Paul Sandy. The Kitchen at Sandpit Gate, ca 1752 RCIN 914333
or, Embrace the Everyday
Chop Wood, Carry Water is taken from a Zen saying: Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.
Yes, I read the classic book decades ago when my life had fallen apart pretty completely, and when I dismantled it again recently, similar principles applied. After processing archival collections, sorting sewer bills and love letters– toiling in the salt mines of the mundane–I came to appreciate Chop Wood, Carry Water even more. The world isn’t really binary, but it can feel that way.
Paul Sandby. At Sandpit Gate, ca 1752 RCIN 914329
We look up out of the trench of daily life and think we see giant, heroic figures doing great things, and we feel jealous. We want to feel special. Some of us want to feel pretty, or handsome, or important.
Some of us want to chop wood, carry water.
Paul Sandy. The Kitchen at Sandpit Gate, 1754. RCIN 914331
The way to make living history more interesting and more relevant is to go deep into the everyday. I don’t mean spinning– unless you tell me why you’re spinning, and I hope it’s part of Boston’s failed “We’ll make it all ourselves!” Little-Red-Hen experiment of the late 1760s–I mean living. Everyday things.
Dishes, laundry, three meals, sweeping, making up beds, mending, chucking the cat out the window, checking on dinner, chucking the cat out the window again. That’s the background against which all of the Great Men and Remembered Ladies stride and saunter. Us. You and me. Waking up with frowzy hair, blinking in the pale light of dawn. That’s the world the Great Men woke up in. That’s the world they occupied most of the time.
When we recreate Great Moments, we’re only replaying the highlight reel. Without context, those moments have less meaning. You’ve heard this sentiment before.
Chop wood, carry water. Embrace the everyday, bring everyone back into history.
But here’s the thing: if the Monday is emphasized, the Massacre stands out. Focusing on the normal makes the unusual ever much more so. And in the case of Monday, March 5, 1770, the usual is actually unusual.
Paul Revere, “The Bloody Massacre in King-Street, March 5, 1770.” Boston, 1770
Over the course of the month leading up to Saturday’s event, Drunk Tailor and I spent a lot of time talking about the night watch, peddling, food supplies to Boston, population, and what I might call “the texture of everyday life” in a meeting at work. Any reading you do forces you to realize that the key to the Massacre is how very abnormal everyday life had become in Boston that winter.
Edward Langford, disaffected nightwatchman. @BostonStrolls on Twitter
By 1770, Boston was an occupied city: Ferguson comes to mind, or Ramadi. Soldiers and watchmen patrol the streets, civil and martial structures clash, and the Sons of Liberty chafe under this control– or attempt at control. Scuffles, fights, brawls, break out. A boy is shot to death– accidentally– and tensions mount higher. Sailors and soldiers alike commit acts of vandalism. Women are assaulted. Normal isn’t normal anymore, and Boston was always expensive to live in. Even in a city occupied by “friendly” forces, gathering supplies and going about one’s daily business became harder.
People are scared. This is a tense city. Lots of people are just trying to survive. Lots of those people are children. Roughly 16,000 people, and if the estimates are correct, 2,000 soldiers and 4,000 men (white, African, other, free, indented and enslaved), which means about 4,000 women and 8,000 children under 16. Let that one sink in: lots of children, lots of teenagers. I don’t know about you, but a city with a large population of teenagers is going to be tense under the best of circumstances, even in an era before the rise of youth culture. Hormones, man. The kid can’t help it.
So imagine this: instead of a mobile monument and a commemorative ritual that substitutes fists for muskets, the Massacre commemoration expands to include the day, and not just the night. Monday and a Massacre.
Townspeople hurry home as dark falls. Women lug laundry back to customers or to the washhouse, or trundle barrows home, empty, after a day of hawking cats’ meat, oysters, or fish. Tired cordwainers trudge the streets, hoping for meat at supper. A mother scavenges firewood to warm her rented rooms, keeping an eye out for the watch. Those are not Mr Hutchinson’s fence posts, truly.
Photo by Tommy Tringale (Claus’ Rangers, 2nd NH, 3rdMA and HMS Somerset)
Women look over their shoulders, nervous at the sound of hobnailed shoes on the streets. Older men skirt closer to buildings, out of the way of soldiers in the street. Apprentices mock an officer, a sentry responds.
Insults, a scuffle, a boy knocked down. A mob, soldiers, a woman shoved, shots fired, men killed and wounded, blood on the snow.
Murder in the midst of the mundane. More horrifying (in truth, I have never heard Boston so silent as I did on Saturday night) within its context than set apart.
The Women of the 2017 Boston Massacre commemoration. Photo by Drunk Tailor at the behest of Our Girl History
The benefits?
A more complete picture of life in 1770 that puts the events of the evening of March 5, 1770 into deeper context and thus a sharper contrast.
A recognition that history isn’t just about men and conflict.
Understanding that what made living under occupation so hard was more the living– trying to be normal–than the occupation.
And, yes: more for women to do.
Lately, I have felt like a street preacher exhorting people to change their ways.
Feel the power of the primary source.
Behold the possibility in the unknown.
Surrender to uncertainty.
It’s not for everybody, I know. But rethinking reenacting will change not just you and your appearance, but the way you “do” history. The more you dig in, the more you question and change, the more engaged you’ll be—and the more engaged your visitor will be. The more fun you have, the more fun the public will have.
“That’s great, Aunt Kitty,” you say. “But how am I supposed to do that? I’ve already learned rabbtre sous le main and buttonholes and pinning my stomacher and making soap. What more can I do?”
Stop asking how. Start asking why.
Look, I get it. Those 18th century skills are hard to acquire. Tons of people have better skills than I do, and I willingly and happily admit my general incompetence.
The Soap Boiler and Candle Maker. Popular Technology or, Professions and Trades.
Take soap. I cannot make soap. I know that it takes lye and tallow and heat. I know it is slimey and hot and dangerous and vaguely disgusting. (I’ve done my time with tallow candles, thanks.) So I respect the soap.
But honestly, so what? is the question I ask when y’all tell me how to make soap. I want to know why you’re making soap.
Are you selling it? What will you wash with it? How often do you do laundry? Do you share the soap? And if you’re selling soap, how do people know to come to you? Why is your soap better than, say, Bono Brown across the river? He’s cheaper by a penny, why is your soap so special? If you do sell it, what do you do with the money? Are you married? Does your husband drink the profits?
Jean Siméon Chardin Soap Bubbles, ca. 1733–34 The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Wentworth Fund, 1949 (49.24) Soap bubbles I can do.
Tell me a story. Tell me why you’re doing something, or why it was done in the past, not just how. Then I might give a damn. But telling me only how a musket works, and not why you have it and where you got it and what you’ll do with it and whether the sergeant yelled at you the last time you failed to clean it and the punishment you got when you failed AGAIN to clean it…. Well, you see what I mean.
Change the question, change the answer, change how people see history.
Kirsten Hammerstrom 
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