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A Yankee Farmer and

Sacred Indian Corn

s t o n i n g t o n , c o n n e c t i c u t

“I’m the eleventh generation of the family to work this farm. And

I may be the last. This is the last working farm in Stonington, and

it was also one of the first. We haven’t missed a crop here since

1654.”

He’s got the thickest Yankee accent I’ve ever heard, bar none.

Tall, thick-chested, with clear blue eyes and a weather-creased

face, Whit Davis comes to greet me in jeans and a blue denim

shirt, red suspenders and a straw hat.

Whit Davis, a local gardener told me, was someone who had

close ties with the Native American tribes of Connecticut, the

Mohegans and Pequots. His English ancestors were the Stantons,

one of the founding families of Stonington, a picturesque fishing

village that is now an enclave of the wealthy and that was built

on a sheltered headland between Long Island Sound and the

Pawcatuck River, on land that had once belonged to the Pequots.

It had taken nearly two weeks to arrange to meet. The first

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time I came, I found the farm, but no one was home. It was a

clear, hot day in July, and all around me the waving grasses

hummed with insects. Up on the knoll stood a dark brown house

of great age and grace. It was rundown, with all the signs of a

working farm in midsummer where no one had time to keep up

the yard, yet striking for the dignity of its clean geometry and its

purchase on the land.

I walked up the rocky unpaved driveway and knocked at the

kitchen door. No one answered. I peered in the windows. A huge

Glenwood stove sat back against one wall, cardboard boxes

stacked all around and on top of it. Through the windows op-

posite, I could see clear across the road to the sweep of a great

meadow and low-lying salt marshes. This must have been the

summer kitchen. Despite the clutter inside and out, an air of still-

ness and tranquility inhabited the place.

I wrote a quick note, tucked it in the side window of a pickup

parked in the driveway, and left.

When Whit finally called, I told him what I was looking for.

“Well, I’ve got a two-acre field of Indian white flint corn up

here. When the Mohegan tribe has its annual Wigwam this Au-

gust, I’ll be going up there to make the johnnycakes for them,”

he said.

If I want, I can drive up and see the corn.

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A few days later, we drive down hot mud tracks through the

grass between the fine old house and a barn and then head to-

ward the water. “Hold on now, this is only front-wheel drive,”

Whit says. “I’ve got to get through this mud pretty quick so we

don’t get stuck.”

The corn is taller than we are. Whit stops the truck, jumps out,

and disappears down a row. I hear his voice booming through the

stalks and leaves and try to follow. The mosquitoes find me in-

stantly and swarm.

“This is your corn right here, filling in pretty good.” He strips

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back the husks on a long fat ear to show me the kernels. “That’s

the old eight-row Indian white flint corn. They all grew it—Nar-

ragansett, Pequot, Mohegan, Nehantic. And when that begins to

get a little shadow, kind of a butterscotch color, a spot on the tips

of the ear of the kernels, it’s ready to pick and dry. We’re going to

let this go longer, we’re going to let this dry on the stalk pretty

much. When that dries, you run it through a sheller. And then

you go to the corner of the barn and you pour it, one bushel bas-

ket into another, and the wind’s blowing, and that will blow all

that chaff right out of there.” Winnowing, the ancient way. “This

is the johnnycake corn,” Whit says emphatically. “Yokeag corn.

Right back from before the colonists came here.”

Johnnycakes is a corruption of “journey cakes.” In 1628, Isaack de Rasieres, an agent for the Dutch West India Company,

described how the local Indians made them: “The finest meal

they mix with lukewarm water, and knead it into dough, then

they make round flat little cakes of it, the thickness of an inch

or a little more, which they bury in hot ashes, and so bake into

bread; and when they are baked they have some clean fresh wa-

ter by them in which they wash them when hot, one after an-

other, and it is good bread, but heavy.”

“Do the Mohegans or Pequots still have this seed?” I ask

Whit.

“No,” he says. “It was a stone trap, a dead fall. They lost it

when they lost their land.”

Blunt and swift, the cruel surprise of tricking your prey into

releasing the bone-crushing weight that will kill it, “stone trap”

seems an apt figure for the history of the English, the Indians, and

the land—the story held by this cornfield.

The story of corn in New England is the story of one idea of

the garden supplanting another, as one culture set out to supplant

another. Three hundred and fifty years ago, the seeds of white

flint corn that the Algonkian-speaking Indians had carried east

with them a thousand years earlier passed into the hands of their

European conquerors. In a quiet gesture of restorative justice,

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Whit Davis, who inherited the seeds with the land that came to

his English ancestors in the decades following the Pequot Massa-

cre at Mystic in 1637, now gives them back.

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On the way back to the house, Whit describes his plans for this

corn. “Once it’s dried—that’ll take about a year—I’ll have this

ground for cornmeal, johnnycakes, cornbread. Bring it up to

Harry Here’s Farm up there in Exeter, Rhode Island, where he

has a water-driven gristmill, and have it ground. I gave him some

of my seeds a few years back, and when I went up there to get

some this year, why, he gave me some of my own seeds back.

