My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys

    Most of my posts to date have been related to history of the Colonial Era in New England, and to my first two novels, The Heretic’s Daughter and The Traitor’s Wife.  But, as I’m nearing the completion of my third novel set in Texas during the Reconstruction Era of post Civil War America (and have spent the last year researching the topic) I’ll be posting some discovered revelations about this little known period of Texas history. 

    One northerner visiting Texas in 1869 said that Texans were like the weather, “a perpetual enigma, a tissue of contradictions” and that its citizens did “everything for honor and nothing for justice.”   The time in which this ”damn yankee” made his observations was one of the most violent periods in the Republic’s past.  In 1869 Texas led the country in homicide rates.  Recognizable man-killers like Cullen Baker, Elisha Guest, Wild Bill Longley and Ben Griffith walked openly in the streets and the home-grown law keepers had been effectively gutted, disarmed and disenfranchised, by the still-present Federalist forces.  A year later, in 108 counties there were 2,790 known petty and violent criminals at large.   There was general and open hostility towards the immigrant population flooding into Texas, which had been left at least physically untouched by the Civil War battles raging farther to the East; border disputes still flared with Mexico, Native Americans were being shot first and questioned second, and gun control was a hot button issue.

     Struggling to rise from the chaos, and often volunteering at great risk to themselves to restore order in their towns and fields, were men and women of the soil, settlers and cowboys who were often the real, unsung heroes of this battle to regain peace and civility to a savage place.

    The above photo is of my dad, John Hickman, who, in an earlier time, would have been happy to have been called a cowboy.

A Journey Through Time

    For many people the discovery of their ancestry begins later in life; following school, career-building, perhaps marriage and family.  It’s often only when we have the extra time and resources to look backwards that we pursue our lineage through genealogy, or, if we’re lucky, through family stories.  I was extremely fortunate to have been given some of my mother’s family history as a young child.  I was about eight years old when I was told by my maternal grandmother that my grandmother, back nine generations, was one of the nineteen men and women hanged as a witch in Salem in 1692.   Her name was Martha Carrier and she was called by Cotton Mather, “The Queen of Hell.”  My first novel, told from the point of view of her daughter, Sarah, was titled The Heretic’s Daughter, and it chronicled the growing witchcraft hysteria and the subsequent trials and imprisonment of Martha and four of her five children.    Martha was ultimately hanged in August of 1692, going to her death refusing to admit to being a witch, refusing to implicate any of her neighbors, and chastising her judges for listening to a group of girls who were “out of their wits.”

    Martha’s story, however, was only part of the Carrier family lore.  Her husband, Thomas Carrier, according to local Massachusetts’ gossip was thought to be one of the executioners of King Charles I of England.  He was long suspected in the colonies to be part of the group of regicides—confederates of Cromwell—who fled to New England following the restoration of King Charles II to the English throne.  According to my grandmother, Thomas lived to 109 and was over seven feet tall.   This giant figured prominently in my imagination for most of my childhood and it was with great enthusiasm, and more than a little awe, that I wrote about this remarkable man in my second novel, The Traitor’s Wife (published in hardcover as The Wolves of Andover).

    It is a fictional rendering, built in part on true-to-life history of Restoration England, and, to a greater extent, on my own imaginings of the experiences of a soldier who survived the English Civil War, sailed to a new world with a price on his head, and married in the colonies at forty-eight years of age.  After the death of his wife, Martha, he moved to Connecticut, began building three homes for himself and his children, and started a blacksmith forge—all at seventy years of age.  Contrary to custom, and the formidable pressures of Puritan society, he never took another wife.

    The photo shown above is the last surviving Carrier house of that era, built in Colchester, Connecticut, around 1730, five years before Thomas died.

Sympathy for the Devil

   As world tyrants go, King Charles I was not that evil.  England certainly had it’s share of greater villains and bullyboys.   Look at John, son to Henry II and Eleanor of Acquitaine, brother to King Richard I and bane to the fictional Robin Hood character.  One author called him “spectacularly awful as a human being as well as a king.”   Treacherous, cruel and greedy, he sent a poisoned egg to a woman of the court who had rejected him, married a twelve-year old and ditched his first wife, and drowned his young nephew, also heir to the throne, by tying a stone to him and throwing him in the Seine.  Personally.

   January 30th  marks the anniversary of the death of Charles I, the only king in England to be tried and executed by the common rabble.   His greatest sin was arrogance and a complete disregard for the voice of his people.  He disbanded the parliament three times when they wouldn’t give him the money he had asked for to support foreign wars and his own court, and, unfortunately in his case, listened to the advice of his foreign-born Catholic wife, who told him, in effect, “let them eat cake.”

