Listening for the Land's Voice
Bonus essay: Island of the Little God
I’m restacking this essay previously published in 2014, by the excellent journal Earthlines, where I was first introduced to a lot of writers who influenced my work like
, , and . Blackie was also the publisher and editor of the magazine and has gone on to publish some wonderful books like When Women Rose Rooted and Hagitude. I recommend clicking on those green highlighted names above and subscribing to their Substacks.Earthlines was one of my first publications and I was very proud to be included along people I admired. Although much of my from ten years ago is not something I would exactly want people to read now, for me, this piece still holds up. It’s stood the test of time—at least ten years of it! Which may not be much in geological time, but is a decent stretch in human terms.
Re-reading it I can see how it was a prophetic manifesto for my work to come, which is bearing fruit now after some years in the wilderness where I developed some essential qualities and skills necessary to hold the tension between public and private without being destroyed by them both. I hope you enjoy it and if you’re not familiar with Block Island, get a taste of its depths from these words.
Island of the Little God
This is where it began. Or at least where the beginning is set in stone--Settler’s Rock—a large rock hoisted upright in a parking lot at the north tip of Block Island. The front side, facing the cars, is smooth, the back, facing the ocean, uncarved and rough. There is a bronze plaque bolted on to the front, blue-green with patina. On this plaque, are the names of the original settlers of Block Island, men fleeing the Massachusetts Bay Colony who purchased the island in 1661 from some prominent government figures who had been deeded the island by the colony for some deed that wasn’t recorded, although the probable reasons are not hard to imagine: they were men, they were white, and they were powerful, which at that time meant they either had religious status or money. These fortunate men sailed to the island with all their worldly goods, including women, children, and cows. We know there were cows because they threw them overboard when they reached this very cove to see if they would make it to land. If they did, the plan was to follow them ashore. The Rock is a testament to their success and the cows have been memorialized as well. The small cove to the north of the parking lot has been called Cow Cove ever since. Taxi drivers stop at the edge of the pavement and tell tourists the story. Everyone laughs at the poor cows whose names are not engraved on the rock. The names of the women and children are missing as well.
Some insects so insignificant to me I’ve never learned their names dive bomb me as I stand before it as if I was a threat to their existence. They are almost invisible, but I can feel them hitting my face as I read the Rock. I keep my mouth closed so I don't swallow one. I move to the side and sit on one of the stones heaved by the ocean to the edge of the pavement. There is a dead gull, greasy and ragged. I lean around to get a look at the back side. With my ear against it the stone, I ask silently, tell me your story. I feel a pulse against my face, as if the ore inside the rock’s veins swelled like blood vessels, but I’m not sure--it could be my own beating heart.
Two old people get out of a white van, stiff-kneed, walk toward The Rock. The man's eyes take me in then move quickly away. A pair of miniature field glasses hangs around his belt loop. "These are the original settlers," he says to his wife. "Yup," she says. I want to hand them a magnifying glass so they can see the grains of the stone up close. His wife mutters "1661," gruff, almost ominous. I sense they are unsettled, that no site will satisfy them, but they read the names on the Rock because they don’t know what else to do. Touch the stone, I want to tell them, it will calm you, but I keep silent. I notice there are white streaks of bird shit on the backside of the Rock. Teachers in high school called it guano and we all laughed whenever they said the word. We learned that in some cultures it was a fuel source. Today it looks like graffiti, or aboriginal art, or a Jackson Pollock. I thank the vandal gulls, wonder if the town crew cleans the shit off the front for the tourists.
Finally, I see the expected cigarette butts, crammed between rocks close to the ocean. A dozen at least. I wonder if they were all smoked by one person in a furious binge at land’s end, or if they were tossed out of car windows one by one by stir-crazy locals on an island cruise. Maybe they were swept by the wind and deposited in this one spot, a patch of deflated sea purslane whose crinkly edges have caught the butts now that it has started to die. A succulent that can grow in sand, even it can’t survive the cold that creeps towards us as we’ve started to turn away from the sun. A Jeep pulls up next to me, circles. Someone says hello to me, then drives away before I have to answer. I look toward the North Light and see the clouds have shifted to let the sun through. Gulls wheel around the tower and disappear on the far side of the dunes.
The stories I've been told aren't enough for me anymore. I want what hums beneath the pavement and car motors, what I heard when I placed my ear to the rock. Even if it was my own heartbeat, isn’t my heart the earth’s? I want to be able to write those words and know they are true.
The old tourist couple has reappeared to my right, sitting together on a boulder, already forgotten. Chin in hand, she looks down at the ocean. Their white hair glows in the gray light. The man shifts and says something to her I can't hear. All three of us watch as a wave comes toward us. It breaks and the rocks beneath our feet rumble as water fills spaces between stones I can’t see. The ground shakes. I realize it isn’t solid at all.
