From The Memory Palace Audiobook: Fine New England Granite

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Speaker 1 Hey, before we get started, I wanted to let you know that we are in the middle of our Radiotopia fundraiser.

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Speaker 1 As we here in the United States head into a holiday weekend, I wanted to share a Thanksgiving story about Thanksgiving stories. It is a favorite of mine.

Speaker 1 It is a good listen if you you are taking a drive or waiting around at the airport. And this version of the story comes straight from my audiobook.

Speaker 1 Last year, right around this time, Random House released The Memory Palace, True Short Stories of the Past, a collection of Memory Palace stories, beloved and brand new,

Speaker 1 as well as an audiobook that was one of the most satisfying things I have done in my professional life.

Speaker 1 In it, you get me reading all of the new material, including a nested collection of stories drawn from my own life.

Speaker 1 And then there are a dozen other readers reading stories that have appeared in the show before.

Speaker 1 These range from celebrities like Carrie Kuhn and Ryan Reynolds to beloved voices from your favorite podcasts like Jed Abermrod and Roman Mars and fellow radiotopians like Rishi Herway and Avery Truffleman and then people like my teenage daughter and a special cameo from my mom.

Speaker 1 And now the normal thing for me to do here is for me to say some vague people say or dig up a review or a blurb to vouch for the book for you, but you know what? This is just me.

Speaker 1 My book makes a great holiday gift. It is a can't-miss gift.
It even makes, and well, this I was told, I got an email the other day from a listener pointing this out, it makes a great host gift.

Speaker 1 If you're staying with someone, if they are inviting you over for a big meal. And the audiobook is both a great gift.

Speaker 1 I recommend going to libro.fm for audiobook gift giving needs and a good companion to your drive home this weekend or on your your long drives that might lie ahead.

Speaker 1 So, this story is from the audiobook, and interestingly, it actually is me reading, even though it is a story that has aired on the show previously.

Speaker 1 The other rule, besides new ones, or new people, older ones, or me,

Speaker 1 was that if one of the stories had like a very distinct first person that seems strange put into someone else's voice, then I would read that one as they do here.

Speaker 2 New England Granite

Speaker 2 I like to think of the men in this first part of the story as just a bunch of dudes. Just a bunch of dudes doing dude things.

Speaker 2 Someone has an idea, probably while drinking. The year is 1774.
It is the eve of the Revolutionary War. The place is Plymouth, Massachusetts.
They have recently organized a militia there.

Speaker 2 They have put up a Liberty Pole, which is essentially just that. A a big wooden pole.
But it is, of course, more than just that.

Speaker 2 It is a symbol of defiance against the crown, a metaphoric middle finger rising from the town green.

Speaker 2 The Liberty Pole tradition traces its roots to ancient Rome, where a group of senators celebrated the emperor's assassination by sticking a red cap on top of a pole.

Speaker 2 The cap was the same type that was given to freed slaves to signal their new status. The senators, it seems, co-opted the cap to suggest that Rome, with Caesar's death, had been similarly freed.

Speaker 2 Then, during the Renaissance, when everything ancient Rome was new again, people revived the concept and refreshed it for a new era, turning it into a more generalized symbol of liberty, one that could be carried or rallied around as necessary, eventually bringing us to the polls that popped up all over New England.

Speaker 2 on the eve of the American Revolution, and from there back to the dudes in Plymouth.

Speaker 2 They want to do the other towns with their red floppy cap-cap poles one better.

Speaker 2 This is Plymouth, after all, founded 154 years earlier by people who famously fled English oppression. A regular pole isn't going to do.

Speaker 2 The next morning, a quote, large number gathers. That is as specific as the historical record gets on this.
on the town green with oxen and the biggest cart they can find.

Speaker 2 And they head down to the shore to dig up Plymouth Rock and put it on top of the Liberty Pole.

Speaker 2 That will show them.

Speaker 2 I like to think that it wasn't just the transatlantic journey of the Mayflower in 1620 that led those men down to that shore with shovels in hand, but another, much shorter trip.

Speaker 2 That one took place in 1741, when a man named Thomas Faunce heard they were planning on building a new wharf on the Plymouth waterfront.

Speaker 2 Faunce was 95, which is plenty old now, but which back then was truly extraordinary.

Speaker 2 And when he heard about the wharf plan, he was bereft, because that wharf was going to cover up what we now know as Plymouth Rock.

Speaker 2 By all accounts, the very first time anyone mentions any rock in conjunction with the pilgrim's landing comes in 1741, 120 years after they landed, thanks to Thomas Faunce.

