Holder of the World - Bharati Mukherjee [27]
“Can you imagine me herding sheep? Married to a ewe like my wretched brother?” It was true; Morgan and his wife, named Felicity, whom Hannah called Fleece, and brood of children did come south once to pay their respects and to inspect the homemaking skills of the New World bumpkin their brother had hooked. Hannah had the impression of having been visited by a flock of geese rather than blood relatives.
Homemaking skills, in the world of Morgan Legge, had decided linkages with submission and stupidity. It was mandated that the wife should not outshine the husband in anything but parental wealth. In the case of Fleece, a serving girl on a neighboring farm, this condemned her to permanent eclipse.
Hannah, orphaned by secrecy and a bee sting, had set great store by family, having forbidden herself to think too deeply of her mother. It did not seem possible that actual blood relatives could not unlock a secret, did not possess in abundance, a side of oneself otherwise hidden or left undeveloped. Morgan, squat, short, fair and balding, with two eyes and seven children, wiped that expectation from Hannah’s mind. She was grateful for the absence of family, the absence of definition and expectation.
She had married a man as singular in his society, as inexplicable to Morpeth, as she was in Salem. His life was a mystery to her, fabulously rich when he chose to embellish it, but otherwise a blank. He could describe the interior of a Mongol tent, the smell of camels, the pink flesh inside the trunk of a raja’s elephant, but he could not, or would not, answer the simplest question about the ships he sailed or the captains he served. He pointed out to her that his life was provisional. In the parts of the South Atlantic and Indian oceans that he plied, the odds were better than even that any voyage he undertook would be his last. She would be well looked after; that’s all he could guarantee.
WHEN Hannah Easton Fitch Legge left Salem for England in 1692, the Massachusetts Bay Colony had been in existence for sixty-two years. Time enough for a full range of political responses to have evolved. New World Man was either an ungrateful wretch wallowing in moral regression, or the upright angel of God’s green promise, reaping the rewards of sober rectitude. Reading those responses today—the charges and countercharges—is a shock: we have not changed in three hundred years. The colonists were not grateful or respectful enough to the Crown and the Mother Country; the colonists were ignorance personified and insufficiently ashamed of their backwardness; the colonists were proud and self-reliant, New World giants to Europe’s dwarfs. England’s Noblest Party, England’s Folly. The New World was hard and savage; it was soft and bountiful. It was evil, it was innocent. England was refined and cultured; it was soiled and sinful. Probably every colonist and every Englishman ascribed to one or many of those views, serially or simultaneously, whatever the nature of their mutual contradiction.
Hannah personally knew many old men and women in Salem who’d arrived on the Arabella with John Winthrop in 1630, and who had been intimately involved with every aspect of establishing a colony. It was unclear if by their beliefs they honored more the pristine, God-given nature of the world they first beheld, or their own vain scratchings on its surface. Firsters, she called them, those who believed, passionately, that the first time anything had been made, built, eaten, sold or raised was inevitably the best. They believed that God had guided their hands in those first harsh years, not permitting them to fail; therefore any second-generational dwelling, any frivolous or decorative activity, were by definition the devil’s vengeance. She was aware of Firsters’ disapproval, the implied fall into