The Serpent Cast Out of His Mouth a Flood

The Puritans mirrored in their descendant

Frontispiece for An Account of Anne Bradstreet: The Puritan Poetess, and Kindred Topics, edited by Colonel Luther Caldwell (Boston, 1898). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts. Public domain.

It’s winter break, the day after Christmas, as I write this. I’m alone in the house, and it’s early morning, still dark. I’ve been on the couch for over an hour, drinking the generic French roast I buy at Kroger, reading about the early Puritans in the Massachusetts Bay Colony: John Winthrop, the Reverend Roger Williams, the poet Anne Bradstreet.

I’m researching the context around my tenth great-grandmother, Mary Bradbury, the only accused witch from the Salem trials who, though sentenced to execution, escaped the hangman. I’m reading into the roots of American culture, trying to imagine these people—including my earliest ancestors on the continent—living on the frontiers of the earth in sometimes squalid conditions.

You may not think of squalid as describing the pilgrims, but when Thomas Dudley, the poet Anne’s father, wrote about the conditions in New England when his family arrived in 1630, he noted, "We found the Colony in a sad and unexpected condition, above eighty of them being dead the winter before; and many of those alive weak and sick; all the corn and bread amongst them all hardly sufficient to feed them a fortnight."

I read this, along with Winthrop’s famous sermon of that same year, Dreams of a City on a Hill, in my small house in the Ohio River Valley, Kentucky, nearly four hundred years later. We’re a long ways from the Colony and its depredations. My house is warm, the refrigerator filled with food: lentil soup, black bean enchiladas, a summer pasta salad, grapes, Mandarin oranges, pineapple, heads of kale, eight-grain bread, lemonade.

I count myself as lucky, and also fortunate that my own pilgrim ancestors—the Cutter’s, the Bradbury’s, the Perkins’s, the Hill’s—survived at all.

The more I decipher the past—the more I learn that it is my people who lived through it, who suffered these privations and held those offices—the harder it is to not compare my own station to theirs. Driving back from the clinic today, I looked at the graffiti splashed across the walls of the storage facility, the cracked concrete of the interstate overpass, the digital billboards and cement trucks and everything else and thought, What would they have made of all this?

I’ve taken on the overwhelming task of writing about Mary, born in England, who sailed on the Lyon toward Nantasket Beach, at the mouth of Boston Harbor, sailing, of course, to her destiny. I’d discovered this family connection from a book belonging to my father, John V. Beck’s work on the descendants of Lavina Locke, my fourth great-grandmother. I’d been talking to some of my colleagues at the high school I teach at, the eleventh grade teachers that taught The Crucible, as I had taught many years before, when I lived in the high desert of Oregon.

Just writing that sentence, I realize how strange and long my life has been. In my fifty odd years, I’ve lived in five states, held numerous jobs, been married and divorced, and became a father. By now, teaching high school, trying to build a side business from my photography and my writing, my daughter approaching high school graduation, I think, what else could possibly happen before I’m retirement age—if I can retire, that is—or even make it to my seventies?

Mary was in her seventies when she was brought to court, with depositions made against her by a child. Where will I be when I’m her age? Will I even make it that long? Will I stare at life, as she must have, with disbelief? Or, as some attested of Mary’s countenance, with patience?

On Christmas Eve, I turned fifty-four years old. Generally, I’m healthy, though there is a pain in my hips I can no longer ignore—possibly hip bursitis, or gluteal tendinopathy. I’ve been sitting a lot, I know—it’s the nature of my work as a writer, I suppose.

Over the course of these two weeks of winter break, I’ve taken on an enormous amount of work. Much of it is for my photography. I’m writing a business plan, laboring now over the executive summary, with the hopes of getting it mostly done by mid-January. There are several grant applications coming due beginning in the new year, and so I’m working on a series of composite photographs in Photoshop to ready my work samples. There are two travel grants I want to apply for—I’m thinking I’ll fly to Spain, beginning with Barcelona, to take part in the photography festival there this summer, meeting some photographers and museum curators in that country.