These men whose names are cast in bronze—they were not the first to live on Block Island, although they may be the first “settlers.” The word settle has an Old English root and in the Merriam Webster Dictionary bears the following meanings: 1. to place so as to stay. 2. to establish in residence. 3. To furnish with inhabitants: COLONIZE. According to the dictionary, the men from the Massachusetts Bay Colony may have been the first settlers, but as in the rest of North America, there were people living on the land before them. On Block Island, these people called themselves Manisses. The island had the same name which translates as “Island of the Little God.” I wonder if they named themselves after the island or if it was the other way around? Did they call themselves little gods because they thought they were god-like or because they thought they were made in the Creator’s image? Or was it because the island was so beautiful it was fit to be the home of a god? Could it be all three? These are questions I want to ask, but there are no Manisses left on Block Island. The last Manissean, Isaac Church, known to all as “Uncle” Isaac, died in 1886 at the age of 101. Even in 1785, the year of his birth, there are no references in the history books that his ancestral culture was still alive on Block Island. If anyone asked him what he knew about his ancestors, it wasn’t written down or passed on orally. Most likely he knew very little. Like the mainland New England tribes, the Manisses were decimated by disease and enslavement, and I would imagine despair, within fifty years of being colonized. There is little evidence of their existence here, which archaeologists say spanned thousands of years, except for stone tools people still find on construction sites and midden heaps in the Great Salt Pond where they cast their clam and oyster shells. Their stories are extinct.
One of the men who sold the island to the sixteen settlers was Colonel John Endicott, who in 1637, led a retaliatory exhibition for the death of a trader named John Oldham, supposedly killed by the natives. Oldham, by all reports, was widely disliked. However, the death of this unpopular man was a convenient excuse to grab more land and Endicott set forth with a band of soldiers to see if there was anything worth taking on this mysterious island twelve miles off the coast.
Endicott knew the island as Block Island, but the name bequeathed to it by the first European to record its existence was Claudia, after the mother of the French King Francis I. Verrazano sailed by in 1524 and saw people on the shore. This is how he described them: “the most beautiful people and the most civilized in customs that we have found in this navigation. They excel us in size: they are of bronze color, the face sharply cut, the hair long and black, upon which they bestow the greatest study in adorning it: the eyes black and alert, the bearing kind and gentle.” Verrazano did not set foot on the island, but his description of it as “an island triangular in form, distant ten leagues from the continent…full of hills, covered with trees, much populated judging by the continuous fires along all the surrounding shore which we saw they made,” was the first mention of it in recorded European history, and has haunted my imagination since I first read it. I want to know those people. Truth be told, I am sick with so-called civilization and want to be one of those people. Unfortunately, my ancestors, while not engraved on Settler’s Rock, were probably just like those who are—men who pushed cows overboard to see if they drowned and who killed Indians that got in their way. My female ancestors were either compliant or helpless. I’m ashamed of them, and this shame carries down all the way to the present day, where I am still, after years of healing work, still ashamed of myself, still unsettled inside and out. I want to feel at home on the earth.
Block Island came to be known as Aydrian’s Eylandt when the Dutch explorer Aydrian Block claimed it for his country in 1635. Aydrian must have seemed too foreign for the English colonists who next laid claim to the island. Dropping the first name for the last, the rolling and irregular curves of this island became limited by the one syllable Anglo-Saxon sounding “block.” As in building block, chopping block, blockhead, or as a friend of mine who questioned why I chose to live in such a short-sighted place, “blocked.”
Ironically, the only firsthand description of how the Manisses lived before their world was destroyed was written by Captain John Underhill, who took part in the exhibition to avenge Oldham’s death. In Underhill’s words, “Having spent that day in burning and spoiling the island, we took up the quarter for that night. About midnight myself went out with ten men about two miles from our quarter, and discovered the most eminent plantation they had in the island, where was much corn, many wigwams, and great heaps of mats, but fearing less we should make an alarm by setting them on fire, we left them as we found them, and peaceably departed to our quarter.” But don’t breathe a sigh of relief yet. The next day they marched back with forty men to the same plantation and “burnt their houses, cut down their corn, destroyed some of their dogs instead of men, which they left in their wigwams.” They also killed the fourteen men they could find. Everyone else hid in the swamps, but although they survived that day, they would not survive much longer. Disease, enslavement and murder: that is the true foundation of the United States. The ground beneath us is rumbling. It is not solid.
