votingwellbyallareneebozarth.blogspot Plymouth Rock and Pilgrims’ Feet Plymouth Rock is no Rock of Gibraltar, no sentinel against the enemy, no island of redemption, but a small and adequate sea level stepping-stone from the Old World to the New, where the Pilgrims’ feet could feel the solid earth beneath their sea-worn bodies again. It was a modest beginning, and the dazed and weary passengers, still listing and slightly queasy from more than three months at sea, must have been grateful that such a simple welcome as the land provided did not demand too much of them, no awe, no dropping to the knees to kiss the ground, just inexpressible passing gratitude for one foot at a time to step from the stench and dreadful hardships of churning waters felt below deck to a fresh-aired grassy place, no matter how cold or brown, where they could plop themselves down and lie on their backs and close their eyes and feel the stillness embrace them. Blessed then, the solid bed of the earth, the waiting land that did not reject them but gave them a chance, and no matter the cost, they accepted, no matter the deaths over winter, they refused to turn back and face the open waters and the hell-hole of ocean travel again. Freedom awaited. Freedom more dear than any easy forfeiture of it for peace or comfort at the price of the souls respect. Thank you for staying, my American ancestors, whoever you were, starting with the professional soldier among them, Myles Standish~ hired by the Pilgrims to be their military guardian, scout and leader, who was one of the valiant passengers on the original journey, and his descendants from whom I followed. I cannot imagine your lives, I who am spoiled by the 21st century, who cannot tolerate the idea of life before daily hot showers and antiperspirants, air conditioned houses and cars and public buildings~ and jet planes with first class service over the oceans, and steam ships with elaborately decorated ballrooms and lavish dance parties and elegant international cuisine at any hour of the day or night, and private staterooms with their own terraces and Jacuzzi tubs and showers, and one to one staff to passenger service at the ring of a bell or a telephone call. When I feel ill and have to go out and tend the garden in mud anyway, getting thorns in my flesh while I feverishly sweat in cold weather to beat the ice or temporary loss of power, it’s important for me to remember that modest rock on the shore of the northern Atlantic that welcomed those miserable people whose distant, unrecognizable stock I am, and without whose courage and persistent effort I would not be. Alla Renée Bozarth My Blessed Misfortunes Copyright 2014 Villa and Will When Villa Wiard married Will Little, my generation was four constellations away, unborn, a mere dim, distant indefinable scent in the air beyond the farm, the scent of the future that came along once in a while in the springtime. Sarah Standish had married John Wiard, my ancestor, eight generations earlier~ Sarah the granddaughter of Myles Standish, who may or may not have been the only Roman Catholic on the Mayflower, and John the descendant of my Breton archancestor, Johannes Wiard, who fought with William the Conqueror at Hastings. Villa’s mother, Rovilla, was French Canadian, hence the French name. Of Great-great-Grandpa Little, I know very little, except that his people hailed from New York. Will Little courted and married Villa Wiard back in Illinois, and their daughter Alice Delphine would grow up to become the most educated woman around, a tiny intellectual who was also a rural teacher and midwife, widow and mother of four, her youngest child only six months old, my grandma. This was almost a century of generations and miles from the big buzzing lights of sin city Chicago, where I went from my mountain town in Oregon to receive higher education at the university and in the sweaty workout rooms of The Holy Ghost Honky Tonk Gym and The Gospel Blues Temple of Christ. From there, the Black Madonna would patrol the streets to gather in the needy for hot soup, hot singing and smooth clean sheets for safe sleep. It was one of the few places where people would not be robbed of the lie that we live in a safe world, that lie being a necessary possession which some of us mourn the theft of, for we needed it badly and still do and can hardly adjust to going on without it, because now we have to know how unsafe everyone here is, not yet being dead. Imagine that it’s taken me more than half a century to realize that when Grandma would say to me across her tiny kitchen table in her little green house beneath the tall trees, “Baby, I am proud as can be of my ancestors, and especially of being an eleventh generation direct descendant of Myles Standish who came to this land on the Mayflower,” she was telling me that I was a thirteenth generation heir of the pilgrim legacy. And incidentally, on my grandfather’s side, seventh generation Osage Indian.Though Myles Standish was hired as a military organizer to set up the colony, he came with the Pilgrims, and lacking Puritan restraint, he shared their spirit of new beginnings and their freedom to invent themselves. And so I inherit that spirit of independent autonomy and occasional anarchy for the common good that motivated those early modern immigrants. Before them, it’d been mostly quiet of newcomers on this continent since the human ancestors of the people who already lived here had immigrated from the other direction sixteen to twenty thousand years earlier. The Asians, the Europeans and then the Africans all came here with their own songs of lament and joy, love and supplication, their own pipes and drums of thanksgiving prayer. We sons and daughters of global immigrants, whether they came here kidnapped and enslaved or freely, still all sing on the same stringed instrument built into our human throats. It’s our common birthright to sing. We all know how to clap and dance and ride the sound pitches on our own breath swings through the air, and we all pray as we choose and survive this way, or if not by making the sounds, by listening and carrying on inside and saying our own Amen in our own ways. Being a descendant of pilgrim people makes me the same as everyone else since the beginning of the Great Migration out of Africa before the coming of ice, when the call was strong to see how big the world was and how far we could go before it invited or forced us to light ourselves down and say, Home, if that happened, or at least, Stay for awhile and explore. We all arrive wherever we light with our songs and souls intact or in shreds, depending on the journey and how strong we are in body and spirit and what help we had or did not on the way. Raising our voices to meet angels’ choirs allows us not to mind so much, or at least not all the time, the fact that we can’t be safe till we’re dead. The music of everything keeps us all going anyway, because it lightens the spirit and clears the mind for when we have to decide how we’re going to respond when life and death happen. We respond in an instant, sometimes, without thinking. The singing helps us forgive ourselves for what later might look like bad choices and moves. We did the best we could with what we knew or believed and had at the time. We couldn’t know the pain and trouble our moves would lead to until they presented themselves. Then we sang again, to give ourselves mercy and firm resolve without violent judgment against ourselves. At home again in Oregon, when I visit The Holy Ghost Honky Tonk and Gospel Blues Temple of Christ* in my mind, I come up singing every time, dancing around my kitchen without touching the walls, thinking that Myles Standish and all would never have imagined such a sight, such a sound, such a rhythm, such a person, or that their own blood runs in her veins and does such strange and marvelous things. *My names for The Chicago Urban Training Center and Jessie Jackson’s Operation Breadbasket, where I attended regularly, learned, cried, clapped and danced in the aisles. Alla Renée Bozarth From My Blessed Misfortunes, © 2014
Posted on: Sun, 23 Nov 2014 22:21:18 +0000
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