Showing posts with label #julietwaldron. Show all posts
Showing posts with label #julietwaldron. Show all posts

Monday, December 28, 2020

Nevis Story for Alexander Hamilton's January 11 Birthday

 




Once upon a time, back in the 1950’s, I was a youngster. One, however, who was driven by the same interest in history that still brings me so much pleasure today.



Me, Charlestown, Nevis, 1958

Here’s a picture which I recently discovered in the attic. I remembered it, but didn’t know if it still existed. Old and color faded, it is framed in a way that tells me my mother had it somewhere in her last little home. It has survived our journey which took us from upstate New York, to the U.K., to the West Indies then back to America again. It also survived the fire in her house, one which she inadvertently set while heating milk one night. Plenty of things disappeared during that--books, furniture, pictures, and a good part of the roof. Other possessions were water-damaged or broken after the firemen came to save the house.

I'm very happy this picture has survived, because it was taken on one of those spectacularly good days--one of those days where wishes come true. There I am, sitting on the ruins of a sea wall on a black sand beach, with the remains of a fort behind me. This is Nevis in 1958 and my Mother had taken me to see the birthplace of my hero, Alexander Hamilton.  Besotted with Alexander as I was, this made me the weirdest kid in my school. The term "nerd" had not yet come into being, so what I was did not yet have a put-down label. That's what I was all the same, especially in a world where Elvis Presley reigned, teen heart-throb supreme.

Nevis today

The entire story of our trip to Nevis sounds improbable today, but jet planes were not yet "a thing." It took nine or ten hours to fly from Idlewild airport-now, JFK--to the West Indies. The trip was accomplished in jumps and layovers--to Bermuda, to San Juan, to Antigua, and, from there, hitching up with whatever "puddle jumper" between islands was heading toward your  destination. 

To get to Nevis in those days was not exactly easy. There were a couple of flights a week from St. Kitts, otherwise travel was by ferry. We'd flown into St. Kitts the day before, traveling north again from our base in truly tropical Barbados. 

St. Kitts surprised us. What we saw of it was nearly treeless, mountainous, and cold and windy too. I remember the wind howling around our hotel that night, and Mom and I searching for extra coverings for our beds. 

At the St. Kitt's airport the next day, we arrived to discover that the small plane in which we and two other passengers were to travel was in pieces in the hanger. Would we be able to leave today? Lots of head shaking was the answer to Mom's question. I sat on a bench in the open-to-the-elements waiting room and lost myself in a book. The book was, of course, about Hamilton. Published in 1912, the story was, I've since learned, mostly fictional, though the characterization still rings true. In those days, this used bookstore acquisition traveled with me everywhere.



Afternoon passed. As the sun began to go down, the plane was working again. At last we could start the flight over the narrow strait that lay between St. Kitt's and Nevis, although not without some trepidation about the plane's mechanical worthiness. By the time we arrived at the island, twilight was almost at an end. Our landing lights were men holding torches--kerosene soaked rags on long sticks held aloft.  After a bouncy light plane's landing on green turf, we were there at last.  

This looks a bit more formal than I remember.

We were tired when we reached the guest house Mother had booked in Charlestown. The soft light of kerosene lanterns lit the windows. We'd learn that electricity was a new convenience here, one that came on from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. every day. Past six, the power was gone and we were in an earlier age.

Charlestown in the 1950's

In the parlor, every surface --a maze of small tables --was covered with a Victorian level of clutter. All the upholstered chairs sported antimacassars. Here another trial lay in wait for us tired travelers. The landlady appeared, declaring that she'd had no idea I was a child--and that she NEVER allowed children in her guesthouse. "Especially not American children!

As you might imagine, my Mom reared back into her frostiest lady-of-the-gentry persona and replied to the effect that her daughter was a model child. Besides, she continued, we'd come here all the way from Barbados because of my interest in Alexander Hamilton and heartfelt desire to see his birthplace. At my mother's nod, I presented my ancient novel, and told the landlady how excited I was to be visiting Nevis, the place of my hero's birth. As much as my mother, I wanted a place to rest my head after a long day of anxiety and uncertainty, but knew I'd have to be as persuasive as possible.

After flipping through the book, the woman handed it back to me and said we could stay overnight. The next morning during a boarding house breakfast where I was careful never to speak unless spoken to and to say "please" and "thank-you," our hostess said she'd decided we could remain. Later in the morning, we went down to the broken seawall in the picture, wearing clothes over our swimsuits, and carrying our towels. In those days, walking around in just a bathing suite was "not done." And there I am, instead of my usual solemn, preoccupied self, wearing a big smile.  