Why do I want to know the lost stories of the Manisses? Because I know in my heart, not from reading books or watching movies, that the people who lived here lived the way I desire to live, in balance with the earth. They were an earth-based culture because the stories by which they lived came from the earth herself. The nearby Narragansetts tell the story of how humans came to live in cattail wigwams by watching muskrats built their homes. These are the kind of foundational stories I long for, a culture built on learning from animals and trees and stones, not the one in which I was raised where humans were cast out of the Garden of Eden for taking the advice of a snake. The Narragansetts and Wampanoag still survive on the mainland, and most famously, the Mohegans, with their gigantic casino Foxwoods rising out of the Connecticut woods, and because they share creation stories there is a good chance the Manisses had a similar cosmology, but that is not enough for me. Their mainland stories are not the stories of this place, this island. The land I walk on, the waters where I swim, where both sun and moon rise and set over the ocean.
I know what I must do—I must listen to the land for its stories. I am a descendant of John Carver, first governor of the Puritan settlement Plymouth, so I know my ancestors took part in the abuse and murder of the tribe I long to connect with now. I know what I must do, but I’m not sure I can do it. I have a wild imagination that can spin a story out of the thinnest thread. It would be easy to make things up, to say the wind told me this, the waves that, this is the way it was in the beginning. But if I stick to what I can only learn through my senses my hope is that the stories will form out of wind and water, and my words will carry a truth greater than what my mind can perceive when it’s only reflecting on itself. By listening for this island’s stories, maybe the grief I feel at my ancestors’ genocide will be transformed and I can walk on the earth without feeling ashamed. Maybe if I tell those stories in a way that honors the spirits of the land, I will help awaken a seed in my listeners’ hearts, a seed that will be saved and planted, saved and planted, for as long as it takes to reawaken the holy in human’s hearts. To be a little god does not have to mean we have god-like powers to destroy, it could mean we have the power to create. What will grow out of our holy seeds? Tell me how to live, seeds. My ears are pressed to the ground.
I must listen—and write--without expectations. If the stories don’t come, I vow not to invent them. If I don’t hear the voice of the land, I will write about what I see:
Black sand on white swirled in the shape of a butterfly’s wing. Millions of grains of sand on the beach, each one once as big as a boulder. The moving shadow of my hand on the page—bits of broken bladderwrack, mounds of Irish moss. A can of motor oil without a label jammed under a driftwood tree.
Low bluffs at my back topped with dead brush, probably bayberry. There’s a boulder at the top that looks like it will fall soon, a couple of patches of green growing out of the sand. Ahead, the land narrows to a point where it curves. The waves keep coming, adapting to the shape of the land. Their sound is shaped by rocks under the water, some big as undersea hills rise above the surface. I know because I have snorkeled far offshore and seen them. Waves flash as they break, rejoin the infinite.
A tiny spider is crawling up my pants leg. It has disappeared in a fold of my hoodie. A butter-colored moth lands on my left hand. It is comical and furry, like a character in a Japanese anime. It wipes its nose with one leg. It looks at me, not at my hand, but up, into my eyes looking down at it, and without fear releases itself back into the wind that it somehow manages to navigate with translucent wings.
A rustle to my right-- blue-gray bird clinging to a larch tree. When I look it flits deeper into the trees. It is a migrating bird. I don’t recognize it. I try not to let my mind wonder where it came from and where it is going. Anything I think I might know about it is knowledge acquired from books and films. Tell me about your life, I ask it. Birds’ hearts beat so fast. That I know, because once a bird dropped down the chimney of my wood-stove chimney and become trapped in the black, cast-iron cavern. When I opened the doors it did not fly into the light. It was still in my cupped hands when I carried it toward the door, but its heart was an earthquake.
Broken plastic rings the island’s beaches. Some I can identify, but most I can’t. It’s like the end of the world has already come and we haven’t noticed.
I have followed a trail of white feathers to the end. There is no body of a bird to identify. I can’t go any further. I plant two of the feathers in the sand. They waltz in the wind like courtly lovers.
Maybe that’s how stories begin. Maybe the voice of the earth is these two feathers left behind by a white bird that is now skimming over waves on its way south. Maybe when I planted them upright so they could catch the wind again that bird was answering my question—how shall I live? If that is so, the birds says, live by loving what is right before you.
It is hard to turn my back on those white feathers glowing like angel wings as the sun sets. What if one of them blows away and leaves the other alone? On my way back to the car I pick up plastic. I can see now most of them were bottles. People once sealed messages in bottles and cast them into the sea, but those were glass bottles, not these crumpled scraps of plastic punctured with holes. If there was a message in any one of these, it didn’t make it to shore. No one got it. I will take them to the Transfer Station to be recycled.
Jen, this is wonderful 💜🎶💜
LOVE this.