The Wrath of God

The Wrath of God

Reflections on history while writing my novel, American Hero. 

Remember back in grade school when we drew turkeys from the silhouettes of our hands and learned that Squanto helped the Pilgrims during the first Thanksgiving?

Spoiler alert: I’m going to shred that illusion, so if it means a lot to you, don’t read on.

       •PILGRIM’S PROGRESS•

The Pilgrims were religious fanatics who didn’t come to America seeking religious freedom; Pilgrims came to America fleeing religious freedom. They hated those in England and, later, in Holland, who disagreed with them (Catholics, Jews, other  Protestants). Their basic belief: Some people are chosen at birth to be righteous; the rest will go to hell no matter what they do. You never know who is “good” or “bad,” but anyone who didn’t follow the Puritan rules had a seat warming up in hell.

These are the people who brought us the Salem Witch Trials. It was a reductive, joyless, intolerant way to experience life, one probably very comfortable to certain presidential candidates today.

       •ANGER MANAGEMENT•

Squanto, the “good” Indian, was really Tisquantum—not a name, but a title meaning “The Wrath of God.” It conveyed his status in his Patuxet tribe as a bodyguard of the sachem (the tribal representative, not quite a “chief”). Later, after he had been kidnapped as a boy, sold into slavery in Europe, escaped twice, and returned to his village to find everyone dead of smallpox, the name reflected his enraged psyche.

Yes, he taught the Pilgrims a few tricks he learned as a slave in farms in Spain, such as sowing the earth with dead fish so their nutrients would enrich the soil.

But make no mistake about the object of The Wrath of God. Tisquantum wanted the white men out of America. Unlike most other Indians, he had been to Europe. He had seen their weapons of mass destruction. He knew their unabiding greed.

When the Pilgrims built Plymouth literally over the bones of Tisquantum’s family in Patuxet, he immediately tried to unite the warring factions of Indian tribes against them while insinuating himself among them as a spy. But Indians, contrary to Hollywood’s guilt-ridden assumptions of super-nobility, are human beings. The tribal sachems fell over themselves trying to win favor from the Pilgrims to get their guns and wipe out their enemies. Their small-minded agendas prevented them from heeding Tisquantum’s warnings.

In a desperate effort, Tisquantum falsely claimed that white men kept vats of smallpox in underground cellars to infect Indians with the deadly disease. Ironically, this bio-terrorism occurred soon after when the British sold smallpox-infected blankets to Indians.

When Tisquantum’s plot was found out, his fellow Indians felt compelled to sentence him to death in order to please the gun-selling Pilgrims. In a last act of defiance, Tisquantum took his own life one cold, rainy night on Cape Cod.

       •GIVING THANKS•

I enjoy turkey and sweet potato pie as much as the next guy. And, I always find a lot to be thankful for, perhaps mostly for people like Tisquantum who not only saw the truth but did something about it.

       If he’s not an American hero, who is?