Washington, D.C. 29.12.91: Country Churches and Urban Decay

Writing this in D.C. On Friday, Steve and I drove to Raleigh and spent a night with his cousins. Then on Saturday we drove to the Eastern Shore of Virginia and spent the night at Nassawadox. Drove today to D.C.

The weather foul—i.e., drizzly, or as they say in Newfoundland, mizzling. Foul i.e. for driving, but oddly beautiful otherwise. It’s warm—up near 60◦—and everything on the Eastern Shore was fog-enshrouded.

When we arrived last p.m., it was already turning dark at 4 P.M. But we had time to see Christ Church Episcopal church in Eastville, an 1832 (?) church of the original Hungars Parish. Cemetery full of Nottinghams. The Eastville courthouse dates from 1731 (?), and court has been held in the county from the 1670s, I believe. All is built around a commons—old, small, red-brick buildings with nice glass windows (in churches as well) and a small green in the middle.

After Eastville, we drove down the Wilsonia Neck road, where the Monks and Nottinghams lived, south of the road, between Hungars and Deep Creek. Saw the little 17th-century house called Pear Valley that appears in Whitelaw’s book on the Eastern Shore. Several of the large houses nearby—including, apparently, the one owning the P.V. cottage—are for sale.

In the morning, we returned, going via the older Hungars Parish church north of Eastville, which is strange to see. An Episcopal church out in the country, fields and pine trees all around, pick-up trucks in the churchyard—for all the world, the same feel as a Baptist church in north Louisiana.

I wanted to putter about in the cemetery, but church was going on and I felt abashed to be seen tripping and tipping over Wilkins and Mapp graves, as service sent on. The church itself as plain as any evangelical one, telling a lot about the variety of plain, non-sacramental Anglicanism my forefathers brought to Virginia. Of whitewashed brick, square, plain glass windows. I felt very keenly at home, especially in the silence of the surrounding fields, broken only by a whush of birds in the grass verges now and then. Very, very like the area of Cashie Neck where Nottingham Monk settled. . . .

D.C. is a shambles—homeless people everywhere, 480+ people murdered this year, urban decay that boggles the mind. Yet in it all, I sense hope in the open and alive presence of gay people around Dupont Circle, in the movement away from the dead and forward to the new and living in reappraisal of gender roles, increasing frankness re: the monstrous stupidity of the Reagan era, multiculturalism, artistic revisioning. I’m babbling—tired and feeling a bit hopeless myself.

Charlottesville, Virginia 6.10.93: Human Comedy Amidst Gorgeous Buildings

From Wythe Co., we drove to Charlottesville for the night. Wanted to see Monticello on Thomas Jefferson’s 250th birthday year. A horrible Vietnamese meal in Charlottesville.

Next morning, we walked on the campus to see the Rotunda, the residences it behind it facing one another across the lawn. Students live in some of these as an honor, and most black-painted doors with brass nameplates had various posters, announcements, and newspaper clippings on them. One had a sticker saying something like, “Republicans Still Have the Answer.” Next to it had a sticker with the word “visible,” the V being a pink triangle. There were other openly gay things on the door. What a story in the juxtaposition of the two, and in the very existence of the latter in this staid environment.

Then to Monticello. The drive itself, in morning mist on the hills, was lovely, but the place was infested with visitors. A college-student tour guide was barely articulate—made about eight subject-verb agreement errors, used the word “basically” constantly and meretriciously, and seemed to have absolutely no feel for the place and its history. I felt very grumpy, out of sorts, scrutinized.

After Monticello, back to Charlottesville for lunch. We walked and then ate in the old downtown. It was very pleasant—another lovely fall day—but something about the place disturbs me. It’s as if the people are all playing a role, an Anglo role, of forced politeness and formality. Very few seem to be native Virginians, but they all seem to have adopted the air (an air of superiority) of Virginians. But don’t they realize that the English culture of Virginia is something much different from a Masterpiece Theater staging of Brideshead Revisited? It’s earthy, 16th-century, Shakespearean in its roots.

