Prologue
How do I tell my children that I am the daughter of a pirate and a papist? Is that a necessary thing for them to know? I doubt it. Just as I doubt the wisdom of visiting Grandpa Tobias’s decrepit little house in Roxbury, looking for some ill-begotten truth that Mama Becca made me promise, on her deathbed, to find. And yet, here I am, honoring my pledge to the only woman I ever wanted as a mother.
“The commandments, Hanna!” Mama Becca gripped my arm with an uncanny strength for one too weak to raise her head for a sip of water. “I am taking two broken commandments to my grave. Don’t let me die a liar, as well.”
“You’ve broken no commandments. You’re the saintliest woman I know.”
“She keeps appearing to me in my dreams, reminding me of what I promised her. Please, Hanna. Do what I ask.”
“I don’t even remember Thankful Seagraves,” I lied, stroking Mama Becca’s clammy forehead. “Why should she matter so much to you now?”
“I swore upon your life that I would tell you the truth. That I would give you the letters that Thankful Seagraves left for you to read. After . . . after she disappeared, we found a trunk in Grandpa’s house. It was locked, but it was the only thing left. Maybe she left the letters in there. I don’t know if anybody’s taken it, or if it’s survived after all these years, but promise me you’ll go and find out. Promise me you’ll go and find the truth.”
“I know the truth, Mama. I was not born of your flesh. The woman who gave birth to me was a papist slave that Papa purchased from the pirate’s ship. I know you raised me and she left me. That’s all I need to know. The rest of it doesn’t matter. What’s done is done. Don’t vex yourself so much.”
“You must help me keep my vow, Hanna,” Mama Becca muttered, pulling me so close to her face I could smell the sour milk on her breath. “The key to the cottage is in a hollow in the witch hazel tree by the well. You will find what Thankful Seagraves left for you there. I gave my word on it and you shall have your truth or my soul will not rest for all the wrongs I committed against your mother.”
It was the only time Mama Becca ever admitted to any wrongs against Thankful Seagraves. And one of the few times she ever referred to her as my mother. I think the illness was distracting Mama Becca’s mind, but she seemed so certain that she would be judged a liar on Judgment Day that I had to promise her to come to Roxbury and look for this so-called truth. I did not want to leave her bedside, knowing how weak and close to the end she was, but the desperation in her eyes and her relentless pleading were too much for me to bear. I denied Caleb’s request to come with me, and I will not bring the twins into this, either. They know nothing about Thankful Seagraves. Their grandmother was Rebecca Greenwood, a merchant’s wife, a Visible Saint in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, not some mixed-breed, forked-tongued, Catholic woman transported from an ungodly country on a pirate’s ship.
The pirate that sired me was not English but Dutch or French, light haired and dark skinned, with eyes like mine, I was told, the color of fresh tree sap. Those who feared this man, my unknown pirate father, said he was more awful than Henry Morgan or William Kidd. Papa called him a buccaneer or a privateer, never a pirate, as it would not look well for the chosen children of God to be doing business with pirates, and nothing but Captain Seagraves to his face, though his real name was something else, something foreign that Papa could never remember.
Thankful Seagraves, the woman who delivered me into the world, hated this man, said little else about him save that, after pillaging her body and seeding a child inside her, the pirate had sold her like a household slave to the English merchant who is now, thank God, my papa.
“A mestiza can never be a slave!” Thankful Seagraves used to say to me, incensed at an injustice that I could never understand. Even when I was old enough to tell the difference between a slave and an indentured servant, between a blackamoor and an Indian, I didn’t understand or care what a mestiza was. She had a Spanish father and a mother who was a mix of Indian, Spanish, and some Oriental race, but all it meant to me was that Thankful Seagraves was a mongrel. She had eyes of different colors—one brown, one green—and skin like cinnamon bark and an accent so thick it made English sound like a foreign tongue. When she spoke, I cringed as though she were spewing spiders from her mouth. The truth is, I was afraid of Thankful Seagraves. I was afraid I would catch the way she spoke or that one of my eyes would change colors and look like hers. I did not want Thankful Seagraves to be my mother. She was a papist and a mixed breed and a foreigner. Who would want to be born of a mother like that? We had different family names, so it was easy for me to pretend we weren’t related. It was Mama Becca I always wanted.
Sometimes when she slept, names tumbled from Thankful Seagraves’s lips. For as long as I knew her, she denied that Thankful Seagraves was her name. “That is a falsehood,” she would tell me in her weird English. “Everything here is false, except you, my reason for living.” When I’d ask her who she really was, what her true name was, she would only shake her head. “That one drowned,” she would say. “This husk of a body is all she left.” Mine—or at least the names she gave me, not the ones I was christened with—she said most often, Juana Jerónima, pronounced in that raspy way of hers, in that foreign accent which turned the first letter of each name to a hiss. If it hadn’t been for Mama Becca insisting that Thankful Seagraves give me a proper Christian name, I would have gone through life sounding like a papist. Thank God for Mama Becca, who made her christen me Hanna Jeremiah. It is a fitting namesake: Jeremiah, full of woe, full of strife and dissension. I have been conflicted as far back as I can remember. All of my life I have opposed and rebelled, and the object of this rebellion has been my own self, a hidden part of myself that I have tried to forget but that now presents its shadowy form.
There was a time when I feared the sign of Thankful Seagraves would show itself in the faces of my children, that they would be born red skinned like her or, worse, with two-colored eyes. Perhaps the odd mixture of bloods that produced that variance in Thankful Seagraves has alchemized into a purer strain now that Caleb’s good English blood has joined the Dutch or French in my own veins. Still, the girls bear one telltale mark of the mixed breed: Clara’s skin has the color of honey, Joanna’s is like a light maple syrup, and yet Clara’s eyes are round green filberts, while Joanna’s are chestnuts, light brown and with the slightest downward slant. Oddly, both have full heads of curly auburn hair, where Caleb’s is flaxen and mine a hazel brown. Thankful Seagraves’s hair, I remember, was Indian straight and black. That curly hair must be a trait the girls inherited from the pirate.
I still do not know why Mama Becca was so prejudiced against my using those names for the twins—Clara and Joanna. And I know not why, when I held them for the first time, one in the crook of each arm, I was so certain those had to be the girls’ names. Caleb had no say in it. I just remember Mama Becca’s disappointment, the way she shook her head and muttered, “It must be in the blood.” I can only surmise that those names must have had something to do with Thankful Seagraves, but that is a secret that Mama Becca took with her.
The twins know nothing of their heritage, for they are still too young to understand such things, but even when they are older, I will not tell them. I have never felt the obligation or the desire to share the dark intimacies of my childhood with anybody. Even Caleb, who was there much of the time, does not know everything. I could have put it all behind me and lived the rest of my life a contented woman, but now I am forced to return to Grandpa Tobias’s house in Roxbury and face this specter named Thankful Seagraves. Copyright © 2007 by Alicia Gaspar de Alba. All rights reserved.