They’ve been in my family for generations. Now I hope that when

we have a homecoming, a Wigwam Festival, we can have our

own corn this time—we won’t have to go buy the meal from an-

other farmer that grows it and has a gristmill.”

Something in this account, lodged in Whit’s pronouns as he

slides from I to we and back again, catches my attention, but I don’t say anything.

When we arrive at the house, Whit invites me in. He launches

his narrative before I’m halfway through the door.

“You see that table there? You ever heard of Uncas? He was

the first chief of the Mohegans. During King Philip’s War, Uncas

sat at that table right there. If that table could talk, boy, she’d tell

you some stories.”

We sit there too, and I run my hands over the table’s worn

surface, relishing the eighteen-inch boards. King Philip’s War,

the costliest war in American history, broke out in 1675 and con-

sumed New England like wildfire, spreading from Connecticut to

Maine.

“My original ancestor, Thomas Stanton, was interpreter gen-

eral for the United Colonies,” Whit says. “He was a friend of

Uncas. In fact, he wrote Uncas’s will. We’ve been looking for that

will for over two hundred years. Still haven’t found it.”

The Stonington Chronology notes that in 1670, “accompa-

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nied by a picked band of braves in full war regalia, Uncas visited

his old friend, Thos. Stanton, at his home in Lower Pawcatuck

to have him write and witness his will.” They held “a ‘big party,’

with Indian dances, a great feast, and much smoking of the peace

pipe.” This house, and the field of corn we have just visited,

would not be here if these two men, Uncas and Stanton, had not

played pivotal roles in the struggle to determine whether colon-

ists and Indians could live together in peace.

Whit stands up and asks me if I want to see the rest of the

house. We climb all the way to the attic, and he shows me where

the black slaves whose descendants now come to the Stanton

family reunions slept around a huge brick chimney. “See those

trunks over there?” He points to the far corner, where great

wooden trunks with arched lids, their wooden ribs coated in

dust, are piled on top of one another. “Those haven’t been opened

in three generations.”

While I’m pondering the mystery of what those trunks from

colonial days might hold, he turns and I follow him slowly past

worn leather doctors’ bags, birdcages, and dollhouses. We de-

scend carefully down the stairs to the second floor, where he

shows me his father’s cradle, the Revolutionary War musket his

great-grandmother saved, an eighteenth-century muzzle-loader,

the seventeenth-century diaries of a ship’s captain who sailed be-

tween Barbados and New England, and then a pair of silver spurs

so sharp you can still pierce a finger on them. Once the house is

turned into a museum, as it soon will be, it will never again be

possible to visit each room and hear the story of each clock and

lamp and photograph told with the intimate, knowing relish of

someone who lived here.

As rich and deep as the Stanton family lode is, three centuries

of dwelling in the same house feels thin beside the history of the

land and the seeds Whit has planted there. Standing near a win-

dow composed of twelve over twelve panes of wavy and bubbled

glass, he gestures toward his land. “We’ve got stone tools from a

field down there that go back ten thousand years. And there’s a

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village site that’s five thousand years old. We’ve had archaeolo-

gists come down here three times since the 1930s, and every one

of them has told us the same dates. That village site down there is

just one tribe on top of another. They’d fight and drive each other

out, then another tribe would live there. I didn’t want to see all

that buried up and blacktopped. I want it preserved as a farm.”

Whit and a board of directors have secured nonprofit status for

the house as a future museum and have begun raising funds for

its restoration.

“So anyway, I got it by the attorney general that we can pass

the land on to members of the family, and well, I think that pretty

well guarantees that the state isn’t going to get a hold of it. There

are five hundred Stantons out there, still living. Because the first

thing the state does when they get a piece of land is scorched

earth—they burn the house for a fire drill, bulldoze in the cellar,

and that’s it—cover it over and that’s the end of that. That’s the

state’s policy. That’s been for as long as I can remember.”

The theme of preservation, the need to be keen in foreseeing

betrayals and foreclosures in order to outwit and outlive them,

has been struck; it will resound, with deepening variations, for

the length of the raveled story.

“The state cheated me,” Whit says, his syllables clipped as he

remembers. “We agreed on the price, but then they found a loop-

hole and they got it for sixty cents on the dollar.” He shakes his

head in disgust. We’ve reached the front room, where dust motes

hang in the light filtered through the old glass. This is where Whit

nursed his father through his final illness, having set up a sickbed

near the potbellied stove, which kept them both warm in the

huge, drafty house. He sweeps his arms out, turning slightly so

that my gaze follows his around the room—from the sagging

beam and buckling wall where one of the original six chimneys

threatens to give way to the long folding tables friends have set

up, covered with the contents of old cupboards, closets, and

drawers, so they can sort their way through three hundred and

fifty years of family life.

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“I’d have had this house all fixed up if they hadn’t skinned

me,” Whit says. “So I’m in the Indians’ corner. Broken promises.

Broken treaties. You know? The greed of the white man.”

I am so startled to hear this from a tall, robust, blue-eyed Yan-

kee of such a pedigree that in spite of myself, I laugh.

