-Caveat Lector- <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/"> </A> -Cui Bono?- an excerpt from: Mount Hope George Howe©1958,1959 The Viking Press New York, NY LCCN 59-5643 312 pps. – First edition – Out-of-print --[1]-- I. Home Town FRom Stamford, Connecticut, to Machias, Maine, the coast of New England is studded with former seaports that have turned their backs to the sea. Some earn their livelihood from textile mills, some from truck farms, and others from summer boarders; those which are nearest to the old way of life, like Gloucester, Massachusetts, from codfishing and lobster-trapping. Some are almost deserted, like Machias; some have become suburbs of the spreading cities, like Salem, Massachusetts, and some, museums, like Mystic, Connecticut; some, like Stamford, are cities themselves. Some, like Norwich and Hartford, are far inland on rivers that once were navigable; others, like Newport, Rhode Island, lie open to the ocean. Their founders were Englishmen, almost without exception. Their populations now are the happy mixture called American. Though to the tourist one may look just like another, the mailboxes and shop signs carry names which are French or Polish in one town and Portuguese or Italian in the next. Similar though they may be now, they differed sharply in the days when they were cut off from one another by forests or impassable roads, and their only highway to the rest of the world was the sea. New York itself was isolated then. Some of the seaports were actually islands, like Nantucket; others, though on the mainland, were so remote as almost to be islands too. Speaking of his home town in Rhode Island, Bishop Mark Antony DeWolfe Howe (1808-1895) said: The villagers of Bristol, having little intercourse with the outside world, became in many respects a peculiar people, and of these, the few who differed from their neighbors were decidedly eccentric. All were queer, he meant, but some were queerer.* When he delivered this opinion, his home town was two hundred years old already, and had a population of five thousand. Now it is three-quarters of a century older and two and a half times as crowded. Even now, people are always going through Bristol, not to it. If they drive down Hope Street, they see the lacy architecture of a slave trader's mansion and the massive stonework of the Town Hall, and the end of an archway of elms which vaults the length of High Street. If they take the Back Road from Providence they see a radar station on the hilltop where an Indian king was slain, and a Nike battery on the site of General Ambrose E. Burnside's banquet hall, and catch the reflection of a thousand mill windows in Fall River, over Mount Hope Bay in Massachusetts, before they cross the Mount Hope Bridge toward Newport. The twenty thousand tourists who watch Bristol's famous Fourth of July parade get only a day's glimpse of its history in the Continental uniforms of the Train of Artillery, and only a hint of its seaborne commerce in the Star boats of the Yacht Club regatta. [* Lunacy, in the strict sense of aberration induced by a full moon, is not recorded in Bristol. But Mrs. Thurber, in the Bungtown quarter of the rival town of Warren, would once a month refuse to take more than a dime a dozen for her eggs, and, if she found a stick of kindling with a knot in it, would chuck it over the fence to get rid of the Devil. The waning of the moon, however, always brought her around.] The seal of Rhode Island is the word HOPE, surmounted by an anchor. The state is the smallest in the Union, and Bristol is the seat of its smallest county, but there is no town in New England with a prettier setting or a more lurid history. It lies halfway between Newport at the mouth of Narragansett Bay and Providence at the head, on a two-pronged peninsula, shaped on the map like a lobster claw half ajar. On the cast, Mount Hope Bay divides Rhode Island from Massachusetts; on the south, the mile-wide channel still called the Ferry (though there have been no ferryboats for thirty years) divides it from the island which gives the state its name; on the west, the main waters of Narragansett Bay lead up to Providence. Bristol harbor lies between the two jaws of the lobster claw. The bigger jaw is the town itself, with its wharves, like teeth, jutting into the salt water. The smaller is the peninsula of Poppasquash. Between the two, like the lobster's bait, lies Hog Island. Mount Hope, like the knuckle, rises two hundred feet into the sky behind the claw. Bristol is earthbound on the north alone, where the rival town of Warren, like the lobster's wrist, joins it to the body of the USA. The origin of all these names is uncertain. On the stony beach at the north side of Mount Hope, by the water's edge, is a boulder of the soft, enduring rock which geologists call graywacke. It is seaweed-brown