Valleys Of Black Stones

I grew up in Massachusetts, south of Worcester on the Rhode Island line, in a town called Uxbridge, named for a town in England; we called our region the Blackstone River Valley.

Never thought of this before: why that name?  The stones in this valley are mostly whitish gray and pink flecked granite; at least the dry ones are.

Once they’re wet, of course, it’s a different story.

Everything’s blacker under water; the stones, the bodies of Nipmucs, the remnants of mills, the memories of millworkers.

I romanticize, of course: I’ve learned today the river was named after a white man named Blaxton, AKA Blackstone, who magically moved from the coast to build his house along these banks in 1635.

The dead Nipmucs called it the Kittacuck, meaning  “the great Tidal River.”  It once was full of salmon and lamprey.

No one remembers any of that now; most of the Nipmucs and all of the fish are gone.

After white guys had been here a while, some of them built mills that filled with Scottish and Irish and French Canadians and Polish and Italians.

That’s half the story of how I got here.

I don’t often mention it. I romanticize, of course: I tend to focus instead on my descent from New Mexico, where in 1635 white people were already killing and being killed, as were the natives I call my own.

In that high desert lava and obsidian are plentiful; black stones are everywhere.

Think of it now: how parallel the stories, how unlike the geologies — think of  all that killing, thousands of miles apart: dead Indians, dead fish; some dreams slaughtered in spirit if not in the flesh.

Others had their dreams came true in these valleys of black stones.  Big houses in both places testify to success, even a I stare at the land and try to hear the cries of those who lived and died there.

I romanticize, of course: mostly, I hear nothing now in either place.

I drive through highway cuts that gleam black under the intermittent streams that flow after intermittent storms. I go to work or play tourist and don’t think much about changing names,

or about unchanging black rock filled with old light that was sucked into the ground and held fast in basalt or volcanic stone, light that leaks like radon and keeps on killing as it always has.

I’m dying here, people — eh.

Perhaps I romanticize.