Ancestors (6 page)

When he had the good fortune to arrive at a log cabin or a farmhouse at nightfall, I expect they took him in. But in 1866 the Great Prairie was not densely populated, and so, many times, when evening came there was not a house of any kind in sight, and he went into an oak grove, out of the wind, and made a bed of leaves beside a fallen log. In his knapsack, or if he didn’t have a knapsack then in his coat pocket, he carried a Bible, which I see him reading from as he walks along. It is too late in the day for him to be surprised by hostile Indians in Ohio or Indiana, but he could have been murdered by a white man for whatever was in his pockets. Such crimes were not common but they did occur.

His first sight of the prairie he must always have remembered. The vast illimitable plain spreading in all directions.
Timber and grass, grass higher than his head and undulating in the wind like the long swells of ocean. The Virgilian cloud shadows following one on another. The meeting of earth and sky. The feeling of being exposed. The unreality—for part of what he saw was a mirage and would fade from sight, only to reappear in its actuality half an hour later when he reached the crest of that farther ridge.

I know what my grandfather looked like at the time of this journey, because I have a tintype of him, given to me by my Aunt Bert. It was taken when he was still a very young man. The face is not that of somebody given to feeling sorry for himself. The photographer is probably responsible for the cheerful, upward tilt of the head, but the set of the narrow jaw is surely his own, and what it suggests is granite. Even so, it’s a long walk from Ohio to Illinois.

When he had crossed the Indiana line and was about fifteen miles northeast of Springfield, destiny prompted him to stop in a farmyard and ask for a drink of water. The farmer inquired where he was going, and my grandfather explained that he was looking for a job teaching school. “Can you teach singing?” the farmer asked, and my grandfather said that he could. “You can stay here, then,” the farmer said.

The house was clean and neat, the stock well cared for. In the fields the grain was ripe for the harvest, and it may have made him think of the Bible. It was land Jehovah might have given Abraham for his descendants. There were five sons and four daughters in the family. The oldest was just back from the war. The youngest was a little girl of three whom everybody petted. They were twelve when they sat down to eat. What I think happened, though nobody ever said it did happen, is that when they got up from the table he picked out a hoe and went into the corn patch. On Sunday he walked beside them to church, but as they went in he held back, because of the condition of his clothes,
and one of the boys saw this and motioned that he was to sit with them. When Saturday came around, the farmer’s wife asked him to try on a shirt that was still warm from the iron, and when it fit she said he was to keep it and wear it on Sunday. One day when he sat down and held her skein of wool for her to wind, she said, “Have you written to your mother?” and he knew that he was accepted.

They were gentle, soft-voiced people, and treated him with a kindness he was not accustomed to. And he was careful not to seem better educated than they were, though in fact he was. What he couldn’t conceal was how happy he was. When he rode off to singing school on the farmer’s horse, the oldest daughter, Maggie, rode behind him, with her arms around his waist. Two years later, they were married, on Christmas Eve, 1868.

With a Middle Western American family, no sooner do you begin to perceive the extent of the proliferation of ancestors backward into time than they are lost from sight. Every trace of them disappears, through the simple erosion of human forgetfulness. They were in movement in a new country. The women were committed to drudgery and died young. The men had no proper tools to farm with, and weren’t good farmers anyway. They used up the land by improper practices. Wild animals broke into their fields. Their horses were half-starved, and their cattle sometimes actually did starve, before there was any grass in the spring. In the mountains of Virginia they listened thoughtfully to tales of how easy life was in Kentucky, and from Kentucky, when they had to sell out, or were sold out, to pay their debts, they moved on into Illinois. With their minds always on some promised land, like the Old Testament figures they so much resembled, they did not bother to record or even remember the place of their origin.

My Grandmother Maxwell’s mother’s maiden name was Louisa England, and my grandmother accepted as gospel truth something that probably was not true—namely, that she was descended on her mother’s side from a little boy who wandered on board a sailing ship and was given the name of England because that was where he came from and all anybody knew about him.

In an effort to find out something more about this branch of the family (and before I had access to my cousin’s papers,
which would have told me all there was to know) I entered into correspondence with the Reverend Stephen J. England, of Enid, Oklahoma, who once lived in central Illinois. His name was given to me by the minister of a church on Park Avenue, when I went there to borrow a history of the Disciples of Christ from the church library. It could hardly have been more roundabout.

Dr. England had never heard the story of the little boy who wandered onto a sailing ship, and thought it apocryphal. But he knew something about his own ancestry, going back to a David England who lived on the James River in Virginia at the time of the American Revolution. Dr. England’s line of descent was through one of David England’s sons, and he thought it likely that mine was through another, Stephen England, who was, he said, a great preacher of the frontier and a towering figure in the early history of the Christian Church.

The minister of the Park Avenue Christian Church had already suggested this, and I said, “No, that couldn’t possibly be.”

Dr. England recommended that I write to a Mrs. Lloyd Robert Geist, of Maryville, Missouri, who was descended from Stephen England and had a good deal of information about that branch of the England family. It turned out that Mrs. Geist’s great-grandmother and Louisa England, my grandmother’s mother, were sisters. And the great preacher of the frontier was their grandfather. Mrs. Geist supplied me with a genealogy going back past Stephen England to his father, David England, and
his
father, William England, who had a plantation in Goochland County, thirty or forty miles up the James River from Richmond, and died in 1768.

