The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth - Couverture rigide

Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0679445943 ISBN 13 : 9780679445944

Editeur : Alfred a Knopf Inc, 2001

A propos du livre

Extrait

Chapter 1

The basket is four and a half inches high and four inches in diameter, about the size of a large tomato can, though smaller at the top than the bottom. When new it could have held a generous pound of meal or beans or twenty-four fathoms of wampum. Now light leaks through a weft ravaged by time and insects. The basket holds it shape through hundreds of invisible mends, the unseen art of a conservation lab. Tiny twists of rice paper bonded with unpronounceable adhesives like polyvinal acetate and polymethyl methacrylate fill gaps in a fragile fabric strengthened by multiple infusions of soluble nylon in ethyl alcohol. Would the basket be as precious without its story?

It came to the Rhode Island Historical Society in 1842 with a label carefully written by the donor:

This little basket, was given by a squaw, a native of the forest, to Dinah Fenner, wife of Major Thomas Fenner, who fought in Churche's Wars; then living in a garrison in Providence, now Cranston, R.I. The squaw went into the garrison; Mrs. Fenner gave her some milk to drink, she went out by the side of a river, peeled the inner bark from the Wikup tree, sat down under the tree, drew the shreds out of her blanket, mingled them with the bark, wrought this little basket, took it to the garrison and presented it to Mrs. Fenner. Mrs. Fenner gave it to her daughter, Freelove, wife of Samuel Westcoat, Mrs. Westcoat gave it to her granddaughter, Wait Field, wife of William Field at Field's Point, Mrs. Field gave it to her daughter, Sarah. Sarah left it to her sister, Elenor, who now presents it to the Historical Society of Rhode Island.

The reference to "Churche's Wars" led nineteenth-century antiquaries to date the basket to 1676, the year Captain Benjamin Church of Little Compton, Rhode Island, led New England troops in victory over the Wampanoag leader Metacomet, or King Philip. No one since has doubted the attribution.2 Displayed in the late nineteenth century alongside other relics of Rhode Island's first century, the basket quieted a troubling history of frontier conflict. Exhibited today as an icon of native art, it fulfills much the same purpose, shifting attention from the violence of the late seventeenth century to our own generation's hopes for multiculturalism.

The details in Field's description line up like clues in a mystery: a garrison, milk, a Wikup tree, shreds from a blanket, and those evocative names-Dinah, Freelove, Wait. There was a Dinah Fenner who lived in Rhode Island in 1676, though in that year her name was Dinah Borden, and she was only eleven years old. She did eventually marry Thomas Fenner, a man who helped to defend Providence in King Philip's War, and they did have a daughter named Freelove who had a granddaughter named Wait. Yet there is much in the story that remains puzzling. If the basket was made by "a native of the forest," why would she have come to an enemy garrison in time of war seeking milk, a food repulsive to a people known today to be lactose intolerant? Was she a refugee? So desperately hungry she was willing to accept any food offered? If so, how does one explain the basket? The exposed warp is indeed rough, but the twined pattern is intricate and artful. Could its maker have stripped and soaked fibers from the inner bark of a tree, gathered husks from an abandoned field, then patiently sat on the bank of a river weaving in a time and place where even friendly Indians were in danger? That hardly seems likely, yet laboratory analysis tells us there are fragments of red and blue wool still clinging to the interior of the basket. Could they have come from an English blanket?

The twentieth-century Narragansett historian and basket-maker Ella Sekatau once told a visiting scholar about a curious window in an old schoolhouse near her Rhode Island home. One pane was of "old, old glass," ridged and warped. Looking into it, people saw things that weren't there, like "a sea with Indian people, and it didn't match with the window next to it" or ancient figures standing by a big stone outcropping. Everybody saw different things, not the actual objects that sat on the other side of the window, but shadowy scenes from somewhere else. "My cousin's husband said you shouldn't have things like that, and he broke it."

Dinah Fenner's basket is that kind of window. Some will use it to imagine a history more intimate and peaceful than the one in books. Others will find nothing in it they can trust. Interpreting such an object requires both imagination and skepticism, imagination to see new possibilities in an old story, but skepticism about its placid surface. Here the important question is not how a Rhode Island woman got her basket, but why milk, a basket, and a blanket should appear in the same narrative. Rereading the early history of New England with these objects in mind transforms an apocryphal story into a powerful lens for understanding exchange relations in the first century of English settlement. To write about blankets is to write about the expansion of English commerce. To write about baskets is to discover the little-known work of Native American women. To search for the meaning of milk is to find the biblical vision that animated the English quest for land. The history of Dinah Fenner's family brings these themes together in unexpected and disturbing ways, providing a solution to the origins of the basket that is less literal than Field's telling yet true to its larger themes.