   He dragged his country into a civil war that lasted seven years because he could not allow himself to concede to the most basic rights of his countrymen: freedom of speech, freedom to assemble peaceably, fair trial by a jury of equals, etc., etc.  The seeds of our own revolution were planted and fostered by the savagery and single-mindedness of the conflict.

   As a man he was shy, short and stuttered.  He was, by the standards of the day, a faithful husband and a loyal father.  On the day of his execution, he said a solemn goodbye to his children, and walked with dignity to the block wearing two shirts in order not to shiver, which would have given the impression to the gathered throng that he was afraid.  His last words, spoken without a stutter, were reportedly, “I go from a corruptible to an incorruptible crown.”

   In researching and writing about him for my second novel, The Traitor’s Wife, I came to experience a greater compassion for the man.  He was the product of his time, believing himself to be God’s annointed, above the laws of man.    Unfortunately for him, the enlightened world had begun its slow and painful growth away from the notion of One Man, One Rule.  This engraving of him, which I keep on my mantle, illustrates so well his arrogance, and his humanity.

“For pity’s sake, and for pity’s sake alone, did I, in one rapid movement, draw back, bringing down the ax with a clean and heavy stroke.”   The Traitor’s Wife

   

 

In the White Room

My room with a view

    The image at the left has not been overexposed, it’s a photo of my view from my desk.   It’s a plain, white wall.  And it’s intentional.  With all the distractions of media, phones, internet and, during the holidays, happy crowds of family and friends visiting my house, my desk in front of the blank wall has become a necessary sanctuary to be able to formulate ideas and then mold them to the written word. 

     It’s such a curious thing, really, writing a novel about the world and yet being at times a hermit from that world.  The writer is a kind of cipher, experiencing the joys and sorrows of life, its music,  its art, its beauty, and then distilling it into words on a page, or computer screen.  But often times only after the door is shut, the phone is turned off, the warning sign posted on the door. 

    I’m always amazed, and a little bit envious, of people who can sit at a coffee shop or crowded book store and write!  How do they do it, I wonder; filtering out all that conversation, the commotion, the demands for attention and hear the voice of their characters inside their heads?

    It’s comforting to know that I’m in good company wanting to write in a kind of zen-like solitude.  Annie Dillard writes in her book, The Writing Life, “I shut the blinds one day for good.  I lowered the venetian blinds and flattened the slats.  Then, by lamplight, I taped my drawing to the closed blind.  There, on the drawing, was the window’s view: cows, parking lot, hilltop, and sky.  If I wanted a sense of the world, I could look at the stylized outline drawing.  If I had possessed the skill, I would have painted, directly on the slats of the lowered blind, in meticulous colors, a trompe l’oeil mural view of all that the blinds hid.  Instead, I wrote it.”   Thus does the oracle speak.

Colonial Cures for Overindulgences

    Last night, after my house full of family had departed, I got to thinking about the aftermath of the Thanksgiving weekend: the physical discomfort that always seems to accompany the over indulgence of wonderfully rich and heavy food and drink.  After all, it’s an American tradition—eat till you’re more than full and afterwards lay on the couch to watch holiday football and/or take a nap!

   And when the occasional stomach upset strikes, we have many options to choose from that offer relief.  Fizzy tablets, pink viscous liquids, and chocolately tasting squares that will, if nothing else, lessen the misery until our systems can overcome the stress and shock of being stuffed, well, like a turkey.  We think of these remedies as less than pleasant, but compared to the curatives of the Puritan Era they are downright ambrosial.

   Some of the treatments for stomach ailments due to gluttony, or ”dyspepsia”, included such benign ingredients as catnip, dandelion, dill, mallow, parsley and mountain ash brewed into teas.  Some of the popular herbal remedies used in the New World of the colonists we still use today, such as chamomile.   But other treatments included bleeding, emetics, blistering and clysters (which comes from the Greek word Kluster, meaning to cleanse—think of a colonic in less than hygenic conditions and you get the idea).

   A recipe for relief of an upset stomach following too rich a meal dating from the 17th century was as follows:  salt, molasses, turpentine and castor oil mixed with water and drunk until “purging” followed.   Well. . .yeah!

   So the next time you dread reaching for the chalky-tasting Milk of Magnesia to relieve stomach and intesinal distress, think of the drastic methods our Colonial ancestors had to endure and the cure will not seem so onerous.

“She needs to be bled, and heartily.”  Dr. Roger Toothaker about one of his patients, from The Traitor’s Wife.

A Journey through New England

     Last week I went on book tour through New England for The Traitor’s Wife, my second novel— a fictionalized account of Thomas and Martha Carrier, my grandparents back nine generations.   Thomas, by family legend and historical accounts, was a soldier for Cromwell during the English Civil War, and Martha Allen Carrier was later hanged in Salem in 1692 as an accused witch. The weather during my stay was gorgeous for most of the week and I had the opportunity to visit some historical sites in Danvers, which was called Salem Village during the time of the witch trials.