below tidemark and weather-gray above. Its slanted top, broken off in some unnoticed disaster of the past, is carved with a crude boat and a line of angular letters-if they are letters—in an unknown tongue. The learned Professor Wilfred H. Munro, who, in the last century, knew more about Bristol than everyone else put together, claimed that the Vikings carved it five centuries before Columbus discovered America; that they visited the monticule on a cruise from Iceland, picked grapes on it, and named it Hop—which means a fiord fed by a river at one end and open to the sea at the other. The inscription, he said, could be translated: HALLY STRAYS HIMSELF AND IS LOST HEM The Indians, he believed, garbled the Norse name Hop to Montaup, and the English to Mount Hope. What grapes grow there now are not worth picking, that is sure, and other historians doubt that Norsemen ever came to New England, anyway. Perhaps the rock Was carved by the Indians, though they had no written language, or perhaps by the English boys of Bristol, to fool professors. It was carved, whoever the author, a long time ago, for the blurred inscription was there as far back as 1818, to puzzle and inspire such scholars as William Richmond, a poetic lawyer who will be quoted later. The name Poppasquash is just as unsatisfactory. Colonel Merton "Chezzie" Cheesman of the Train of Artillery, who lived there, insisted on spelling it Pappoosesquaw, on the theory that the Indians hid their women and children at its tip when the English attacked Mount Hope in 1676. Others have spelled it Poppysquash because Proprietor Byfield, when he moved in soon after, planted the first flowers and vegetables in town. As for Hog Island, the lyrical Mrs. Henrietta Brownell, in her novel God's Way Man's Way (1885), submits that the Indians called it Chessawannoe, which, scholars say, meant "many clamshells." Captain Jim deWolf, the town's richest slave trader, owned Hog Island once. In a burst of poesy, he called it "my plum pudding set in a silver bowl." When he died in 1837, he left it to his Perry son-in-law. His will defines it as "that well-known island called Hog, hereafter to be called Perry." For a few years the charts marked it "Hog or Perry Island," but then gave up the effort to obey him, for the irreverent Bristolians called Perry "Captain Hog" behind his back. One local wit named his hog Captain Perry. There has always been more prestige than profit to owning Hog Island, anyway. Until fifty years ago Ray Arnold's family were the only people aboard it; they lived in a single house, three generations of them, until they grew tired of solitude and moved to the mainland. Even on Hog Island, though, there has been adventure. It is recorded that once, when the lighthouse ran out of oil, one of the three Mrs. Arnolds warned a ship off the shoal by outshouting the storm with her powerful pair of lungs. On a fall morning the harbor between the twin peninsulas can be as calm as a pond, the wake of a quahog skiff stretching a line of blue the full length of the silver water; and as silent too, the flat surface rising and falling a little with the tide, echoing the cry of seagulls and the whir of mill spindles. In summer the southwest breeze, every afternoon at two, threads up the channel from Newport and the ocean beyond, spangling the harbor into a million diamonds and dropping a blanket of lethargy on mankind till the sun drops behind Poppasquash. In Saint Michael's Episcopal Church, Minister Locke once preached an hour-long sermon to explain why the sou'wester made him sleepy every afternoon and had so dulled his invention that week that he could think of nothing else to preach about-and why the bleak northeaster, when it blew, "keened him up." He repeated the sermon from year to year. They say a Bristol man left in the middle of it to catch a clipper for the Alaska goldfields; and that when he came back, twenty years and a million dollars later, at the same hour of a Sunday morning, he walked into the same sermon at the very same sentence. The sou'wester is also reputed to be aphrodisiac, as witness this letter of 1825 from Ike Peck in Virginia to his convalescent brother Nick at home: —Dear long-lost unforgotten brother: You are now in the town of girls, geese and onions. Bristol is a fine place to pick up one's flesh, but don't misunderstand me, I pray. You may recover there as well as any place on the earth, or better. Fine sea-breezes, bathing and very fine chowder. Very pretty girls and plenty of them. I hope and trust, though, that you will carry yourself moderately among the kind consenting creatures wherever you may find them. Do not hold too fast to that which is good. When I went home two years ago, you remember, I had the ague and fever. From a skeleton, I was up to full health in a jump, almost as fast as you could say jack