Nancy Locke Meyer - After the Laurentide
Filing family papers after my mother Eleanor ‘Toni’ Grose Locke died in 2015, I re-read Forty Acres by “Cousin” Jimmy Huntington as he was known in our family. I saw an anecdote about Zebulon Prutt, man enslaved by Elizabeth Pitkin Porter, climbing the Hadley church steeple and crowing like the copper rooster whirling at its top. I was dumbfounded both that our family had been enslavers and by the image of Zebulon climbing a steeple and crowing.
My family mythology peeled apart. Not farmers, educators, preachers, do-gooders, and in more recent years social activists for progressive causes. But enslavers for 150 years. The Porters and Phelps were not part of the early abolitionist movement fomenting in Springfield and the Pioneer Valley. They were leaders of the community using all means of labor to enhance their wealth and status.
Not villains. But not heroes or mere followers either. I am the inheritor of wealth and education built on the bodies of people we enslaved. That reality led me to a multi-year study of colonial slavery, especially in the Pioneer Valley and of the details available in the PPH archives about the 7 or more people enslaved on the Porter Phelps estate. I was relieved to learn that by the 1830’s Elizabeth Phelps’ descendants joined the wave of reformers seeking women’s suffrage, fighting child labor, and at last, abolition.
I am not a professional researcher. I am a late-life poet, so I decided to approach this project with a mix of imagination and fact, bringing alive in my mind the lives of the enslaved and the interactions with our family. I have drafts of over fifty poems that I’m working to revise and craft into a small volume.
I am not writing a history lesson. I’m focused on the impact on me personally of this family story. For 15 years I was married to a Black man of Jamaican heritage, we raised a mixed-race son, and have two grandchildren. This experience makes my knowledge of our family role in colonial and Caribbean slavery particularly poignant.
I am not writing a political rant, though I have been re-considering the biases, subtle and overt, that ripple through me and my first marriage. At almost 80, I’ve been active in the civil rights movement since the 1960’s, marched in Selma, work hard to stay abreast of current issues and to do my part in building a more equitable society.
I am proud that PPH has sought grants to expand the research into this aspect of our family history and the role we played in laying down the institutions and ideologies that undergird our institutions.
One poem I wrote sets the earliest stage. Triggered by memories of climbing Mt. Sugarloaf, I read more about the Indigenous people who lived in “Hadley” and the history of the land itself. It was published in The Laurel Review issue 53.2 in the Spring of 2021. I offer it here, with their permission.
After the Laurentide
Ice, miles-thick, the world groaned under it. No life moved. A crack, an ooze. The ice began to melt and like a turtle from the mud, the earth rose, barren as the turtle’s shell. Creamy-blue was Lake Algonquin that grew from glaciers’ flow, so cold no fish could survive. Beavers big as black bears, Pocumtuck legend tells, dammed the lake, before it drained away creating the River Quenecticut. Lichen, spruce, deer found a toehold. Pequot ancestors followed, 11,000 years ago. To the place called Nonotuck “midst of the river,” they walked, pitched their wigwams, in the meadow Capawonk, caught trout in the clear waters of Nepasoancage running down Mt. Quunkwattchu. They planted corn in Wequittayyngg. Honored their dead below Mt. Wequomp, the blocky prominence resembling a giant beaver. A man-eating, insatiable beaver who ate all the plants until the people complained to god Hobomok who clubbed it with a tree trunk so it died in the great lake and turned into their stone mountain. Hunt, fish, move on after reaping chestnuts, year upon year. Until their sachems Chickwollop, Umpanchella and Quonquont sold the land to John Pynchon and the strange white men, my ancestors, moving up the river.