To the Market Place by Berry Fleming

Author:Berry Fleming
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504009874
Publisher: The Permanent Press

Assembling by night “near the gate of King Hugo at Tours,” condemning the mass in placards “nailed on the very door of François Premier’s bedroom at Amboise,” the non-conformists, the protestors, the persecuted, granted some toleration for a while, then learning in 1685 that “the best of the largest part of Our subjects, who had formerly held the so-called reformed religion, have embraced the Catholic religion, and therefore the Edict of Nantes has become unnecessary,” and beginning their migration westward, to England but better still to England’s colonies in North America, westward in search of a passage to freedom, in search of a land where they could worship their own God in their own way, better themselves and their generations after them.

To Port Royal in the Carolinas and Charlestown, “where the soil and latitude fitted their habits,” then up the sluggish rivers, away from the gray unwelcoming gaze of the Carolina English, and over land westward again. Pierre de l’Aigle, in 1764, hoeing his flat field at Nouvelle Bordeaux, “boiteux,” crippled in the leg by a Cherokee arrow, limping up the rough aisle of the new church on the creek to lead the prayers, prayers to le Tout-puissant for health and courage, for strength against the heathen Indian, for the long life of George Trois. Westward to Georgia and Oglethorpe’s downtrodden English, alien in blood and language but brothers in oppression, brothers in purpose: to establish themselves in freedom, between the Christian persecution behind them and the heathen persecution and death before, themselves and their children. Marrying with the English, their language gradually falling away from them, their grandchildren praying to the Almighty in New Bordeaux. Anglicizing their names: Pierre’s great-grandson, Owen for his mother’s English, DeLegal for his father, neither French nor English now but a Georgian, marching north in 1860 with K Company of the 7th Regiment of Georgia Volunteers to join the Army of Northern Virginia.

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