Authors: Jill Lepore
Book of Ages (10 page)
Born, March 27, 1712; married, July 27, 1727. Fifteen years, four months. She married as a child.
I hear you are grown a celebrated beauty
. Six months after her brother wrote to her on January 6, 1727, the day he turned twenty-one, Jane Franklin was married.
The
legal age for marriage in Massachusetts was sixteen. The average age was twenty-four, which, except for Jane, is also the average
age at which Josiah Franklin’s daughters were married.
10
So, too, his sons: Josiah’s sons all married in their mid-twenties, none before twenty-two. Benjamin didn’t marry until he was twenty-four. Jane’s two closest sisters, Sarah and Lydia, both married when they were twenty-three. Their mother had married at twenty-two.
11
Marrying the man she did, when she did, determined the whole course of Jane Franklin’s life. Marriage determined the whole course of every woman’s life.
12
Maybe, if Benjamin Franklin wrote more letters to his little sister than he wrote to anyone else, he wrote because he bore the burden of her fate. “I never can forgit that you have not only been the best of Brothers but as a Tender Father to me,” she once wrote him.
13
Tender, but absent. He left her behind.
He wasn’t the last to leave. Her brother James had shut down the
Courant
in June 1726 and moved to Newport,
Rhode Island. Jane had had other losses since. “I fainted at Meeting and again when I came home,” her uncle Benjamin wrote after collapsing during Reverend Colman’s sermon at
Brattle Street. In 1726, in a catalog he kept of his illnesses, he had written but a single entry: “I have been much out of order this year with the Dropsie, & faintings.”
14
He died the next year, on March 27, 1727—Jane’s birthday, the day she turned fifteen.
“A Person who was justly esteem’d and valu’d as a rare & exemplary Christian,” his obituary read, “and tho’ he courted not the Observation of Men, yet there were many that could not but take notice of, and admire the peculiar Excellencies that so visibly adorn’d him.”
15
He did his good in silence. He was buried at the Granary Burying Ground.
16
Benjamin Colman preached a funeral sermon at the Brattle Street Church from
Psalms 37:37.
17
The sermon Jane heard that day she never forgot.
Marke the perfect man, and behold the upright: for the end of that man is peace
.
18
Four months later, she was married. The man she married, Edward Mecom, was not the perfect man. He was twenty-two. She never knew his birthday. (Nor, probably, did he, but he was born on December 15, 1704.) He was the son of Duncan and Mary Hoar Mecom.
19
He had an older sister, Mary; two older brothers, Hezekiah and Ebenezer; and three younger sisters, Rebecca, Elizabeth, and Ann, the youngest.
20
He was poor, he was a saddler, and he was a Scot.
21
He wore a wig and a beaver hat.
22
Jane never once wrote anything about him expressing the least affection. She hardly ever wrote anything about him at all. She knew about the worst of marriages—“Ill be Ansurable for yr Husband that He shall not Beet you,” she once wrote a friend—but she never wrote about hers.
23
She left her parents’ church to marry Edward Mecom; their marriage was entered into the books in Colman’s church, her uncle Benjamin’s church, her brother James’s church. Brattle Street was also Edward Mecom’s church.
24
He led the church in singing psalms.
25
He had a beautiful voice. He once proposed opening a singing school.
26
Maybe she loved the sound of him.
If there was something at home that Jane had wanted to run from, marrying proved no escape. Edward Mecom had no place of his own. Once they were married, he simply moved in, threading himself into the lives led in the dark, tallow-lit rooms behind the door of the Blue Ball.
Jane Franklin was restless and impatient and even saucy and provoking.
The day she got married, she might also have been pregnant, which would explain why her father gave her permission to marry so unpromising a man at so unwise an age. Very many eighteenth-century brides were pregnant when they married.
27
Neither a Fortress nor a Maidenhead will hold out long after they begin to parly,
says Poor Richard.
28
A Harvard society even debated, in 1721, “whether it be lawful to lie with one’s sweetheart before marriage.”
29
But in the parish register of the
Brattle Street Church, the first child recorded as having been born to Jane Franklin and Edward Mecom didn’t arrive until nearly two years after their wedding.
30
If she was pregnant when she married, she either miscarried or gave
birth to a baby born dead.
31
And then she might have stared out across the water in the harbor and known that she had married a wastrel for naught.
In her Book of Ages, below the record of her marriage, she added another line.
Josiah Mecom their first Born on Wednesday June the 4: 1729
She named him after her father.