People dress in Charlotteville—dress the part. Lots of preppy college boys in short hair, ironed Oxford-cloth shirts, loafers, lots of preppy college girls with clean bobbed hair and fresh faces. Older people very formally dressed, even for a shopping foray.

Then home via highway 29, with gorgeous scenery in Albemarle and a bit of Nelson Co., but flattening as one approaches Campbell and Amherst, becoming very unattractive in Pittsylvania.

Wytheville, Virginia 16.10.93: Log Cabins and Shot Towers

Back today from our trip to the Blue Ridge and Virginia. After our overnight stay on the Blue Ridge Parkway, we went to Wythe Co. to look up Brooks and Whitlock roots.

Wytheville itself was a surprise—a pretty little mountain town, surprisingly . . . well, sophisticated seeming.

At the courthouse, I copied the will of Thomas Brooks, what few estate papers there were, and deed records for Brookses and Whitlocks. Then we had lunch at a place called Umberger’s, famous for hot dogs. There seem to be a lot of Germans in and around Wytheville, though the corner of the county where the Brooks and Whitlocks apparently lived, the southeast, seems to have more English and Scottish names, even today.

From lunch we went to the library, where I found something saying the land Thomas Whitlock sold in 1805 to the Harbert/Herbert family, on both sides of Little Reed Island Creek, became the site of a forge called High Rock Forge, and eventually became the Patterson post office.

From deeds, it seems to me Thomas and Hannah Whitlock sold their Wythe Co. land in 1804 and moved to Kentucky. My recollection is that Thomas Brooks had to have been in Kentucky by 1797 in order to claim land, but I believe his daughter Jane was born in Wythe Co. in 1798, and he appears on the tax list up to 1804. I think he must have settled the Kentucky land in 1797, and the family moved with him ca. 1798, though he kept Wythe Co. land up to 1804.

From Wytheville we drove out to Poplar Camp, to the old Shot Tower, one of only three such places still standing in the U.S. It was a gorgeous fall day, clear and windy, and from the tower (i.e., the base of it, since it’s not open for inspection) one can see quite a ways. In a little dell at its feet is an old farm still operating, with a log cabin and lots of old farm buildings. Behind the tower runs New River—a pretty, rocky, shallow river.

Then to Patterson, a poor aggregation of buildings with people who seem hard-bitten living around it. We stopped and talked to an elderly woman gathering black walnuts with a young man. She had a brown and white gingham apron, gray hair up in plaits, a fierce, hawkish-looking face with stern brown eyes. We asked where Little Reed Creek is, and they said they’d never heard of it—there’s a Reed Creek, they said. I believe Little Reed Creek doesn’t flow into New River nowadays, though it did in the late 18th century. When we thanked the old lady, she bowed very gravely and majestically.

Virginia and North Carolina 11.8.94: Old Diaries and Country Churches

After a drive through the mountains, we went to Richmond and cloistered ourselves two days in the state library, state history museum, and archives. Some fascinating stuff—most alluring to me, an account book kept by Caleb Lindsey of Gloucester-Essex County in the late 1600s. To hold it in my hands . . . . I photocopied from it a “recete” for beer, from early 1700s when the book had come into the hands of Caleb’s son James.

After Richmond, a day in Norfolk. Pretty weather, clear, not too hot. A ghastly seafood dinner for which we paid too much in the expectation we needed to “treat” ourselves. One of those all-you-can-eat buffet deals with people clustered like locusts around steam tables, picking at this and that. Why can’t I learn, I’m not an all-you-can-eat buffet type? The night before, we had had a wonderful Vietnamese meal in the Fan district of Richmond for half the price: cold spring rolls, cabbage, carrot, chicken, and peanut slaw, shrimp, crab, and noodle soup, and skewered charcoal-roasted pork on noodles with fish sauce, mint, coriander, bean sprouts. Just as Duong and Phuong prepare it . . . .

