Letter from London

By Kathleen Stocking
Sun contributor

Dear Leelanau,

I don’t know if you’ve reached the place in your life yet, that you want to find your ancestors. It seems to be something that comes with age. Maybe you don’t care. I didn’t care for years. But the truth is that all Americans, I’m speaking as one here, came from somewhere else. Native Americans were always here, but what about the rest of us? Sooner or later we start to try to trace the trail back.

When I was a fractious teen at Glen Lake High School, my parents decided I should spend my senior year in Buffalo where my oldest sister was a biology professor. In September, before we drove out across Canada, my father told me if I got a chance to go to the Buffalo Public Library and see if they had a book, The Stockings in America, a book he’d heard about from his grandfather, Erastus Stocking who’d moved from New York to Michigan in the 1850s.

I found the book, a small ancient copy, which recorded George Stocking as an immigrant to Connecticut in 1633 from Suffolk, a Dissenter from the King and a Nonconformist; for the first time it occurred to me that maybe my rebelliousness was genetic. Stocking means a measure of standing timber ready for harvest, a “stock” or “stocking” as you would have stock on Wall Street. They were all lumberjacks. The name Stocking is recorded in a survey of English land owners in 1086.

People always seem to describe the New World as a wild and forbidding place, but for a tree cutter 400 years ago, any forest would have been pretty much like another. A cottage of hand-hewn timbers in Suffolk would have been little different from a cottage of hand-hewn timbers on the Connecticut River and in Connecticut the hunting and fishing would have been better.

England isn’t very big. It’s the size of Michigan. And, like Michigan, you’re never more than 60 miles from a view of the water. Six thousand years ago England was a European peninsula. Then glaciers melted, the sea rose, there was a tsunami and Britain became an island.

These are the two things I learned on the Internet about Suffolk County: the Magna Carta was signed there and there had been a ship burial, like the ones in Scandinavia, at Sutton Hoo on the Deben River. Pieces of that 1400-year-old ship are in the British Museum. I saw them. The British Museum, like your aunt’s attic, is crammed with stuff from all over the world, much of it looted during the heyday of British colonialism.

I liked London. I liked the restaurants where there were young people working from all over the world. I liked the sign on the side of the bus that advertised the 2012 Olympics on one side and, “Some people are gay, get over it,” on the other.

Half the people on the red, double-decker buses were from somewhere else. I liked that there were all different kinds of people on the bus: different clothing styles, different skin colors, different ages and, from the looks of things, different incomes; and those differences seemed to be just fine with everyone. I like a democratic prism.

Most of us on the bus, no matter where we were from, spoke English. I think the English people may disappear, once they’ve intermarried with everyone they colonized, but the English language is likely here to stay. English is the language of commerce, computers, and international travel. English got the beachhead.

Westminster Abbey, with all the tombs of all the kings and queens for 1,800 years, is beautiful. Parts of it were still under construction when Chaucer, in the last years of his life, was forced to join the beggars and thieves in the courtyard there. He sent several letters to the king asking for back wages for his services tending to the docks along the Thames but no one ever responded. Chaucer finally died in Westminster after a mugging. Only later did the palace honor Chaucer with a tomb, which was nice of them but he probably could have made better use of it when he was alive to stay out of the rain.

In beautiful spring weather I crossed and re-crossed London by subway and bus. It was easy and cheap. They had great maps. They had information kiosks all over the city staffed by the world’s nicest people. I liked the names for things: Burned Oak, Picadilly Circus, Knightsbridge, Tower Hill, Pimlico, Hay Market Square, Covent Gardens, Oxford Street, Charing Cross, Aldgate, Newgate, Cripplegate, Shoreditch, Cockfosters. In London my name wasn’t the only funny one.

My hotel was on Belgrave Road. The first morning I was served toast, eggs, bacon, juice and baked beans. Now I knew where my mother got the idea for her bean sandwiches which we all spurned but which she liked. You probably don’t need a DNA test for Englishness if you can eat a bean sandwich. Maybe my mother was English after all.

