s rights. Almost invariably negotiated with the bridegroom before the wedding by a male relative (in Grizzell’s case, probably Coddington), a jointure promised the bride the use of funds she brought into the marriage. Grizzell received a life interest in her joint estate with Nathaniel: the use of one hundred pounds sterling a year—a fortune for her “better comfortable livelyhood.” Her bed and board would be Nathaniel’s responsibilities. (If their marriage had ended in divorce—and divorce did occur in Puritan New England—Grizzell would have had her jointure to fall back on.)
Like a venture capital agreement, a jointure also rested on hope. Nathaniel and Coddington were making a bet that profits would flow from the success of the island plantation and its company trade; Grizzell’s estate would be her investment in that venture. A wife’s ability to hang on to jointure rights depended partly on her family’s power to enforce them, and partly on the mutual trust that she and her husband brought to the arrangement. No signs of wariness, no self-protective clauses, appear in either of the Sylvesters’ wills; their long marriage appears to have been peaceful, generous, and affectionate.
Under Nathaniel’s will, Grizzell would inherit the entire island and everything on it for the remainder of her life, including the “Negroes … and their increase.” Her ownership did not include the eventual disposition of assets after her death, however; it was Nathaniel, in his will, who planned in painstaking detail the partition of slaves, land, and livestock that would take place then. Following general custom, he did not specify gifts of domestic furnishings: “all my household goods to be to and for the use of my said Deare Wife.”
Also excluded from Nathaniel’s bequests was a family of three: Jacquero, Hannah, and their daughter, Hope. “Being my Wifes owne,” they were “to be at her my said Wifes dispossal for Ever.” They were almost certainly the first people of African descent to set foot on Shelter Island, arriving in 1653 with Grizzell after her marriage.
Property law is the clue. If Jacquero and his family belonged to Grizzell under her jointure—“the Deed left in the hands of my Brother William Coddington,” which unfortunately has not survived—then they were hers outright. But if she purchased them as a married woman out of her annual allowance, or “pin money,” her unequivocal ownership would have been in doubt, because the reading of a woman’s separate property rights narrowed over time. For example, a 1674 English case for assigning such assets to the husband reads: “So long as the husband and wife do cohabit … if the wife out of her good housewifery do save anything out of it [her “allowance”]; this will be the husband’s estate and he shall reap the benefits of his wife’s frugality.” Furthermore, in most cases, larger expenditures such as real estate, housing, or chattel (as slaves were classed) were judged as more than a woman needed for “her better comfortable livelyhood” and thereby became her husband’s property or inheritance.
The names of the three, in the case of Jacquero, at least, tell us something about events in their lives before they arrived on Shelter Island. Jacquero, an Iberian-sounding version of the French name Jacques and the English John, is an Atlantic creole’s name; he surely acquired it in Afro-Portuguese Africa, or Brazil, or the French West Indies before arriving in New England. Hannah and Hope, Jacquero’s wife and daughter, may have been given these biblical names by English colonists.
Nathaniel singled out Jacquero and Hannah’s second daughter as his property, not Grizzell’s, which means she was “increase,” born on the island after the earlier purchase of her parents and sister. He bequeathed “my Negro Girl Isabell being the Daughter of Jaquero and Hannah his Wife” to his sixth child, daughter Elizabeth, “when shee shall bee twentie one years of age or at her Marriage if it be before.”
The rights that were so carefully safeguarded for Grizzell (and the land and possessions bequeathed to her children) did not exist for Jacquero, Hannah, Hope, and Isabell. The Sylvesters’ temperaments and experiences eventually led them to the Society of Friends, but if we think that meant that slave families could count on not being broken up, or that individual family members would not be sold separately, we are mistaken. Everything depended on the Sylvesters’ needs and wishes, which would trump Quakerism. As parents, Jacquero and Hannah would be powerless to protect their daughters or arrange their futures for them. Hope and Isabell would be forced to understand that this was so whatever strategies their parents might devise to try to keep them safe from harm.
Nevertheless, as Ira Berlin writes, “the slaves’ history—like all human history—was made not only by what was done to them but also by what they did for themselves. All of which is to say that slavery, though imposed and maintained by violence, was a negotiated relationship.”
At the kitchen hearth on Shelter Island, in the birthing room, in the garden rows, on the threshing floor, and most of all within the echo chambers of their hearts and minds, Jacquero and Hannah negotiated with Grizzell for thirty-two years. But she did not free them by the terms of her will, as some masters did. She wrote, “Item I give unto my five daughters [the eldest, Grizzell, had married] … my Negro’s Jacquero and Hannah his wife for the use of the house for all my aforesaid Daughters that are unmarried … and after my said daughters are married or die … unto my son Giles Sylvester,” that is, for the rest of their lives. Then she adds, “And my mind is, the warming pan should remain for the use of the family in general.” By 1685, Grizzell would have become accustomed to the idea that slaves, like the warming pan, were “for the use of the family”—her own family.