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It is strange, but true, that the justification for taking the Indians’

land in New England—and so the resulting violence—grew out

of an argument for the true nature of a garden.

“The whole earth is the Lord’s garden,” John Winthrop, Sr. ,

wrote in 1629, in Reasons and Considerations Touching the Lawfulness of Removing Out of England into the Parts of Amer- ica, “. . . and he hath given it to the sons of Adam to be tilled and improved by them . . . Why then should we stand starving here

for the places of habitation . . . and in the mean time suffer whole

countries, as profitable for the use of man, to lie waste without

any improvement.”

Preparing for the Great Migration of the English to America,

Winthrop anticipated the objection that “we have noe warrant to

enter upon land which has so long been possessed by others.” He

resolved the moral dilemma by arguing that because the Indians

“enclose noe Land, neither have any settled habytation, nor any

tame Cattell to improve the Land by,” the only lands they had

established title to were their cornfields. This meant “the rest of

the country lay open to any that could and would improve it.”

So long as the English left the Indians land “sufficient for their

use,” Winthrop argued, “we may lawfully take the rest, there be-

ing more than enough for them and us.”

The English described their coming to “the garden of New

England” as a planting, not a violent uprooting of the indigenous peoples. Each settlement was a plantation. This made the En- glish both plants (or, more properly, transplants) and gardeners, cultivating their culture in a new land. But what place in this

extended garden metaphor did this leave for the Indians? Win-

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throp’s invocation of the biblical mandate to cultivate “the

Lord’s garden” sanctioned a religious and political ideology of

racial supremacy, lending credence to a form of economic and

ecological imperialism that would give rise to incalculable suffer-

ing for Indians and whites alike and initiate a series of cascading

biological and social changes that would do violence to the land

as well.

Among the first biological consequences of European contact

with the New England tribes were the epidemics of 1616 and

1633. Exposed to pathogens to which they had no immunity, In-

dians died in vast numbers. The rapid spread of infection emp-

tied whole villages, reducing the Indian population so drastically

that the tribes of northern New England states, including New

Hampshire and Vermont, virtually disappeared. In 1632, Thomas

Morton, the author of The New English Canaan, wrote that coming upon an Indian village wiped out by disease was like

coming upon “a new found Golgotha,” there were so many skulls

and bones lying exposed on the ground.

Once the terrified and demoralized survivors of the epidemics

fled, leaving their dead unburied—a sign of the extent to which

disease broke down the traditional structure of their communi-

ties—the English took over their gardens, harvesting their corn-

fields and raiding their pit barns, using the carefully stored dried

corn for seed and for food. They built their own villages where

Indian villages had once stood, cutting more and more trees for

the construction of solid wooden houses and strong fences to en-

close private gardens.

“God,” John Winthrop wrote in 1634, “hath hereby cleared

our title to this place.”

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In 1635, just one year after Winthrop’s startling claim that God

had cleared the title to New England for the English, Whit

Davis’s ancestor reached the shores of America.

No one really knows why Thomas Stanton renounced his

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patrimony to sail for the New World in January that year. It

may have been his decision to become a Puritan, and as a result

his withdrawal from Oxford University in July 1634, that put a

wedge between him and his parents. Whatever his reasons, Stan-

ton immediately shaped an extraordinary role for himself in a de-

fining moment of American history. Arriving in Virginia aboard

the Bonaventure when he was no more than twenty, he walked all the way to Boston, where he knew he would find friends from

his home in Warwickshire. By the time he arrived, having been

given food, shelter, and guidance by tribe after tribe on the long

trek north, he was fluent in the Algonkian languages.

Once in Boston, Stanton quickly gained a post as a mediator

between the English and the Indians in matters of trade, land dis-

putes, and treaties—a role he would play, later with the formal ti-

tle of interpreter general for the United Colonies, until his death

in 1677. After he was accepted as a member of the Puritan con-

gregation in Hartford, he was granted a monopoly on the fur

trade along a stretch of the Connecticut River. He became known

to the most powerful Englishmen of the Massachusetts Bay Col-

ony, who needed his services as a translator. He also became

known to the principal tribes along the Connecticut shoreline, in-

cluding the Pequots and the Mohegans.

The Mohegans were in fact Pequots who had only recently

broken away under the leadership of Uncas, a young and power-

ful sagamore tied to the royal family by both blood and mar-

riage. It was Uncas’s frustrated claim to the status of sachem

—his rivalry with Sassacus, his father-in-law—that led to his re-

bellion and banishment from the Pequot tribe in 1635. Tensions

arising from the recent extension of the Europeans’ trade routes

and the smallpox epidemic that had decimated the coastal tribes

as a result in 1633 contributed to this split. The two factions of

the tribe chose radically different strategies to deal with the Eu-

ropean invaders: Sassacus chose resistance, Uncas alliance with

the English.

