Warehouse of colonial junk: "A Faithful but Melancholy Account of Several Barbarities Lately Committed" by Jason Brown

Every Fourth of July, when America celebrates its independence, we are likely to remind ourselves of the lives of the generation of '76 and our inheritance from them, but we don't really stop much to think about our inheritance from the century and a half of European settlers who preceded 1776. The closest we come, perhaps, is on Thanksgiving, when we vaguely recall a colony struggling to survive and the way natives of this continent helped them to make it through those first years. In my school days, of course, the relationship between colonists and natives was whitewashed a bit to make it seem more harmonious than it really was. Nowadays, most of us probably have that one friend on Thanksgiving who will post some article on the truth of what went down between those early colonies and Native Americans, something like "The Terrible, True Origins of the First Thanksgiving." Still, I'd wager more Americans can name six signatories to the Declaration of Independence than can name six Europeans living on the American continent in the 17th century. 

John Howland the Younger would like to forget about America's early history as much as most Americans would, but for him, it's impossible. His link to the earliest days of America is as close to him as his name: "The name John Howland also belonged to my grandfather and his father, et cetera, in a more or less unbroken line of Johns going back twelve generations to the John Howland who accidentally fell off the stern of the Mayflower in a storm..."

Jason Brown's Maine he writes about in both this story and the collection of short stories of the same name this story belongs to is a mix of reality, some coming from his own life, and fiction. There really was a John Howland on the Mayflower, the one that landed in Massachusetts. There really is a town in Maine named for that John Howland from the Mayflower, although that town is inland and wasn't founded until 1818.

The younger John Howland of "Melancholy Account" has been trying to escape the fate that has befallen most of his family. Most of the family still living near Howland Island are proud but failing: "Striving constituted an unforgivable sin to those of us who believed ourselves chosen a priori and therefore beyond the indignity of scrabbling after the very things without which, of course, one found it difficult to feel chosen." The family boasts of its link to the first generation of colonists, its status as original Americans, but it has also continually sold that inheritance until the family only owns a few acres of the island bearing its name. It is losing to an encroaching capitalism that sees the island as nothing more than a quaint place for a weekend getaway. 

John the Younger has gone off to what you might consider the opposite part of America to escape the family and its crumbling fortunes. He lives in Tucson, where he struggles to pay his rent on his salary as a professor at a community college. His sister considers Arizona to be America's "third world," while John thinks of Douglas, Arizona, where his semi-fiancée Melissa is from, as "a scary DMZ filled with guard towers, giant Border Patrol assault vehicles, and attack helicopters roaming the lunar border with Mexico." Arizona is a land stolen from a different people at a different time, perhaps, and so it suffers from different anxieties. 

Much as John the Younger tried to save himself by getting out, he is still struggling. He has gone to rehab for alcoholism and other addictions, but he also presents with vague symptoms grad-school Melissa diagnoses as "disorganized detachment disorder." When stressed, young John sometimes exhibits "diminished motor control" or throws up or starts to talk too loud. John has asked Melissa to marry him, but she has mostly politely postponed her answer or told him she doesn't want to get married at all.

Americans are not ones to let a little history get in the way of a good story

The return of the native

There's a reason studios continue to make movies involving grown people returning to the places they grew up. It's an interesting twist on the typical narrative arc. Instead of the coming-of-age story in which a young person needs to grow up in order to confront some issue, the return-of-the-native story forces the hero, who thinks he has already had his climax of enlightenment by leaving home and escaping his demons, to test the solidity of his epiphany by going back to where the demons all live. 

John the younger has taken Melissa with him to his sister Bridget's wedding on the family island. Well, fake wedding. Unbeknownst to most of the family but knownst to John, his sister already married the guy a year ago. Bridget is the black sheep of the family, partly because she had the audacity to go off to New York to work to become wealthy, but also because the family rightly judges that she wants to use the island to make even more money, possibly by turning it into a tourist spot. She's the symbol of the America the family has had no choice but to keep selling its birthright off to. Getting married on the island is something of a test run for her, a chance to show her husband the potential profitability of the island because of its extreme "authenticity," which is, of course, hugely ironic given the fakeness of the wedding. 

