Method One: Looking Through
By looking through,we can trace several threads through the account: one thread might highlight the purchases of pork, rice, oats, cheese, and sugar with which Fowler Occom fed her children—and perhaps other Mohegan people—while Samson was in England. We can surmise based on the women’s shoes, flannel, and oznabrigs (an inexpensive linen cloth) that Mary purchased items to make clothing for herself and her children. We can see from the tea, coffee, and rum she bought that she participates in the circum-Atlantic exchange of commodities made from American plants. And we can see that she purchases technologies of literacy, from ink and an “ink pott” to paper. Finally, in 1765, she pays some of her debt in cash, and in June 1766, she receives a credit “by a pot returned.”
The pot returned may reflect Mary’s increasing need in Samson’s absence, for this is a moment when Eleazar Wheelock, who sent Samson to England, has failed to fulfill his promise to provide for the Occom family (he then attempts to blame Samson for their destitution—see Hilary Wyss’s fantastic reading of these events and of Wheelock’s letters).4 By the early months of 1766, Shaw was refusing to “supply” Mary, likely because Wheelock had failed to provide supplies or credit with which to make purchases. In this context, the pot returned might suggest a creative or perhaps desperate act to obtain food and clothing, indicating the edge of financial precarity on which the family lived.
Mary was no stranger to this precarity and to the ways that colonial accounts created it. In Samson’s autobiographical narrative, drafted shortly before his departure for London, he astutely surmises that the Company for the Propagation of the Gospel paid him less than its white ministers “because I am [a] poor Indian.” Samson wrote that narrative to provide what he calls a “Short Plain and honest Account of my self,” and to correct the “many gross mistakes in [others’] Accounts,” namely false claims that he had used his money extravagantly or that he was lying about his level of education or his Mohegan identity. Accounts, Occom’s autobiography makes clear, are often used against him and other Native people, to justify placing them in debt—as the family was when he was in England—or to level false claims against them. The “pot returned” points to the actions Mary took to alter a situation in which, once again, the men tasked with paying her husband had failed to do so. Reading through the account gives us a sense not only of Mary’s needs and actions but also of her interactions with colonial systems of accounting—and purposeful miscounting.