We all mythologize ourselves and my mother, to whatever extent she could, saw herself as English. She bought English biscuits in tins with the British flag on them. She quoted Shakespeare by the page. For years I thought Macbeth was some guy in Glen Arbor. When Queen Elizabeth and Prince Phillip sailed through the Great Lakes and passed in front of our house above Lake Michigan, my mother watched with joy and pride, daubing her eyes. There was the Queen!

I was young but I thought her love of the Queen was odd. Wasn’t that the queen of the country America had fought during the Revolutionary War, the country of those frightful tinned biscuits? In fact my mother was not at all English by heritage or anything else. She was at best Scottish and maybe Jewish.

Three families, the Lees, the Cushmans and the Finks, came over from Scotland in the late 1800s. My grandfather Lee married my grandmother Cushman. The Lee and Cushman families were close but my grandparents were not. Had they married each other because their families felt they needed to marry someone Jewish? Was Lee an anglicized version of Levi?

My mother kept matzos on a top shelf at Easter and said they were crackers. But if they were crackers why couldn’t we eat them whenever we wanted like the other crackers? When her breast cancer metastasized when she was in her 80s, she said that breast cancer was something to which Jewish women were more prone.

I didn’t know what matzos were, but I remembered how she’d stiffened when I asked her about them. When I made friends with Jewish students at the University of Michigan I learned matzos were the unleavened bread for Passover. I didn’t think about matzos again until Madeleine Albright was Secretary of State and reporters uncovered her Jewish heritage. I have no idea if my mother was Jewish; maybe she was mythologizing herself as that, too. What I do know is that she never researched her genealogy or showed any curiosity about it, and she was the kind who would have.

My father really was English; or more accurately, someone in his family had come from England. But he was also, just from looking at him, very likely part Indian and maybe part black. His family had been in the backwoods for 400 years where it wouldn’t have always been easy to find English people to marry. We know the black slaves escaped to the Indian tribes and intermarried. We know the pioneers married the Indians. Surely there were some French in the mix. What about the Lithuanians?

Somewhere I read about one of the ancient people buried in peat bogs and the DNA test showed that he had the same DNA as the people living in the nearby village. In general, people don’t move very far from where they were born. England was so small I thought I might be related to everyone there.

So one sunny day I got on the train to Bury St. Edmunds in Suffolk. I liked the idea that I might be related to people who had created the Magna Carta. For part of the way my seatmate was a lorry driver with a Cockney accent going to visit his mum. When I got off the train it was apparent that I wasn’t going to see much without a car. I saw no taxis. I needed water and walked to the nearest Tesco.

I thought maybe in the grocery store I would see people who looked like my father’s side of the family. Sure enough, there they were. There was a man with a high forehead, a long neck and an overbite who looked like a cousin. Once I was in an elevator in a hotel in Thailand and people started speaking Norwegian to me; they couldn’t tell. This man was blonde and sort of Danish-looking and, just like me, might have been related to the old guy buried at Sutton Hoo. Just before I asked his name, as I trailed him myopically out of the aisle with bottled water and into the aisle with laundry soap, the chickens of my ridiculousness, which had been flying dizzily every which way for days, came home to roost and the hawks of my reasonableness swooped down to feast on their weaker cousins, thus restoring the balance of nature and the vitality of the hen house.

The question, I saw clearly now, was not really where did we come from but how should one live in this world? What does a person feel drawn to? What does a person choose? I choose Blake’s compassion for harlots and orphans, Thomas More’s sense of humor in the face of death, Julian of Norwich’s idea that God is love, Chaucer’s way of describing April and lorry drivers with Cockney accents. In the same vein, I choose Walt Whitman, Chief Joseph, Mother Jones, Sojourner Truth, Woodie Gutherie, and Marilyn Monroe. Whoever my ancestors were they have been in America for so long that England has to be an infinitesimal part of my genetic heritage, and what does it matter? The reality is that we are all 96 percent chimpanzee and 29 percent daffodil.

Kathleen Stocking is author of the acclaimed book, Letters from the Leelanau (University of Michigan Press, 1990). Her “Letter from Romania” appeared in the July 26 edition of the Glen Arbor Sun.