Nancy Meyer

Our Family’s First Century in Hadley

1659

Back when the 49 founders followed
their Calvinist gospel. Back when
they laid out 8 acre lots with care that no one
had better land than another. Back
when my ancestor Samuel Porter
built the modest house on Middle Street
and everyone’s cows grazed
in the Commons. Back then
they still honored the contracts with
the Pequot and Abenaki who sold them
the land. Welcomed them every spring
to plant corn, fish the Quinnecticut,
and a few stayed on, sold baskets and brooms.

 

        1704 

Back when the Sumptuary Laws forbade
gold rings and lace collars, lest God
punish them with war and pestilence. Back
when my forebears got rich trading furs
down the river. That’s when others
pointed fingers, named them River Gods.
Back when, one snowy night, the French led
Mohawk and Pocumtuck to attack Deerfield,
right next door. When they killed 48 townfolk, 
captured 140 in under 2 hours.

 

         1752 

Back when Samuel’s grandson Moses acquired
600 acres beyond the Commons. Back when
he built his grand house, with a four-flued chimney
and rusticated cladding. Back when the Abenaki
returned to plant corn and found fencing
and dogs to run them off. Back when, two years later,
Captain Moses Porter was killed in the ambush
of Bloody Morning Scout.[i] And Porter’s Pequot body
servant delivered his sword to my 8th great
grandmother Elizabeth, who took to laudanum
and rocking in a darkened room.

***

StoryKeeper


I inherit Mom’s copy of Forty Acres when she dies at 98. Slim
volume, nevertheless it jams my bookshelf. Gramma’s cousin,
Jimmy Huntington, wrote it. Moses Porter, my 9th great grandfather,
built it, 1752. Said to be first house outside the stockade, that
protected our Hadley, Mass. founders. Forty Acres, towering elms
and single black shutters. 200 years we lived there, Cousin Jimmy
the last. I played on the verandah, rolled in the grass.

Genealogies, antiquities, I never cared. Until these words,
catalogued without comment:

an inventory for the Estate of Cap’t Moses Porter, March 8, 1756.
Cash 3£ 5s, Negro man £400… Zebulon Prutt, the son of Arthur, a
slave, belonging to the Reverend Isaac Chauncy, pastor of the
Church in Hadley… This slave boy must have been the property of the
parson’s daughter for she sold him to Moses Porter … 29th of July, 1745  

Minister.   Ancestor.    Women.  Buying and selling     people. 

And then, this:

“…. when the cock was placed at the top of the steeple, Zeb Prutt, a
young colored man, ascended to the summit, sat on the copper bird
and imitated the crowing of a rooster.”

I know this church.  The steeple, 90 feet high.  

Gramma never told us these stories, no Zebulon on the steeple.
Never, even when I married an African-Jamaican man. Mother
never said our cow-milking, broom-corn-planting, Harvard-
attending family were also slave-owning. Even when we raised a
son only miles away. I must tell him, his children.  I spin like the
rooster. Us, enslavers. A man crowing. A man who hoed the sod
where we just buried my mother.

***

Text Fragment: Accounting


[My ancestor] Michael St. Agnan was drowned while bringing back to Trinidad a cargo of African slaves from the mainland of Latin America. This tragic event…[ii]

Michael, I refuse to let you curl
silent on the ocean shelf, brass buttons
turned green, beneath black bodies strewn
among rusted chains and rum barrels.

I haul your ghost up from the brine
            stretch your shade out on the sand.
            Flies swarm, all these years waiting
for you to surface.

Drowned 1821, you smuggler, you
            black marketeer[iii]. Let the sun parch
your skeleton dry as the brown cursive
of your human ledgers, promissory notes.

Cousin Jimmy elides this part, brags about
your luster pitcher, tortoise-shell combs
rimmed with gold, deep-toned mahogany
on dusty display at Forty Acres.

No matter how I swat away the buzz
tormenting me on kelp-striped sand,
your ridged coins keep multiplying
deep in my pockets.


[i]   https://elizabeth-porter-8edg.squarespace.com/letters-of-the-porters
[ii] James L. Huntington, Forty Acres, p 37
[iii]  International slave trade banned in 1808

 

 

 

 

Nancy L. Meyer she/her is a 2020 Pushcart nominee, avid cyclist, grandmother of 5 from the unceded Ramaytush Ohlone lands of San Francisco. Recent journals include: Decolonial Passage, Feral Journal, Third Prize Nebraska Poetry Society Open Contest, New Note, Gyroscope, Book of Matches, Laurel Review, Sugar House Review. Forthcoming: Last Stanza Journal, Write Launch, Kind of a Hurricane Press, Frost Meadow, Ocotillo Review: Julia Darling Prize Finalist. In 8 anthologies, including by Tupelo Press, Ageless Authors and Wising Up Press.