Speaker 2 His father had arrived in Plymouth on a ship called the Anne a few years after the Mayflower. It being a very small community, Thomas's dad was pals with all the original pilgrims.

Speaker 2 And one day when Thomas was a little boy, twenty-some years after their arrival and after the first winter and first Thanksgiving and all that, his dad pointed out to the water's edge and said, See that rock?

Speaker 2 That's where Miles Standish and all of them first got off the boat.

Speaker 2 Some 90 years later, when he heard about the plan to build the wharf, He says he remembered that day with his dad and it didn't seem right to build a dock over such an important piece of of history.

Speaker 2 So he told someone, his kids, a neighbor, we don't know, that he'd like to see the rock before it got covered up.

Speaker 2 But this wasn't going to be easy. He lived outside of town and was impossibly old and not particularly mobile.
So the next day he was carried in a chair for three miles to see it.

Speaker 2 I like to think of this 90-year-old man being set down in the sturdiest chair they could find, a blanket wrapped around his frail shoulders, being lofted through the woods, as a crowd forms and joins them, swells as they approach town in the soft morning light, and the smell of the sea greeting them as they come up and over Coles Hill and make their way down the grassy slope to the shore, where a witness named James Thatcher will write down that Faunce, there upon that rock, bedewed it with his tears, and bid it an everlasting adieu.

Speaker 2 And I'd like to think this actually happened that way, that a ninety-five-year-old man was so distraught that this history was being forgotten, a history that only he apparently knew and thought to bring up at all only at the 11th hour, that he wept so forcefully that tears actually splashed down onto the rock.

Speaker 2 But I doubt it. Bedooed it with his tears and bid it an everlasting adieu is the stuff of poetic license and bad poetry.

Speaker 2 To this day, historians debate whether Thomas Faunce's memory at 95 was accurate, and whether that specific rock, or any rock for that matter, played any particular role in the pilgrim's arrival.

Speaker 2 But it is clear that it didn't hold any real significance, practical or sentimental, to the pilgrims themselves, because they basically wrote everything down and no one ever mentioned it.

Speaker 2 Instead, the thing that makes this rock Plymouth rock is poetry.

Speaker 2 There is something moving about this 95-year-old man being moved.

Speaker 2 There's something romantic about the idea that this, right here on this spot,

Speaker 2 this is where it all began.

Speaker 2 That is where it all began for the idea of Plymouth Rock, at least.

Speaker 2 When they built the wharf in a different spot and started to protect this rock and turn it into a relic, a symbol of freedom, a tie to a glorious past, an object worthy of veneration, and apparently of being dug up by a bunch of dudes gathered at the waterside to stick it to England.

Speaker 2 Back in 1774, our dudes set themselves to the task of removing a ten-ton boulder from the sand, to get it into a cart where thirty strong oxen would haul it up Coles Hill, and then they would place it atop the Liberty Pole, to tell every red coat in the area that Plymouth was ready for a fight, that the spirit of the pilgrims, brave and defiant, still flowed through their veins.

Speaker 2 They set at the ground with their shovels. They wedged enormous and ingenious screws beneath the corners of Plymouth Rock.

Speaker 2 It began to rise, and the ox driver urged on the oxen and got the cart into position.

Speaker 2 And the gathered men put their shoulders into it, pulled at the levers, got ready to heave and push and lift this sainted stone.

Speaker 2 Maybe they agreed to push on the count of three, and they didn't even need to stop and ask whether they would push on three or say one, two, three, and then push. They were together.

Speaker 2 They were of of one mind, filled with the spirit of revolution and of their ancestors, who 120 years before had stepped off that fabled ship after 66 days at sea, and as their leather shoes touched that New England granite, they left their lives of persecution behind.

Speaker 2 And so the men counted to three, and they pushed. And Plymouth Rock sheared in half.

Speaker 2 The top just popped off like they were splitting a muffin with a co-worker at the Free Continental Breakfast at the airport Marriott.

Speaker 2 I like to think of those men there in the sand, having just broken Plymouth Rock, and of the shock, and the finger-pointing, and the panic, and the comedy.

Speaker 2 It seems that at one point someone said some version of, hey, hey, hey, hey, hear me out, hear me out.

Speaker 2 What if this is actually good?

Speaker 2 and suggested it was a sign from God that the colonies would, like this rock, break, away from England. And they just went with it.