   Pictured here is the Rebecca Nurse home which has been lovingly preserved and is open to the public at various times.  Poor Rebecca Nurse: she was one of the nineteen men and women hanged for the crime of witchcraft, along with one of her sisters, Mary Easty.  Another sister, Sarah Cloyce, was arrested and later released.  The day I visited the grounds, the weather was warm and sunny, the surrounding fields still green.  It was hard to imagine that so much death and destruction occured so near by, and that many good and decent people were wrenched from their homes and families, thrown into prison and later executed based on the testimony of a few hysterical girls.

 

I also visited the Danvers’ memorial to the 19 men and women hanged, and to Giles Corey who was pressed to death under heavy stones.  It is a touching memorial, yet somehow out of place, nestled as it is in the middle of a modest suburban neighborhood. 

   Martha never wavered in her insistence of her innocence, she never accused another person, even when 4 of her 5 children were arrested, and went to her death saying to her judges, “Shame on you for listening to these folks who are out of their wits.”

  I fervently hoped, as I stood looking at the memorial, that I would be as principled and as courageous as Martha had been in standing up for what she believed to be the right course of action.     

   Following are the wonderful, supportive bookstores that hosted me for a week of author talks.   Many heartfelt thanks to them.  Where would we be without our bookstores!!!!! 

            Bookstore of Gloucester, Gloucester, Mass

            Baker Books, Dartmouth, Mass.

            Porter Square Books, Cambridge, Mass.

            Spirit of ’76 Bookstore, Marblehead, Mass

            Jabberwocky Books, Newburyport, Mass.

            Toadstool Bookshop, Milford, NH

See more entries below–

 

A Trip to Andover, Mass.

   This past Friday, I got the opportunity to give a talk at the Andover Historical Society about the background research and personal family history that went into the writing of The Traitor’s Wife and The Heretic’s Daughter.  We had a packed house and a lively conversation followed my presentation about how important the town of Andover was to the Salem witch trials.  In fact, about 50 people from Andover were accused of witchcraft and imprisoned—more than were arrested from Salem and Salem Village combined. 

   My grandmother back nine generations, Martha Carrier, was one of those people.  She was hanged in Salem as a witch on August 19, 1692.  One of her accusers was a close neighbor, a man named Benjamin Abbott, who had evidently drawn some of his boundary lines on Carrier property.  In confronting Benjamin over his trespasses, and letting him know that she had her eye on him, Martha told him, “I will stick as close to you as bark on a tree.”  (Source:  B. Abbott deposition)

   I had the privelege Friday afternoon of getting a private tour of the Abbott house in Andover (see photo above of the parlor), and marvelled at how much of the original building—with it’s beautifully worn wide-planked floors, square-headed nails, and period doors with fading paint—was still standing.   The day was dark and stormy, with heavy rain, and the owner, Kelly Novak, had lit some of the rooms by candlelight.  It wasn’t hard to imagine the nearby street noises fading away with the mist; replaced by the sound of a solitary rider passing by in the night, carrying the arrest warrant for the Abbott’s close neighbor, Martha Allen Carrier.

Andover Historical Society Event Calendar October: http://andoverhistorical.org/?page_id=181

“In the early morning hours of May 31st a cart approached the house and we heard the lurcher strain against his chain and bark viciously as John Ballard walked to our door.”  From The Heretic’s Daughter.

 

 

 

Book Tour in England for The Traitor’s Wife

What a beautiful week I had in England.  I was there for the launch of the UK paperback version of The Traitor’s Wife, published by Pan Macmillan.  The wonderful folks at PanMac were gracious hosts and made my time in England truly memorable.  I travelled one afternoon by train to Croydon on a gorgeous sunny day, and in my spare time walked the streets of London through Soho and Bloomsbury, enjoying the blue skies and warm temperatures.

One of the highlights of the trip was spending five hours in the British Museum.  I had forgotten the wealth of treasures housed there, including the Rosetta Stone, the controversial Elgin Marbles, and more Egyptian artifacts than could be viewed in a paltry afternoon.  In the English History Hall, I saw a noble bust of Charles I of England (pictured here) in the same room as a death mask of Oliver Cromwell, made within a few hours of his death.

See below:

 The detail of the mask is remarkable, and more than a little spooky.  A marble bust, or painted portrait may bear a true likeness to the subject, and the bust of Charles certainly looks detailed and accurate, but a plaster or wax cast of an individual’s face recreates the anomalies and irregularities of features that an artist could never reproduce.

