The Last Enchantments
“My first paternal ancestor in America was a man named Abraham Backer—described as “surly and ill-tempered” by John Winthrop, who was so surly and ill-tempered himself that the description has an inflection of admiration in my reading of it. Abraham’s great claim to glory in life, other than venturing across the ocean to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1623, was the inadvertent submission of his family to wholesale slaughter by a group of Pequot Indians, who, again in the words of Winthrop, “bur...ned them in their wigwams.” Great.
All families are equally old, whether or not there are records of their age, but Abraham is mine, and I feel a half-serious pride in him. Nobody in history is more real to me. He left seven books to his son William—who survived the Pequots—in a time of almost unexceptioned illiteracy. Before his death he was a magistrate in the colony. These cinders from the fire of life, those seven books: I feel his human presence down the years. I can imagine that he breathed as I do, stretched his stomach too full with food, loved his dog, annoyed his wife.MoreLess
All families are equally old, whether or not there are records of their age, but Abraham is mine, and I feel a half-serious pride in him. Nobody in history is more real to me. He left seven books to his son William—who survived the Pequots—in a time of almost unexceptioned illiteracy. Before his death he was a magistrate in the colony. These cinders from the fire of life, those seven books: I feel his human presence down the years. I can imagine that he breathed as I do, stretched his stomach too full with food, loved his dog, annoyed his wife.MoreLess
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