Then drove back yesterday, stopping briefly in Windsor to visit the little Episcopal church and talk to Harry Lewis T. re: Monk ancestry, then to Nash County, Spring Hope, to talk to people about the Batchelors. And home. . . . .

In the car on the way home, Steve driving, I took out letters Daddy wrote from World War II and surprised myself by crying as I read them. Don’t know why. I suppose it’s the sense of loss—of his loss, his not ever having achieved anything near his measure. In some ways, this felt like the first real mourning I’d ever done for him—perhaps precipitated by my own corner-turning experiences of late.

And now. As I walked this morning, thought of the Shannon Faulkner case. Janet Reno recently said, ostensibly, that men who broke the gender barrier to become nurses are not required to put on dresses.

The point, it seems to me, is that the hierarchical male power structure Faulkner threatens must humiliate her. If it cannot exclude, then it must demonstrate its ultimate control over her and others by setting up a ritual of humiliation/subordination.

The head-shaving ritual already has that symbolism, for male cadets. It’s to initiate the cadet into the power structure, at the entry level. The whole structure passes power down, top to bottom, and requires subordination. It won’t work if one questions this requirement, or the motives or character of those above oneself.

Thus, it requires a tutelage in being subordinated, not questioning authority, accepting command, as a preliminary to one’s movement up. It requires that one learn to be pummeled, so that one may learn to pummel. It functions this way in any male hierarchical structure, whether church, university, corporation, or military.

This system doesn’t care about what people in “feminized” occupations—e.g., nursing—do. Men who become nurses are perceived as stepping down. No need to humiliate them. For men who seek to step up, such humiliation is extremely important, as an initiation into power.

Winchester, Virginia 3.9.07: Prancing Fawns, Absent God

Now in Winchester, Virginia, having driven (beginning 27.8.07) to Walterboro, SC, Edenton, NC, Williamsburg, VA, and now Winchester.

A pilgrimage journey, which began as we prayed a bit in St. Paul’s church in Edenton. Both Steve and I happened to open the bibles at the back of the pews to the Old 100th psalm—reassurance that the Lord doth us make and for his flock doth us take: therefore jubilate Deo.

I seem called in some way I can barely perceive to connect to my disparate spiritual roots. While we were in Edenton, we drove across to Bertie Co. to Scotch Hall, first settled by William Maule, who was, I have to think, a relative of my ancestor George Strachan through Maule’s mother Barbara Strachan.

We found Scotch Hall only fortuitously, by the kind intervention of an elderly librarian and a lady in the library—genteel old Southern ladies. They gave us precise instructions.

As we neared it, we came to a little chapel with a graveyard for the Lockharts and Maules who lived in Scotch Hall after William Maule and his family. As we neared the chapel, two little fawns pranced across the road: hinds’ feet in high places (though this was a very low one).

The chapel was deeply restful, breezes from Batchelor’s Bay sweeping around it. George Strachan lived just west of here on the Cashie. I know he must have been often to this spot. My Anglican roots, led a sheep in that particular flock.

Then in Williamsburg, we go to Bruton Parish and sit in one of those box-pew things, and I notice I’m sitting in a box that has a plaque showing that Paul Carrington sat there as burgess. Inside the box is a plaque saying George Clinton Batchelor had donated furnishings for the box. The Paul Carrington who was burgess was a son or grandson of Paul Carrington and Henningham Codrington, my ancestors. And George C. Batchelor is surely one of my Virginia Batchelor relatives, somehow—two more small reminders to pursue my religious roots on this trip.

We prayed a bit in the Bruton church, reading the Old 100th again.

As we drove north and neared Staunton, I told Steve I believed Tinkling Spring Presbyterian church, where my Kerr and Pickens ancestors were baptized, was somewhere near here, and wouldn’t it be nice to see. But how? I had no directions.

Near Staunton, Steve got off the highway to buy gas. I happened to see the road we crossed as we exited the freeway was Tinkling Spring. Steve asked in the filling station about a church of that name. They pointed across the road.

