Читать книгу Thanksgiving - Melanie Kirkpatrick - Страница 9
ОглавлениеIt is a good thing to give thanks unto the Lord.
—Psalm 92
I am standing in the grand exhibition hall on the upper level of the Pilgrim Hall Museum in Plymouth, Massachusetts, admiring a painting titled The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth. The museum’s amiable director, Patrick Browne, is about to give me a reality check.1
The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth is an iconic work of American art. It has appeared countless times in books, calendars, and greeting cards since it was created by Jennie Brownscombe in 1914. Most Americans would recognize it. Every American would know at a glance that its subject is Thanksgiving.
This is the First Thanksgiving as we picture it in our mind’s eye. Pilgrims and Indians are gathered around a long dining table that is set outdoors on a beautiful autumn day. The sun is sparkling off flame-colored maple trees in the background; the placid waters of Plymouth Bay are visible in the distance. As I am silently taking in the painting, Patrick cuts into my thoughts.
The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth is full of historical inaccuracies, he tells me. That is not what it looked like. The Pilgrims wore bright colors—reds, blues, greens, violets—not the sober hues pictured here. The Indians of New England never donned feathered headdresses, as in this painting, which seems to have been inspired by the Plains Indians of the American West. If there had been a table, the Pilgrim women would not have been seated with the men; they would have been busy preparing the food. The First Thanksgiving may not even have taken place in the fall; it could have been late summer, when the harvest would have been gathered. In short, there is not a whole lot that the artist seems to have gotten right about the event other than the fact that it was held outdoors. The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth is an interpretation, Patrick emphasizes, and we can enjoy it as such; but it is not historically accurate.
On that score—interpretation—it seems to me that Brownscombe’s rendering of the First Thanksgiving deserves high marks. The focal point of the painting is an elderly Pilgrim who is saying grace. He is standing behind his seat at the table, head lifted to heaven, eyes closed, hands raised and clasped together in prayer. The artist may have fallen short on the historical details, but she captured the most important aspect of the First Thanksgiving and of every Thanksgiving that has followed: giving thanks.
Downstairs in another gallery are various artifacts that belonged to the Pilgrims. Many of them were brought over on the Mayflower and may have been used at that three-day harvest feast of 1621. These ordinary household items hold at least as much power as Brownscombe’s painting. View them, and the Pilgrims’ story comes to life.
We start with Governor William Bradford’s Bible. It is the 1560 Geneva translation, which the Pilgrims favored as more accurate than the 1611 King James Version used by the Church of England. Most Pilgrim households had a Geneva Bible, and the one on display was printed in London in 1592. One of the Geneva Bible’s most important innovations was to divide the text into verses as well as chapters. Another was to use roman rather than gothic type. How much easier these simple changes must have made it for ordinary readers to follow and understand the words of the Bible.
Bradford’s Bible embodies the entire history of the Pilgrims. This is the volume that accompanied them through their voyages and whose words sustained them through ordeal after ordeal. “You look at it and you think of the fact that when the Pilgrim congregation was gathering together in England, William Bradford was reading this Bible,” Patrick tells me. “When they went to Holland, he was reading this Bible. When they came over on the Mayflower, he was reading this Bible. This is the Bible that was in that primitive little house he built a few blocks over from here. And now it’s right in front of us.”
We move on to examine more Pilgrim belongings: Myles Standish’s sword; Peter Brown’s beer tankard; Constance Hopkins’s beaver hat; and a pair of armless spectacles made of glass, horn, leather, and wood that belonged to an unknown Pilgrim, presumably of middle age, whose eyesight was failing. There is a faded piece of needlework made by Standish’s daughter that is the earliest known American-made sampler. It is long and narrow and embroidered with a pious verse that begins:
Loara Standish is my name
Lord guide my heart that I may do thy will.
We take a look at Myles Standish’s iron cooking pot. It boasts two handles, convenient for lifting it on and off the hearth. In another display case is a large wooden bowl fashioned from burl maple. The bowl was used by the Wampanoag for preparing and serving food. It is one of the few Native American artifacts in the museum’s collection.
We also see the cradle of the first European child to be born in New England. The cradle rocked Peregrine White, son of Susanna and William White. Susanna was pregnant when she and William and their five-year-old son Resolved boarded the Mayflower, and she knew she would need a safe place to lay a newborn infant.