Robinson. Well, what did I do? Why, I carried myself very properly and moderately, as I always do. The change was so rapid in all my feelings that I found it exceedingly difficult to forbear. Nothing but great prudence and the native fortitude of my character kept me within bounds. In a week or two you will be like a well-fleshed stallion, very dangerous at times. Be moderate. If so, how great your victory over the flesh and the Devil! When ships were smaller than they are today, and the sea was America's highway, Bristol harbor was the town's livelihood. The town began existence at its edge, and spread inland through the years. In 1819 as many as one hundred sail were Bristol-owned: West India freighters, seaweed sloops, slave ships, and assorted smugglers. It was prophesied that the port would outgrow New York. No vessel drawing more than 16 feet can now lie at the docks, though they used to take 20 feet. The harbor is outgrown. When the destroyers visit for the Fourth, they have to anchor far out by Hog Island. The old wharves have rotted from the top down, or been unplanked by hurricanes. Once in a while, at the neap tides of the fall equinox, the ocean itself roars up into the harbor. The September gales have drowned homebound sailors in sight of Saint Michael's belfry. The big blow of 1815 drove William deWolf's brig Juno, 160 tons, upwater from his wharf, taking the sloop Toadfish with her. Together they hurdled the wharf of Deacon Royal Diman, and brought up against a new brig of Captain Sarn Wardwell's, sending her to the bottom. The buoys in the harbor were all uprooted. The south end of Thames Street washed away, the whole length from Constitution Street to Burton Street. A storm-tossed fishhawk dropped a tautog in the front yard of the impecunious Baylies sisters, who had not eaten for three days, and four Poppasquash boys were drowned crossing the sluice of the old windmill at the head of the harbor. The gale of 1869 sank every ship in the harbor, uprooted 197 elm trees, toppled the Baptist steeple, and let Bridget Ellersly's pig into Saint Michael's. Mrs. Ellersly was a reprehensible Irish widow who listed her profession as "washwoman." She sold whisky in her kitchen, to the disgust of all the Yankees who didn't drink it, and of some who did. There was not much the police could do about her, for the whole department consisted of one-armed Captain Hoard. Like everyone else, the widow kept a pig in her back yard for the fall slaughter. (In one year, the Bristol Phoenix reported, the thirty-seven families on Constitution Street laid down fourteen thousand pounds of pork, which works out to nearly four hundred pounds a family.) When the two-day September gale abated, Minister Locke of Saint Michael's, who had only just been called to town, ventured up Church Street from the rectory to see what damage it had done to his new freestone church. He found the big door blown in, and a pig happily hurdling the box pews from a stance on the new turkeyred pew-cushions. The widow was a poor woman; he knew that the pig was hers because it was so skinny at a time when most pigs were fattening up. He tried to shoo it out, but hunger had made it more agile than he. The pew-ends were just the right height for a pig, and just wrong for a parson. He could not catch it. At last he gave up and strode up the street, over the fallen branches, to her shibeen. "Mrs. Ellersly," he said sternly when her red eye peered through the crack of her kitchen door, "do you own a pig?" "I did, Reverend," she told him, "but what with the blow I've seen nor tail nor squeak of him for the two days gone, and where the poor darling is now I don't know at all." 'Well, I know where he is. He's in Saint Michael's Episcopal Church, and I request that you call him home at once." Mrs. Ellersly drew herself up. Before shutting the door in the young minister's face, she told him, "That I will not, Reverend. If he's turned Protestant, he's no pig of mine." In the gale of 1938 the Methodist steeple went. The empty tanks of the gas company swept up to Mill Gut on a fourteen-foot tidal wave, and 'Tave Leclair's twenty-footer, the Go On, rode over Miss Isoline Barns's seawall to land with her stern cradled on the piazza. The hurricanes come more often now. In the last one the buoys stored on the Coast Guard dock floated up-harbor and pounded Bob Tasca's auto showroom into matchwood. A lady was drowned off the boat works trying to save her yawl, and her husband, with his leg broken, was pulled out of the breakers by four townsmen whose names are not known and who are too modest to let them be known. On the other hand, the winters are not as cold as they used to be. Not so long ago hundreds of children gathered at the top of Cooke's Hill each winter afternoon, and coasted all the way down Constitution Street on reaches and Flexible