I have an essay to write for Black+White Photography magazine on Robert Frank’s anniversary edition of The Americans, which the Aperture Foundation was kind enough to send me. I have other ideas to write about, as well: the declining numbers of chimney swifts in our country, and my mother’s ancestors, apparently descended from Virginia slaveholders. There is, of course, my book manuscript as well.

I’ve promised a student’s mother I’d coach her daughter with her writing so that she could enter a contest with The New York Times, and perhaps another with our local Better Business Bureau. I’ve offered to teach my friend’s daughter, too, the in’s and out’s of the digital camera I gave her—she’s thirteen and wants to be a wedding photographer.

And then there’s this, the Substack, which I’ve not scheduled out more than a month, to be honest. There’s all the social media posts I know I should be making: Notes, for sure, but also Instagram, Facebook, maybe Threads.

This morning I went to an appointment with a nutritionist in Old Louisville. I have much to do: changing my diet, coming up with some sort of exercise regime, stretching my hips. Maybe it’ll require yoga, or a gym membership, or even rehab.

In a few weeks, I’ll begin again the commute to the high school I teach at in Oldham County. For a few weeks in January, I’ll grade the persuasive essays turned in earlier in December by my sophomores. I’ll shop on Friday evenings to get the bonus fuel points. I’ll clean the house, maybe climb the ladder to scrape residual willow leaves from the gutters. I’ll watch anime with my daughter.

My life will be difficult, but nothing like that of seventeenth century New England.

From The King’s Handbook of Boston Harbor, 1882. Public domain.

Today, I’m reading the sermon attributed to Winthrop, “A Model of Christian Charity,” where he says, “We must entertain each other in brotherly affection…We must delight in each other; make others’ conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of the same body.” We shall be, as he claims, as a city upon a hill, the eyes of the world upon us.

So how was it, I can’t help but wonder, that the people of Salem turned on each other? It wasn’t fear of witches, as we’ll see; rather, it was resentment, a hunger for land, and a desire for revenge.

I think of Cotton Mather, with whom I also share a common ancestor, who, in his 1693 tome The Wonders of the Invisible World, wrote, “The New Englanders are a People of God settled in those, which were once the Devil’s Territories; and it may easily be supposed that the Devil was exceedingly disturbed, when he perceived such a People here accomplishing the Promise of old made unto our Blessed Jesus, That He should have the Utmost parts of the Earth for his Possession.”

Then I’m reading the lines of Bradstreet, from her poem “Contemplations” of 1645:

Nor wit, nor gold, nor buildings scape times rust;

But he whose name is grav’d in the white stone

Shall last and shine when all of these are gone.

Not only he, but she. I think of both Mary and her husband, my tenth great-grandfather Captain Thomas Bradbury, who were given new memorial stones in the Salisbury Colonial Burying Ground, spearheaded by a descendant and dedicated, after many years, in June of 2023.

These past lives I examine, best I can, have not escaped the rust. The original stones of the Bradbury’s were broken to fragments, lying flat in the grass. Now their names are engraved anew, and for a time longer, they’ll be known. They call out from the burying ground.

“The Devil thus Irritated,” Mather continued, “immediately try’d all sorts of Methods to overturn this poor Plantation: and so much of the Church, as was Fled into this Wilderness, immediately found, The Serpent cast out of his Mouth a Flood for the carrying of it away.”

I’m looking at a country, in the year 2024, at odds with itself. We no longer trust each other. In Winthrop’s sermon, which he was thought to deliver on the docks of England before they set sail, are the seeds that sever the rich from the poor. In Mather’s writing, there seems to be a rage, as he was known to defend the waning forces of his day. Is it any different from what we see on social media, in the news outlets, on late-night talk shows?

Now, at the dawn of what I feel to be a new life, I have to think, what is it I have to say?

Out of his mouth, a flood.

Next time, readers, I’ll tell you more about Mary Bradbury and the crucible she was set in.