Raylene Hinz-Penner here, a Liberal, Kansas native, retired English professor now living in Newton, with a glimpse into Wordy Shipmates, an edgy pop-history novel about the characters and culture of the Massachusetts Bay Colony Puritans by Sarah Vowell, public radio voice, quirky writer of history and travelogue, raised Pentecostalist, part-Cherokee, student of contemporary culture and master of the sarcastic aside in a voice the NYT calls “flat indi-girl affect and kitsch worship.”
Here’s an example early in the book introducing the Puritans: “Check out those barbarian idiots with their cockamamie farce of a legal system locking people up for fishy reasons and putting their criminals to death. Good thing Americans put an end to all that nonsense long ago.” She is “witty and cheeky in the face of Puritan sobriety.” Perfect summation. To accomplish what? To show us the Puritans are us in their belief that they were God’s new chosen, American exceptionalism, the image of America as “the city on a hill” both Reagan and JFK used.
Now you see how a Puritan history in Vowell’s hands can be fun, off-beat, enlightening. Vowell appreciates and seeks to understand her subjects, John Winthrop, John Cotton, Roger Williams, Anne Hutchinson. Her title, Wordy Shipmates, gives her license to quote lots of Puritan writing—pamphlets, letters, sermons, arguments—but she never loses her own voice amid the Wordy Shipmates. The novel reads like a history of the period interspersed with Vowell witticisms. It’s been a long time since the 1630’s but we are still who we are!
So, a reader threads her way through John Winthrop’s journals, his two months on the Atlantic enroute to Massachusetts, encounters with other religious zealots, primarily Roger Williams, to the beat of Vowell’s commentary, like this: “Threatening to take away a Puritan magistrate’s right to punish is like yanking the trumpet our of Louis Armstrong’s hands.” We get the point.
Vowell is especially interested in rabble rouser Roger Williams’ interactions with the Native Narragansett. Williams is thrown out of the Massachusetts Bay Colony for his offbeat and Separatist beliefs like his argument that the charter that gave Plymouth the rights to settle is illegal because what Plymouth really needed was a deed from the Indians. As Vowell says it, “Williams is under the impression that the land belonged to its original inhabitants!”
After his banishment Williams goes to live with the Indians and found Providence, Rhode Island. He couldn’t stomach a society about nothing more than harmony and groupthink. He cares more about truth than popularity or respect or personal safety. Vowell admits, “I find him hard to like but easy to love.”
In 1643 seven years after his banishment, Williams is on his way to England to acquire a legal charter for Providence, with his book, A Key into the Language of America -- a souped up dictionary arranged in chapters devoted to such subjects as sickness, fish, and the seasons of the year. There are Algonquian words matched with English equivalents. There are also observations about the native way of life.” Of course, the key is to help tradesmen and missionaries. But it is also a tribute to the Narragansett people, “ the ravens who fed me.”
Vowell says this is Williams’ best writing, “modest, gripping, down to earth.” It is my favorite part of the book--Vowell making sense of Williams’ Key. He finds the Indians good listeners, unlike, perhaps, the Puritans he lived with before. They commit fewer scandalous sins than Europe—one never hears of robberies, rapes, murders, and they never shut their doors, day or night.” Native women’s lives were harder than Native men’s or whites. They were quarantined alone five days during menstruation, took complete care of raising, harvesting, preparing all crops except tobacco, worked so hard that childbirth didn’t faze them.
Vowell concludes that the Indians are strangely similar to the Puritans: the supernatural seeps into every facet of their lives on earth. She finds one phrase in Williams’ Key equally useful in Boston or the wilderness: “God is angry with me?” and laments the teachings of original sin. In Vowell’s words: “The Good News is that the native is in fact a wicked, worthless evildoer and so was his mother.”
The final chapters cover The Pequot Wars, Anne Hutchinson, and a timely reminder of the American propensity for a dangerous disregard for expertise in our leaders—“a suspicion of people who know what they’re talking about.” The more things change, the more they stay the same. This study of the Puritans is a perfect way to see it!
