A kind of interesting thought has been weaving through my mind the last two weeks, and the time near "Columbus Day" may be an appropriate moment to throw it out there.
I was definitely brought up with the old paradigm, triumphalist version of American history: that courageous Europeans, fleeing religious and social persecution in their home continent, risked everything to come to the new world and carve out an entire society from scratch. There is still some truth to that superficial telling of the story, but most of us now are conscious of the disturbing shadow stories behind this narrative. That isn't my focus today. Maybe another day.
But as I try to rise above my own strangely intense chronic homesickness for England, I've begun to imagine possible precedents. I'm a fly on the wall of an English couple in the 1600s or early 1700s in their original home, my ancestors. Perhaps they were anti-establishment in some respect, I don't know. Let's say the husband comes home and announces to his wife, "We are leaving for America. There are wide open spaces there, freedom, land to farm or do anything we want. Get packing!" In those days, what choice did the wife have? A woman had no autonomy, no ability to choose differently from her spouse. She would be leaving her social network, likely a nearby family, and everything that she knew. If she refused to go -- well, we can imagine the possibilities in many cases. How many women swallowed their terror, their disagreement, and simply went? And if they survived the perilous two month journey, what was their impression when land was sighted? I am talking about the earliest New England, New York, and Virginia settlers. Whatever town they landed in would have been extremely rustic by European standards, and then beyond that, trees, trees and more trees. And if she survived the first winter (probably at least 30 degrees F colder than she was used to) and the first summer (probably at times nearly 30 degrees F hotter than she was used to), did she ever really get used to her new environment, her landscape, her life of struggle against the elements?
Even if many of the women who came to America early on were dissident Puritans and Quakers, not Church of England, the fact is that in their old homes, they would have been an integral part of a landscape dotted with stone circles, Celtic crosses, churches, abbeys, and cathedrals. Centuries-old pre-Christian and Christian art and architecture would have at least been part of their daily visual experience. Literally uprooting from this land would have been heartbreaking on some level. It must have been. How many years did it take to acclimate? Or did homesickness get passed down to the next generation, and the next, and the next?
Many of us have been brought up to assume that these ties were simply broken, for some of us, up to four hundred years ago. That there shouldn't still be any repercussions. But what if somehow I've heard the echoes of women's tears through the ages, as they were torn from home? Perhaps the ache in my heart isn't only mine, but an inheritance from the women of my past.