I thought of Thomas Carrier, and the legends of his being a soldier for Cromwell, as well as the executioner of Charles I, and wondered if there was somewhere, hidden in some as yet undisclosed place, a portrait of him.  In every painting and etching of the execution of the King, I look for a tall man standing on the killing platform, visored and poised at the edge of history.

“And so I pulled the ax swiftly from the straw and within five steps was beside the block.  For pity’s sake, and for pity’s sake alone, did I, in one rapid movement, draw back, bringing down the ax with a clean and heavy stroke.”  Thomas Carrier from The Traitor’s Wife.

Building a Giant: Thomas Morgan Carrier

I’m taking a break this week from my series of postings titled “A Day in the Life of a Puritan Woman” because I’m leaving for England tomorrow on book tour for The Traitor’s Wife, and a good portion of this novel chronicles the life of Thomas Carrier, my grandfather back nine generations and husband to Martha Carrier, hanged as a witch in Salem in 1692.  According to my Carrier relatives, Thomas lived to 109 years of age, was seven feet tall and was one of the executioners of King Charles I of England.

So I thought this week I’d post something about the research that took me to Wales a few years ago in search of clues for creating a substantive fictional character based on this remarkable ancestor. 

Most of my research was done the old fashioned way; with conventional study of historical source material of the American colonies and Restoration England found in libraries or bookstores.  There is a wealth of information that gives the Who, What, When and Where of the 17th century, and I spent several years compiling notebooks of information about colonial life, the spy rings of Charles II, and the flight of the regicides to New England.

But to find the Why of the characters I had been developing, especially for Thomas, I thought it would be important to travel toWales, the country of his birth.   Dylan Thomas writes of the Welsh countryside, “the carved limbs in the rock leap, as to trumpets”, and I wanted to see, and feel, for myself the land that had helped to shape his character.

Before leaving for Wales, I didn’t have a lot tangible information about Thomas.   All the documents regarding his livelihood and family status came from Massachusetts and Connecticut; sparse records of a farmer in the new world.  But I did have my family’s stories, a good many of which painted a portrait of a soldier who had first been a bodyguard to King Charles I, and who later fought for Cromwell during the English Civil War.   The rumor that he had been one of the executioners of Charles I followed him throughout his life while he lived in New England.

Not knowing for certain where he had been born, I decided to travel to one of the most beautiful towns in Wales—Conwy—not far from Mount Snowdon.  The 13^th century castle, and its battlements, had been built to subdue the rebellious Welsh.    It was there, exploring the nearby villages, experiencing the hard rocky ground, the changeable weather, and the breathtaking views of Mount Snowdon that I began to formulate Thomas’ character.   Over time, I came to believe that the shadows of an invading English King’s fortress helped to give him his strength of will, but the lyrical, savage beauty of the countryside gave him his heart.

“The earth where I first placed my feet to walk was savage hard and rocky with scarce enough topsoil to fill the hand.”   Thomas Carrier, The Traitor’s Wife

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A Day in the Life of a Puritan Woman

Sex

Saying the words “Puritan” or ”Pilgrim” does not readily bring to mind a carnally-minded, lusty or uxurious people.  The only word less likely to conjure thoughts of indulgent sensuality would be to say ”Huguenot.”   We have been given, thanks to the Victorians, a lasting discomfort regarding the bedroom (or common room) antics and pleasures of our fore-fathers and -mothers.   But in truth, the Puritans were closer to the Elizabethans in their perceptions of marital bliss than what the Victorians were willing to admit to having, and didn’t have the squeamishness regarding their lack of privacy or hygiene and sanitation that we more modern folk do. 

The Puritans were a displaced western European people, used to living in the crowded press of large families and cramped towns and cities, who brought with them to the New World their accustomed way of dressing, eating, farming, etc.  Until Cromwell took over the rule of England after the civil war, becoming Lord Protector, the courts of Charles I were brimming with elaborately staged pastimes,  including the theater, bull and bear bating, and even executions, which were attended by entire families, including children.   Many of the early settlers in America eschewed those sinful or over-indulgent practices, but neither sex, nor public executions, were included in the ban.

It’s hard to imagine the exemplary and estimable Ann Bradstreet becoming overly passionate, but her letters and poems often attest to her sighing over her oft-absent husband.  The theologian, Thomas Hooker—his true name, honestly—wrote, “As a wife deales with the letters of her husband that is in a farre Country, she finds many sweet inklings of his love. . .The man whose heart is endeared to the woman he loves, he dreams of her in the night, hath her in his eye and apprehension when he awakes. . .she lies in his bosom. . .that the stream of his affection, like a mighty current, runs with ful Tide and strength. . . .” (spelling from the original).

We can only imagine what was in Mr. Hooker’s mind when he wrote that sermon!

“In the morning, it was clear to Martha that the bed ropes weren’t the only things squeaking in the night.”   From The Traitor’s Wife

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