The English who came to the coast of what is now New England in the early 1600s were not all alike. Some came to fish, some to pray, and among those who prayed there were enough differences to keep them squabbling and sometimes hounding one another from colony to colony for generations. The people they found here also differed. Although scholars sometimes refer to them collectively as Algonkians, they spoke different dialects, inhabited different river basins, and assigned a bewildering array of names to one another. In terms of textile history, however, Englishmen and Algonkians differed more from each other than they did among themselves. The English came from a wool-producing country proud of its blankets. Algonkians were renowned for their basketry.

Archaeological sites on coastal New England are littered with lead seals once attached to bolts of fabric. As the Englishman Richard Hakluyt espressed it in a 1584 treatise, the second purpose of colonization, after advancing the "kingedome of Christe," was the vending "of the masse

of our cloths and other commodities." The English did that with a vengeance.Yet the first Englishmen to visit North America were fascinated with the unfamiliar fabrics they found in Indian villages. Among the Algonkians, textile production was women's work. Men worked in stone, metal, and wood, producing impressive tobacco pipes, knot dishes, pendants, and other ornaments. Women made netted, twined, sewn, and plaited textiles to cover their houses, dry corn, trap fish, store provisions, carry produce, and line graves. In the words of one English observer, they made baskets of "rushes, some of bents; others of maize husks; others, of a kind of silk grass; others of a kind of wild hemp; and some of barks of trees, many of them, very neat and artificial, with the portraitures of birds, beasts, fishes, and flowers, upon them in colours." Men hunted and cared for tobacco fields. Women planted, hoed, and harvested food crops, storing them in containers of their own manufacture. Rhode Island's Roger Williams described heaps of maize "of twelve, fifteene, or twentie bushells a heap" drying on woven mats by day, covered with tarps of basketry at night.

One writer claimed to have seen an immense basket buried in the earth that held sixty gallons of maize. Another said Indian containers ranged in volume from "a quart to a quarter" (in archaic usage a quarter was eight bushels).Tightly woven bags of soft hemp held the parched maize called nokake in some dialects and yohicake, yoheag, yokeg, or nokehick in others, a food "so sweet, toothsome, and hearty, that an Indian will travel many days with no other food but this meal, which he eateth as he needs, and after it drinketh water." Williams claimed to have traveled with an Indian band "neere 100 miles through the woods, every man carrying a little Basket of this at his back, and sometimes in a hollow Leather Girdle about his middle."

Although Europeans had their own basketry traditions, basketry was far more varied among the Algonkians. Thomas Morton wrote of mats made by stitching together long strips of what the English called "sedge" with "needles made of the splinter bones of a Cranes legge, with threeds, made of their Indian hempe." In preparation for netting or weaving, women spun fine fibers between their fingers or across their thighs. William Wood said that Indian cordage was "so even, soft, and smooth that it looks more like silk than hemp." Other writers admired the "curious Coats" or mantles of turkey feathers that women wove together "with twine of their owne makinge, very prittily." John Josselyn, who spent much of his time in northern New England, described "Delicate sweet dishes . . . of Birch-Bark sowed with threads drawn from Spruce and white Cedar-Roots, and garnished on the outside with flourisht works, and on the brims with glistering quills taken from the Porcupine, and dyed, some black, others red."

Wigwams were also a form of basketry. Wood said that women framed them like an English garden arbor, "very strong and handsome," then covered them "with close-wrought mats of their own weaving which deny entrance to any drop of rain, though it come both fierce and long, neither can the piercing north wind find a cranny." Observing Indians along the Maine coast a little later in the century, Josselyn described similar structures "covered with the bark of Trees" and lined inside "with mats made of Rushes painted with several colours." Two different marsh plants-cattail (Typha) and bulrush (Scirpus)-yielded different fabrics. Sewn in overlapping layers, the leaves of the cat-o'-nine-tails swelled and exuded a gummy substance when wet, giving exterior mats their waterproof quality. Rushes, on the other hand, dried quickly and when combined with other fibers, such as the soft inner bast of cedar, could be woven into soft and absorbent mats as decorative as they were practical. These mats gave Indian dwellings their portability. "I have seen half a hundred of their Wigwams together in a piece of ground and they shew prettily, within a day or two, or a week they have been all dispersed," Josselyn wrote.12 Wigwams moved because work moved. Coastal groups cultivated fields of maize, beans, squash, and tobacco in summer, mov-ing to warm interior valleys in winter where game and fuel were more plentiful.

