I’ve been digging around the roots of the family tree, and
discovered an ancestor from the 1640s in Virginia who had a wee farm. Of 2,000
acres. Don’t get too excited—he probably came over as an indentured servant,
and a lot of the farm was marshy—more sea than land. We aren’t talking royalty
here-- He was a tobacco and sustenance farmer. Aside from farming, he must have
loved the sea, since he dwelt within sight of it until the end of his days.
His name was Richard, and he had three wives over his long
life. Wife one was Dorothy, definitely an indentured servant, according to the
records. How desperate was an Englishwoman like Dorothy, to indenture herself
to live in the dangerous, god-forsaken colony that was Virginia? Richard agreed to
buy her freedom from another planter, by “replacing” her with a servant from the
group due to arrive on the next ship. She gave him the son from whom I am
descended.
The next wife was Ruth. She was a pistol, and Richard must
have loved her to put up with her wild ways. Ruth was convicted of fornication,
and had two sons “from the other side of the blanket.” Richard stood by her and
got along so well with the two illegitimate sons they eventually took Richard’s
surname. Now that’s being broadminded, all the way around, for the 17th
century or any other time.
Wife three was Elizabeth, a much younger woman, who was with
him to his death. Richard referred to her in his will as his loving wife,
leaving her a life estate on his farm. The will mentions distribution of the
acreage, cows, sheep, horses, tobacco, bedsteads, and a few other basic, household
goods among the five children. Not a bad estate for a man who had arrived in
the New World with nothing and did not own slaves.
In those days, conditions in Virginia were so harsh, that
many, especially indentured servants, did not survive their first two years in
the colony. The first year, called the “seasoning,” would have included
scorching, blistering heat, followed by an icy winter, when water drawn in
buckets for the livestock was frozen by morning. Clouds of biting insects, diseases,
back-breaking work, crop-failure, and scant food for many years was the lot of
most colonists. Setting traps for game, netting fish, eating venison, turtle, wild duck, geese, and
mud-hens, and glad to get them.
Richard, who’d been converted to membership in the Society
of Friends by an itinerant preacher, noted in his will that he was departing
this life with much more than he deserved. He committed his soul to God, his body
to Mother Earth. I can find no known remnant of his dwelling place or his
grave. Much of the land is still under cultivation, right down to the marshy
edge of Gargathy Bay, with its outlet to the Atlantic Ocean.
The place names from Richard’s day fascinate me. The creek
near his homestead he’d named “Long Love Branch.” The plantation--no, not Tara—it
was probably originally one room and a dirt floor-- was called “Arcadia,” a
reference to a district in ancient Greece, a symbolic, lost, rural place of
innocent bliss, as the dictionary tells me. A school near the site of his farm
bears the name Arcadia to this day.
You may have heard a Latin expression:
Et in Arcadia ego.
Roughly translated, it means “I too lived in Arcadia,” and
as an inscription on a grave marker meant the departed one had also enjoyed the
metaphorical pleasures of an idyllic place, his own personal Arcadia.
I too lived in Arcadia.
Learning about Arcadia, Richard’s farm, explains a lot to me.
In high school my group of friends joked a lot about running away to live on an
island. I was the one who actually did, when I slipped off to live for 15 years
on Ocracoke Island, on North Carolina’s Outer Banks. I worked as a commercial fisherman
for years, and I’m sure that Richard took what fish, clams, crabs, and oysters
he could from the teeming waters near the farm. Although I have never raised
enough food to sustain me, I’ve dabbled in gardening, dirt under my
fingernails, since I was a child. I have had a compulsion to plant flowers, herbs, and
vegetables, even when I lived on sandy Ocracoke.
My years on the remote island were often idyllic, although
not without struggles and heartbreak. Yet, there I was free. The simple kind of
free that comes from not owning much, having few bills, being able to walk to
work or the grocery store, futzing around in a garden, having a few books and
the time to read them.
So when I discovered Richard's Arcadia, I was not entirely surprised. Not to get all New Age-y, I believe some of us have a genetic memory that may
affect our lives in ways we don’t fully understand. These memories pull on us, giving us dirty hands
at the end of a summer day, calling us to live near the sea, and making our ears prick up at the sound of Canada geese flying overhead.
As their 10th generation granddaughter, Richard’s and Dorothy’s blood is present in me, even across
four centuries.