Speaker 2 They put one broken half of Plymouth Rock into the wagon, and the 30 oxen had an easier trip up Coles Hill, and they deposited it beside the Liberty Pole. No effort was made to hoist it.

Speaker 2 There it lay for many years, a sturdy and symbolic soapbox for speeches on liberty, a point of pride for Plymouthians.

Speaker 2 In the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville, the French chronicler of early America, arrived in Plymouth.

Speaker 2 He marveled at how the young nation, this great experiment in secular democracy, had turned this rock into a relic, had imbued it with near-religious power.

Speaker 2 He saw pilgrims, lowercase p, not the pilgrim pilgrims, whose own mythic power was expanding well beyond historical reality.

Speaker 2 He saw Americans who'd come to Plymouth to see where this whole thing began, to touch their own toes to this rock where those legendary trailblazers of liberty might or might not have touched their own 200 years before.

Speaker 2 He saw others who wanted to take a piece of it, who come to the metaphorical mountain with chisels in hand.

Speaker 2 In his travels, Tocqueville saw pieces of the famous Plymouth Rock all over, used as doorstops, as paper weights, set in the centers of mantles like the mandibles of sainted martyrs.

Speaker 2 What had once been a point of local pride was being woven into the national story.

Speaker 2 There was a pilgrim museum built in the middle of the 19th century. They moved the rock again so it would be next to the museum.

Speaker 2 Another bunch of dudes and a bunch of oxen got it into a cart, in one piece this time.

Speaker 2 But when they were taking it out, they dropped it, and it split in two.

Speaker 2 I like to think of those men, who had surely heard about the last time some dudes moved Plymouth Rock. who had probably joked about it.

Speaker 2 Wouldn't it be kind of hilarious if they dropped it again, while doing everything they could could not to drop it again, praying, please, please, please don't let me drop it again, and then dropping it again?

Speaker 2 They put it back together this time. They put some mortar in there and smushed it together and it was all good.

Speaker 2 In the 1860s, when the pilgrim story was fully enshrined as one of the pillars of Capital H history, Thanksgiving became a national holiday.

Speaker 2 The genocide and forced removal of indigenous peoples in the West was in full swing, and the Thanksgiving story, in its reductive construction paper pilgrim hat form, was offered up to soothe the discomfort of white Americans.

Speaker 2 They built an elaborate Victorian canopy to protect the rock from relic hunters and seagulls, and they also chiseled the date 1620 into its face.

Speaker 2 In the 1920s, they redid the waterfront, opened it up, got rid of some of the piers. It's nice.

Speaker 2 They moved the rock again, managing to keep it in one piece this time, and put it back there at the water's edge, more or less where it was when Thomas Faunce bedewed it with his tears, or didn't, and where the pilgrims first set foot on the land that would become America, or didn't.

Speaker 2 It is still there, still underwhelming tourists.

Speaker 2 Now it's surrounded by a fence and protected by a neoclassical structure like the Lincoln or Jefferson Memorials, or any of the other places where this secular country turns its recent history into Greco-Roman myths.

Speaker 2 They've repaired the rock a number of times. A full moon or storm tide can cover it for a while, and the salt water does a number on the mortar.

Speaker 2 At some point, before too long, scientists tell us, the sea level will rise permanently above where it now rests.

Speaker 2 And perhaps we should just let it.

Speaker 2 There is so much that people have willfully gotten wrong about the story of the pilgrims in their first years in this place, Wampanogland,

Speaker 2 that maybe we should just let the tide wash it away. I suspect they will move Plymouth Rock again one day.
The old story, true or not,

Speaker 2 right or not,

Speaker 2 is too dear to too many people.

Speaker 2 People like to think what they think.

Speaker 2 I just hope they're more careful with it next time.

Speaker 1 This episode of the Memory Palace wasn't really an episode of The Memory Palace.

Speaker 1 It was an excerpt from the audiobook of The Memory Palace, True Short Stories of the Past, audio excerpted courtesy of Random House, audio from The Memory Palace by Nate DeMayo, read by a full cast, excerpt read by Nate DeMayo, copyright 2024, Nate DeMayo, published 2024, Penguin Random House, LLC, all rights reserved.

Speaker 1 The show is a proud member of Radiotopia, a network of independently owned and operated podcasts from PRX, a not-for-profit public media company, and a 501c3 company.

Speaker 1 So if you're making your year-end donations and you want to support independent media and what I do at the Memory Palace, now is the time to do so. Go to radiotopia.fm/slash donate.

Speaker 2 Radiotopia

Speaker 2 from PRX.