All things rise and flourish
Then go back to their roots
Seeing this return brings true rest.
Where you discover who you really are.
Lao Tzu
Protestant Immigrants
In the early years of the sixteenth century, the Weavers’ Company (ferm) was in financial straits. Under Henry VIII, difficulties over payment of the ferm were so severe that the King agreed to take a lower rate, it being recognized, at last, that the Company no longer enjoyed the extraordinary power which had justified the original heavy tax. This helped to alleviate its problems and it became more prosperous. However, it now had to cope with the new influx of foreign workers, Protestants fleeing from persecution on the continent. These were silk workers, bringing with them new skills, and although there was natural resistance to foreign competition, the stimulus to trade given by the new materials led to greater prosperity. Londoners took up silk weaving and many foreign weavers were absorbed into the Company.
The Worshipful Company of Weavers, www.weaver.org.UK/history
Chapter 1
What’s for Dinner?
The scent as we come in the door tells us that, but we ask anyway.
“What’s for dinner, Mom?”
Sometimes it’s an old familiar scent and when we are extremely hungry, that is the smell of coming home. Other times it’s a whiff of something new that peaks our curiosity with a little trepidation. New dishes work now and then and other times, they really don’t. It’s the ones that don’t, when first tasted, we know should never have been made. Yet – we sit at the table because we must. Sit and suffer. Those dinners are a long struggle. But no dinner is more suffered than the ones whose permeating stench, for want of a better word, reach us before we even open the front door and we truly wish we could just call someone else and invite ourselves over for their dinner. What’s for dinner – a question full of hope and often answered with utter despair.
As we sit down at the table together – all six of us back then and all twelve of us now – we begin telling a story. A story that started long ago. A story, that for us, began at the dinner table – namely my mother’s. She received it from her mother and thus, we received it from Grandma. It is the tale of our long road to this table, filled with trials and poverty where we are near starvation and wandering from place to place to find a home.
We put the pot roast in our mouth and never question Grandma as to this story’s authenticity or its accuracy. The meat seared in bacon fat first indicates a different legacy, but we don’t see it. We pop a caramelized potato, also sautéed in bacon fat, and as she tells us our history, the little drums in our ears beat in rhythm to the storyteller’s tale.
The principal character of our story is a grandmother named Grandma Black. Second only unto her was Joanna Black. Sometimes Grandma Black is Joanna Black. Sometimes they are related in some way like daughter to mother or granddaughter to grandmother. But what is very important – above all things – is that our grandmother knows Grandma Black. She loves and respects Grandma Black. And Grandma Black is a Native to the continent of North America.
Not like we are a native to North America. No. She is indigenous. Sometimes she is 100% and sometimes she is mixed. Sometimes it is Joanna who is mixed. And every time the pentameter of story is pulled out of memory and begins its gentle, quiet rhythmic beating upon the drums in our ears, the place from which our tale begins is Tombstone. My mother is born in Tombstone. My grandmother is born in Tombstone. It gets a little fuzzy here, but her mother is born in Tombstone. All stories start from that desert town.
A sampling – my grandmother’s grandfather had Billy the Kid’s saddle upon his death; a grandfather was married to an indigenous woman and when Geronimo came through on a war path, he had to climb a tree so he wouldn’t be mistaken for a white man worth killing; my grandmother was nearly coaxed onto a train by child slavers when she was very small. All this happened in Tombstone, but what came before Tombstone – B.T. – was anyone’s guess. It’s like we rose – a spectral family taking form from the backbone of that mesa, fed through it’s failing silver veins into something corporeal. We were born of the dust with no past.
So I was repeating our story – my family story, that is – to Amy, my sister-in-law. My brother married my best friend only he found her first. Anyway – we were cooking a family meal like we do. It might even have been the pot roast because once I made that for her, she was hooked. Somewhere in the making of this particular dinner, I mentioned Billy the Kid’s saddle and she looked at me with a knitted brow and asked, “Is this true?”