Gorgeous church, cemetery on a hillside. We went inside. Deeply peaceful. Read Jeremiah 31 with its promise to return the blind and the lame home, to live by brooks of water on a level road, to ransom Israel and guard Israel as a shepherd the flock. Again, roots . . . .

And today, Hopewell Friends’ Meeting, where my McKay and Jobe ancestors would have attended meetings.

Okay. Here’s the thing. All this sounds so pious, so clear, so smug, so certain. And yet our lives aren’t. They’re all too often shitty.

What we experience far more are the aporias, the inexplicable gaps in history caused by outright cruelty and malice. We grapple with the absence of God, with the dearth of any religious language to speak of the experience of being gay in a church that savages gay people.

Home? It’s all I’ve ever sought. Still waters, green pastures, God’s guiding hand . . . .

But where and how? How to sustain life in such a savage church and world?

Fakenham, 4.5.06: Lemon Posset, Women's Rights, and Lessons for Pilgrims

Writing now from Fakenham in Co. Norfolk. The last two days rather a blur.

After Chris left us on the morning of the 2^nd, Steve and I went to the library in Canterbury and found its local history section to be closed until the afternoon. So some aimless knocking about Canterbury—

To find a travel kit of multicolored thread for Trudie Reed, who says she’s found this no place else but in England. So off to Marks and Sparks, which didn’t have it. But we did buy things for supper—egg salad and watercress sandwiches, chicken and ham, ploughman’s. Found nice juices—raspberry and orange or strawberry and orange. And tomatoes and a mix of greens—rocket, watercress, and spinach.

We did find the thread at a sewing shop. Turned out it’s called a plait.

And suddenly I look up to admire an elephant—some cast metal; the b and b lady has many of them—that’s catching the morning light in our breakfast nook. And see the lampshade above it, which says, “Beatus vir qui non abiit in consilio impiorum et in via peccatorum”: another pilgrim moment.

We are definitely in via. And the way I seek on this pilgrimage—should seek—is that of the righteous and just . . . .

And back to Canterbury. Found that scented shelf paper we’ve seen only in the British Isles at the sewing shop. Got some lavender-scented boxes. Nice to go out of one’s way to fulfill the needs of someone else and happen on what one needs oneself: pilgrim, take note.

Then on to have a bit of lunch at a Cornish pasty place off the High Street. The day was close, and the air at the outside tables felt good. We sat and talked. To talk with fellow pilgrims often tiptoeing through a minefield. I must learn to be more aware (ware: Warten, watch?) of the needs and feelings of others. Another gift for which I pray on pilgrimage.

Then several hours of research in the local studies room of the library. It was mostly misspent time, except that I was able to obtain the originals of Dorothy Gardiner and Gregory Whatmore on William Watmer the mayor.

And they had bits and pieces of information no one had abstracted, which fill in gaps re: the Wynnes. E.g., once Robert and his wife died of plague, it was confirmed within three weeks and the house was sealed, a guard placed at its door. William Watmer had apparently removed the children by then. Their clothes had to be burned—hence the details in some family histories about local merchants providing clothes (for which the estate paid).

And that Watmer’s papers have survived and are in the Dean and Chapter library of the cathedral. The house on the north side of the High Street west of Mercey (from “mercer,” I find) Lane was owned by the Dean and Chapter.

That the “Scottesden” referred to in the Watmer lineage for arms is Stottesden in Shropshire. William Watmer left there as a young man to go to Canterbury, evidently because—Whatmore suggests—Robert Wynne had preceded him, going with William’s sister Frances. Whatmore says the Wynnes were from Canterbury.

The papers of William Watmer form the bulk of Consistory Court records of Canterbury in the early 1600s, and of dispositions from that period.

