Published in Issue 64.1: Winter 2025
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The melting glaciers begat a flood: a colossal lake high in the mountains, held back only by ice. When it gave way, the lake roared down a river valley, eating resistance and carrying rocks the size of young mammoths. The water crashed through land at the mouth of the river, sweeping it out to sea, dropping the mammoth rocks along the way.
The melting glaciers begat post-glacial rebound, the land easing upward after shedding its packs of ice. Rebound begat the isles that would be called Mana-hatta, Aquehonga Manacknong, and Wamponomon; begat Ihpetonga and the Wee-awk-en. Begat tidal rivers and great stretches that flashed between land and water. Loose land, thick water.
Which begat alewives and shad, weakfish, summer flounders and winter flounders, menhaden and mullet, Atlantic ray, thorny skate, oyster and clam, ribbed muscles, lobster, ghost shrimp, mantis shrimp, sea urchin, blue, hermit, and fiddler crabs, tiny amphipods and periwinkles. Burrowing worms of the parchment, decorator, and trumpet variety.
Which begat their sleek predators: blue and black-crowned night herons, common loon, glossy ibis, clapper rail, marsh harrier, sharp-tailed sparrow, laughing gull and great black-backed gull, piping plover, raccoon, muskrat, otter, and human. And the predators of the predators: the golden saltmarsh mosquito, leeches, ticks, mites, biting flies. And so on: dragonflies, frogs, diamondback terrapin, and the minnows of mummichog, stickleback, sheepshead, and killifish.
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The land that dotted the water and stretched loose with water begat grasses and trees that preferred wet and salty feet, or didn’t mind occasional spray or spill when rivers and ocean breached their banks. Cord and spike grass. Black rush, erect knotweed, sea lavender, and salt marsh goldenrod. And Atlantic White Cedar, Common Horse Chestnut, Black Cherry, Northern Red Oak, and American Elm.
The land cut by and soaked with water had basins, beaches, rocky hills, rivers, springs, meadows, each packed with a thousand creature dramas, which begat human habitation that moved between these dramas, skimming off the top. A dozen different habitats within an hour’s or a day’s paddle, an hour or a day’s walk, a paddle, a portage, another walk. After thousands of years, they became known as the Lenni-Lenape, the grandparents, the elders to all of the Algonquin tribes that stretched north and west to the great fresh water lakes. They remembered the flood and told the story of how the animals and Nanapush, the “Grandfather of Beings,” had held a council and volunteered their talents in order to survive. Nanapush took that dab of mud from muskrat’s paw and grew it on the back of turtle until there was enough for all. The animals brought drowned grasses, flowers, trees, and food-bearing plants to Nanapush who breathed life into them and spread them over their new earth. The earth was already very beautiful when humans grew as sprouts from a shimmering tree. The animals cared for the humans; bear even sacrificed himself to help them survive the first difficult winter.
The Lenni-Lenape honored the reborn earth and the sacrifice of their animal elder brothers with a philosophy to waste nothing and mar little. Select narrow poles for your wikewam and replace the earth when you pull it up. Disassemble a sweat lodge after four days of ritual, replace the stones and sod to leave no trace. Lenape were known for peace and the steady talk that makes and keeps the peace. Lenape diplomats met regularly to reaffirm agreements within their tribe and between tribes whose bonds might not be as strong. Colonial incursion begat written records of their diplomacy. A six-day summit between the Munsee, or Northern Lenape, and the British to negotiate the sale of Staten Island begat a document signed by Munsee chiefs, or sachems, but also by Munsee youth: young men, fifteen and twenty, girls, six and twelve, and a five-year-old boy. They were teaching younger generations to negotiate, but with people whose signatory would be a guarantee of betrayal. The Xs of the youngest bleed through to the other side.