The most exotic textiles required both male and female labor. Men drilled and ground the beads called wampum from periwinkle, conch, and whelk shells or from the blue-black centers of the quahog. For ordinary exchange, these were strung into lengths the English measured in fathoms, but for ritual regalia, women wove the beads into "pleasant wild works" with warps of sinew and wefts of hemp. A wampum band worn by the Wampanoag leader Metacomet was nine inches wide and long enough to reach from a man's shoulders to his ankles. It was edged with red hair said to have been acquired in the Mohawk country. Metacomet's accoutrements, according to Josselyn, were worth twenty pounds in English money, or five times as much as all the clothing and bedding he recommended an English immigrant bring to New England.

Although English writers admired Algonkian textiles, they had difficulty explaining their decorative qualities. The best analogy they could find was to the needlework of upper-class women, but since Indian women also did field work, this only confused the issue. The most elaborate exploration of the problem is in a Latin poem with English translation published by William Morrell, who spent a year at Plymouth in 1623. Morrell compared decorative mats to the pictorial tapestries or "arras" found in English country houses and the "curious finger-worke" he found in Indian villages to passementerie or parchment lace. Yet he puzzled over the fact that Algonkian women combined this delicate work with physical labor. "These hands doe digge the earth, and in it lay / Their fair choyce corne, and take the weeds away." Native women confounded English notions of class by combining outdoor labor with fine finger work and English notions of gender by performing agricultural labor the English assigned to men. While women worked, men, Morrell believed, spent their days "in play, / In hunting, armes, and pleasures."

The division of labor among Native Americans was probably more complex than the simple male-female divide described in English accounts. Surely there was some heirarchy of age, skill, or status in textile production, and the sexual division of labor was not as fixed as it might seem. Williams said that men cut and set the long poles for houses, and that even in agricultural work, "sometimes the man himselfe, (either out of love to his Wife, or care for his Children, or being an old man) will help the Woman which (by the custome of the Countrey) they are not bound to." Williams no doubt idealized the noncompetitive virtues he wished to inculcate among his own people when he wrote of "friendly joyning" to break up fields, build forts, hunt, or fish, but his description of work parties of forty, fifty, or a hundred men and women corrects others' accounts of female drudgery and male leisure. His observations reinforce the larger point, however, that female as well as male labor was visible to and admired by outsiders.

Nothing survives that can fully convey the complexity of seventeenth-century Algonkian textiles, but Dinah Fenner's basket read alongside archaeological fragments helps us to understand some of the techniques and materials used. The warp is of bark, the wefts of wool and of a flatter material that may have been cornhusk. The construction is complex. The weaver began with a plaited base, using three strands of bark for each warp, then moved to simple twining and finally to a technique called "wrapped twining" in which two wefts, one active and one passive, intersect the warp. By changing the color as she wrapped, she produced the pattern. The technical details are important because they locate the basket in an ancient textile tradition. Shreds of twining very similar to that in Dinah's basket have been found in northern Vermont in archaeological sites dating from the Early Woodland period (1000-100 b.c.). One fragment even revealed a faint chevron created by weaving animal hair in two colors. Except for the wool in its weft, Dinah's basket could have been made a thousand years before the first European excursion to North America. It only hints at the variety of early textiles. Through electron microscopy, archaeologists have identified early baskets woven from the "bast" or stem fibers of wild hemp, dogbane, milkweed, and nettles, as well as the fibrous inner bark of slippery elm, black willow, cedar, and basswood. Excavations from later sites include plaited and sewn matting, coiled netting, and twined textiles of many kinds.

Other bags and baskets thought to have been made in the early colonial period suggest the range of techniques and designs. On July 4, 1842, the same year that Eleanor Field presented her great-great-grandmother's basket to the Rhode Island Historical Society, a Norwich, Connecticut, man donated a twined bag to the Connecticut Historical Society in Hartford. It, too, came with a story. He said he had received it "from Cynthia, now 60 or 70, and daughter of Lucy Tocamwap, the first member of the M...

Présentation de l'éditeur

They began their existence as everyday objects, but in the hands of Bancroft Award-winning historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, fourteen domestic items from preindustrial America–ranging from a linen tablecloth to an unfinished sock–relinquish their stories and offer profound insights into our history.
In an age when even meals are rarely made from scratch, homespun easily acquires the glow of nostalgia. The objects Ulrich investigates unravel those simplified illusions, revealing important clues to the culture and people who made them. Ulrich uses an Indian basket to explore the uneasy coexistence of native and colonial Americans. A piece of silk embroidery reveals racial and class distinctions, and two old spinning wheels illuminate the connections between colonial cloth-making and war. Pulling these divergent threads together, Ulrich demonstrates how early Americans made, used, sold, and saved textiles in order to assert their identities, shape relationships, and create history.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Alfred a Knopf Inc
• Date d'édition: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0679445943
• ISBN 13: 9780679445944
• Reliure: Relié
• Langue: anglais
• Numéro d'édition: 1
• Nombre de pages: 501
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible