In 1636, Roger Williams fled the Massachusetts Bay Colony, where he was wanted for heretically preaching the separation of church and state and condemning the King’s charters, which allowed colonists to take land from the natives without paying for it. Under cover of a blizzard, he escaped capture and disappeared into the woods south of Salem, in modern day Rhode Island, where the local Indians gave him food and shelter. He would later write
Gods
providence is rich to his,
Let
none
distrustfull be;
In
wildernesse, in great distresse,
These
Ravens have fed me. (17)
In
gratitude to God, he named the city he founded there Providence, on land for which
he paid the Narragansett chiefs in full. In gratitude to the Narragansett
Indians, perhaps, or at least as a result of his time with them, he learned to
speak their language, observed how they lived and died, and published his
findings, not wanting to “lightly lose
what [he] had so dearely bought in
some few yeares hardship” (A3).
The
result, A Key into the Language of
America, is the first recorded attempt at an English-to-Native-American language
phrasebook. Though more practically useful for the English colonists than the
illiterate natives, Williams’s Key also
stands as a salvo in his lifelong struggle to keep colonists’ dealings
with natives above the belt; if the English settlers could talk to the Indians,
at least, maybe they’d be less likely to swindle and slaughter them. “For want
of this, I know what grosse mis-takes my selfe and others have run into” (A3),
Williams writes, alluding to, even as he glosses over, the often grisly costs
of miscommunication and distrust between the colonists and the Indians. What
effect access to these translated phrases had or was intended to have on
native-settler relations is an interesting question, but this isn’t Phrasebook Daily, and Williams purposely
wrote something that wasn’t just “a Dictionary or Grammer,” judging those formats to be “not so accommodate to the Benefit of all, as I hope this Forme is”
(A8).
The
form Key does take attests to his
intent to hammer into his readers the humanity of these so-called barbarians (even
as he calls them barbarians himself), beyond giving both parties a common
language. By way of anecdote, ethnographic observation, moralizing doggerel,
theology, tutorial, list, comparison, and translation, Williams systematically
cobbles together a demonstration of a way of living, of approaching the world’s
pleasures and challenges, of cohabitation. In A Key into the Language of America, language and the world it’s
wielded on through reference and performance are intercut so as to make the
Narragansett way of speaking inseparable from what it is to be a Narragansett. Williams
calls this slippery form “Implicite
Dialogue,” which he distinguishes from dialogue, a form which he uses elsewhere, but passes over here “for brevities sake” (A8). I’d call it an essay. “A little Key may open a Box, where
lies a bunch of Keyes” (A3): Williams lays on the “key” metaphor pretty thick, but
as a description of his structure—nested, shot-through with little insights—and
as an articulation of one of the ways an essay can proceed, I think it fits
perfectly.
The
way Williams structures this book is enchanting and remarkable and central to
his life’s work of shifting colonial perceptions of Indians, so that will be my
chief focus here. A Key into the Language
of America consists of 32 chapters, each of which has a handy title, from “Of Salutation”
to “Of their Death and Buriall,”
which he intends to be used like any phrasebook: “Whatever your occasion bee either of Travell, Discourse, Trading
&c. turne to the Table which will direct you to the Proper Chapter”
(A8). But where things get interesting is in the shape each chapter takes, at
once formulaic and free-wheeling. First we get a straightforward list of words and
phrases in Narragansett and their English translations, relevant to the subject
at hand:
Of
Salutation.
Askuttaaquompsin Hou doe you?
Askuttaaquompsin Hou doe you?
Asnpaumpmauntam I
am very well. (2)
The
translated words range from the obvious to the obscure, the pointless to the
pointedly specific—sometimes so much so that a single phrase suggests a whole
story, like the best micro flash fiction: “Mauchinaash nowepiteass. My teeth are naught” (15). “Cummachiteouwunash
kuskeesuckquash. You spoile your Face” (192). At times, it’s the loaded juxtaposition
of phrases on the list that suggests a narrative: “Nkeke Commeinsh. I will give you an Otter. Coanombuqusse.
You have deceived me. ... Misquesu
Kunukkeke. Your Otter is reddish” (162). When Williams feels the need to
elaborate on any of the translations, wants to relate a relevant anecdote, or
sees the opportunity to squeeze a sermon in, he inserts a prose block labeled
“Observation” right between items on the phrase list:
Tuckowekin Where
dwell you?
Matnowetuomeno I
have no house.
Observation.
As commonly a single
person hath no house, so after the death of a Husband or Wife, they often break
up house, and live here and there a while with Friends, to allay their
excessive Sorrowes.
Tocketussaweitch
What is your name?
Now annehick nowesuonck I have forgot my name.
Which is common amongst
some of them, this being one Incivilitie amongst the more rusticall sort, not
to call each other by their names but Keen, You,
Ewo He, &c. (4)
This
oscillation between translation and observation could be understood as helpful
elaboration to further ease communication, which in many cases it seems to actually
be, but it also gets deeper and less practical. We get, in the translation of Muckquachuckquand, the Children’s God, an
anecdote of a dying Indian stabbed by an Englishman, praying to Muckquachuckquand because he had
appeared to him as a child and told him to call on him in times of distress. In
“Of their Gaming,” we get a theory
that the Thunderbolt, a precious stone made from lightning, makes the holder win
at gambling as Satan’s punishment for not “rising higher from the Thunderbolt,
to the God that send or shoots it” (178). We learn Williams’s delight at the
new wonders of strawberries and beavers as he translates them into English
(though the original Narragansett, Moose,
stays with us).
