The other day, when looking into family history for my March “Shipwreck Rose” column on the Ku Klux Klan’s eye-opening activities in Southampton in the 1920s, I read a New Yorker magazine profile of a charming rustic character by the name of Everett Joshua Edwards: my great-grandfather. The writer was Berton Roueché, who had a summer house in Amagansett. The issue was dated Sept. 24, 1949, and the profile stretched out over 10 pages. A lot of it was about whaling, but what interested me most was my great-grandfather’s evocation of the near-total isolation of Amagansett, which he painted as a pastoral paradise, in his boyhood.
E.J. was born in 1871, when Amagansett was considered the easternmost habitation in New York State. “Town” was East Hampton Village, and E.J. rarely went there as a boy. Why would he? The closest Long Island Rail Road station was in Sag Harbor, a couple of hours’ drive away by horse cart. E.J. was 24 by the time the L.I.R.R. pushed a line onward to East Hampton.
Roueché was clearly intrigued by E.J.’s picture of a village forgotten by time, Rip Van Winkleville by the Sea. Both East Hampton and Amagansett, he wrote, “remained almost motionless throughout the 18th and 19th centuries,” facing New England rather than Manhattan and, stretched out along the skinny neck of the South Fork, never a waystation for travelers, because travelers had no reason to pass through. Contemporary visitors from Boston or New Haven, in the early centuries of America, often remarked in their diaries and letters on this time-stands-still quality of life in East Hampton, too, before the alphabetical advent of the L.I.R.R. and the L.I.E. Apparently, many quaint customs and queer fashions persisted in isolation.
Among the peculiarities of East Hampton that persisted into the 20th century was not just the Bonac accent of the working people of Springs and Amagansett but archaic terms of speech dating all the way back to the 1640s and 1650s, when Englishmen arrived here via the Massachusetts Bay Colony — the Pilgrims’ pilgrims, who, we’re told, pressed onward to even farther shores because they were unimpressed by the oppressiveness of the Puritan authorities in the mother colony.
Family opinions and points of view persist as stubbornly as a family nose or cowlick. I wasn’t surprised to read that my great-grandfather detested both the increase in population and the march of progress. “Up-to-date doesn’t mean a thing to me,” E.J., who was tall and strong with a shock of white hair, told The New Yorker in 1949. “I’m old-fashioned. I believe in long drawers and keeping the Sabbath and the best good for all hands. I’ve seen a lot of changes around here but I can’t say I’ve noticed much improvement.”
As I’ve described a few weeks ago in my column on the K.K.K., it appears that E.J. was a thorough racist who positively ran at the sight of Black people, but he was also droll and rigorously upright, both in actual posture — 6-foot-1 in stocking feet at 78 and, “unlike many tall men,” Roueché reported, holding his head high — and in moral energy. (And here maybe I’m managing to approach the larger point I’m striving toward: that when the Bible says we are all flawed, it really means really flawed. Not just cute flaws, like sneaking the largest portion of cake at a birthday party or talking during the movies. No, we’re each of us profoundly flawed. I think that’s the biblical point, isn’t it? “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” I mean, it’s modern to talk in elementary school about ethical gray areas, but it takes some aging to understand that the measure of bad is, in all of us, big.) The Edwardses wouldn’t go whaling on a Sunday, no matter what appeared on the horizon puffing and blowing, and they never swore. The worst E.J.’d say was “cod dum” if particularly inflamed.
We had a dog named Wickus when I was in elementary school. My dad said that “wickus” was a word he’d gotten from E.J., his grandfather, archaic English, meaning a rascal. Our Wickus was a yellow lab and, indeed, a bad boy; he bit people. That’s one of only two morsels of our Puritan forefathers’ 17th-century rural English dialect that came down to me in actual speech. The other was “swivet,” a word used frequently in our domestic fold, meaning a total tizzy, sometimes in anger but always in emotional disarray.
My father, in one of his books, noted his antecedents’ use of the word “rank” not as a noun — and not in reference to rot — but as an adjective to describe someone who was tough, as hard as the hinges of Hell (or, since we’re discussing euphemistic interjections, maybe I should say as hard as hickory). Whether or not “rank” implied a certain wildness, I’m not 100 percent certain, but I think so. E.J. used “rank” to describe his own father’s and uncles’ extreme hardiness in the pursuit of right whales, adding also that they were “wild to go” and “not afraid of the Devil.” If you google “rank,” which of course I’ve just done, you will — after scrolling down and down — eventually learn that in actual Old English, “ranc,” of Germanic origin, meant “proud, rebellious, sturdy” and also “fully grown.”
Old English?
Old English was only spoken until the 12th century. I’m no etymologist, but it seems to me that we might infer from the survival of this particular and handy-dandy Old English word — from 1640-something, when the Edwardses, Conklins, Barneses, and others from the Amagansett side of the family tree sailed away from England, all the way up until 1949, when one of them was sitting at a kitchen table eating pie with a reporter from The New Yorker — that the settlers of Amagansett had originated from quite an isolated setting, with its own mulish dialect, back in Britain, themselves.
One word I’ve never heard out loud, or seen in print before reading Berton Roueché’s profile of E.J. Edwards, was the very delightful “pightle.” E.J. used “pightle” while edifying his city-sophisticate visitor on the topic of the dietary habits of rural Amagansetters in the 19th century. Because they “didn’t break the Sabbath on any account,” the Edwardses ate pie and samp for Sunday dinner, because both pie and samp — “a kind of porridge made out of hulled corn cooked up with dried beans and salt pork” — could be prepared the day before. Whether this prohibition on cooking on Sunday began at sundown on Saturday, as in Jewish custom on the Friday, I do not know, but the analogy of samp to cholent is obvious and, to me at least, very pleasing.
In winter, they lived on samp and salt cod. “We salted our cod out in the pightle — what they call the backyard now — and the stock ate the scraps,” E.J. explained. “During the cod run, our ham and eggs tasted like fish.” Merriam Webster defines “pightle,” origin unknown and dialectical, as “a small field or enclosure usually near or surrounding a building (as a house, barn, or shed).” Dr. Johnson spelled it as “pingle” in 1733 and defined it as “a small close or enclosure.” Wikipedia, noting its usage in dialects of Norfolk and Hertfordshire, adds that a pightle would often have been enclosed by a hedge.
A hedge! That’s funny, too: Here we have the origin story of the high privet hedges of the Hamptons.
E.J., looking back from postwar East Hampton toward the rural idyll of his youth on Atlantic Avenue (which was called Whippoorwill Lane, then, a name, sadly, lost in time like the whippoorwill itself), was unimpressed with the immigration of wealth. “There’s more rich and there’s more poor,” he said. “There’s less working and more worrying.”