Peregrine was born aboard the Mayflower as it lay at anchor off the tip of Cape Cod. It was late November 1620, a few weeks before a scouting team decided on Plymouth as the location for the Pilgrims’ permanent settlement. Susanna and William chose a name for their son consistent with the circumstances of his birth. The name derives from the Latin word peregrinus, which means wanderer or foreigner, and is the source of the English word pilgrim. Like his fellow Pilgrims, little Peregrine was a stranger in a strange land. By the time of the First Thanksgiving in the late summer or early autumn of 1621, he would have been old enough to crawl.
Susanna White was one of eighteen Pilgrim wives who accompanied their husbands on the Mayflower. Several men left wives behind, planning to send for their families after they were established in America. Only four of the eighteen Mayflower wives survived to the time of the First Thanksgiving. Susanna lived, but her husband, William, died three months after Peregrine’s birth, during the wretched first winter in Plymouth.
All together, only half of the men, women, and children who had sailed on the Mayflower were still alive a year after landing in the New World. Many fell victim to an illness that scholars theorize was a virulent form of influenza. The Pilgrims called it “the great sickness.” Whatever it was, the weak, poorly nourished settlers started falling ill about two weeks after arriving in Plymouth. Most of the sick were crowded into the small common house that the settlers had managed to construct quickly. But not everyone could fit into it, so others were kept aboard the Mayflower, anchored in Plymouth Harbor. Both the ship and the common house were overcrowded, and the illness spread rapidly. The few people who stayed well had to prepare the food, get the water, and care for the sick.
As I examine the artifacts Patrick shows me, I wonder what role they might have played in the First Thanksgiving. Did Susanna set the cradle under the shade of a tree with baby Peregrine asleep inside, while she prepared food for the outdoor feasting? In The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth, Brownscombe paints Peregrine in his cradle, with Susanna seated nearby.
What of the cooking pot that belonged to Myles Standish and his late wife, Rose, who had died in January? Did the four surviving wives press the Standish cooking pot into service when they set about feeding the Pilgrims and their many Wampanoag guests? Constance Hopkins, then fourteen years old, surely lent a hand as the women worked. I can picture her wearing that wide-brimmed beaver hat with the peaked top. And what of Governor Bradford himself? Did he read aloud from his Bible to the assembled Pilgrims? Did he take a break from the hubbub and seek a quiet corner to read the Scriptures by himself?
Many of the Pilgrim artifacts have sorrowful stories associated with them—the cradle that rocked a fatherless child, the cooking pot that often would have been empty for lack of food to put in it, the sword whose owner was prepared to use it against the “savages” he expected to encounter. In the face of such sadness, deprivation, and terror, how is it that in the late summer or early autumn of 1621, the Pilgrims came together with grateful hearts to celebrate their first harvest in the New World and give thanks?
There are two eyewitness accounts of the First Thanksgiving. William Bradford, Plymouth’s longtime governor, penned one.2 Edward Winslow is the author of the other. Both accounts are brief but vivid. Bradford’s weighs in at one hundred sixty-seven words. Winslow’s is only one hundred fifty-one words.3 Read them and you find yourself in familiar territory. As described by the two Pilgrim leaders, the event that Americans have come to call the First Thanksgiving was remarkably similar to the holiday we mark today. There was feasting and game playing, and an all-round mood of good cheer.
In their separate accounts, Bradford and Winslow each make much of the bounty on hand in New England, an abundance that presages the dining tables at modern-day Thanksgiving dinners. Bradford tells of the “great store of wild turkeys, of which they took many.” He also notes the “cod and bass and other fish, of which they took good store.” Winslow offers an anecdote about the rich natural resources of the American continent that would have wowed his readers back in England. The governor dispatched a shooting party for the occasion, he writes, and the four Pilgrims killed enough birds in one day to serve the community for almost a week.
