Jincy Willett - Winner of the National Book Award

Here’s my guess: Hilda’s editors pleaded with her to do it this way, but our Hilda would never pander to the baser instincts. Guy would never forgive her for it. What we get, instead, is careful, plodding evidence for Abigail’s ultimate canonization. Hilda starts, of course, with what she thinks is the beginning: the pedigree.

So we learn that Abigail’s first American ancestor was one of the “First Americans”! See, this is the thing about Abigail. She has just as much contempt for Hilda as I do, if not more. My sister is not stupid.

…descended not, as might be supposed, from Cotton Mather, but instead from one J. Herkimer, of Bristol, England, who booked passage on the Mayflower in 1620. Though there is no further record of Herkimer in the colonies, he does not appear on the list of the dead, and apparently, in 1625, he married one Mary Willett…

Mother paid a cut-rate genealogist to come up with a Mayflower ancestor, and he obliged, but all he would tell her was that Herkimer disappeared from view upon his arrival at Plymouth. Mother made up that stuff about Mary Willett, probably to amuse herself and us. Mother was not a snob. She just liked a good story.

We believed in J. Herkimer, First American, for about the same length of time we believed in our different birth dates. As I recall, accidentally discovering the truth about our birth led us, or rather me, to look into the other matter. After a great deal of correspondence, much of it transatlantic, I learned that J. Herkimer, who really was our ancestor, was also the only passenger on the Mayflower to return to Southampton with her crew in the spring of 1621.

If you ask me, here’s what happened. Herkimer, my Herkimer, a threadbare, desperate, misanthropic little loser, uneducated and unfit for any aspect of life, arrived in the New World, took one good look around, announced, to an empty hall (people had stopped listening to him weeks ago), “This place isn’t worth the powder it would take to blow it to hell,” turned on his heel, and stalked off.

Of course, the ship had to wait for winter to pass before leaving for England, so that while he didn’t have the opportunity for just this dramatic crispness, he did have plenty of time in which to harangue the miserable settlers with variations on his prophecy of doom. J. (for Jeremiah) Herkimer had quite a time for himself that winter harassing the frostbitten, alarming the exhausted. For a few months he managed to preserve, just, the fiction of compassionate concern, confronting the beleaguered pilgrims with looks of such elaborate pity that they could not stand to look at his face, and many a good man turned to his goodwife as Jeremiah glided out the door and muttered, “Jesus, I hate that guy.”

Eventually he dropped all pretense, and while Squanto patiently explained to the ragged circle of survivors the principles of corn-planting, Herkimer rolled on his back on the soggy spring ground, hooting and slapping his thighs, and if he hadn’t been about to sail away he would have been beaten to death.

He got off one parting shot—“So long, suckers!”—as the stiff sea breeze mussed his thinning hair, and the creaking tub carried him toward the eastern horizon and the one sure thing which lay beyond.

He died penurious and bitter, or at the very least confused, in 1635, in Cheddar, England (twenty miles west of the original Frome), leaving a wife and ten living children. I have no idea how he had supported himself or them, but I like to imagine him as a speculator, in futures of some kind.

Eventually, as they will, Herkimers turned into Mathers, and one of them, Alfred, made it back here, in 1893, to work as a textile machinist. Alf was part of the other wave of English immigrants, which wave has never, to say the least, achieved the cachet of the first. Alf’s people were garden-variety wretched refuse, and for a time, and despite the fact that they didn’t have to learn a new language, they managed to be an embattled ethnic group. The Portuguese, who had been there far longer, looked down their noses at them, and made fun of their awful food and their strange ways. They told English jokes.

Between Alf’s people and the children of the first wave, the Real Yankees, lay an unbridgeable class gulf. And while I’ve always found the distinction hilarious, Alf apparently didn’t. When he was forty-five he married a visiting schoolteacher from Indiana, and, soon after the birth of Jabez in 1923, Alf quit his job and moved his family to Indianapolis, where he could masquerade successfully as a Real Yankee, and school his offspring in their bogus heritage. When Jabez reached his majority, Alf sent him east, to claim his cultural birthright.

So much for Solid Yankee Stock.

This was the third and final blow in the trinity of our disillusionments, and it affected us just as deeply as the news about our ordinary single birthday and J. Herkimer, First Un-American, which is to say, not in the least. My sister was born knowing she was special, and so was I. We both knew she was special, and that this had nothing to do with her being a potential member of the DAR. It made us a bit sad on Father’s account, until we realized that he never knew about the fraud, and died believing in it, taking comfort from a relatively innocuous lie, which makes him lucky, really.

Your True Yankee died out long ago, anyway, in the collective American imagination; which is to say you never come across him in a movie. The Redneck lives and thrives, and the Western Loner, and the Stoic Farmer (Solid Pioneer Stock), and so on. These are archetypes, but they stand for extant individuals, who really are Ethnics, with their Ethnic ways, like fiddle-playing Cajuns; and the people of Minnesota and the Dakotas really do embody something, with their musicality and their plain-spokenness and their Scandinavian lilts. And even though every human being has an inalienable right to be judged by his own actions, it does seem to me that every American but the Yankee comes from some still-living subculture which gives him a starting point to do with as he will.

Of course these groups vary enormously in vitality, and it may be that the Yankee is only the first of many inevitable casualties, as we all homogenize. Whatever the cause, the Yankee has become a pure Idea, an abstraction, and because nobody really knows one, none of us can ever agree on just what the Idea is. We talk about Yankees, but without a great deal of coherence, since we have lost our ostensive definition. They turn out movies about “Yankees,” and they never, never get the accent right (even though we can’t all agree on what the right accent was ). All you have to do is show some raw-boned moron sucking on a pipe and muttering “Ayah” and audiences of all regions outside of ours will thrill to the stereotype; but nothing much follows the “Ayah.” Your Hollywood Yankee is either (a) implacable, taciturn, darkly mysterious, fatalistic; or (b) righteous, taciturn, deadpan, gently cynical, mythically decent. In either event, your Real Yankee is the world’s furthest thing from a fool, which may be why we won’t bury him no matter how badly he stinks.

Abigail claims that there are Real Yankees still, up north in Maine and Vermont. But those are a lot of slow-talking, full-of-themselves Yankee impersonators, in my view. Of course, there are plenty of Country People up there, as there are still everywhere, but they’re just Country, and Country is the same all over.

Whatever the truth, it’s a fact that the Yankee in southern New England is a shmoo, a leprechaun. An Idea. Rhode Islanders with English names talk in hushed tones about so and so being a Real Yankee and with the same reverence with which Arizona people talk of ghostly Indian tribes, who are out there somewhere, but whom no one has actually seen. Just watch their faces when they talk about old Mrs. Sprague, down the road and up the hill, watch their delighted smiles when they say “real Yankee.” How badly they need to believe.