In 1636, soon after Stanton’s arrival in Connecticut, a series

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of heated skirmishes fueled in part by the escalating pressure of

colonial trade on the Native American subsistence economy led

to the outbreak of war between the Pequots and an alliance of

English, Mohegans, and Narragansetts. This, the first of New

England’s Indian wars, culminated in a predawn attack on the

Pequot fort at Mystic in 1637, led by John Mason. As William

DeForest recounts in his History of the Indians of Connecticut, once Mason had succeeded in penetrating the palisaded fort that

enclosed many hundreds of sleeping Pequots, including women,

children, and old people, he shouted, “We must burn them” to

his second-in-command, John Underhill. The fire they set burned

so quickly “that in little more than an hour this frightful death-

agony of a community was over.” Between four and seven hun-

dred Pequots perished in the fire.

The remaining Pequots fled southwest along the coastline and

took refuge in a large swamp in Fairfield. Not content with hav-

ing driven the Indians from the valuable coastal territory they

wished to control, the English pursued them. Led to the swamp

by Uncas, whose men had no trouble tracking the starving ref-

ugees through the wilderness by noting the signs of their desper-

ate hunt for edible roots and tubers along the way, the English

surrounded them. Though Mason tried to dissuade him, Thomas

Stanton, attempting to avoid a second massacre, went into the

swamp to explain to the Pequots the terms on which their lives

might be spared.

Within two hours, two hundred Pequots—old men, women,

and children—came out of the swamp. Only a group of warriors

remained. The next morning, in deep fog, a fight ensued. Many

Pequots were killed. The rest were taken prisoner.

“The colonists at first tried to make use of their prisoners

as servants, or, more properly, as slaves;” DeForest writes, “but

such was the uneasiness of these proud children of the forest, and

so troublesome did they make themselves to their master, that

very few of them remained any long time in servitude. A small

number, as we learn from Winthrop, were shipped off by the

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Massachusetts people, and sold in the West Indies.” The surviv-

ing Pequots who were not sold into slavery were divided among

the tribes allied with the English. The largest number, nearly one

hundred, were given to Uncas, whose power grew in proportion

to the suffering and dispersal of his former people.

The terms of defeat, it is clear, were meant not only to subju-

gate but to strip a whole people of their identity. “The Pequots,”

DeForest records, “were not to live in their ancient country, nor

to be called by their ancient name, but to become Narragansetts

and Mohegans. Lastly, the Pequot territory was not to be claimed

by the sachems, but to be considered property of the English of

Connecticut.”

In the years following the Pequot Massacre, tensions escalated

between Indians and colonists, culminating with King Philip’s

War, named for the great Wampanoag chief Metacom, called

Philip by the English, who led a loose alliance of independent

tribes against the colonies. This, DeForest writes, was “a war for

freedom and existence, and when those were no longer possible,

it became a war of revenge.”

As William Cronon argues in Changes in the Land, it was the cascading effect of the colonists’ transformation of the land-

scape, one change leading to many others, that unraveled the bal-

anced subsistence ecology and local economy of the Indians and

led to the violent collision of two distinct views of how to live on

the land. The provocations for the outbreak of King Philip’s War

included an arrogant attempt by the government of Plymouth

Plantation to force the Wampanoags into an agreement granting

the colonists the exclusive right to purchase the land Indians had

begun to sell in order to survive, and the continual destruction of

Indian gardens by colonists’ farm animals, for which the Indians

sought legal redress, without success.

The war, DeForest records, “broke out in June, 1675, just

about a century before the commencement of our own struggle

for independence, and continued with uninterrupted fury until

the autumn of 1676.” This was “the last great struggle of the na-

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tive tribes of New England against the race of foreigners which

was gradually crowding them out of the land of their fathers.”

In 1676, after a raid party captured King Philip’s wife and

children, Philip himself was also captured. The war ended soon

after he was murdered while in custody, killed by an Indian loyal

to the English. The losses on both sides were terrible. But for the

Indians loyal to King Philip, the consequences were especially

devastating. Those who had not lost their lives lost their land,

and many more lost their freedom as men, women, and children

were sold into slavery in the West Indies.

The Indians’ fight to drive the English from the land was over.

All across New England, Englishmen returning home recorded

coming upon acres and acres of abandoned Indian cornfields.

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Without this historical context—the abandoned corn as the sign

of English dominance on the land—Whit’s return of the seeds

that were at the center of Native American culture before the

English conquest can seem like an idiosyncratic or sentimental

gesture by an aging farmer. Yet the meeting of Indians and the

English is a critical moment for restoring history and politics to

the American garden, and corn is the most potent seed of all for

unearthing the complicated story of our tangled relationship to

the land.

Corn. Zea mays. “If maize were the only gift the American Indian presented to the world,” Alfred Crosby writes in The Columbian Exchange, “he would deserve undying gratitude.” Indigenous peoples of the Americas domesticated two thirds of

the staple foods the world eats today, corn so long ago that no

one has ever found a specimen of it in the wild. As corn traveled

north with peoples migrating from Mesoamerica into what is

now the United States, it evolved into local land races—ethno-

ecological adaptations of a seed not only to the place where it

was cultivated but to the people whose hands planted, tended,

and harvested it. Oaxaca Green, Hopi Blue, Pawnee Black Eagle,

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Cherokee White Eagle, Iroquois White—the many names of In-

dian corns testify to millennia of intimacy between people and

the seeds their lives depended on, seeds they held sacred, seeing

them always as a gift of the Creator.