Fliers, with the tassels of their stocking caps flying behind them and their metal shoe-tips ready to brake their speed in case some cranky housewife had sprinkled ashes on the snow or a horse should come trotting past the corner of Wood Street. Crowds gathered to skate on the ice-ponds -Reynolds', Circular, and Big and Little 'Fessor's. Sometimes the harbor itself froze over. Then the boys could skate all the way to Hog Island or Poppasquash. In 1780 a ship of Captain Charles deWolf's was ice-locked in the Ferry; he walked out to her and dragged her bags of gold dust home to his wharf on a sledge. After the Revolution, Lafayette's barracks were sledged across the harbor ice from Poppasquash to town, set up on brick foundations, and sold off as dwelling houses. One of them still remains on High Street. (Houses were always being moved round town in the days before electric wires made it impossible. Spencer Rounds, in 1906, moved off the State Street dock three houses that he had moved onto it thirty years before. I remember seeing a two-story building, chimney and all, creeping along Hope Street on rollers behind his horse-winch, while its occupants ate dinner inside and chatted with the passers-by.) A fellow who was used to sailing his skiff two nights a week across the breadth of Narragansett Bay, to see his girl in Warwick, had to make the trip afoot instead one winter when the harbor froze. He must have loved her to trudge that seven-mile journey over and back each Wednesday and Saturday, all winter long, in the dark, across the treacherous slushy salt-water ice. In 1837 the snow at Sam White's Lane (it is called Chestnut Street now) was so deep that a tunnel was dug through it for the Providence stage. Ox-drawn sleds filled with men and boys cut their way through High Street with floating banners and merry bells. Looking from her secondstory window, spry Mrs. Elizabeth Dimond, eighty-four years old, composed this poem upon the scene for her friend Abby Smith down street: O Abby dear, have you the scene surveyed And view'd the beauteous carpet Nature's made? Not only in one spot its beauty shone, But every building wears a milk-white dome. How did you like the grand majestic throng, Waving their banners as they wade along? Their noble bells they call a grand review, To see this beauteous carpet cut in two. To judge from the old stones in the North Burying Ground, and from the obituaries in the Phoenix, which, like its neighbor, the Warren Gazette, appea rs twice weekly, Bristol people seem to live longer than most. In 1840, sixty years after the Revolution, there were still fifty veterans on the pension rolls. Captain Daniel Morice was born in 1764; his daughter Arselia Babbitt did not die till 1927 -a life span of 163 years for the two generations. They enjoy their old age more, too. My father drew a meticulous picture of Bristol houses at the age of eighty-eight. In 1909 the publishers of the Boston Post, for an advertisement, ordered seven hundred canes of the finest Gaboon ebony, with engraved gold heads. They sent one to the Council of every New England town, asking that it be given to the oldest citizen, and handed down on his death to the next. I doubt if one of those canes is left, except the one in Bristol. Old Dan Coggeshall, State Senator for fifteen years (he is only ninety-one, but they call him Old Dan to distinguish him from Young Dan, the Postmaster), has it now, but doesn't need it for support. (Since this was written, Old Dan has been called to a reluctant rest, and the cane has descended to John Usher on the Neck, whose first Bristol ancestor came to town as a missionary in 1727.) Minister Locke, one of my grandfathers, was asked to fill Saint Michael's pulpit for a single Sunday in 1867; he stayed over until his death at eighty-three in 1918. Bishop Howe, the other, was old enough to have pulled a pig out of the water by its tail in the gale of 1815, and died in 1895 at the age of eighty-seven. Only recently Alice Bell Morgan of Bristol, in her eightieth year, appeared in a flowered hat on a television show, and won $32,000 for her knowledge of finance. When the young interlocutor asked her for a tip on the market, she told him sternly, In Bristol we don't fry our eggs till they are laid." And when Sally Mutton, at the end of the last century, was pronounced dead, her husband held off the undertaker with a shotgun, forced hot milk between her lips, and brought her to; she survived him forty years. You feel the harbor even when you are out of sight of it. Turn over in bed, and you know whether your face is toward it or away, from the fan on your cheek when the breeze is up, and the scent of the clambanks when the tide is out, and the moan of buoy and gull when the fog is down. From the sky, whence only airplanes and fishhawks watch the town, it would look like