He pictured them walking toward the south, wished he were with them, wanted to show them that his success among the coatmen meant nothing. He’d often wondered to himself of late whether he’d return to his people if he could. Last night he’d had the chance. He’d declined. But it would come again, in two years’ time, when he’d finished his term of service. When he’d be free to leave without being branded a runaway, another treacherous tawny, ungrateful to the warmhearted Curries. Out of love and loyalty to them, he would wait. The craft he was learning beneath their roof in the meantime suited him, he reflected. He was a rememberer, a preserver, like the books and broadsides and tracts he printed. His nights with Michamauk, however, had led him to vow to devote his memory not to the Bible or the tales of the Greeks, but to the lore of his own Narragansets. He would listen and learn. He would become their book.
That night, once sleep had closed the Curries’ eyes, William slipped outside. Without setting foot in the street, where Mr. Baggot might be waiting, he crept through the snow to a house behind his own. Earlier in the day, he’d found the chance to speak with Thomas, the Narraganset man his father’s age, who served there. He approached his quarters, set off to the rear. The air was chill. Above him, a maple’s bare branches held a heavy crop of stars. Reaching into his waistcoat pocket, he drew out his bone flute and played three notes. And was admitted to the man’s room, to listen.
NOTE
“A warr with the Narraganset is verie considerable to this plantation,” wrote Emanuel Downing, in 1645, to his brother-in-law Governor Winthrop in Boston. “For I doe not see how wee can thrive untill wee gett into a stock of slaves sufficient to doe all our buisines.”
The founders of the American colonies were accustomed to keeping servants. Old England was crowded with those who were willing to place themselves in service. In New England, however, where there was land for all, every man wished to be his own master. Indentured servants, who paid for their passage to America with their next several years’ labor, were too few in number to fill the demand. Paupers and convicts were sometimes used. Slaves were imported from the West Indies. Desperate for help in their homes and fields, many of the colonists looked toward the Indians.
King Philip’s War, fought thirty years after Mr. Downing’s suggestion, left dozens of New England towns burned, and remains to this day, in its proportion of casualties to the general population, the bloodiest of America’s wars. Civilians on both sides were massacred. It was a war of ambushes and midnight raids, a style of fighting favoring the Wampanoags, Narragansets, and Nipmucks who allied themselves, too late, against the English. Its largest pitched battle was the Great Swamp fight of December 19, 1675, a strike at the then-neutral Narragansets, whom the Puritans greatly feared. Brought on by more than the clamor for servants, the war did provide a supply of captives, some shipped to the West Indies as a commodity to be traded for African slaves, others serving in the colonists’ homes. Though many of the help-hungry English saw the Indians as a providence, supplied by God to meet their needs, in practice they were found too intractable to make good servants. The colonists soon looked elsewhere.
Saturnalia Page 9