WHAT MY FOREFATHERS REALLY DID...
Sally Peck gets a fresh take on American history
Americans like to tell you where their family is “from”; originally – not actually. Wander among the shingled McMansions of coastal New England’s summer communities and alongside the stars and stripes you will see Italian or Irish flags whipping in the wind – a homage to immigrant greatgrandparents long gone.
Growing up in Brooklyn in the 1980s, I was aware of what I believed were sadly less interesting origins: my family, in all streams, had come from England. And because this is a thing of which Americans keep track, various family members had charted lines back to passengers on the Mayflower.
If you had asked me 35 years ago, I’d have told you the narrative of the white settlement of New England: people seeking religious freedom sailed from Plymouth, England, to what, in a fit of unoriginality, they named Plymouth, Massachusetts, to establish a colony. Happily for them, the local American Indians taught them to grow corn, helping them to survive.
The truth is far more complex, if horrifying. This is why last summer I was intrigued to meet Stephen Hopkins – or a man dressed like the Stephen Hopkins who was on board the Mayflower. I was with my father and children on a grassy slope overlooking Plymouth Bay in eastern Massachusetts.
“When are you going to tell this guy we’re related?” whispered my daughter Antonia, glancing at the hirsute farmer who was aggressively attacking a vegetable patch. In a 17th-century version of an English accent, greatgreat-grandfather Stephen explained that he thought the Pilgrims were (and I paraphrase) as mad as a box of frogs.
“I am here for the money,” he said as he moved the earth around, going on to explain that he had already tried to get rich in the Jamestown settlement in Virginia, 13 years earlier. After that failed, he returned to England, but hopped on the next ship he could back to the New World, ending up with ideologues whose notions didn’t quite jive with his own. My agnostic father and six-year-old son nodded in recognition; avarice is perhaps more immediately relatable to the modern visitor than Calvinism.
Like Hopkins’ story, America’s is more nuanced than I was taught 35 years ago. The living museum at Plimoth Plantation (plimoth.org) today has a Wampanoag Homesite, which tells the crucial story of the indigenous people of Patuxet, on the banks of the Eel River. While the tribe initially welcomed the Europeans 400 years ago under Massasoit, 55 years later their new leader Metacom tried to send them back to England.
The colonists not only refused, but waged battles so bloody that they nearly wiped out New England’s indigenous people. Settlers killed Metacom and, to celebrate, left his head, prominently displayed in Plymouth, to rot.
Unlike the actors in the English replica village, who adopt specific names and life stories of historic figures, the Wampanoag volunteers at the Plantation do not role-play but teach visitors about their culture – a positive change from the one-sided story of my youth.
Some say that Covid-19 has signalled the end of the American era, reducing to tatters the illusion of American exceptionalism. Certainly, it is at a crossroads. But the US is finally telling its story with greater accuracy.
Despite what today’s red-cap-wearing mob might say, America has always been great: it contains multitudes. And it is precisely in the uncovering of that many-layered story that the joy of visiting lies.
There are currently severe restrictions on travel to the US from Britain. For full details, see gov.uk/ foreign-travel-advice/usa