a herd of cattle clustered at a drinking-hole, and the intown roofs, peeping up among the vaulted elms, wait thirstily behind the big ones at the brink. Inland, the goldenrod grows yellower than anywhere else. Elderberries are plump on their clusters. In Tanyard Woods the mayflower blushes in the spring among the curly tobacco ferns, and the cardinal flower blazes in summer. Snakes hide in the huckleberry bushes there; and amethysts, says legend, are imbedded in the quartz at Ferry Point. The uplands are stony and the lowlands are boggy; but Bristol harbor has been compared for beauty to the Bay of Naples by our own Neapolitans themselves, with Mount Hope its miniature Vesuvius. "Bristol touches the sea," exclaimed the Fourth of July orator in 1843, "and thereby the world!" Then, there was no railroad to the city and no bridge to the Island. You reached one by stage and the other by horse-ferry. The railroad, which came in 1855, went in the gale of 1938. The town was hitched narrowly to the rest of America, but seaward the world spread before it. Bristol was at the end of the line. You had to make a point of going there. It was not on the way to anything, for traffic between the city and the Island was easier by land through Massachusetts than by the ferry. The town was secluded on its land's-end—that is why the slave-smugglers liked it-and a town can grow peculiar,, just like a person, from loneliness. Peculiar, I should say so! For instance, Dr. Neylan, who brought me into the world, had taught gymnastics in New York before he set up as an obstetrician in Bristol. For fifteen years he had been a professional acrobat. He had trained animals with John Robinson's Show and the Great Eastern. But the Train of Artillery trusted him enough to make him their surgeon, so my parents trusted him with their firstborn. Perhaps the whole world was eccentric in the days when it had to hoist all its water from a well, and, to travel fifteen miles, had to walk to the stage office a day ahead, write its name on a slate, then wait at home till the driver blew his horn in front of its door; when it had no heat but a fireplace and no plumbing but an outhouse and no light but a candle. The Yankee character is a perpetual battle between conscience and cupidity. The old-timers were generous and skinflint, irreverent, pious and scandalous, antlike for work and catlike for fighting. They loved sport and laughter, and they never took themselves too seriously. The teams in the old YMCA bowling league, for instance, who often came to blows over the ninepins, gave themselves such names as the Canvasbacks, the Honk Honks, the Pinticklers, and the Neversweats. Bristol had a tennis club as far back as 1876, a yacht club in 1877, a choral society in 1891, and a golf club in 1897. It now has clubs called the Recordacoes da Patria and the Societa Principessa Elena. It is more like a club than a township, anyway. How they fought! At the Neck, where Warren and the rest of the world is tethered to town, pitched battles used to rage between the Bristol Clams and the Warren Mussels. The Mussels' insulting warcry was: The Bristol boys they have no Sleds, They slide downhill on codfish heads; The Bristol girls they have no combs, They comb their hair with codfish bones. As soon as the horse-chestnut pods opened in the fall, Bristol girls gathered the biggest and hardest and saved them till winter for the boys, who embedded them in snowballs for the battles. As if another town wasn't enough to fight, Bristol fought itself. There have been fist fights at Town Meeting (as in the days of Charles II, you must own property to be admitted, but $143 is enough), and bloody noses over the election for such offices as Inspector of Stove Pipes, Surveyor of Fences, and even Night Soil Agent. The boys south of State Street-it was called Pump Lane then, from the longhandled town pump at the corner of Hope-used to taunt the boys north of it with their chant: Downtown gentlemen, Uptown rats, Coree niggers and Poppasquash cats, to which the uptown boys shouted: White cockade and a peacock feather, The uptown boys will fight together. There was a truce between the Clams and the Mussels every fall, at general muster of the militia on Bristol Common. The Mussels came down under a white flag, and even visited with the Clams at home. The only insult they had to bear was the cheer of the Select School, as the high school used to be called: One-two-three-four-five-six-seven; All good people go to Heaven. When they get there they will yell B-R-I-S-T-O-L. In the end the Mussels won the battle by stealing the battlefield. At the state election of 1872, Bristol voted red-headed Lawyer Turner into the Assembly. It woke up one morning to find that he had put through a bill to give Warren two miles of the Neck. When it turned out that the renegade had been