32
She was seventeen. Her belly had swelled, and burst, and then there were two. “That knot’s unty’d that made us one,”
Anne Bradstreet wrote, about giving birth.
33
Jane Colman wrote poems about
childbirth, too. Colman had married
Ebezener Turell, minister of Medford.
34
Her first child was stillborn; her next lived eleven days. Pregnant for the fourth time, she wrote about her first three pregnancies—
Thrice in my Womb I’ve found the pleasing Strife,
In the first Struggles of my Infant’s Life
—about the torture of each birth—
in Travail-Pains my Nerves are wreck’d,
My Eye-balls start, my Heart-strings almost crack’d
—and about the agony of loss—
But O how soon by Heaven I’m call’d to mourn,
While from my Womb a lifeless Babe is torn?
And then she prayed that this child might live:
To this my earnest Cry and humble Prayer,
That when the Hour arrives with painful Throws,
Which shall my Burden to the World disclose;
I may Deliverance have, and joy to see
A living Child, to Dedicate to Thee.
When that hour arrived, “No humane Help was nigh.” Jane Colman endured her final trial alone. Her baby died. And then, at the age of twenty-seven, so did she. The only one of her children to survive her died the next year; he was six.
The Father’s Tears over his Daughter’s Remains
was the title Benjamin Colman gave the funeral sermon he preached for her, a sermon he had printed as a pamphlet made to look like a
gravestone.
35
· · ·
What remains of a life? “Remains” means what remains of the body after
death. But remains are also what remains of a person’s body of work. “Literary remains” are unpublished papers. And “remains” can also mean descendants: what remains of the family line. Benjamin Franklin wrote about his visit to
Ecton as a journey to see “the Remains of my Relations.”
36
Bradstreet wrote about her
children as her remains: “my little babes, my dear remains.” But her poems were her children, too: “Thou ill-form’d offspring of my feeble brain.”
37
Bradstreet’s poems were all that her children would, one day, have left of her. “If chance to thine eyes shall bring this verse,” she told them, “kiss this paper.”
38
At Jane Colman Turell’s funeral, her father gave out to mourners 144 pairs of mourning gloves to wear and remember her by. He paid for a tomb, carved of stone. To members of his family, he gave out
mourning rings, bands of gold inscribed with his daughter’s name and decorated with a tiny skeleton encased in a coffin of glass.
Tokens of the dead, given to the living.
39
After Jane Colman Turell’s death, her husband published a collection of her writing, with the running head “Mrs. Turell’s Remains.” In it, he chose to omit all “Pieces of
Wit
and
Humour,
which if publish’d would give a brighter Idea of her to some sort of Readers,” on the ground that her mind was, on the whole, of a more serious and sober cast.
40
He didn’t want anyone to remember that she was funny.
All of Jane Colman Turell’s papers have been lost; all of her children died. What remains of her is what her father preached and what her husband published.
41
Jane Franklin Mecom’s Book of Ages is her remains.
42
She wrote it herself.
Josiah Mecom their first Born on Wednesday June the 4: 1729
And, below this, she wrote,
and Died May the 18—1730
Her firstborn, the child of her childhood, a nursling, died two weeks shy of his first
birthday. She counted the days of his life. And what of her grief?
“A Dead Child is a sight no more surprizing than a broken Pitcher,
or a blasted Flower,” Cotton Mather preached, in a sermon called
Right Thoughts in Sad Hours
. One in four children died before the age of ten. The dead were kept at home, wrapped in linen or cerecloth—linen dipped in melted wax—while a box made of pine was built, fit to size, and painted black. Jane had no money for gloves or rings. At the tolling of a bell, pallbearers carried the coffin to the burying ground, in silence. A minister might offer a sermon the next Sunday, but no sermons were preached at the grave.
Puritans banned prayers for the dead. There would be no words.
43
Nor, ministers warned, ought there to be tears.
A Token for Mourners; or, The Advice of Christ to a Distressed Mother, bewailing the Death of her Dear and Only Son,
published in Boston the year Jane buried her baby, explained “the Boundaries of Sorrow,” citing Luke 7:13: “Weepe not.”
44
She washed him and kissed him and bundled him in linen and watched him being laid in the ground, the place marked with a cross made of sticks. She tried to have right thoughts. As best she could, she wept not. But she could not abide silence.
The Book of Ages is a book of remembrance.
Write this for a memoriall in a booke.
She had no portraits of her children, and no gravestones. Nothing remained of them except her memories, and four sheets of foolscap, stitched together. The remains of her remains.
The Book of Ages was her archive.
Kiss this paper.
Behold the historian.
CHAPTER XI