TWO NUTMEGS AND A POUND OF GINGERBREAD

The first Milstead in America that we know of was Edward, born in 1656. He lived in Bethersden, Kent, England and was deported in 1674 for stealing 2 nutmegs and a pound of Gingerbread. After serving an indenture to pay for his passage, he went on to acquire land, marry thrice, and father a number of children, from which many of the Milsteads in America are descended.

The life and times of my family and how-we-came-to-be-here were changed drastically three hundred and thirty-five years ago, when a Great-to-the-nth-power Grandfather was transported and indentured-for-passage, for the theft of two nutmegs and a pound of Gingerbread.

My mind jumps immediately, not to the history and the hard-earned sea journey with its deprivations and hard hours with scant food, no sanitation, and below-decks pallet holding fitful dreams, but to the BEFORE of it, the home and the lacks---the small, airless house, the meager fire, the scant, floury diet of the unlanded and poor. There’s a Les Miserables feel to it---though he would have probably been obstinately John ValJohn---that seventeen-year-old who put out his hand and grabbed those exotic small stones, seductive with the whiff of hot climes and their ride in the dusty dark of a rough camel-bag along the Spice Roads.

Were they a whim, a fancy, or did the elusive fragrance capture his cravings so fiercely that he had the need to carry one of the little brown nublets in his pocket? Did the bland potatoes-and-dough diet, the Winter-long lack of anything green or crisp or bitter of his home table spur his hand to flash out and capture the fragrant prize? Perhaps a taste of a street-bought sweet flavored with the spicy specks caused a Goblin Market quest for more. Or could they have been for a sweetheart, from whose youthful love he was snatched forever. I like to think him like my own sons, so caring and solicitous for my welfare---maybe the small offering was to cheer the drab kitchen and the chilly house for his own Mother, with a bit of fragrance and a taste of faraway, when the here and the now were so daunting and spare.

Whatever the cause, whatever his mind at the moment, he was caught, captured, sent from home at seventeen, indentured to whatever kind or grim or mercenary soul paid his passage. And the years of servitude in this new “free” land were not freedom---they were probably more of the same dull diet, the labor of his hands earning him the bread and the pallet and the same restless dreams, to the final emancipation---a man on his own in a new land. He had had some training as a cobbler, and so his Indenture Master set him to work making shoes. I wonder how many pairs went across his last during the six years he spent working off his debt.

And so he walked free, with a trade or occupation, hard-taught and hard-learned. He married---thrice, the book says, and fathered many children, from which a side of my family is descended. I read the paragraph above, taken from the preface to a long list of begats of our own, and that odd perverse Southern trait which makes us want to trot out all our crazy kinfolks, all the oddities and the strange, and set them right out there for the world to see---that made me prouder to claim this man than I'd be if he had saved his pence and booked passage and set foot here with a glad heart and hope in his eyes. He worked and paid his debt, and by Crackey, he was HERE and so are we.

I read the story, and I went right to my kitchen spice rack to the little Penzey’s jar. The dusty clunk of the small nutmeg inside, the whiff of Christmasssssss when the lid was removed, the promise of sweet delights to come---perhaps a moment just such as that set the feet of my forebears onto the path which led me here, which leads on with my children and grandchildren.

I will tell them all of Edward and his nutmegs, and the pound of Gingerbread concealed in his coat. I hope he got to eat it all---every bite---before he was dragged to the assizes. And I want to think that in his pocket, for the comfort of thumbing in those dark storm-tossed ship-nights, for taking out in the darkness and inhaling the aroma of something BETTER to come---I just have to believe that he carried at least the scent of those nutmegs in his pocket all the way to his new life in a new world.