Where does the story begin?
This is the book’s opening line; it is a volley across the court of net of history served with the intention of landing the ball in perfect spot on the court as if being unable to see where they are standing. This is a book that is about the recording of historical events as it is about those events themselves. Throughout the text are references to other texts. Secondary sources and primary sources alike are challenged and analyzed to get at the essential historical truth while always with the reminder that even those at the center of historical events are not always necessarily the most faithful source for determining truth.
To recapitulate: Cambridge (England), Iroqouia, Dedham, Deerfield, Madrid. In short, multiple beginnings, none of them truly “first,” each of them contributing in one way or another, to the story that follows.
To this list of five could certainly be added others—indeed, an almost infinite number. As with all stories that together form “history.”
The five cities which are mentioned here have all been introduced with a repetition of the same phrase: “Perhaps it begins in ____.” In turn, this phrase is situated by the narrator as a potential answer to the very opening line of the book. One would think that of all the questions to be answered about a specific historical event, one of the easiest to answer would be “Where does the story begin.” In his overview stretching form 1629 in England to Madrid in 1700, the author demonstrates to e actual difficulty involved where history proves to be a layering process.
“We find…a person in a very doleful, distressed condition…made to possess sorrow and pain to such a degree as to be a common subject or theme of discourse for all men to relate doleful things about…afterward God, in a very remarkable and wonderful works of power and mercy, not only gives release from sorrowful possession…but he is sitting at the feet of Jesus.”
The author quotes extensively from a paper published by Williams following his successful return from captivity among the “Indians” in which the subject is not the experience of captivity itself, but the purpose of writing a narrative account of such. One of the most popular genres of literature by colonists—perhaps the only successful genre—was the captivity narrative: stories of white settlers being kidnapped by the savage natives. Apart from the obvious inherent dramatic enticement of these accounts is an element very much in keeping with the entire paradigmatic reason for many British people being available for capture in the first place.
What Williams is essentially stating here is that captivity and release is a part of God’s plan and redemption for any sins a captive may have been forced to suffer committing involves writing an account of that experience with a clear focus on the part God played in being released back into the civilized world. The final words of the quote put the cherry on top: not only does writing an account bring redemption, it makes the captive special. It makes them part of a “chosen.”
“Savagery” and “popery.” The battle had been lost on both fronts.
Being captured is not the key to redemption. Nor is escape back into “civilization. In order for the captive to attain redemption, they had to give all the credit to God. But even then certain terms still applied. The young daughter who was captured along with Rev. Williams was not killed and did not return to her life among the colonists. Ever. As a teenager she married an “Indian.” Which would have been bad enough, but even that horror was compounded: he was an Indian converted to Catholicism by missionaries. This means Eunice was now a Catholic, which meant redemption in the eyes of the protestant Puritans was impossible. That the captive narrative is a chapter of literary history that is far more about religion than survival or culture clashes or violence or racism becomes demonstrably clear in her case in which even fulfilling the requirements of escape and subsequently writing about it would not have been enough to redeem her soul.