It is from Winslow that we learn that a large group of Wampanoag warriors joined the Pilgrim feast. In telling how the Pilgrims welcomed the Wampanoag to their celebration, Winslow homes in on other attributes of the holiday, then and now: hospitality, generosity, neighborliness. He describes, too, how the guests returned the favor. The Wampanoags’ “greatest king Massasoit” and his men “went out and killed five deer,” which they “bestowed on our Governor [Bradford], and upon the Captain [Myles Standish] and others.” So, too, a modern guest, upon accepting an invitation to Thanksgiving dinner, is likely to ask his host: What can I bring?
The central similarity between the First Thanksgiving and today’s holiday is something less tangible: the spirit of thankfulness. From the first, as Bradford and Winslow imply, Thanksgiving has been a time to stop and take stock of the blessings enjoyed by family and community. As the English settlers overcame the trials they faced that first year in Plymouth, qualities that Americans have come to honor as integral to our national identity were on full display: courage, perseverance, diligence, piety. These are the virtues that helped to shape the American character.
The Pilgrims displayed another virtue, one they practiced every day and which stood at the heart of the First Thanksgiving. Cicero called it the greatest of the virtues and the parent of all the rest: gratitude.
And yet, here is an odd thing—odd, at least, for the modern-day reader of the Pilgrims’ accounts. The word “thanksgiving” does not appear in either description. Neither Bradford nor Winslow referred to the feast as Thanksgiving.
If you could travel back in time to 1621, tap a Pilgrim on the shoulder, and ask him to define “Thanksgiving Day,” his answer might surprise you. For the Pilgrims, a “day of thanksgiving” was not marked by feasting, family, and fellowship—the happy hallmarks of the holiday we now celebrate. It was a different matter altogether.
The Pilgrims brought with them from England a religious custom of marking days of thanksgiving, along with their counterpart, days of fasting and humiliation. Days of thanksgiving, usually including a communal meal, were called in response to specific beneficences such as a successful harvest, propitious weather, or a military victory.4 Fast days were called to pray for God’s help and guidance in time of trouble or difficulty. For the Pilgrims, then, a “thanksgiving day” was imbued with religious meaning, and set aside for prayer and worship.
Some contemporary observers like to stress this historical usage, arguing that the event known today as the First Thanksgiving was therefore not a true “thanksgiving day.” These naysayers aren’t just being Thanksgiving Scrooges. They are right that the Pilgrims would not have viewed the harvest feast of 1621 as a thanksgiving in their understanding of the word. But it is also true that the spirit of gratitude was very much present on that occasion. The Pilgrims may not have called it a thanksgiving, but there is no reason we shouldn’t do so.
William DeLoss Love, a nineteenth-century scholar of the religious days of thanksgiving in New England, eloquently expressed this point of view when, in 1895, he wrote about the First Thanksgiving: “It was not a thanksgiving at all, judged by their Puritan customs, which they kept in 1621; but as we look back upon it after nearly three centuries, it seems so wonderfully like the day we love that we claim it as the progenitor of our harvest feasts.”5
The day we love, to use Love’s affectionate words, owes a debt to both of these traditions—the harvest feast of 1621 and the New England colonies’ religious days of thanksgiving.
The Pilgrims were world-class practitioners of the virtue of gratitude. They gave thanks in their morning prayers and again in the grace they said before and after every meal, and once more in their evening devotions. As they went about their work, the Pilgrims would sing psalms, hymns of praise and thanksgiving. The congregation sang psalms, too, in their Sunday worship services. The music and text they followed came from the Ainsworth Psalter, a book of psalms published in Holland in 1612 and one of the volumes they brought with them on the Mayflower. In some sense, the Pilgrims viewed every day as a thanksgiving day, certainly including the days of the 1621 feast that has come to be known as the First Thanksgiving.
There is no written record of prayers spoken by the Pilgrims on that occasion, or any other day. This is not surprising. The Pilgrims did not believe in reciting set prayers, which they viewed as forced and inauthentic, and they rejected the Church of England’s magisterial Book of Common Prayer, which contains some of the most beautiful poetry in the English language. John Robinson, the Pilgrims’ pastor when they resided in England and Holland, warned of “counterfeit” prayers. He wrote: “We may say prayers, and sing prayers and read prayers, and hear prayers, and yet not pray.”6 Set prayers were considered a barrier between the individual and God. Rather, the Pilgrims practiced extemporaneous, individual prayer. Each person was responsible for communicating directly with the Almighty, using the words of his choice.