I remember the overcast that often came in the afternoons, as clouds gathered around the volcano. There were black sand beaches which in those days we had mostly to ourselves. I remember bathing in the hot springs in town. Again, clothes over bathing suits, we made our way to the place, led by a tall man who was the caretaker of the ruin of the once famous spa hotel. It had been visited by many famous travelers in the 19th century, but now it had crumbled away to a wall here and there. Blue sky rolled overhead as we inched our way into the hot water. 

I also remember hearing drums, high up on the volcano on a Saturday, sounding down to us from beneath a wall of fog. This was the old time West Indies, before jets made a vacation "down de way" a mere jump from North America.


  Update the car in the background of this picture to a 1940's model, and this would have been a typical scene. The elemental roar and hiss of a gigantic field of cane on a windy day, I'll never forget. I've often wondered if Hamilton ever thought with regret of the tropical world from which he'd come, one so different in climate and vegetation from his adopted home, especially at a time when the earth was going through a cycle of extreme cold. How he must have suffered in those first years in America, just trying to acclimatize, wintering in places like Valley Forge and Morristown! 

So, Happy Birthday, Alexander! It's a bit early to be doing this before January, but here goes, anyway. I've literally spent a lifetime thinking of you.  :)


Hamilton ("Mrs. Washington's ginger tomcat") and me at work, early 2000's


~~Juliet Waldron

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Saturday, July 29, 2017

The Loaf Mass


Catherine Schuyler burning the wheat before General Burgoyne can feed it to the invading British army
Schuylerville, NY before the Battle of Saratoga


http://amzn.to/1YQziX0  A Master Passion, The story of Alexander & Elizabeth Hamilton   ISBN: 1771456744


We’re about to celebrate the first of the old harvest festivals--Lamas, or The Loaf Mass. Living in an area that still has a great deal of agriculture, I’m keenly aware of the seasons, though I’m also darn glad I don’t farm for a living. Mother Nature isn't always kind to the farmers who feed the rest of us. This year She started spring with a long stretch of uncharacteristic cold and rain, delaying planting.


Then just about the time corn and other temperature sensitive crops begin to grow, She''ll sometimes send a “a flash drought.” Not this year, though! This was generally a good year, and though things were late, there was plenty of water. When those waving green vistas turned gold, the harvest began well.


Now, in wide swatches to the east of us, where the six mule teams still pull threshers and barefoot women hoe kitchen gardens and hang clothes on lines, the corn stands high and tasseling. If we can just get a few more inches of rain into the ground, this year should provide a spectacular harvest of maize too.  



When I lived in England long ago, I was thrilled to enter my neighboring square stone Saxon church and see great loaves of bread, three and four feet high. Some had been baked in special lidded pans, but many others were carefully fashioned by hand. A stiff hard to hand-mix dough is necessary, with a nice egg wash at the end to make them shine. (It's more about keeping its shape and less about being good to eat.) Some of those loaves were shaped like sheaves of wheat and others like men. They were leaned against the altar rail among the more usual floral offerings.


When I asked who the men were, I was told that they were “John Barleycorn, the life of the fields.” This was in a pub where I sat decorously drinking a Baby Cham besides my glamorous mother--so perhaps that particular informant was thinking of the hearty, earthy local ales that were being drunk all around us. (I'd hear the phrase again, some years later, back in the States, sitting in an art house in Cambridge, MA, while watching an extremely disturbing British movie called The Wicker Man.)


Another gentlemen, of a more scholarly bent, protested. He said that these loaves were a living link to the past, to the powerful Celtic sun and smith god, Lugh. Yet another man, this one in a green tweed jacket, disagreed. He claimed the loaves represented an even more ancient Celtic divinity, a god of vegetation, one who was born, died, and resurrected again every spring, on and on, for more than a thousand years all across the British countryside. That divinity's name--since the genocide of the Roman occupation--had been forgotten.

St. Just in Roseland, Cornwall

Years later, and now baking my own bread, an Uncle who owned many, many farms presented me with a bucket of wheat that had come straight from his harvester. Cleaning out the residual dust and chaff and then grinding it into flour took time, but the bread I made from this had an extra dimension of taste, a nutty sweetness that apparently gets lost even from the finest brands of commercial flour.


 Now swaddled in a/c and so distanced from our original place in nature, enthralled by our gadgets, the Loaf Mass reminds me of a time when all humans grubbed dirt. They endured summer heat and desperately prayed for rain, hoping to raise enough food to get them and theirs through the next winter.



