Amara remembered Ms. Hempel. “Look at the Chinese!” she added. “They had poetry, and philosophy, gunpowder and noodles and silk, when all those Europeans were running about waving clubs at each other. Wearing animal pelts!”
THIS WAS A WAY OF THINKING that Ms. Hempel couldn’t quite rid herself of. As she accompanied her class through the Reformation, and the growth of European empires, and the race to explore, and the discovery of the new continent, and the settlement of the first English colonies, she often found herself wondering, What was going on in the rest of the world? Her thoughts would begin, Meanwhile, back in China … but she wasn’t sure how to finish the sentence.
All she could say for certain was that the English colonists seemed an unhygienic, scrabbling bunch. They died off at an alarming rate.
“Does that mean we’re going to see people dying?” asked Jonah.
“Possibly,” Ms. Hempel said. “But if anyone dies, remember that it’s a re-creation.”
“It will look real, though,” Jonah said. “Won’t it?”
It should, if Plimoth Plantation recreated death with the same devotion with which it clothed its inhabitants, bred their livestock, built their dark and smoky homes. Ms. Hempel had studied the brochure. Upon any day of the week, one could step back into the year 1627. Scores of thrifty colonists would mill about you, busy with their chores: cleaning muskets, plucking chickens. And when you asked them a question—Why did you come to America? Or, What is that there you’re growing?—the colonists would look up mildly from their labor, and offer you an off-the-cuff and fascinating answer. They might then introduce themselves: Captain Standish, Goody Billington, Governor Bradford. Each colonist’s accent was true to the English county from which he or she hailed. Even the swine were recreated: modern pigs, being too dainty, had been crossbred with a warthog; thus the hairy, truculent animals that now rooted about at the edges of the settlement. Ms. Hempel was very excited to see it all for herself, even though it did mean spending a long time on a bus.
“Ask lots of questions!” she yelled, trying to secure the seventh grade’s attention. The bus was luxurious, its seats high-backed and plush. Probably every kind of mischief was occurring, unseen. “You will get the most out of the experience that way!”
Ms. Hempel worried that her students might be overawed by the colonists, might spend the whole day staring at the strange pigs. So she had assembled a list of suggested questions, of the type that curious seventh graders might ask an English colonist. These she distributed as the kids came careening down the aisle of the bus, tangled up in their backpacks and clipboards and sweaters. Ms. Burnes waited outside to make sure they didn’t go anywhere.
Ms. Hempel stepped off the bus last. The air! It delighted her, it was brisk and wood-smoky; it smelled the way early music sounded: thin, feverish, slightly out of tune. Ms. Hempel hurried to the top of the path, flapping her hands to encourage the seventh graders, who tended to clot and clump and meander off into the distance; she touched their arms, she called to them, “Just a bit farther! Just over the crest of that hill!” And there it was: the settlement, the colonists, the sea. The blue sky, and the white smoke rising up in wispy streams. The roofs, gray and matted; the gardens, brown and stumpy; the roosters, red-crowned and wandering. The fort, with its cannons peeking out from under its eaves. The high, ragged fence, running along the perimeter of the settlement. Its purpose was to protect the colonists at night—to keep out the Spanish, or unfriendly Indians, or wild, hungry creatures of the forest.
“But you don’t sleep here, do you?” Jonah wanted to know. “After this place closes, you go home.”
The colonist scratched at his delicate beard. “Aye, I go home and sleep in my own bed. You can see it yonder,” he said, pointing at a gray roof. “And if you happen upon my wife, you tell her that I will be back for the midday meal.”
About ten or so seventh graders had another colonist surrounded. He was leaning jauntily upon an axe.
“What was the voyage over like?”
“What was your profession in England before you came here?”
“Did you come here for religious freedom or economic opportunity?”
“How do you feel about King Charles marrying a Catholic?”
“What is the literacy rate in the colony?”
They looked up from their sheets and stood braced for his answers, their clipboards jutting forward. Soon they would be free to climb on things and poke long, tough blades of grass into the animals’ pens. But the colonist, suddenly, had turned gruff. “I was a planter there, in England, and I am a planter here,” he said, before wielding his axe and letting it fall decisively into an upended log. The seventh graders moved away, in search of a more obliging colonist, and Ms. Hempel followed, whispering, “Have conversations with them.”
But some children needed no prompting. Peering into the dim interiors of the houses, Ms. Hempel saw Annie explaining, with many violent shakes of her pencil, why Indians ought not to be called savages; Daniel squatting beside the fireplace, examining the contents of a big, tarnished pot; Maria reaching out and stroking a woman’s dress, asking, Is it scratchy? Does it itch?
Jonah was looking around for the dying. He couldn’t even find a colonist who was feeling sick. He ran up to Ms. Hempel and told her this, rather pointedly.
“It isn’t winter yet,” Ms. Hempel said. “Come back a few months from now, and they’ll be dropping like flies.”
She drifted about the settlement blissfully. She ran her fingertips along the fence; she pressed her nose into the marigolds that hung drying from the ceilings. She asked, in every house she entered, what was cooking for supper. The seventh graders darted about her but they seemed,
