Tom Swift Writer’s Notebook

The other day I finished “American Jezebel,” a biography of Anne Hutchinson. There are several positive things I could write about author Eve LaPlante’s fine work — especially considering the dearth of material available (Hutchinson lived in the gender equivalent of the Paleozoic era; a woman was scarcely allowed to speak much less have her words recorded and preserved) — but I won’t. If you’d like to read a well-researched book about a zealot who stood up to a society of prigs, give it go.

A few words, though, about a scene from the book. LaPlante tells the story of a woman who gave birth to a physically deformed baby. Hutchinson, a midwife who herself gave birth to a couple of pews full, helped the woman by discretely burying the stillborn baby. The reason? Most folks in the Puritan populace believed a deformed baby was a certain sign that God hated the parents.

That story prompted me to think of a tale from another noteworthy work of history, Tim Egan’s “The Worst Hard Time,” about the impossible living conditions that destroyed communities during the Dust Bowl. Egan writes of a town that hired a man to make rain using human tools. In other words, people believed rain could be made in the same way man can make doughnuts.

Of course, time moves on, science instructs, and so it’s not my intent to stand on the mountain of human achievement and rip people for not having the mental aids of today. Instead, I push the fast-forward button. In fifty or a hundred years people will read books about our years on the planet and giggle at us for some of our currently commonly held beliefs. Which ones? I’d like to offer a sober prognostication but, unfortunately, whenever I think of the question my mind always drifts to the easy answer.

This post was added on Wednesday, February 27, 2008 by Tom Swift at 16:22 and is filed under Reading Material.