The Wordy Shipmates

So far, I'm doing a great job on this "blog about every book I read" thing--I finished The Wordy Shipmates two days ago, and here I am blogging about it! I think as long as I blog each book before I finished the next one, I'll be OK. (The next book, Deja Demon, is a pretty quick read, so I had to get moving.)

I've read most of Sarah Vowell's books--I skipped the one about listening to the radio. This one is about the Puritans. Early in the book--or maybe later in the book that I think; I can't seem to find it to quote properly--Vowell tells an anecdote about how when she's at parties, someone inevitably asks what her new book is about. When she says "The Puritans," her interlocutor inevitable rattles the ice in his bourbon glass and says, "Fun."

Oddly enough, however, The Wordy Shipmates is fun (well, except the parts that are about women and children being burned alive). At times, Vowell writes about the founders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony as if she's gossiping about people she and the reader know personally. In between those bits, however, she also traces how the Puritans are still with us today--particularly in the idea that Americans are God's chosen people, with a moral responsibility to go over to other people's countries and show them how it's done. (The colonists' logo shows an Indian man--holding a bow in one hand and an arrow in the other, and wearing what looks like a shrub around his waist--with a speech bubble saying, "Come over and help us." The Puritan colonists helped the natives in part by burning down a village while the men, women, and children who lived there were asleep in their homes. But a not-compeltely-unrelated group of Indians had killed a white guy--a drunken sea captain that the Puritans were going to execute if he showed up in their colony again--so that's OK.)

There are a couple of good chapters about Anne Hutchinson--if you're like me, the name rings a bell, but you're not totally sure who she it. You might also have her mixed up with Anne Bradstreet, but they're totally different people who happened to share a first name, a gender, and a town. Vowell wrote Shipmates largely from primary sources--diaries, letters, sermons, and so on. Here's what Winthrop--governor of the colony--wrote about the Hutchinson family when they got off the boat: "'a man of a very mild temper and weak parts, wholly guided by his wife'" (206). There's not much more about Mr. Hutchinson. Mrs. Hutchinson, however, is a mother of 15, a midwife, and a minister (although without the title). She has women over to talk about the Bible--which is all fine and good, until the groups get to be fairly large (60 plus) and to include men as well as women. At that point, the colony's two paid clergymen start feeling threatened--especially since she starts hinting around that they're preaching a "doctrine of works"--you don't really need to know what a doctrine of works is, except that saying a Puritan minister is preaching one is like calling a Republican Senator a flaming liberal. Fightin' words.

So eventually they put her on trial, and she keeps asking what she's done that's against the law, and Winthrop keeps giving vague and unsatisfying answers--because, duh, what she's done is have people over to talk about the Bible in her house, which happens to be one of the few things you're actually allowed to do with your spare time in a Puritan colony. So Anne totally pwns Winthrop, and she's about to be acquitted, until she decides to bring up, "something God said to her one day when they were hanging out" (229). Yes, Hutchinson thinks that God has addressed her personally, on more than one occasion. He gives her encouraging hints about the future, because they are BFF.

And here's where Vowell is cool. She points out this exquisite tension between Anne Hutchinson, you know, totally rocking as an outspoken career woman who took on the religious establishment and, when they threw her out of their bitchy little club, organizes her weak husband and some other dudes to found a better colony; one where they won't throw you out for talking. (Sorry, that sentence got away from me.) Anyway, the tension between that, and the fact that she's sort of a nutball who believes God directs her decisions, and hasn't it worked out great for us, in recent history, when our leaders have made crucial decisions based on what God puts in their hearts?

Fun fact: George W. Bush is a direct descendant of Anne Hutchinson. Seriously, guys. Unfortunately, he didn't inherit her intelligence or her mad debate skillz. (Hutchinson also, in her role of midwife, delivered a stillborn child with serious birth defects, which Puritans would have interpreted as being God's punishment against the parents. In order to spare the mother having everyone else in town speculate about what sins led to her bearing what Winthrop's diaries describe as "a monster," Hutchinson helped the mother secretly bury the fetus. In other words, she put into practice the belief that a woman's reproductive health is her private business and not the church's or the government's. So it's hard to imagine her giving whole-hearted approval to all of her many-times-great grandson's decisions as president.)

Anyway, it's a good book, and I haven't put in all of the A material by any means. You can check out the intro here.