born in Warren there was more sympathy than anger for him in Bristol: what could you expect of a Mussel? The Mussels held a torchlight celebration. They posted a sign on the pole at the railroad crossing, which had been the former boundary between the towns. Arrows marked WARREN pointed both ways, and a placard was tacked below it reading: From the Flood to now, Warren to Bristol four miles; from now to Judgment Day, two miles. How they worked! Charlie Dimond, who is ninety at this writing, used to drive cows to pasture for a neighbor when he was ten-two miles in the morning and two at night. He earned 30 cents for those 28 weekly miles. His mother took it out in milk at 3 cents a quart. She fed her eight children a quart apiece, and had two left over for the chickens. In the winter Charlie slept in the garret with his brothers. Come summer, she would chase them all outdoors, barefooted, for who could afford shoes for eight children, even if she was a sea-captain's daughter? They spent the long vacation days in the fields, living from breakfast to supper on turnips and carrots and swamp-apples. In 1904 Town Topics, the scandal-sheet of the era, called Bristol .a more or less unhappy family of fourteenth cousins." It meant the deWolfs, the Great Folks, as the rest of town called them—although even as late as 1904 half the people in town still had a drop of deWolf blood. Most of the deWolf mansions have burned down or been demolished, but on Hope Street one still stands which shows about what the rest of them were like. The deWolf stillhouse, seven stories high, was carried away in a hurricane. Their wharves and counting-houses have all disappeared too, except for Captain Jim deWolf's brick bank, which is now a bar, and for the indestructible wharfhouse on Thames Street where he emptied and reloaded his slavers and privateers. It is built of stone blocks brought from Africa in ballast, and its cambered beams are as sturdy as a ship's timbers. In his day Bristol harbor was a nest of slavers, privateers, and miscellaneous smugglers, or what the deWolfs themselves called Iree traders." Nowadays its only lawbreakers are the tongers of undersized quahogs. A man can rake thirty dollars' worth of quahogs in a day, about the price of a prime slave on the African coast no more than a hundred and fifty years ago; and recently, when the Coast Guard cutter rammed an illegal quahog skiff, the dockside watchers were as indignant as their ancestors Of 1799 when her predecessor captured a slave ship. (The quahog, pronounced "cohog" in Bristolese, is the hardshelled cousin of the succulent softshell, or clambake, clam. It lives in deep water, while the softshell burrows in the beach between high tide and low. Fifty years ago the quahog was considered unfit for anything but chowder, but since New England waters warmed up, the softshell has almost disappeared, and the quahog is the nearest thing to it that is left.) The Bristol cousinship now embraces names like Angelo, Mora, and DeCosta. The town is still a family, but a larger one, and, as families go, a happy one. Bristol has always been more like a clan than a municipality. In 1808, it is recorded, Captain Jim deWolf spotted Charlie Clark of Bristol leading a parcel of calicoed slave girls down a Charleston street to auction, and called out from the piazza of his hotel, "Charlie, where are you going with those girls, and how's everything at home?" Not long ago a Bristol boy was walking down a street of shuttered houses in Providence when he heard his name called by a soft voice he remembered well enough from the next desk at Byfield School. "Don't come in, Jim; just tell me, did they have a good parade at home last Fourth?" In 1928, when I had lost my American passport in Europe, the immigration officer in New York let me land without it because I knew Emma Rounds, who sings alto in Saint Michael's choir. He had been sweet on her years before when he played baseball for Newport against Bristol. And in 1953 Jerry Donovan, with the 77th Division in the Philippines, hitched a ride with a truckload of GIs. The man in front of him was reading a paper that looked familiar to Jerry. It was the Bristol Phoenix. The fellow was John Troiano, the Hope Street tailor. They had not known each other at home, but made up for it then. Immigrations have changed the old Bristol accent, which was never just the same as in Boston, or even in Providence or Newport. The word "harm," which is pronounced "ham" in Boston, is pronounced "hem" in Bristol. Many of the twelve thousand citizens still say "ayer" for "yes," and "hobbeeya?" for "how are you?" and "cookih" for "cookie" and "bot" for "boat." Charlie Dimond pronounces his own name "Chelladaymon." The Wardwells used to be called "Wardle"; the Coggeshalls are still called "Cogzle" and the Gladdings "Gladn." Nobody but an