Among Max Fuller’s papers there was a photostat of my Aunt Maybel’s application for membership in the D.A.R. On one page she stated that the England family “could
hardly be traced as my great-great-grandfather when a boy of 4 years old went onto a ship docked in English water at or near England and the ship left shore and they were so far out before they discovered the boy and would not go back so brought him on to America and gave him the name of England, as he could not tell his name.”

What kind of a four-year-old boy doesn’t know his own name? Was she claiming descent from a mental defective?

On another page of the same application she said that her great-great-grandfather, Stephen England, was born in Virginia in 1774. Neither side of my family has ever had the slightest difficulty in entertaining two contradictory ideas at once.

Max was unable to go back beyond William England. There were several Englands who received Royal Land Patents or Land Grants in the 17th century, but no one has been able to connect William England with any of them. William England left his second son, David, half the plantation and the best featherbed and furniture. David England was fourteen when he came into his inheritance. He married Lucy Hodges. Her father, John Hodges, signed his will with an
x.
Lucy Hodges, on a deed of 1779, also had recourse to an
x,
but ten years later had learned to write her own name. It was no reflection on a farmer’s wife not to be able to read and write, and the fact that she was not content to remain illiterate suggests that her husband may have been a gentleman and a farmer, or that she herself had a hitherto unencouraged inclination to use her mind for something besides carding wool and beating wet clothes with a club to get the dirt out.

David England was a private in the Continental Army. It wasn’t a glorious experience, judging by a petition he and several other soldiers addressed to the Governor of Virginia and the Honorable Members of the Council. The Goochland Militia marched to Hillsborough in divisions and there,
soon after, sustained a disgraceful rout, “being raw and ignorant of discipline and under officers generally as undisciplined as your petitioners, who being ordered not to fire until they had the word, and then to advance with charged Bayonetts, occasioned the confusion that followed.” The men arrived at Hillsborough destitute, “without a shirt to shift to,” and applied for leave to go home and procure such supplies as their families could furnish, and were refused. With the connivance of their officers, some of them went home anyway, and hurried back, to be told that they were sentenced as deserters to eight months additional service in the Continental Army. The petitioners stated that “they did not wish to repine of the Lott, in performing a Tour of duty in so good a cause, but most of them being very poor men with families of small children unable to labour, must inevitably loose a great part of their stocks by the shortness of their present crops, when then must be the distress of their helpless families the ensuing year, should they be deemed soldiers eight months longer.” The petition passed through various hands and ended up with the following bleak sentence attached to it: “I have no power to remit the sentence of the law, nor do I know any power which can, except the General Assembly, unless the Commander-in-chief to the Southward should think proper to discharge the petitioners at any certain point of time short of eight months, which it does not appear probable to me he will do. Thomas Jefferson, 10–7–1780.”

Either because of what happened while he was soldiering or because the soil was worn out from too much planting of tobacco, David England left the land that was bequeathed to him and to his heirs forever and settled in eastern Kentucky, where he died in 1801. The forests of Kentucky were magnificent (there is a record of a sycamore tree with a trunk twelve feet in diameter) and the lowlands offered good pasture. There were more deer and buffalo here than
anywhere east of the Mississippi River, and therefore more of the wild animals that preyed on them. The Indians thought so highly of Kentucky that they refused to live in it. They used it as a hunting ground, and crossed over from Ohio and Indiana and Tennessee. The white men were not so delicate, of course, and within twenty-five years of the time they began moving in in large numbers, game had become scarce. That David England contributed to this mindless and improvident slaughter and to the destruction of the forests there is no reason to doubt. To each of his sons, in his will, he left five hundred acres of the Indians’ hunting ground.

The oldest, Stephen England, my great-great-great-grandfather, was a Baptist preacher in Kentucky until he met and became friends with Barton Warren Stone. Their friendship has been giving off reverberations ever since, for more than a hundred and fifty years now. This book is one of them.

Stephen England could have been a General Baptist, in which case he held the Arminian belief that the atonement of Christ is not limited to the elect only but is general; or he could have been a Particular Baptist and believed that atonement is particular and for the few. Probably he was the second, because the pioneers who settled the southern mountains after the American Revolution mostly were of this persuasion. To accept placidly or with satisfaction the damnation throughout eternity of the greater part of mankind requires a harsher nature than, from all accounts, Stephen England had. And what I think is that in his preaching he had come up against a high wall of some kind, from which Barton Stone delivered him.

Where did they see each other? In the forest, probably, sitting on a log. Someplace where they wouldn’t be disturbed. Of the two, Stone was infinitely better educated, a man of genuine intellectuality. My great-great-great-grandfather
was, when he descended from the pulpit, a farmer, and a simple man.

I know that it is possible to consider history wholly in the context of ideas—the rise of this abstraction, the pressure exerted by that—because people do. And are impatient and even enraged if you suggest that human personality enters into it. But that isn’t the way my mind works. I have to get out an imaginary telescope and fiddle with the lens until I see something that interests me, preferably something small and unimportant. Not Lee’s surrender at Appomattox but two men, both in their late thirties, whose eyes are locked, as if to look up at the sky or at an oak leaf on the ground would break the thread of their discourse. One of them is wearing very small old-fashioned spectacles, which he has pushed up off his face. In the rush and complexity of his logic he sometimes stutters. Both men are nagged by the knowledge that the sun is low on the hills and there are chores that must be done before dark and they would so much rather go on talking about whether faith precedes repentance or follows it.