As we learn from Bradford’s journal, Winslow’s letter, and other documents of the day, the Pilgrims had numerous reasons to give thanks that autumn.
The most important was the chance to practice their religion freely. This was the reason they had uprooted themselves from their refuge in Holland and risked everything to settle in the wilderness of North America.
The Pilgrims were Puritans, or English Protestant reformers who followed the teachings of John Calvin. The name “Puritan” derived from their aim to “purify” the Church of England, which they believed clung too closely to its Roman Catholic roots. While some Puritans were willing to work for reform within the Church of England, others took a more radical view. They broke away and established their own tiny congregation in the village of Scrooby, in Nottinghamshire, thus coming to be called Separatists. When the Crown tried to have them arrested and jailed for refusing to take part in Church of England rituals, the congregation fled in 1608 to Holland, which permitted the free practice of religion. The Separatists spent more than a decade in the Dutch city of Leiden. They were allowed to worship freely, but they struggled to make a living and they worried that their children were growing up more Dutch than English. So they pulled up stakes again and crossed the ocean to the New World.
At the time of the First Thanksgiving, the Pilgrims had a second reason to rejoice: their survival. They gave thanks for having made it through the previous winter, when cold, famine, and disease killed half of their original number. The fifty-three surviving Pilgrims included twenty-two men, four women, five teenage girls, nine teenage boys, and thirteen small children and infants.7
Peace with their Wampanoag neighbors was a third reason for the Pilgrims to give thanks. Their friendship with the Wampanoag people was a welcome and unexpected development. They had negotiated a peace treaty with Massasoit, the sachem, or chief, of the tribal confederation of Indians who inhabited coastal Massachusetts and Rhode Island. When Massasoit and his men showed up at the First Thanksgiving, the Pilgrims welcomed them and entertained them for three days.
In sheer numbers, Massasoit and his men overwhelmed the Pilgrims at the celebration. In his letter to his unnamed friend in London, Winslow is specific about the number of Indians who joined them for their feast. Massasoit brought with him ninety men, he writes. That number—nearly double the size of the Pilgrim band—speaks volumes about the peaceful ties between the two peoples. If they had been so minded, the Wampanoag warriors might have overpowered the English easily enough. The Pilgrims had the advantage of possessing guns, but they had not had time to build a fort or other defenses, and the number of fighting-age men was a mere twenty-two. The settlers had taken pains earlier that year, during the time of the great sickness, to ensure that their Indian neighbors did not find out how low their numbers had dwindled, burying their dead at night. Now they were taking the risk of exposing their entire community in full view of Massasoit and his men.
The Pilgrims were on their guard—Winslow records that they “exercised their arms,” presumably in a display of power as well as for entertainment. But they sat down together with the Wampanoag as friends, and the friendship would endure for fifty years.
The Pilgrim leaders recognized the debt they owed the Wampanoag tribal confederation—which was a fourth reason to give thanks. Without the practical assistance of the Wampanoag, the Pilgrims’ first harvest in the New World almost certainly would have failed. Tisquantum, the Patuxet Indian whom the English dubbed Squanto, was indispensable. He taught them how to plant corn using fish as fertilizer, and he directed them to the best hunting grounds and fishing spots. Bradford praised Squanto as “a special instrument sent of God.”8
It was two years later, in 1623, that the Pilgrims held their first official “day of thanksgiving” as they understood the concept. The occasion was a rainfall that saved their harvest and their lives. If the harvest had failed, famine was sure to follow and the settlement of Plymouth might not have survived.
A drought began in the third week of May, just after planting—the worst possible timing. The Pilgrims’ winter food stores were depleted and their diet depended heavily on their luck at fishing. “God fed them out of the sea for the most part,” Bradford writes. A lobster, some fish, a drink of spring water—that was a typical meal. In the middle of July, as the corn began to shrivel and the ground was “parched like withered hay,” Bradford ordered a day of fasting “to seek the Lord by humble and fervent prayer.”