outsider would sound the second 'U' in Herreshoff. Bristolians even spell the same name in different ways: there are Dimans as well as Dimonds, and Munros and Monroes, and deWolfs, DWolfs and DeWolfes. Some Perrys are Yankee and some are Portuguese. Half of the present-day Kings were originally Joaquins from the Azores. My boyhood chum was Albert Cicerchia, whose father, from Turin, grew violets in a greenhouse on Carfield Avenue. Some Yankees pronounced it Chicherea, to rhyme with Korea, and some Chicherary, to rhyme with Tipperary. Neither is right. For a few years the family had to call itself Ceven, which a Yankee can pronounce; but they are back to Cicerchia now, for Yankees are learning how to speak Italian. The Town Council meets each Monday night in the largest room of the Burnside Memorial Town Hall, sitting in captains' chairs of worn oak. The pressed-brick fireplace of that chamber has never been blackened by smoke since it was laid up in 1883. Against the oak wainscot are ranged the ever-growing files of wills and deeds and mortgages. Fluorescent lights glare down on the portraits of long-dead town clerks, and on the dusty hatchment of General Ambrose E. Burnside, for whom the hall is named. Over the bookcase hangs a portrait of Benjamin Franklin, sewn in needlepoint by the wife of Peter Cladding, who was Town Clerk from 1847 to 1882. On top of the case, at the ends, stand the bronze trophies of the King Philip Little League and the Little-bigger League, presented by Coca-Cola. At the center, till lately, reposed a Mason jar of alcohol. Embalmed inside it floated the blanched ear of one citizen, wrenched bleeding from its socket by another. The attacker expiated his mayhem, and the Chief of Police, after the trial, set the victim's ear right in the Council Room as a warning against crime. Someone stole it, however, a year or so ago, and no reward has been offered for its return. Joe Bruno, the last president of the Town Council, is the grandson of a pioneer from below Naples. His successor is Bill Sousa, the first Portuguese-American to hold the job. The last State Senator, Anthony DaPonte, was born in Ponta Delgada. He was beaten for re-election by a lady who is descended from Yankee sea-captains. John Church, who was Town Clerk for thirty-seven years, is sixth in descent, or thereabouts, from Benjamin, who drove the Indians off Mount Hope in 1676. Leah Young, his assistant, is the granddaughter of the sea-captain who brought the first Portuguese to town. When she reads out the voting list, she pronounces those same Portuguese and Italian names in the Yankee accent that he used himself, at the time when everyone else in town was Yankee too. Bristol is part of New England, but unlike New England. Half its population descends from Italy or the Azores, but it is not like them either. Providence to the north was settled for conscience' sake by the Baptists, and Newport to the south by the Quakers. The first settlers of Bristol were real-estate speculators. They set up the town frankly as a "port for trade." It was a little foreign to New England, even before the foreigners came. Like a club, it has a continuing and overlapping history. The Town Clerk's office is its clubhouse, where the dead belong as well as the living. This account introduces some of the elders to their descendants. It is taken from yellowed parchments and crumbling newspapers. from taciturn hermits and talkative politicians. From one lady in a house knee deep, all twelve rooms of it, with old Christmas cards, tin cans, and the skeletons of cats. From another, blind, deaf, paralyzed, cleanly and beautiful, on her Catch bed at a nursing home in Warren, who mumbled into my microphone, "It’s bad enough to live in Warren, George, but think of having to die in Warren!" >From a philosopher who lives alone in a henhouse, a junk dealer born in Poland, a bishop, a banker, and a ball-player. There was not one who did not have the feeling of belonging to a club. All the way from Massasoit, King of the Wampanoags, to Bill Sousa of the Council, the town has been like that. There was a time when nearly all Bristolians were related, when the slaves on Goree took their masters' names, when "as pretty as a Bristol girl" was a common phrase, even in Warren, and "shipshape and Bristol fashion" was a familiar compliment anywhere on the seven seas. The hurricanes have done a lot to alter the town's face, and mankind is always doing more. The population has changed even more than the landscape. But the town will not change at heart till judgment Day, that biggest blow of all, sinks it in Bristol harbor. pps. 3-19 --[cont]-- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, All My Relations. Omnia Bona Bonis, Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soap-boxing! 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