Picture emerging: when Charles was killed, there were riots in Canterbury in 1647 when extreme Puritans sought to suppress Christmas. In 1648, more riots. The man who ended up with the Wynne house—his name is in one of the articles; they’re not in front of me—was a Puritan who sought to mollify the extreme faction and was consequently arrested. The 1648 riots were caused by the court returning no true bill found in his case.

He became a Royalist in reaction and died within the year. Surely all of this—coupled with the fact that the mayor Robert died in debt—forms the background to Robert Wynne’s decision to head to Virginia.

And then there are the ties to the Randolphs, multiple ones, through both the Wynne and Epps families, that would have helped him in Virginia. The Randolphs seem to have had connections both to Massachusetts and Virginia, and a turbulent career in the former, which leads me to think that they were not thoroughgoing Puritans.

The picture I get of Kent is of a county much divided in the war. Hardline Puritanism throve in east Kentish places like Biddenden. Canterburians had a vested—an economic—interest in the business of pilgrimage and some must have run afoul of Henry when he sought to suppress the cult of Beckett.

It was a divided area that, by the end of the 17^th century, was a bare ruined choir—something on which Pepys comments.

Well, what more to say? A nice meal—the sandwiches, raw vegetables, and crisps—in our room that evening. I was excessively tired—heat, constant walking, lingering jet lag.

Next day, a quandary. There’s an Epps tomb in St. Clement’s church, Old Romney I’d have dearly loved to see. There’s Ashford, where the Slomans and Epps lived.

But that would have been to take us south when we needed to go north, and we found the Kentish Studies Society archives—to which the Canterbury library kept nudging us—was in Maidstone, east of Canterbury and on our way to Walsingham.

So we forewent Romney and Ashford and went to Maidstone. Where I found a baptism record, 1620, Ashford, for a Mary Sloman who has to be Mary Poythress Wynne.

And where I found the 1619 and 1663 Watmer pedigrees. The first is when William obtained a coat of arms by tying into the Watmough family of Ecclestone.

The second is his son Giles’s pedigree, showing the Randolph connection. I found in both books the Randolphs, Epps, Petts, etc., and copied multiple pedigrees. Amazing, the extent to which those Virginia families were—and would have known they were—cousins.

As we walked to the Kent archives—we’d managed to park only three blocks or so from them, not knowing we were close—we passed a house that had a statue of a nun in old habit holding a cross, facing out the ground floor windows.

On our return, Steve photographed her. As he did so, I saw in the upstairs window a Virgin Mary. As Steve snapped photos, I saw a shadowy presence looking out the window, and then a witch-like face glaring as she opened the door.

Pilgrims: beware. What appears to be a sign may be conveyed by a “witch.” Things are never as they seem. And grace may arise from unexpected places.

Then on—an interminable trip. We hit terrible traffic, a slowdown, skirting London. Only to find the M11, our main road north, was closed. So on to unexpected byways (pilgrim, take note), wending and winding, anxious about a bed to sleep in and a meal, since we’d had only breakfast earlier in the day.

Then, after driving through scrubby and slightly forbidding forest, past barren-looking fields of sheep, and into Fakenham, we stopped at the first b and b we saw. They had no room, but called a place called Smith’s Cottage on Smith’s Lane.

They recommended a pub at Colkirk (pronounced “coker”) for a late supper. Steve had steak and ale pie, Chuck and I fish and chips and peas. We finished with a lemon posset so buttery it was like eating butter beaten with lemon and sugar. Otherwise, food not distinguished, but the pub was very restful, clean, quiet, in a quaint little village I’d love to explore.

Interesting conversations. A woman, two men, the barkeeper (a woman). Woman at bar tells the group she’s half Spanish. The older of the men says he’s a typical English mongrel, too: he’s half German and partly Scottish.

One thread seemed to be about a soap opera they were watching, which has a repressive Christian character—a vicar?—who thinks the Jews should be killed. That led them to a conversation about how the Christians often betray Christian values. And that led to a protracted discussion of women’s rights and how women (barkeep’s contribution) have no option in today’s workplace except to defend themselves.