As Roger Williams noted in the seventeenth century, the oral

tradition of New England tribes preserved the ancient origin of

corn in their veneration of “Kautántowwit, the great God of the

Southwest, to whose house all souls goe and from whom came

their Corne and Beans.”

One of the most detailed descriptions of Indian gardens in

New England comes from John Winthrop’s son, John Winthrop,

Jr. , who presented his paper “Description, Culture, and Use of

Maiz” to the Royal Society in 1662 while in London to negotiate

a formal charter for the colony of Connecticut, where he served

as governor.

The corn, used in New England before the English planted

there, is called by the Natives, Weachin, known by the name

of Maiz . . .

The Ear is for the most part, about a span long, composed

of several, commonly 8 rows of Grains . . . and in each row,

usually above 30 Grains. Of various colours, as Red, White,

yellow, Blew, Olive, Grenish, Black, Specked, striped, &.

sometimes in the same field, and the same Ear. But the White

and Yellow are the most common.

. . . It is Planted . . . most commonly from the middle of

April to the middle of May. Some of the Indians take the time

of the coming up of a fish, called Aloofes, into the Rivers.

Others of the budding of some Trees.

. . . The manner of Planting is in Rows, at equal distance

every way, about 5 or 6 feet. They open the Earth with an

Howe, taking away the surface 3. or 4. inches deep, and the

bredth of the Howe; and so throw in 4. or 5. Granes, a little

distant from another, and cover them with Earth. If two or

three grow, it may do well . . .

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The Corn grown up an hands length, they cut up the

weeds, and loosen the Earth, about it, with a broad Howe: re-

peating this labour, as the Weeds grow. When the Stalk begins

to grow high, they draw a little Earth about it: and upon the

putting forth of the Eare, so much, as to make a little Hill . . .

. . . The Indians, and some English (especially in good

Ground, and well tilthed) at every Corn-hill, plant with the

Corn, a kind of French or Turkey-Beans: the Stalks of the Corn

serving instead of Poles for the Beans to climb up with. And

in the vacant places between the Hills they will Plant Squashes

and Pompions; loading the Ground with as much as it will

bear. And many, after the last weeding, spring Turnep-seed

between the Hills, and so, after Harvest, have good Crop of

Turneps.

. . . After ’tis gather’d, it must, except laid very thin, be

presently stripped from the Husks; otherwise it will heat,

grow mouldy, and sometimes sprout.

. . . The Natives commonly Thresh it as they gather it, dry

it well on Mats in the Sun, and then bestow it in holes in

the Ground (which are their Barns) well lined with withered

Grass and Matts, and then covered with the like, and over all

with Earth: and so its kept very well, till they use it.

Winthrop’s is a careful account of the traditional intercrop-

ping of the “Three Sisters,” corns, beans, and squash. He records

the Indians’ method of mounding up corn hills and the natural

signs by which they knew the correct time for planting—when

the aloofs, or alewives, are running, when the shadbush blooms. Winthrop records the evidence of an astonishing genetic diver-

sity—a rainbow of corns, sometimes all in one field or even on

one ear—and notes that the Indians could “load” the land so

that it yielded several harvests without exhausting it.

The earthen mound of the corn hill made more air and mois-

ture available to the corn’s roots, while the corn stalks provided

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230

support for the climbing beans, whose roots in turn fixed nitro-

gen in the soil, replenishing what the nutrient-hungry corn re-

moved. And the squash plant’s huge leaves and trailing habit

provided a living mulch that kept weeds down and cooled the

soil while trapping moisture. It was an elegant and sophisticated

form of gardening.

John Winthrop, Jr. , saw no contradiction between his father’s

claim thirty years earlier that the Indians did not know how to

use land and so had no legal claim to it and his own testament to

how efficient and productive their intercropped gardens actually

were. The Winthrops could not, or would not, see how sound the

Indians’ use of their land was. Though Roger Williams argued

eloquently that the Indians’ methods of cultivation gave them le-

gal rights to their traditional lands, his voice did not prevail.

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“This is the field right here,” Whit says. An expanse of timothy,

a deep, rich green, stretches away from us toward an old stone

wall. We stand at the edge of the field quietly, just looking.

“Right over that knoll, that’s where the Indian village was, right

on the shore.”

Years ago, Whit and his father found an old seashell midden

on the riverbank. Oyster shells. “They were there, but we didn’t

know what they were. An archaeologist in the thirties came out

here poking around and spoke to my father and asked if he’d

show him around. My father says, ‘Oh yeah, sure, I guess so.’ He

had a little pointy trowel with him. He dug down a little bit, just

scooped away the shells a little bit, and he found a piece of a flint

chip from making arrows. Then he found a little piece of bird

bone that’d been thrown out, you know, when they cooked it,

threw it in the fire—you know, the bones. So he asked if they

could come down here and pitch a tent and spend some time dig-

ging. The agreement my father had with them was that my father

was to have all the stone artifacts, they could have the pottery

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231

and bones. Well, they got some beautiful pots, and they’re all up

to the University of Connecticut. That’s how we came to know

how old the remains in these fields are.