But there is a shock announcement that throws a wrench into the whole thing. John Howland the Elder, 94-year-old grandfather to both young John and Bridget, who raised them both when their parents faded out of the picture, has decided to bequeath the house to young John. The main reason the grandfather has chosen John is simply his name; the house has always belonged to a John Howland, and John the Younger is not only the last John Howland in the family, he's the last one capable of creating more John Howlands. The grandfather wants to uphold the tradition, and the only way to do that is to pass the place on to John.

The grandfather couples this revelation with what seems an eccentric, second revelation: he will die the next day. He's already had the grave dug. He will lie down in it and die, of his own volition, and when he does, the family is to cover his body up. 

The younger John is momentarily dazed by being named the heir. On the one hand, he is fully aware that the reality of his family's current situation does not match their own self-image as the proud inheritors of all that's good in America. Yet John also can't resist the temptation of seeing himself as proud heir to his family's legacy. He imagines himself married to Melissa, who suddenly will see him as marrying material now that he's a landowner. Even though the house has no electricity and it's falling down, even though it is mostly filled with a "warehouse of colonial junk," they will somehow find themselves happy on the island, picking apples and drinking coffee as they watch the freezing rain through the windows, warmed by the fire. He quickly not only falls for the family's fake history, but he starts writing himself into the narrative. 

In one of the other stories from this collection, "The Last Voyage of the Alice B. Toklas," the same young John learns how telling lies can has the power to improve one's own life. "Melancholy Account," however, is the flip side. John is beguiled by the family's own false rendering of its history, a history that is in many ways synonymous with the history of America. It's a history full of "run-ins with the native people." The family only acquired the island when one of the earlier John Howlands "swindled the island away from the Abenaki chief Mowhitiwormet" in a "1640 land deal worth a hogshead of rum and twelve pumpkins." The same family later killed and were killed by the Abenaki. Some ancestors scalped the Abenaki and were paid by the Massachusetts government for the scalps.  

All of this is elided by the family now, until all that is left is a fake Martha Stewart authenticity just waiting to be sold off to the greedy capitalists in Manhattan. The title of the short story is taken from a Cotton Mather sermon on attacks on white Europeans by native Americans. Of course, the irony of the title is that in the larger historical picture, there is nothing "faithful" about an account of barbarities that leaves out the European barbarities. As Jason Brown explained in an interview, "In the context of the story (a fake wedding on an island in Maine), the title is meant to be funny. The historical context is, of course, not funny, though nothing is funnier than people who don’t understand their lives in historical context. Except when it’s not funny." 

You have to understand the guy whom you just can't understand

"Melancholy Account" leaves us with few choices for the rural New Englanders in the Howland family. They are caught between lapsing into a false version of their own history or being swallowed up by capitalism. Again, Brown provides a pretty good reading of his own story:

"In the wake of what we call global capitalism, many rural Americans (and people all over the world) have lost their sense of family, tradition, heritage, land, and ways of making a living. Those are real losses. But something greater is lost when efforts to hang on to the past and even turn back the clock turn into fear, bigotry, and xenophobia. We can’t go backwards, and the way forward has never been more uncertain."

The younger John assures us that you "can't understand the family without understanding my grandfather," but almost no effort is made in the story to do that. If the grandfather is the link to the real past, he remains shrouded in mystery up to the end, when he is on the mainland looking back at the island, run off by the "trespassers" Bridget has brought. The older John doesn't die, just like our own past never really dies, but neither does he leave a clear understanding of the past for those whose fate it is to live in the shadow of history. 

John would have liked to disappear into a version of his own history that would have allowed him to proudly inherit the past, but Melissa, the more grounded one, who believes it "doesn't matter how she feels," preferring to look at reality than to tell herself a comforting story, isn't sucked in. In the end, when John realizes he doesn't really want to inherit the house, but doesn't know how to go forward, Melissa predicts his future with a pronouncement full of double meaning. 

"Melissa," I said, my face growing hot, "what am I going to do?"

"You'll live, Melissa said as she let go of my arm and laid her cool palm against my cheek, "just like the rest of us."

Does that mean that just as we all survive, you too will survive, or does it mean that you will now live in a way that makes you indistinguishable from everyone else, your unique albeit troubled history erased?