Of course. Did I not quote Grandma?
“Has anyone researched all this?”
My aunt’s husband had. Did I mention that? Yes! I did.
Silence.
And as I walked around the corner to my house after dinner, washed my face, brushed my teeth, and put my daughter to bed, beating that same, low, gentle drum of a story into the heart of her, Amy looked it up.
And in the morning I got a call. A call that quite literally shook my foundation and bent the rebar of it. Did I want to know this? Did I ask for this information? It never occurred to me to challenge my history – my story. My story. Not hers. My heart. My rhythm. All that was the story of me and mine. Her call began here –
“You are not going to believe this…”
She was so right. Not only was I not going to believe it, I didn’t want to know it. I know who I am. I have myself firmly rooted. I am the dust born of a place called Tombstone. I am the child of the itinerant fed mouthful by mouthful on a lost road, the sides of which are overgrown with dry grapes of divine anger. Small. Obscure. A survivor of famine and flood and dust storms. I know who I am!
So – I pour vinegar over my spinach and sprinkle it with lots of pepper and place it in my mouth, tasting the sweetness of home. I watch Popeye eat his spinach and never understand what the big deal is about liking it. But then – all my California friend’s curl their lips to greens, in general, and my vinegar-spinach habit, in particular.
“I am the dust of Tombstone,” I repeat.
But somehow, through the cracks of my foundation, a tiny whisper of truth exhales. No matter how I try to silence it, to bend back the rebar of my foundation, there is no returning to that safe place built for me by my grandmother. And so, I do what all those before me did when the dervish blew in 1939 – I packed up and followed someone new, in this case Amy, down an unfamiliar road.
And as I walk with her, the places we wander have a certain scent like home – feel like my mother’s table. If my family had but looked at what it was served up on our plates over the years, hints of who we are and where we came from were there for the finding. Things which we liked – which we had a preference for – all there as familiars found again on an unfamiliar road.
“I am from itinerates,” I say. This is true. But we did not start in Tombstone. Our plate at dinner says something all together different. And if I follow one road, a single pig path winding through a small, hidden vale of our history, I can find a new place to start and build.
So today, I start with the Sedt family. Our feet land in refuge in the late 1500s on the soil of merry, old England. For several decades now, the English government has made their own citizens in Canterbury move over to make room for our people whom the English call, “The Strangers”. Once the Strangers start coming, they just keep coming.
Who are we, the Strangers? Where do hail from? We are the Protestants. We’ve arrive from France and what is now Belgium because we can’t battle empires built on religion. We are small with children and family and fear. Fear because our style of worship is not that of the empire.
When war comes to our backyard, we move and move again to get out of its way. It follows us and we know what we must do. We don’t want to do what we must. We don’t. But we know we have to leave all we thought we were. Only by crossing great waters can we hope for safety. And as we arrive in this new shore, we find there are those here as well who wish us ill because we are so different from them.
Yet, as I’ve said, refugees have been coming for decades to merry, old England and we, the Sedts, find a place forged by others. We arrive and find a small spot where our customs live on and our language lives on. A place where we can stop and catch our breath. Then, after a time, we set about creating life as it was meant to be lived.
And we begin in 1592 by giving birth in Canterbury to our first daughter, Marie, born of refugees from what is now Belgium. Even Elizabeth I’s England is struggling to find a middle ground in the divisive matter of God’s worship and we have entered a country of conspiracy and public executions. Even so, we live in the Weavers, a French-speaking quarter on the River Stour. We stay separated from the wider community with its upheavals. We are safe. We have had our first daughter and it is here, our new life begins.
Marie grows. And – well. Let me stop here. Let me be my grandmother, make some waffles, and set the little drums in our ears beating a new rhythm to the storyteller’s tale. Imagine with me a day in the life of Marie Sedt, the weaver of Canterbury.
c 2017 Nicole R Dickson all rights reserved