This set-up makes for compelling reading, and I’d like to
imagine that the curious reader of the day, in using it for conversation, would
eventually get hooked on these stories and lessons enough to want to spend more
time with the Key. I’m sure it also
captured the imaginations of the readers back in England, where it was printed,
for whom the language of the New World and the stories of its natives would
have still been full of mystery and adventure, and who may have been all the
more susceptible to Williams’s way of thinking.
Williams’s
structure depends on his reader sticking around, since after the practical vocabulary
lists and the more or less closely linked observations, we also get in each
chapter a “General observation” on the subject that sums up his impressions,
and then a poem in balladic verse that reflects on some aspect of the natives’
relationship with God or the colonists, labeled “More particular”:
From these courteous Salutations Observe in generall: There
is a favour of civility and courtesie even amongst these wild Americans, both amongst themselves and towards strangers.
More particular:
The
Courteous Pagan shall condemne
Uncourteous Englishmen,
Who
live like Foxes, Beares and Wolves,
Or Lyon in his Den.
Let none sing
blessings to their soules,
For that they Courteous are:
The
wild
Barbarians with no more
Then Nature, goe so farre:
If
Natures Sons both wild and tame,
Humane
and Courteous be
How
ill becomes it Sonnes of God
To want Humanity? (10)
These
elements, while crucial for conveying Williams’s overall views on the way the
Narragansett people conduct themselves and integrating these observations into
his European value system and theology, wouldn’t provide a whole lot of
immediate use to someone trying to make himself understood. As much as I
believe in the utility and value of poetry, I don’t think I’d read a poem if I
were trying to look up how to say “Give me Tobacco” just because it was in the
same book. So what was Williams up to? How did he see his Key operating?
He
may give us a hint in the page-length, old-timey full title, which includes “On
all which are added Spirituall Observations, Generall and Particular by the Authour, of chiefe and speciall use
(upon all occasions,) to all the English Inhabiting those parts; yet pleasant
and profitable to the view of all men.” His higher purpose in writing and
structuring his Key, as in his life,
was guiding people toward God: these spiritual observations were the parts he
saw as of use to all English, both pleasant and profitable. The poems, then,
may have been the most important part to him, which could be why he labels them “More
particular.” Each provides a digestible Christian lesson to the topics
discussed in the chapter, often praising the ways of the noble savage at the
expense of some failing of the English. But they basically all end in the same predictable
lesson: none of it matters before God come judgment day, woe unto unbelievers,
and so forth.
So why bother to “lodge with them, in their filthy smoke holes (even
while [he] lived at Plymouth and Salem) to gain their tongue”? Why learn all
about these people and befriend them if he believed they were going to hell pronto if they didn’t
wise up to Western religion? This may just be my confusion with 17th
century Puritan doctrine, but it seems pretty counterintuitive to found a
colony based on the separation of church and state while making every effort to
convert its people, to meticulously record the native beliefs while trying to bring
them around to the truth in Jesus Christ. Part of the answer may lie in the
conflict between his sincere belief in the value of conversion and his deep
ambivalence about the role of the colonists in the natives’ lives. He writes of
the “great Point of their Conversion so much to bee longed for” (A6), and his disappointment
that the other American colonies professed to hold conversion as a goal but didn’t actually put any effort into the converting. As an effort towards this, he organizes the phrases included
in his “Of their Religion, Soule, &c.” chapter like a script for door-to-door proselytizing:
Awaunkeesitteouwincohock: Who made you?
Tunna-awwa commitchuchunck? Whether goes your soule when you die?
Netop Kunnatotemous. Friend, I will aske you a Question.
Awaun Keesiteouwin Keesuck? Who made the Heavens?
Pausuck naunt manit keesittin keesuck, &c One onely God made the Heavens, &c.
(132)
Yet
he also gives accounts of his halfhearted attempts to justify to the natives
how the English have treated them: “Many say the English cheat and deceive them,
though I have labored to make them understand the reason of it” (154). He also notes,
“notwithstanding a sinfull opinion amongst mauy Christians,” that “the Natives
are very exact and punctually in the bounds of their Lands” (95), a direct
observation that’s contradicted in elementary American History textbooks to
this day.
In this contrast, we see a desire to save the heathens' souls coming
up against the knowledge that the settlers were poisoning them through their
influence. The English preying on the Indians like the “Wolfe … Embleme of a
fierce blood-sucking persecutor” on the “Deere … Embleme of Gods persecuted, that is hunted people” (173).
