A Mary Dyer Pilgrimage

Last week I went to Newport, Rhode Island for several days. It had been on my mind for months as a trip I intended to take as part of my project; when I was planning the book I envisioned the conclusion taking place there, featuring my pilgrimage and direct encounter with the past. I wanted to do it to include June 1, the date of Mary Dyer's execution, and also go to Boston to see her statue there (again, I've seen it in the past). Those parts didn't quite work out, but I went on June 5 so close enough; the season was still right (the light, the look of nature). Even though it is no longer the conclusion of a book, I still want to be able to write about Newport and what it was like to go there, to have actual images for my poetry or prose.

It was a wonderful trip. My most striking experience happened on the way down, however. My first stop was in the town of Portsmouth, to see a memorial herb garden that has been created to honor Anne Hutchinson and Mary Dyer, as well as the founders of the settlement who signed the Portsmouth Compact. It was a peaceful and lovely place, set beside Founder's Brook, with birds warbling overhead in the trees. But what was amazing was that as I sat taking notes, a truck pulled up and two men and a dog got out to do some pruning. I ended up talking with one, Michael S. Ford, and it turned out he is the person who largely created the garden and maintains it; he is a 12th-generation descendant of Anne Hutchinson and an 11th-generation descendant of Mary Dyer, and a master herbalist who feels that he may have inherited this calling from them, and an amazing visual artist as well. (Unfortunately he has recently had to close his business, Apollo Botanica.) He lives an hour away and can't get to the garden all that often, so that our time there coincided felt very meaningful to both of us. We have emailed each other since then and shared some of our creative work with one another, and I've sent him a donation to buy plants. There isn't a foundation or anything supporting the garden; he's basically doing it on his own, although there is a group of women in the area who are also involved in preserving these women's memories locally. They are evidently less known there than they are within academia. . . .

Garden sign (created by Michael); garden with midwifery herbs; Michael in his garden; one of the memorial benches -- it was arresting that the Hutchinson line inscribed here is one I used in my poem "May-shine."

The challenge in the trip was how to connect with the concrete, place-based memory of Mary Dyer when no real traces of her past there visibly survive. Reflecting back, the hunt to find connection, the need to engage my imagination in doing so, to make something out of next to nothing, was actually very enjoyable, and gave me a focused and imaginative sense of pilgrimage rather than a touristic one. I had to explore as a poet/writer, not (only) as a historian, although of course I was paying close attention to the documentation more research-minded folks have collected.

Here are some things that were meaningful to me, where I felt like I was touching the past as much as it was possible to:

Between Portsmouth and Newport, a view of Dyer Island, which was claimed by William Dyer on the way down. It has always been uninhabited. Sitting on a pier here with mostly nature in view I had my closest communion with the landscape as it would have been. They saw this. So flat, so much sky -- in that sense I connected it with the feeling I get in the midwest.

Dyer Island in the distance -- it's so low you can barely make it out in the picture.

Broader view of the bay from the same site.

A view from Battery Park in Newport, which is where a spot called "Dyer Point" is, and marks the south end of the Dyer property:

I came here twice at different times of day.

This is Cypress Street, just a bit north. Experts believe the Dyer family burial plot (and the house itself) was underneath this or in the grounds of the Naval Hospital you see to the right). In the nineteenth century, multiple Dyer graves were moved to Newport's Common Burying Ground -- where one of the lanes is a "Dyre Street" as are some other little lanes near Cypress -- but William's and Mary's unmarked graves were missed. In July the Dyers' biographer/historian, Johan Winsser, is hoping to do some underground surveying to see if he can find traces. So nothing old there at all, and yet I knew I was standing as close to her body as I possibly could, and then I went to the water and was seeing the shoreline and view (if you subtracted all the development) as she would have seen it from home. I actually got tears in my eyes.

No access to the naval grounds on the right. 

Looking at the rusted chain around the gate you see here I thought, the past is a locked gate, literally and figuratively.

I had lunch at the White Horse Tavern, perhaps America's oldest inn, which was a tavern since 1673 and a site for many public meetings -- after Mary's death, but William would have gone there. There was a house there before the tavern. The interior is amazingly intact in its seventeenth-century features throughout; you really felt you were in a period interior. I brought home a souvenir glass with their logo.

I was sitting by the enormous fireplace. There were multiple rooms much like this.

The other amazing thing happened on the last day of my trip. I went to the Newport Historical Society and asked if I could see Dyer-related holdings. I was nervous because Michael had said they were patriarchal and anti-Dyer there, but I found the people I dealt with perfectly friendly and very well-informed. A famous 1905 painting of Dyer going to the scaffold turned out to be up in Providence, so the one thing I could see was a 1644 land conveyance deed signed by William and Mary Dyer and Samuel, their nine-year-old son. So there I was gazing on (although not touching!) a paper that Mary had literally looked at, upon which her hand had rested. And seeing her signature, so literate and delicately feminine.

I purchased a quality scan of the entire deed, but this is the interesting part. 

"Dyre" was the more common spelling then, Dyre/Dire/Dyer all variants not standardized yet.

Newport has been a deeply resonant place imaginatively for me not only because of Dyer, but because Jews arrived there in 1658. Sephardic Jews, so not exactly my direct ancestors, but it still felt like the clearest place my genetic/actual inheritance and my chosen spiritual inheritance occupied the same ground in 17th-century New England, the place I study. Newport is the site of Touro Synagogue, the oldest standing synagogue in the New World, and the occasion for George Washington first issuing a letter declaring religious toleration as an integral principle of the United States. It turns out that a Quaker family was central to the preservation of the structure for the many decades between when the original congregation dispersed around the Revolutionary War and when a much later Jewish immigrant population began using it again in the late 1800s -- basically the last Jew out handed them the keys and asked them to take care of it, and they did, for generations. And the Jewish cemetery a couple of blocks away was the basis for Longfellow's famous poem, which I have read and taught for years (it's highly problematic, but also very lovely, especially in its handling of sound).

Touro interior.

Well, it wasn't all colonial history. I walked on the famous Cliff Walk some, got at a least a quick drive-by peek at the amazing mansions, ate a lot of fresh seafood, breathed ocean air, and spent some time on the beach. I would very happily go back!

At Sauchest Beach in Middletown, RI.