Flight of the Sparrow

by Amy Belding Brown

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Mary rides back to Boston in silence, going over and over her conversation with James. She thinks of the many Indians sold into slavery and of those confined in Natick, without the freedom to roam through the wilderness that was once theirs. They are a dying nation, their towns burned, their lands appropriated, their very bodies starved and crushed and sold. All in the name of God.

  It seems to Mary that she is trapped in a great web of English deceit and cruelty. That she has unwittingly allowed herself to become one of the sticky strands. Yet she has sometimes acted rightly—in giving aid and succor to Bess Parker, in refusing to allow her children to be whipped, in repudiating slavery, and in refusing to keep slaves in her own house. She is suddenly struck by the thought that the times she felt redeemed were when she ignored the counsel of the clerics and goodwives around her and followed the promptings of her own heart. How strange that venturing away from accepted wisdom was the very path by which she found herself.

  It is a sweet relief to lie in Samuel’s arms that night. Yet even the blessed joining of their flesh does not assuage the terrible new ache in Mary’s heart.

  • • •

  They make the long journey back to Wethersfield on horseback, accompanied by two traders and a Mohegan scout. Though the Indians have been subdued, it is widely feared that rebellious warriors might still attack lone travelers. Mary sits behind Samuel and they talk of their sojourn in Boston. They discuss Mary’s conversation with James and the sorrow that overcame her when he spoke of what had happened to his people.

  “Something must be done to help him return to his home,” Mary says. “You are an influential man. You know many people of consequence in both the Connecticut and Bay colonies. Surely you could persuade the authorities to open the Indian towns.”

  Samuel laughs. “I think you overrate me, wife. I warrant it is your influence that will be most keenly felt in these colonies, thanks to your pen. Why don’t you write to the new governor of the Bay Colony and make your case?”

  She considers his words. It would be a bold endeavor for a woman. One she would not have considered before her captivity. Yet now she sees that it is not only the right action, but the necessary one.

  “Perhaps I shall,” she says, shifting to a more comfortable position on the horse.

  “Nay, I spoke in jest, Mary,” Samuel says. “Clearly, the authorities are convinced it would be dangerous to allow the Indians to return to their homes, else they would not have required them to live in Natick. It is plain they must be closely watched.”

  “Plain?” she says. “How is that? We have slain and enslaved them and taken all their lands.” Samuel knows her feelings on slavery, but he clearly does not fully agree with her new concern.

  “I suspect it is more a point of wisdom than principle.” Samuel is a practical man. Unlike Joseph, he does not admonish Mary with verses of Scripture, but uses reason and persuasion to bring her around to his thinking. “The prospect of success in English endeavors here requires the regulation and containment of the natives.”

  Mary falls silent, thinking again of the Indians. Samuel is wrong. It is not a practical matter, but one of principle. She recalls again what James said the night she slept in his wetu: While we draw breath, there is always some way we can show mercy and kindness.

  “Yet I trust you will not constrain me, Samuel, should I try to do what I can to bring this matter into the light.”

  “Constrain you?” Samuel laughs. “I doubt I should be able to if I tried.” He turns to look at her. “Nay, wife, you must follow your conscience wherever it takes you.”

  Mary leans forward to kiss him on the cheek. In broad daylight.

  • • •

  The journey home is long and wearisome. They do not draw near Wethersfield until late on a Thursday afternoon. They ride slowly past fields of onions and winter rye. The sky is sheathed in low clouds, thick as the fleece on unshorn sheep. Mary hears the lowing of cows and the throaty song of blackbirds from the river. She peers at a low barn on one side of the road and an orchard on the other. Beyond the orchard lies impenetrable forest. In her fatigue, she thinks she sees a flicker of light among the trees, and the sound of Indian drums. She leans away from the broad comfort of Samuel’s back and rubs her eyes with her fingertips, trying to penetrate the forest gloom. Did she glimpse the glow of a circle fire, or was it her imagination? Has she mistaken the cadence of the horse’s hooves for drums?

  “Samuel.” She taps him on the shoulder. “Did you hear something just now? Drums? Or chanting?”

  Samuel half turns on the horse and peers at the forest, where she is pointing. “I heard something, but I doubt ’tis drums. I suspect we heard nothing but the wind and horses.” He smiles and reaches back to grasp her hand. “You are weary. ’Twas likely your imagination.” Mary appreciates the gentle affection in his voice, yet she knows what she heard was not the wind.

  She leans forward to rest against his back and closes her eyes. She thinks of the flickering lights and the pulsing drums. She is certain she heard and saw something. Perhaps it was a phantasm of the past—a shimmer of ghostly impressions in the afternoon air. Or maybe an omen of a future not yet born. The Indian resistance has been shattered, but she cannot conceive them a wholly broken people. Perhaps—and Mary finds herself praying this—the Indians will find a way to prevail. Perhaps their drumming will be loud again. Perhaps the people will rise from the ashes.

  Mary has no chance to determine the truth of her perceptions, for a moment later Samuel says, “Home!” in a cheerful voice and turns the horse into their lane. As they approach the house, the sun breaks through the clouds and casts its rays over the fields on their left and right. Then the front door opens and the children come running out—Benjamin and Rachel first, their curls golden in the light, then Elizur and Hannah and Mary’s own Marie, who carries little Nathaniel on her hip. Samuel slides off the horse and helps Mary down, and the two of them hurry forward, arms open for an embrace. The children tumble around them, their warm bodies jostling Samuel’s legs and Mary’s skirts and limbs, their excitement filling the air like a rising breeze.

  Mary kisses each child, tells them over and over how glad she is to be home. Then Elizur begs Samuel to toss him in the air and Hannah and Rachel run off to collect wildflowers by the brook. Marie leads Nathaniel in a little dance.

  Mary stands for a moment gazing at the scene as waves of pleasure and fatigue rush over her. She considers all that has happened to her since the attack. How much she has lost. And all she has gained. She looks at the front door. In a few minutes she will go inside to pick up her domestic work again—the long hours of toil for her family that both exhaust and satisfy her.

  She closes her eyes and tips back her head, to let what is left of the afternoon sunshine fall on her face. For a moment, in her weariness, the sound of the children’s laughter reminds her of Indian women singing and she sees again the great circle fire at Wachusett. The white and purple ropes of wampum swing on the sachems’ chests. The women chant and sway. The warriors dance with feathers in their hair, their long braids thrashing. And the people raise their arms to the sky, their faces lit with a terrible, wild joy.

  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 move
d 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.”

  • • •

  There 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.

  • • •

  There 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.