The day of the fast dawned hot, with clear, cloudless skies. There was no sign of rain. Then, toward evening, clouds formed, the sky grew overcast, and it began to rain. The rain fell “with such sweet and gentle showers as gave them cause of rejoicing and blessing God,” Bradford records. The rain then started to fall heavily, in such abundance “that the earth was thoroughly wet and soaked.” The corn and other crops revived. It was “wonderful to see,” and the Indians were “astonished.” Bradford promptly called a day of thanksgiving.9
All the New England colonies followed the custom of designating days of public thanksgiving in response to specific events. The first of these designated days in the Massachusetts Bay Colony occurred in July 1630 after the colonists’ safe arrival. The second took place in February 1631, when a ship from England that had been believed to be lost at sea arrived in Boston Harbor bringing badly needed supplies for the hungry colonists.
The early Dutch settlers in what is today New York City also marked days of thanksgiving. One of the earliest recorded in New Netherland occurred in 1644, after Dutch troops launched a moonlight raid on an Indian village near Stamford, Connecticut. The bloody Dutch-Indian skirmishes continued over the next year, until the warring sides finally concluded a peace treaty. That prompted another call for a day of thanksgiving, on the sixth of September 1645. This proclamation specified that church services be held in the morning so that “God Almighty may be specially thanked, praised, and blessed.”10
Dutch days of thanksgiving were less solemn than New England ones. In New Amsterdam, a more mercantile environment than agricultural New England, work and amusements usually were forbidden only during the hours of the church services, not all day long. When afternoon or evening arrived, the Dutch were free to feast, play games, and enjoy military displays.11
In 1654, the Dutch issued a proclamation for a day of thanksgiving to celebrate a peace treaty between England and the Netherlands. The proclamation ordered citizens to attend worship services in the morning and then went on to tell them to enjoy themselves in the evening: “After the public worship shall be performed,” citizens were called upon “to indulge in all moderate festivities and rejoicings as the event recommends and their situation shall permit.”12
At some point in the 1600s, the New England colonies began to designate annual thanksgiving days, usually in the autumn, around the time of the harvest. These celebrations were deemed “general” thanksgivings—not for a specific event or blessing, but for continuing blessings. They were usually called by civil rather than religious authorities. These were steps toward the holiday we know today.
Connecticut was the first to make Thanksgiving an annual event. In 1639, the colony proclaimed the first in a series of thanksgivings for ordinary blessings. According to the Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut, on August 26, 1639, the General Court of Connecticut “concluded that there be a public day of thanksgiving in these plantations upon the 18th of next month.”13
The custom of a thanksgiving for general blessings did not catch on in Massachusetts until later in the seventeenth century, and then only after a spirited theological debate. The losing side argued that an annual thanksgiving for general reasons would make people take God’s generosity for granted. In the words of one opponent, an annual thanksgiving would “tend to harden the people in their carnal confidence.”14
Under New England law, days of thanksgiving were treated like the Sabbath—as days of rest. Work and entertainments were banned. Violators faced fines and other punishments.
In 1696, an unlucky man by the name of William Veazie, a church warden in Houghs Neck, Massachusetts—now part of the city of Quincy, near Boston—was charged with failing to properly observe a day of public thanksgiving. According to court records, on the morning of that day, Veazie was seen at his farm plowing a field of corn “with an Indian Boy and Two Horses.” He pleaded guilty and was fined ten pounds.
