I, Roger Williams

It's often easier to write about how much we don't know about the lives of early American writers than to discuss the few fragments of the past that have survived. Roger Williams was an early American writer, but we have very little real detail about his life and works. Embellishing upon those few surviving fragments of biography and literature, Mary Lee Seattle created this remarkably poetic novel.

Out of the fragments of the past, she creates a fictional reality for the life and works of Roger Williams.

Moving back and forth through time and space, Seattle depicts the triumphs and tragedies of Roger Williams: his boyhood, education, voyage to America, exile from Massachusetts Bay Colony, founding of the Rhode Island settlement, and beyond. As he recollects his past, in the stillness of the American woodlands, he says: "I must learn to love this child who was myself, forgo shame and denying of his small hopes and fears and sins, and simply go there in my mind's eye and take him by the hand."

Exile in Rhode Island

Seattle re-imagines the drama that brought Williams to that backwoods settlement of Rhode Island, as the founder of a band of exiles and misfits. And she also discusses the dreams and nightmares of the past that must have still haunted him of old England, and all the trials there: "Who among you ancient men hide not your night dreams of old loves, old desires, old terrors, and old losses you thought had released you long ago?"

The controversies of his life and writing come to the forefront here, as she described how and why Williams was exiled. Finally, in danger of being exiled back to England, Williams was forced to wander in the wilderness, until his near-frozen body was discovered and he was brought back to life by a chief. Of that lonely wandering, Williams said: "To wander alone is to wander within the mind and there find angels, tigers, what's hidden, what's plain, and what you thought you had rid yourself of long ago. All is true with the eyes of sleep upon us, even what is had by masks."

Williams fought against the spirit of the colonial philosophy, which was built upon the belief that the land in colonial America was free for the taking. Williams argued that the land belonged to the Indians, and that no settlement could be established without first negotiating with the native inhabitants. As Seattle writes, "We take the world around us without thought. It is our shame to be blind and our sin to care not."

The immigrant Pilgrims were leaving personal persecution in England to found a new brand of repression and conformity in the new land. Williams continued to learn from the colonial persecution, and he learned from his neighbors. He even managed to publish a study of the Native American customs and language, which became a bestseller in England. Williams said: "I who thought I had learned so much had yet too much to learn. And still do. And there is little time. I still steer through a storm sometimes where the waves are high and the ship within my mind pitches and changes course."

In the end, Williams dies in his wilderness home, a place that had became his home. Near the end, Seattle writes: "I Roger Williams, have long been charged with folly for that freedom and liberty which I have always stood for, both in land and government. Such liberties for soul and body as were never enjoyed by any men, nor any in the world yet I have heard of."