In The Naughtiness of My Heart the Native American resistance view was given. In this segment I have decided to reread the text for the fourth time with an attention to the supernatural inclination of the author and to do my best to put the modern reader in the Puritan shoes of 1674-76, when dire portents and soon savage murder submerged the “New IsrŠ°el in These Goings Down of the Sun” in Heathen darkness.
Understand that the English and their Scotch, Irish and orphan slaves, and for that matter their West Indian House slaves of African Extraction all hailed from an utterly cultivated, tamed, broken world, a world where God had used Man’s many tiny hands to drive out the deviltry of heathenism, fell the forests that sheltered pagan ways and break the fertile Earth to His divine will. No chthonic deities yet dwelt under the land that had been pagan Europe and those vile papists that sought to maintain intercourse with the Devil via the cult of Catholic saints served as a buffer against the worse satanic hosts of Mohamed. There was not a mystery in the Old World. Every mile was known. Even the remaining forests were the hunting preserves of the superrich.
The Pilgrims were preceded to the New World by the Angel of the Lord who smote the Heathens and laid them low with plague. Other Heathens had taken up prayer. Still other Heathens—such as the terrible Mowawg man-eaters—allied with the covenant-keepers of New-England, for they had common enemies, the pious Heathen Metacomet and his screeching sorcerers who evoked the Devil in their powwows. To their back was the dark ocean and ahead of them, beyond the tilled land of the plantations, were hills and mountains covered with the Devil’s own forests, which fed his savage subjects without toil, through nut, berry and beast. The rivers teemed with fish, the skies with fowl, easily feeding men who failed to seed the earth in covenant with God and yet plagued the land and were a scourge upon it.
And they rose up and murdered the Christian folk in their towns and on their plantations. The savages were larger, stronger, swifter and more ruthless than Christians, possessed of the cunning of the Devil and his dark minions. While Christian men fled from the fiends, leaving their women and children and fallen fellows behind, the evil savages tortured, killed, captured and even took as their own the helpless—and what was worst of all—retrieved their dead from the battlefield so that they might be risen again as fiends before some devilish altar.
Christian Soldiers were left to lie and feed the Fowl of Heaven and the Beasts of the Earth, threatening to usher in a new age of deviltry.
To the south, in New York, the slaves of Mammon, false Dutch Jews, sold guns, powder, shot and rum to the devil spawn who pounced on the New IsrŠ°elites like fiends up out of the abyss.
The Quakers dealt fairly with the savages, enriching them.
Yet further south, in the catholic abyss of Maryland and the corrupt Anglican trading post of Virginia, sinful men smoked the devil weeds of the savages and bent their servants’ backs to toiling in service to that infernal crop.
Men smoked and drank like the Devil’s own children in Boston and in some un-churched plantations.
Monstrous births had occurred, with direful Creatures being born to the wives of covenant-keepers.
The report of a great gun had been heard in the skies above, as well as the rumble of some unearthly locomotion.
Humiliation is upon the land.
Praying without reforming had angered the Lord, whose solemn voice was soon heard throughout New England in the form of Calamity and of Beasts in man-form sent among the congregations to rob parents of their Children, to destroy Cattle, to embolden faithless servants. As the Heathens loyal to the Devil’s will rose up and murdered covenant keepers and freemen and Churches burned, so candles were removed from the righteous constellation of light that kept the Devil-haunted world at bay.
The dark forests and dismal swamps harbored savage enemies who issued forth as if from Hell in full view of God, who was, like a shepherd displeased with his sheep, of a mind to let the wolves exact his punishments upon those wayward flocks that had forsaken his benevolence.