That wasn’t all. The court further sentenced Veazie to “be set in the pillory in the market place in Boston tomorrow about noon, there to stand by the Space of An Hour.” Pillorying an offender in the heart of the city at the busiest time of day sent a potent message to all who passed: Respect Thanksgiving Day.15
Statutes regulating Thanksgiving Day behavior were still in force in New England in the nineteenth century, though the pillory’s days were past. In 1825, a Connecticut man named Gladwin contested the service of a civil process on Thanksgiving Day. He argued that the constable’s delivery of the writ was invalid since there was a law against working on Thanksgiving. The state supreme court agreed. In support of its ruling, the court cited the state statute pertaining to days of thanksgiving: “All persons shall abstain from every kind of servile labour and vain recreation, works of necessity and mercy excepted.” The service of a civil process, the court ruled, was neither a work of necessity nor an act of mercy. Gladwin won his case.16
It is impossible to know precisely when the feasting and family aspects of Thanksgiving Day began to overtake the religious ones, but the trend appears to have started toward the end of the seventeenth century. That is when Thanksgiving dinner grew in importance in New England, “adding homecoming relatives, extra pies and platters of roast meat,” in the words of the historian Diana Karter Appelbaum. Churches accommodated the custom of a festive dinner by eliminating the afternoon service on Thanksgiving Day, “first in the country districts where the walk to meeting was long and cold,” Appelbaum writes, “then in 1720 in Boston itself.” Soon Thanksgiving dinner was nearly as important as the morning prayer service.17
Thanksgiving wouldn’t be Thanksgiving without someone lamenting this trend and calling on Americans to focus their attention less on feasting and more on giving thanks. In 1792, the Connecticut Courant published a letter from a man complaining that Thanksgiving had become a day devoted to eating and drinking.18 In 1873, an article published in the Boston Daily Globe on the day after Thanksgiving bemoaned the decline in the religious character of the day: “The views of our Puritan ancestors in regard to attendance on divine worship were disregarded . . . but the revered turkey was trotted out with all the alacrity which good housewives are wont to expect.”19 In 1926, an editorial in an educational journal complained that “The religious significance of the day touches many not at all, the historical significance is quite forgotten. . . . Are we so self-sufficient that gratitude and acknowledgement are inappropriate?”20
Still, the religious aspects of the holiday continue to touch many Americans today. Chances are good that before you begin your Thanksgiving dinner, you pause for a moment or more to give thanks. For many Americans, perhaps most, giving thanks means saying a prayer. On an ordinary day, 44 percent of Americans say grace before eating, according to one survey. Another 44 percent of Americans report they almost never say grace—a response that implies they do so on special occasions such as Thanksgiving Day.21 Almost every religion practiced in the United States encourages the celebration of Thanksgiving. One exception is Jehovah’s Witnesses, who do not celebrate any holiday that is not based on the Bible.
Americans are a religious people—a strong majority profess a belief in God—and on Thanksgiving Day, they usually express their gratitude to the Almighty in whatever form that being takes shape in their faith. While the custom of attending religious services on Thanksgiving Day has long since lapsed, and the holiday is not tied to any particular religion, for many Americans the opening words of the old Thanksgiving hymn still apply: “We gather together to ask the Lord’s blessings.”
Nonreligious Americans find secular ways to express gratitude. Some families go around the Thanksgiving table asking each person, young and old, to name something for which he or she is grateful. Others pause to express gratitude to the cooks who made the meal, the farmers who grew the food, the love of family and friends, the blessings of liberty, or simply for their general good fortune. For the late author Ayn Rand, an atheist, the essential meaning of Thanksgiving was “a celebration of successful production.” The lavish meal, she wrote, is “a symbol of the fact that abundant consumption is the result and reward of production. Abundance is (or was and ought to be) America’s pride—just as it is the pride of American parents that their children need never know starvation.”22
In his lovely little book The Thanksgiving Ceremony, published in 2003, Edward Bleier, a Jew and the son of immigrants from Eastern Europe, describes a ritual he composed for use around the Thanksgiving table.23 Bleier’s twenty-minute ceremony acknowledges God but is nonsectarian. The ceremony is inspired by the Passover Seder, which celebrates the Jews’ liberation from slavery in Egypt as told in the biblical book of Exodus. The Thanksgiving Ceremony recounts the Pilgrim story, and includes brief readings from the Declaration of Independence, Lincoln’s Thanksgiving Proclamation, a speech by Martin Luther King, and other notable American texts. It concludes with the singing of “America the Beautiful.”
Bleier’s Thanksgiving ceremony reflects another aspect of Thanksgiving Day gratitude that has become part of the holiday: love of country. Since the Revolution, Thanksgiving has become a patriotic holiday, a time to give thanks for the blessings of liberty as enshrined in the American system of government. Presidential Thanksgiving Proclamations end with the date expressed in both the ordinary way and as “year X of the Independence of the United States.”
Nearly four hundred years after the First Thanksgiving, gratitude is still the byword of the day. On the fourth Thursday of November, most Americans, believers and nonbelievers, take seriously the custom of pausing to give thanks. This is the essential meaning of the Thanksgiving holiday. It was also the meaning of the days of thanksgiving marked by the Europeans who preceded the Pilgrims on this continent.
