This Thanksgiving, I feel grateful to live in America. Gratitude ain't always simple though. I think of America like family – important for the soul, but challenging for the patience. Let me tell a few stories about family – one long and two short – to illustrate.
I never knew much about my heritage beyond my grandparents. I had a vague idea that one of my ancestors had built ships here in Maine, but that was it. One day, my Dad mentioned his mother had written out a geneology going back many generations, but he didn't know what had happened to it.
Turns out my sister had it. One scan-and-email later, I was looking at my grandmother's handwritten diagram. She had listed out birth names of each couple, and made a little set of symbols for brothers and sisters.
I was struck by all the detail. As I looked, I realized this was oral history, and I started to hear it recited in her voice… "Ebenezer Hall married Hannah Anderson, and they had 11 boys and 2 girls. Ebenezer the Second married Sarah Haskell, and they had six boys and one girl…"
I searched the internet, and found results instantly. She had gotten an amazing amount right, and a few interesting things wrong.
Like family, there was both good and bad.
The good: I am cousins with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, probably the most famous writer from Maine before Stephen King. Longfellow wrote an epic poem called 'Evangeline', about the Expulsion of the Acadians – the forced removal of French-speaking people from eastern North America during one of the many conflicts in the early colonies.
Grandmother would have been pleased as punch to learn about Longfellow. More interesting though, is how she got the genealogy wrong. The bad part.
The person she listed at the top of the tree was Hateevil Hall (what a name!), a Revolutionary War veteran, and from all accounts a real character. Hateevil did have a son named Ebenezer, but not the same. Instead, the person she listed as Ebenezer Hall I was actually Ebenezer Hall II.
Ebenezer Hall II was not a good person.
Born in Taunton, Massachusetts, he moved first to the town called Falmouth, Massachusetts, which is now Portland, Maine. Ebenezer III was born there. A few years later, Ebenezer II moved the family to Matinicus Isle.
Matinicus is a little rocky tooth of an island, part of a small chain 20 miles off the coast, battered by the open Atlantic. Ebenezer II moved his family there in 1750, claiming territorial rights on the land, and started setting up a farm.
The Penobscot tribe used the islands for hunting and considered them sacred, but they were still mostly willing to put up with their new neighbor. Until the day, in order to make more hay for his growing herd of livestock, he started setting the other islands on fire.
Ebenezer's presence was illegal under the treaty between Massachusetts and the Penobscot, and the tribe wrote more than once to the Governor in Boston. The Governor sent an official order for Ebenezer to leave, but he ignored it.
In their last letter, the tribe warns that Ebenezer's presence has become intolerable, and states that "if you don't remove him in two months, we shall be obliged to do it ourselves."
They waited four more years, but finally in June 1757, they laid siege to the house. Ebenezer was killed and scalped, but the rest of the family was left alive (which further suggests their beef was really just with him).
In certain cases, you might be able to argue some killing as justified, but atrocities like scalping are personal. The mutilation of a body after death has echoes of our primate ancestors – chimps will tear their opponents' bodies apart after a battle. For human beings to achieve the frenzied state necessary to commit such a horrifying act, it's almost always a group of men who have convinced themselves that some threat to their identity requires vengeance. Killing may have justification, but scalping comes from a demand for satisfaction.
So much for the simple concept of the peaceful native, living in harmony. These were men with bloody hands, well accustomed to brutality. During the colonial conflicts between the British and French, native people aligned themselves to fight on one side or another along lines of ancient tribal animosity.
But we need to view all of them in the perspective of their time.
Ebenezer's great-grandfather John Hall arrived in Boston in the fall of 1630. 19 years old, he had made the hazardous journey by becoming an indentured servant, and worked for without pay for five years. What makes a person take such a risk at great cost? Religious persecution.
The Puritans, while not a likeable group, were America's first refugees. When Henry the Eighth couldn't get the Pope to approve of his womanizing, he created The Church of England, and made it illegal to practice any other belief.
In 1630, London Bridge still displayed the severed heads of the executed as a warning to others. To someone like John, born in a filthy, overcrowded, crime- and plague- ridden English city, North America must have appeared practically deserted.
It's amazing what a person can get used to. The brutality of the natives, who hung scalps outside their settlements as a warning to others, wouldn't have struck the Puritans as anything out of the ordinary.
As a human family, we are slowly waking up from eons of ordinary brutality.
Story two – flash forward to Friday night. I'm riding in a Lyft to see some rock 'n roll in downtown Portland. Chatting with my driver, I learn he's an immigrant whose parents left the Soviet Union during its collapse, moving through several countries before settling in America.
He has another driving job which takes him to the most remote parts of Maine. People up there aren't bad, he says, they just have no exposure to the outside world. Without that exposure, any offense they give comes from ignorance and curiosity rather than malice.
Still, he likes Portland's immigrant community better. "That's what makes this country great," he says with an unusual accent, "the mix. Everyone brings different ideas, and when they mix together, you get new stuff."
Hell yeah to the mix. This country is not always the kindest, or the wisest, but it is the most interesting. Filled with the most possibility.
Last, story three. On one of my recent Wikipedia binges, I learned about the Plessy and Ferguson Foundation for Education and Reconciliation. If the names sound familiar, it's because the founders, Keith and Phoebe, are descendants of the 1896 Supreme Court case that resulted in the "separate but equal" doctrine.
Fifty years of legally sanctioned apartheid followed. My Mom told me about a family outing in Georgia when her little sister threw a tantrum because she wanted to try drinking from the "colored water" fountain. She innocently thought it was magical rainbow water, but this time was the opposite of innocent – her parents had to hustle them out to avoid a potentially dangerous situation. Eventually it required the upheaval of the Civil Rights era to overturn.
But overturn it did. Keith and Phoebe met as a result of exploring their heritage, which they obviously view through the perspective of the past. There's a picture of the two of them at the intersection of Royal and Press streets in New Orleans, where they placed a plaque commemorating Homer Plessy's arrest after boarding a whites-only train car.
They're looking into each other's eyes with genuine smiles, hard earned appreciation. They're bonded through their shared past, like me and the Penobscot.
They're family. A messy, mixed, American family.
I'm grateful for the possibilities.