America Climbs the Cornstalk 85 



Sarah Ann, and the Maid of Gloucester, and whether one had 

 yet made Capetown, and if the other had had luck a-whaling. 



There were few men in those coast villages. The sea 

 claimed all but the very old, the crippled and the spiritually 

 unfit. Hardly was a boy big enough to handle a hoe than he 

 was throwing it down to run down to Derby Wharf to wel- 

 come home the Eastern Queen; to stand shyly on her weather- 

 stained deck; to sniff the pungent odors from the hold 

 crammed with bales of tea and spices, kegs of rum, licorice 

 barks and molasses; and to stare admiringly at his own bearded 

 uncles and cousins who had strutted the Bund of Hong Kong, 

 and knew what it was like to sail clear around the world. 



Boys with that call in their ears couldn't stay in the corn- 

 fields. So it was the women and girls who spaded gardens in 

 April, after the herring had run up the brooks to spawn. The 

 women and girls dressed the fields with fish, and planted corn, 

 and hoed it through the summer while the bobolinks teased 

 them from the meadow grass. Women harvested the corn and 

 husked the ears. Not infrequently it was a long-legged girl 

 with Noah Webster's speller in her hand, who rode the bag 

 of corn to the miller. 



In these ways the whites were following the pattern of the 

 corn-planters who had preceded them. Roger Williams ob- 

 served of the Narragansett Indians: 



Their women set or plant, weede and hill and gather and barne 

 all the corne and fruites of the field. Their women constantly beat 

 all their come with hand . . . and take as much paines as any 

 people in the world. The women of the family will commonly raise 

 2 or 3 heaps of 12, 15, 20 bushells a heap. 



Yet sometimes the man himselfe, either out of love to his wife, 

 or care for his children, or being an old man, will help the woman, 

 which by the custome of the country they are not bound to do. 



Women's labor decreed corn rather than wheat as the 

 basic food crop. A woman could rival a man in the cornfield 

 where frequent and shallow cultivation is desirable. The corn 

 roots grow close to the surface and are injured by too deep and 