“They were supposed to stop at the house every time they

came out, the archaeologist was, the big shot that was sponsor-

ing the dig down there. And leave all the stone artifacts, which

we were supposed to keep, with my father. And they were to have

the bones and pottery. Well, we didn’t draw any distinction at the

time, not knowing they were going to find any graves there. So

they come out—now, this was just a dirt cowpath, a wagon road,

trail—and they came out one time and they stopped at the house.

They had to come up through the yard. So he showed my father

the stone artifacts. I imagine a lot of it went out that he didn’t see,

that they just took. So my father sees a box on the back seat. And

he says, ‘Well, what do you have in that box there?’

“‘Well,’ he says, ‘that’s just some remains that we found of

a child.’ My father says, ‘You found the remains of a child?’ He

says, ‘Yes.’ My father says, ‘What are you doing with it out here?’

The guy says, ‘We’re going to take it back for our collection at

the museum up in Hartford.’ My father says, ‘Oh no you’re not.’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘you said we could have the bone artifacts.’ My

father says, ‘That’s right. All the animal bones you want. Those

are human bones.’ My father said, ‘That child was born there,

lived there, died there. And somewhere around there were people

who loved the child, and that was his home, and you’re not going

to move them, you’re going to leave them right here.’

“So he kicked them out right there. My father says, ‘Tomor-

row night, sundown, I want your tent pulled up and moved out.’

“Not knowing which pit they came out of, we weren’t sure

what to do with them. My father at that time had a cabinetmaker

who was pretty handy at making wooden gadgets and things. So

he had him make up a little coffin box with a glass cover, and we

kept that in the case inside the door there under lock and key.

“Well, came along one day one of the state men was down.

He represented the land preservation department in Hartford, I

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232

guess it’s part of DEP, and I showed him the Indian relics in the

glass cabinet there by the front door that I showed you. And it

came out as we talked that he was an Indian. He was at that time

the executive director of the Connecticut River Powwow Society.

So I showed that to him and he said, ‘Did you ever think about

a reburial?’ I said, ‘Yes. But I didn’t know how, know who, nor

when.’ He says, ‘I know how and I know who. You tell us when.’

‘All right.’ So we agreed on a date. I told him that I didn’t want

any newspapers, I didn’t want any press or media down there of

any kind, and no pictures. He says, ‘Fine.’ I says, ‘You can invite

whatever Indians you want to attend.’ So he did. We had forty.

Men, women, and a few children.

“The supreme medicine man of the Wampanoag Nation did

the service. He’s dead now. We were all down there at the grave-

site. The Indians dug the pit. And all the white man did, and that

was me, was to take a crowbar and stick it down in the ground

and get down where there were no stones so they could dig. They

took the dirt and put it on a tarpaulin. The Indians dug the hole,

and they were all down there. The medicine man asked me, he

says, ‘Where are the remains?’ I says, ‘Up at the house.’ I said,

‘You get your assistant there, get right in my pickup there, we’ll

go right up and get it.’

“So we went up to the house and went in and I got the key

that I had hidden in the house. I opened up the case. It was very

touching. I didn’t mean it to be. I was just surprised. But I took

the little box out and I handed it to him and I says, ‘Here.’ I says,

‘This is yours.’ And he kind of looked at me, he looked kind

of funny, you know, and then I saw the tears coming down his

cheeks. He said, ‘You know, people don’t do this for us.’ He says,

‘What we find is that they’ve been ground up with the bulldozers

and excavators, opening up roads and building houses.’ He says,

‘We don’t get a chance to put someone back where they came

from, where they lived.’

“So that was it. I wasn’t trying to be demonstrative. Here, this is yours, this is your people. Here, take it. That’s all. We planted

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that, we buried that child’s remains, right between the women

and the big guy they’d unearthed in the thirties. I didn’t want to

disturb them. The child was within fifty feet of either one, down

between them.

“We took everyone down there with a pair of horses, in the

hayride wagon, about twenty of them. Most of them were in re-

galia. The medicine man was wearing deerskins. My wife and I

and her daughter and her two kids and my oldest son were the

only non-Indian ones there. I never saw such an impressive cere-

mony in my life. In fact, I liked it so well that I asked the Mohe-

gans when my time comes if they’ll come down and do a service

for me up there in the cemetery.”

“You know, you come from good people,” I say as we climb

into the cab of his old pickup to head back up to the house.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Whit replies, not turning to look at me.

“That’s a good instinct, don’t you think?” I ask.

“I don’t know. I treat people the way I’d like to be treated.

That’s all I can do.”

f

One day while reading the history of the New England tribes,

I discovered that in 1930, around the time Whit’s father caught

the archaeologists attempting to spirit away the remains of an In-

dian child from the ancient village gravesite, a young Mohegan

woman named Gladys Tantaquidgeon published a piece about

the enduring place of white flint corn among the Aquinnahs of

Gay Head, Martha’s Vineyard. A branch of the Wampanoags,

the Aquinnahs, who still live at Gay Head, are a remnant of King

Philip’s people. The island of Martha’s Vineyard was originally

theirs.