In the Lenapehoking, oyster beds stretched upstream for miles, and spawning fish were said to be so thick in the water you could walk to the far shore across their backs. Throughout Mana-hatta, there were vineyards, orchards of cherries, pear, apples, fields of strawberries and watermelon, no end of furred game, pockets of fields cleared for the three sisters, other fields lying fallow to let the soil rest. Canoe routes and trails connected the harvesting grounds. One trail began in what is now New Jersey and ended on Long Island, crossing what later would be called the Hudson River, the East River, and the Long Island Sound. This path begat, what is now the NJ/NY ferry terminal at Vesey Street, which connected to what is now Fulton Street in Manhattan. Fulton Street cuts across the island to where a canoe landing would have been and picks up again across the East River in Brooklyn. What became Fulton Street in Brooklyn transects to another canoe launch on the far east side of the borough from which the Lenape Canarsie tribe could access all Atlantic coastal destinations. Another trail, the Mohican, began at the southern tip of Mana-hatta and didn’t stop until it reached Oka, which begat Montreal. The Mohican begat Breedewegh, which begat Broadway. When the Dutch arrived, they did not build roads; they used and re-named them. They also used the Lenape’s resting fields and did not let them rest.
More fields were needed, of course, and the wetlands of lower Mana-hatta looked fixable, looked like future farmland, to the Dutch. They had centuries of experience seeing wetlands as a waste they could turn to profit. Reclamation of their own country from the sea begat exportable engineers, which begat the drainage and enclosure of the English Fens in the early 1600s. The Land Enclosure movement in England, beginning in the thirteenth century, turned common land into private property, usually claimed by the Crown and gentry, with a sliver left for those who carried out the physical enclosure with fences, walls, and hedges. The Fenland was home to hunter-gatherers who had made their peace with and culture from the wide stretches of loose land and thick water. They fought off the Dutch engineers and the English enforcers until they couldn’t. The Dutch and the English desire for private property met their fear of a people who flourished in an untransformed bog/fen/marshland, people they characterized as “a kind of people according to the nature of the place where they dwell rude, uncivil, and envious to all others whom they call Upland men.” Which begets an ease of conscience in their dispossession.
The Dutch speculators brought this ease with them to Mana-hatta and perched while they traded for furs. They couldn’t live on beaver pelts and foot-long oysters alone, so they built wimpolen and dykes and began draining and ditching for gardens, but also for cash crops to be shipped across the Atlantic, a layer of the soil’s nutrients in each load of Cape-Breton wheat, indigo seeds, cotton, and dyewoods, until the nutrients were gone. Which begat dependence on satellite farms in a land that would beget a nation that would preach self-sufficiency, would swing it like a cat-o-nine-tails, that would swing actual cat-o-nine-tails against the backs of the enslaved, the first of whom would be trafficked to Mana-hatta in 1626, the very year the Dutch assumed ownership of it.
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Hundreds of Lenape paths across Mana-hatta begat crossroads. Major crossroads hosted trading, sports, and gossip, politics, advice, and dancing. Gathering places begat modern circles and squares—Cathedral Circle, Columbus Circle, Washington Square, Madison Square Park, Times Square. At such crossroads, Lenape planted an elm or an oak to mark the gathering place. In the shade of the tree, sacham and orators—men and women of wisdom—would address gatherings. But a beloved leader might lie under the tree, as well. Pet dogs were buried under a blanket of crushed oyster shells, which slowed decay, but great sachem were buried at crossroads with an acorn in their mouths. Their bodies nursed an oak under which future sacham would speak. A twin oak, “because the sprouts would have to exit the skull in a roundabout manner, usually splitting into two parts.” This practice begat a sacred oak at Kintecoying, or “Cross-roads of Three Nations,” in lower Mana-hatta. Kintecoying would become Astor Place, named for Jacob Astor, the first multi-millionaire in Manhattan. A trader with a monopoly on fur trapping, criminal opium dealer, real estate mogul, he gathered a mountain of defaulted mortgages after the financial crash of 1837 and carved up large tracts of Manhattan into ever smaller parcels for ever higher rents. Accumulate your personal fortune on the loss of others, leave your mark—and name—on everything.
Read more by purchasing our Winter 2025 issue, available in print and digital forms.
Amy Benson is the author of two books: Seven Years to Zero (Dzanc Books 2017), winner of the Dzanc Books Nonfiction Prize, and The Sparkling-Eyed Boy (Houghton Mifflin 2004), chosen for the Bakeless Prize in Creative Nonfiction, sponsored by Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Recent essays and stories have been published in journals such as Agni, BOMB, Electric Literature, LitHub, and Orion. She teaches writing at Rhodes College in Memphis.