The impulse remains to say thank-you to the earth and the living gifts she bestows which sustain us. August always begins in my house with the baking of a few celebratory loaves, no matter how goll-durn hot it is outside.      


~~Juliet Waldron



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Tuesday, March 29, 2016

Mother to a Founding Father


 

Besides his wife, Elizabeth Schuyler, Alexander Hamilton had nother strong women in his life—one of them, his mother, Rachel. She was the daughter of a French Huguenot, John and his wife, Mary Uppington.  John was a physician and a minor planter, whose land lay high up the volcano on the island of Nevis—not the easiest ground to work. They had two daughters, Ann and Rachel.
 


Ann married James Lytton, a planter of St. Croix. In 1745 Rachel’s father died, leaving everything to her, the unmarried daughter. At sixteen, by all accounts lovely, Rachel was, in a small way, an heiress. Alexander, who didn’t reveal much about his stormy childhood, termed hers a “snug fortune.” Mary, eager to make a good match for her child, welcomed several suitors. One was an older man, James Lavien, a Dane, whose fancy clothes and reserved manner hid the fact that a.) he was a tyrant and b.) he had already lost most of the money he still pretended to have.   

Mary seems to have pressured Rachel to marry this apparently respectable, stable older man. Unfortunately, it did not take Lavien long to go through his young wife’s money. By 1750, all masks had been discarded. Although we don’t know the details of Rachel’s suffering, her husband was the kind of man who would have  her imprisoned for three months a damp cell in the dark, disease-ridden fortress of St. Croix after signing a complaint which accused her of “whoring with everyone.”

Perhaps Rachel had refused to share his bed, but, perhaps she, spirited as she was, had found a lover. As a modern woman, I say "more power to her!" We'll never know the complete story. If Lavien thought prison could break her, however, he was much mistaken. As soon as she was released, she fled the island with her mother, returning to Nevis. Having no rights in the matter, Rachel also abandoned a young son, Peter, when she escaped.  I see this as a measure of her desperation. Years later, Alexander would write: “Tis only to consult our hearts to be convinced that…individuals revolt at the idea of being guided by external compulsion.”

Still, this act would have endless consequences, first for Rachel and later for her sons by James Hamilton. As there was never a legal separation, Lavien could, some years later, under Danish law, divorce her and name her adulteress. This was a charge she could no longer defend herself against, for she was, by this time, living with James Hamilton on Nevis. Over the years, Lavien, (and, later on, Peter, too,) would continue to persecute the Hamilton children. After Rachel’s death, Lavien promptly reappeared and claimed all his ex-wife’s property for her “only legitimate son” Peter. She, clearly a better businesswoman than either of her men, had created enough wealth to make this action worthwhile.  Alexander and James, barely in their teens, were now penniless, orphaned, and labelled, courtesy of the Danish probate court, as “whore children.”

 
In a world where a woman had almost no legal standing, I believe Rachel Faucette made the best decisions she could. She fled from a brutal husband and then tried, with James Hamilton, to find a happily-ever-after.  Abandoned, again without a man to shelter her after James Hamilton—charming and feckless—abruptly decamped, she found a way to support herself and her children. She kept a small retail store and rented out the slaves, which she, like almost every other white person in the islands, owned. In her store she retailed dried beef, rice, apples, flour, fish, butter and textiles.

 

Alexander first helped his mother in her shop. After her death, he clerked for the international trading firm of Cruger and Beekman, but he no doubt had his first lessons in bookkeeping and management from her. Rachel also taught him French. These skills would serve him well when he joined George Washington's official family during the Revolutionary War. During his childhood,  Alexander also learned about power, about the darker side of human nature, and about injustice, first-hand--subjects he would ponder till the end of his life. 

For very obvious 18th Century reasons, Hamilton almost never spoke of his mother with outsiders, but "she was recollected with inexpressible fondness and (he) often spoke of her as a woman of superior intellect, highly cultivated, of elevated and generous sentiments," and an "unusual elegance of person and manner." *



* John Church Hamilton, fourth son of Alexander Hamilton, "The Life of Alexander Hamilton," published 1854.  

Sources:
Hamilton I (1757-1789) by Robert Hendrickson, ISBN: 9780884051398
Hamilton by Forrest McDonald, ISBN: 9780393300482
 Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow ISBN: 1594200092
The Young Hamilton by Thomas J. Flexner, ISBN: 9780823217892

~~Juliet Waldron
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http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B004HIX4GS



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