Gladys Tantaquidgeon, now 106, carries the last of the au-

thentic Mohegan names. She has been the Mohegan Nation’s

honorary medicine woman for many years, having played a cru-

cial role in preserving the tribe’s history in a small museum on

Mohegan Hill in what is now the town of Uncasville, where she

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lived with her brother Harold, who was tribal chief for a time.

Harold Tantaquidgeon was a friend of Whit Davis’s father.

In “Notes on the Gay Head Indians of Massachusetts,”

Tantaquidgeon writes with deep respect of the Aquinnahs, de-

scribing them as “peaceful, conservative-minded people” who

“have made every effort to maintain the rights bequeathed to

them by their sachem ‘Metaark’ in 1681 . . . Despite the culture-

destroying forces of Europeanization,” she notes, “some few un-

contaminated practices have survived at Gay Head,” the most

important being their abiding tie to their ancestral corn.

Unlike “the remnant groups on the mainland,” Tantaquid-

geon notes, a discreet allusion to her own people, the Aquinnahs

had preserved a core community of two hundred who had never

left their traditional lands. She lingers over the Aquinnahs’ con-

tinued love of yokeag, the food made from white flint corn that

has been parched and pounded—the fine cornmeal the Narra-

gansetts shared with Roger Williams, the same food that Thomas

Stanton must have eaten on his long walk to Boston three cen-

turies earlier. Well into the twentieth century, the Aquinnahs still

prepared yokeag, “a delicacy to be served on special occasions

or when one’s ‘aboriginal nature or constitution’ demands ‘pure’

food, sacred through being made from corn by an ancient pro-

cess.” They still used handmade wooden mortars and stone pes-

tles, “purely aboriginal utensils,” to grind their corn into fine flour,

as their ancestors had for hundreds of years. The Aquinnahs’ rev-

erence for the rules governing the preparation of yokeag, Tanta-

quidgeon concludes, bear “the traits of an ancient religious rite.”

Soon after I found Gladys Tantaquidgeon’s essay, I contacted

the Aquinnah tribe to ask if they still had the seeds of the white

flint corn necessary for the ritual preparation of yokeag. They

did not. Would they like some? Their response was immediate.

f

It’s two days before Thanksgiving when I drive back up to Whit’s

place—bright sun, unclouded sky, and a light wind that carries a

t h e e a r t h k n o w s m y n a m e

235

chill. But the grass is still green and the sun warms my hair. The

corn has been harvested, sorted, and put away to dry, and I have

come to see it. By now I know the way here so well that I arrive

early. Since Whit isn’t back from delivering eggs yet, I take ad-

vantage of my solitude to roam.

The house is so still and quiet that it seems as if it has already

become a museum. Having seen the old main door only from the

inside, I walk around to the front for the first time and sit down

on the threshold, a dark half-moon of gray stone. One clump

of tall black-eyed Susans is still blooming, sheltered by a stone

wall, chest high, that reaches all the way around a gently sloping

stretch of grass, enclosing it but for a space where a gate would

have been. This must have been the original kitchen garden. I get

up and walk its perimeter. The ‘Red Sail’ lettuce still looks fresh,

so I reach down and tear off a leaf and eat it. Nearby is a row of

rhubarb, its ruby stalks bright amid the dark green leaves. The

dried pods of locoweed rattle when the breeze stirs, ready to scat-

ter mud-colored seeds.

Three hundred years—that’s how long there has been a gar-

den here. The sun has warmed the rock just enough so that it’s

comfortable enough to sit, so I do, turning to touch the grain in

the weathered clapboards. I know that just inside the wide door,

its wood gray with age, hangs a ceremonial Indian pipe, its bowl

made of deer bone still packed with tobacco. Above the door, al-

ternating square panes of cobalt blue and clear old glass let day-

light into the hallway. An old brass oil lamp, its glass chimney

intact, hangs from a nail. It would have been hung high on the

wall beneath the great staircase, its light visible through the

clerestory to guide a traveler home.

In 1649, Thomas Stanton was granted a three-year monopoly

on trade near the place where the Pawcatuck River empties into

Long Island Sound. First he had a trading post built about two

miles from here, right on the riverbank, and a house near here; in

time, work on this house began. Though a skilled carpenter, per-

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236

haps a shipbuilder from nearby Mystic, might have supervised, it

was probably Indians, and perhaps a few African slaves, who ac-

tually constructed the house. Someone would have used an ox to

drag the stone for the threshold out of a field all the way up this

rise to the spot just outside the front door.

By the time this stone was set in place, Stanton held title

to thousands of acres of what had once been Indian land. The

beautifully carved railings and corner cabinets, the clocks, china,

glassware, silks, draperies, and books that would make the great

house in the wilderness a gentleman’s home, were all carried to

America by ship. Stanton would have moved his large family

here from New London when the house was ready. Here, he

and his wife, Anna, raised ten children, one of whom eventually

sailed for Barbados, where he supervised the supply end of Stan-

ton’s trade in molasses and rum—one leg in the triangular At-

lantic slave trade.