Could this intricate structure, then, be
Williams’s ambivalence played out on the page, or an attempt at a resolution? A
way of bringing his fellow colonists around to his way of treating the Indians,
to make them see the nobility he saw in them and remind them of the watchful
eyes of God, the ultimate judgment? To coax them into reading by providing
useful information, then lure them into a morality lesson, the sugar that makes the medicine go down? His way of doing right by both his fellow colonists and his native friends? I think so, but let
me borrow Williams’s structure by way of response:
Observation
general:
Williams came a long way in structuring and fashioning his Key out of the “Materialls” he had initially gathered “in a rude lumpe … as a private
helpe to [his] owne memory” (A2). The shaping of the Key, he hints, and I’ve argued, is crucial to what Williams hoped
to work through and accomplish with the book, and indicative of the complexity
of his understanding of the relationship between the settlers in New England
and the Narragansett and other Indian peoples. His attention to structure, to anecdote
and recorded speech; his commitment to enacting a thinking through in the text;
and his transparency on every page regarding the very high stakes that this
subject held for him, make Williams an essayist in my book, as well as a deeply
moral and admirable, though problematic, historical voice.
Squeezing
one final drop out of the key metaphor, he ends:
I have had such
converse with Barbarous Nations, and have been mercifully assisted, to frame
this poore Key, which may,
(through His blessing) in His owne holy season) open a Doore; yea, Doors of unknowne
Mercies to Us and Them, be Honour, Glory, Power, Riches, Wisdome, Goodnesse and
Dominion ascribed by all His in Jesus Christ to Eternity, Amen. (205)
We
start with a key that opens a box containing more keys, and end opening a door,
which becomes multiple doors. We get from these images the importance of the shape of the book,
and also that a tool intended for one purpose can give us access to other, unexpected
tools and purposes. We also get, in this passage, a humble admission that the
mercy which this book attempts to foster goes both ways, to “Us” and “Them,”
and that it is unknown. What mercies Williams actually did open with A Key into the Language of America I
couldn’t possibly say. But the events of King Phillip’s War in 1676, which involved
his friend Metacomet’s severed head on display in Boston and Williams powerless
to stop it, attest to the fact that the colonists and Indians didn’t live
happily ever after, even in Rhode Island, Williams’s domain. But we have, in
his Key, a testament to his sincere thanks
to the mercy of these people and his desire to know them, to give them a fair
shake, to live among them, and to get it all down in writing for posterity.
More particular:
Today,
Providence is full of relics of this conflicted, thankful, pious man, and I
don’t just mean the statues and the zoo. The street names: Hope, Benevolent,
Benefit. The islands further out: Prudence, Despair. And, obviously, the city
itself: Providence. A city of concepts made physical. The
bay, the cheap beer: Narragansett. I can approach understanding Williams’s
gratitude for the city, for I, too, found mercy there, a non-believer’s version
of providence. When I moved to Providence, a confused recent college graduate “figuring
things out,” my apartment there burned down. A coworker took me in. My car was
impounded and destroyed. The families whose kids I tutored gave me rides, fed
me
At that time, I hadn’t
read Williams’s Key, but I did read poet
Rosemarie Waldrop’s 1994 book also titled A
Key into the Language of America, which plays with Williams’s text and form
to explore, according to the jacket copy, “the legacy of cultural imperialism,
the consequences of gender, and the marginalization of the conquered.” It’s
a dark look at the very real physical and cultural conquest present in Williams’s
book, as well as the mixed portrait we get of Narragansett culture—patriarchal
but sexually permissive, prone to war but respectful of all life—, but the
gratitude and wonder are also present in Waldrop’s version. The enlightening
unfolding of the structure is also reproduced in Waldrop’s Key, which takes the shape of the original’s chapters, in prose,
verse, and list.
Waldrop was born in Nazi Germany and came to Rhode Island in the
fifties, where she found the most shocking difference to be the abundance of Indian
place names: Aquidneck, Matunuck, Pawtucket. She notes that since the 1800s,
Narragansett has been a dead language, with Williams’s book the only relic we
have today besides the names of towns and bodies of water. According to
Waldrop, people of Narragansett ancestry turn to Williams now for traditional
baby names.
Of course, it was the colonists who got the overwhelming benefit
from the exchange with the Indians, mostly through violence and trickery, third
grade Thanksgiving pageants notwithstanding. But maybe Williams did, to some
small extent, pay the natives back for having fed and sheltered him, through his
preservation—in a form the West could also appreciate—, of their tongue, their
way of life, their way of thinking through and being in the world.
All quotes and page numbers, except where noted,
are from the fifth edition, 1936 reprint by The Roger Williams Press
(Providence, RI) of the 1643 original A
Key into the Language of America by Roger Williams, printed by Gregory
Dexter (London). You can find a scanned version of the 1997 reprint here. The "A" preceding some page numbers indicates Williams's preface, "To my Deare and Welbeloved Friends and Countrey-men, in old and new ENGLAND." All italics, as
well as unconventional spelling and punctuation, are Williams’s. You can’t make
this stuff up. In the actual text, longer lists of phrases separate the observations, but I've shortened them here to just a few interesting examples. If you want to explore the actual form in its full scope, or to learn Narragansett, consult the original in the link above.
Andy Axel is an MFA candidate in poetry at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. His work has appeared in H_NGM_N and Coldfront. He used to live in Providence, RI.
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