In this house, Whit Davis grew up during the Depression and

raised his own children, during the long years after the family

fortune was gone and farming was in decline. He tended his dy-

ing father in the room where Uncas had once sat, and left this

house only when he remarried and moved to Groton, after years

of living here alone following his first wife’s death. But this is still

where he comes to work every day.

From my perch above the old garden, I can look across the

marsh to a stand of trees—hickories, oaks, and maples that have

shed their leaves. I can see light glinting off the waters of the

sound. There is more history there, in the field of timothy that

runs undisturbed to a massive stone wall at the far limit of Whit’s

land, than there is behind me. Here is where two cultures met

and clashed and one displaced the other—but not completely,

and not forever.

The wheels of a pickup crunch on the gravel in the driveway.

Whit has arrived. When I leave an hour later, I take with me

seven ears of dried white flint corn.

t h e e a r t h k n o w s m y n a m e

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f

As Whit shows me the burlap sacks crammed with ears of corn,

I begin to tell him about finding Gladys Tantaquidgeon’s essay

about the Aquinnahs and their corn. I tell him how members of

the tribe have been moving back to their communal lands at

Gay Head on Martha’s Vineyard and how they want to create

gardens as part of their efforts to renew their heritage. Listening

but saying nothing, he looks for and finds a special few sacks of

corn, then unties the mouth of one of them. Inside are ears that

Whit has carefully separated from the hundreds of others sus-

pended in mesh bags from the rafters of the old summer kitchen

behind the house. The ones he shows me now are not meant to

be ground into meal for making johnnycakes at the Mohegan’s

Green Corn Festival next August. These are the seed corn for

next year’s planting.

“If something comes from somewhere, it should go back,”

Whit says. “That’s why I gave it to the Mohegans. I’ll give you

half a dozen ears for the Aquinnahs. That should give them a

good start.” He rummages through his sack and picks them care-

fully, handing them to me one at a time, explaining that these are

the prized ears, each with a double cap. “Tell them they should

plant two, three fields of it,” he says, “and to keep them sepa-

rated. After three, four years, they should take the best seed from

all three and mix them together and start again. That way they

keep the corn strong.”

Whit is the keeper of the corn—and of the land and all it holds

—and as he sees his long, good run on this land coming to an

end, he is visibly moved to be invited to extend his generosity.

I gather the ears of corn in my arms. They are hard and golden

and heavy. I don’t know what to say other than thank you, which

I keep repeating. We walk slowly toward the back of the house,

where Whit’s truck and my car are parked. It promises snow

tonight, and he needs to get on the road to Maine to visit his kids

for the holiday. I put the corn in a cloth bag in my car.

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238

“Tell them that I wish them well,” he adds. “Tell them that I

wish them good luck in all their endeavors.”

“I will,” I say.

f

I drive away thinking about the husked and dried seed corn on

the back seat. How can a gesture as simple as the gift of seeds be

a meaningful answer to centuries of injustice?

Because it makes possible the restoration of the seed’s place in

a structure of meaning. The English imposed on “the garden of

New England” the idea of land as commodity, the wilderness as

a fund of natural capital at their disposal, and seed as a form of

currency. Whit’s return of the seeds refuses those meanings.

When John Winthrop, Jr. , sailed to England to give his report

on maize to the Royal Society in 1662, the English had already

transformed sacred Indian corn into a cash crop traded in a

global marketplace. Corn had also become an essential source of

food for provisioning the slave ships that traveled between the

windward coast of Africa and the shores of Rhode Island and

South Carolina. The trip to London to clarify Connecticut’s sta-

tus as a colony marks an important moment in the history of

writing about American gardens. Winthrop was careful to omit

the politics and economics—the blood and money—that de-

fined the colonial approach to the cultivation of maize in the

New World.

What Winthrop missed entirely was the meaning of corn for

the Algonkin peoples. He missed the corn’s story. Stories, like seeds, hold the power to sustain a people. A seed

without its story will still produce a tall green stalk of corn, a

weighty harvest of beans, a fat, ripe pompion, or pumpkin. It might still satisfy a merely physical hunger. But it cannot by itself

preserve a culture, though it will hold in genetic memory the his-

tory of its relationship to the hands that first cultivated it. The

story of corn without the actual seed speaks of a different kind of

sadness—a cultural heritage ungrounded, a myth of food for a

t h e e a r t h k n o w s m y n a m e

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real but unanswered hunger of the spirit. When the seed and the

story of its place in the life of a people are reconnected, a part of

the original violence that sundered them may be mended.

The fact of the seed’s survival, like the fact that Whit Davis,

eleven generations after Thomas Stanton and Uncas, also medi-

ates between the white man and Indian culture, suggests how

hopeful even a symbolic act of justice can be.

One ear of corn yields more than a hundred seeds; six ears

yield many hundreds. If even half of them were to grow, one

season’s harvest would multiply the possibility each seed repre-

sents to many thousands. Generations of seed will come from the

return of the ancestral corn. Out of the distant past will come a

future, a garden.

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