Chapter Five

To begin, I have to thank Past Master Randall Pollard of Union Lodge #4, for his information, correcting my third installment. Andrew Bush was not an attorney and Edwin B. Jordain was not a mason. Elders are a true blessing, with wisdom that flows like the wind. Both the wind and wisdom are often taken for granted, but can be a welcomed breeze of relief. The ability to listen and process is the basis of any oral traditionalists work; seconded only by the art of conversation. For some reason, when many people think of native folks listening to their elders, they get this romantic image of a person sitting at a fire in the woods, listening to the wisdom of a stoic faced, monotone voiced saige with Corinthian Leatehr skin. In reality, it’s really just a part of everyday conversation, and the leather skin only applies to those who smoked for years.

This past week was the Mashpee powwow, despite a little controversy, it was a wonderful time. This was my first powwow in a couple of years as I was in graduate school up in Vermont for the last three powwows. It was also my first powwow in regalia in about 3 years. I only got to wear it the last day of powwow as my cousin who was making it fell behind on a bunch of projects. What I’ve always loved about powwow is the fact that it’s a homecoming for Mashpee Wampanoags scattered all across the world, and a chance to connect with all of these folks… and listen to their tales. Sometimes these tales can seem kind of random and even pointless at the time, but will suddenly have a great deal of meaning and can even provide you with greater insight of a situation you’re facing.

Back to that day in April 2001, at the lodge, awaiting the arrival of the Investigation Committee chair and members, Brother Jibreel arrived. Another connection that Brother Jibreel and I have is that we are both members of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc. Along with a winding history of the lodge, and the various personalities associated with it, Jibreel took me on a tour of the building, that culminated with the soon-to-be completed ritual room. Here, I had the pleasure of meeting Warley Williams, a talented, master carpenter and member of the lodge who was finishing the construction on the lodge meeting room upstairs. Our conversation, all be it brief, was a very honest and insightful discussions about the principles and inner-dynamics of brotherhood in general, and the lodge in particular. One by one I began to meet brothers of the lodge, who seemed to be just passing by in the evening, each sharing some information that would eventually make a great deal of sense. Not just as a future brother of the lodge, but as a New Bedford resident; which at the time, I had no idea that I would soon become…

I have a bad habit of starting stories from the middle, as for the last several installments of this tale; I have vacillated between the present and 2001. My story as a Wampanoag traveling from Mashpee to New Bedford actually goes back to 1995, a chance meeting of a youth program director, who brought me here to do some improv theater workshops… ah, that’s the next installment.

Chapter Four

My mind is focused on mentors and the concept of rites of passage. In today’s society, some would say that we as men of color lack rites of passage. I would beg to differ. Being people of color in this contradiction riddled society, our daily lives are a type of rites of passage. Having dreams and goal, and being able to reach them is a rites of passage, and mentors are a key to this rite. It’s good to have mentors and elders who take you under their wing; an act of kindness that should never be taken for granted or discounted. This brings me to the other day, I found a note stuck on my car window. Finding notes in my car window or care packages of information, courtesy of Past Master John “J.C.” Cole in my mail slot, or other brothers stopping in to check on me have become a welcomed part of my experiences in New Bedford. This particular note was from Randall (Randy) Pollard, a Past Master of Union Lodge #4, respected elder in the Wampanoag community, and fellow historian. His note informed me that there was an error in my last article, but as of this writing we have not been able to connect, so the error shall have to go uncorrected until that conversation happens.

I first met Randy in my early teens at my Aunt Shirley’s house in Mashpee. Randy and Aunt Shirley (by marriage) are cousins. A few years later, it was Randy’s son Tony (better known in the native community as ‘Nanapashemet’). I was doing research at the time to find out if Wampanoags had a version of the ‘Hyoka’ or “Medicine Clown” as found among native peoples in the west. Nanapashemet directed me towards the writings of E Winslow, whose journals from the Plymouth colony contained many observations and references to Wampanoag life in the 1600’s. Winslow’s writings often reference “tricksters,” Wampanoags who delighted in annoying and victimizing the colonists. Apparently our clown practice was suppressed by the Puritan church and considered demonic, since clowns were considered half human and half spirit. As more Wampanoags embraced Christianity, the practice of the clowns was even more underground, continued as humor and pranks. Thanks to Jessie Little Doe, the principle scholar and teacher of the Wampanoag language, I learned that the term or this branch of medicine was ‘Ahanaeenun’ or ‘Laughter Keeper’.

Jumping back to April of 2001; the first time that I sat in the Prince Hall Temple parking lot, waiting for the members of the investigating committee who were going to interview me before the lodge voted on my application. Although I was told to be there at 5pm sharp, except for the teachers from West End Day Nursery and a stream of parents coming to pick up their little ones, the lodge chair hadn’t made it there yet. As I waited, a trucked pulled into the lot and out popped a familiar looking gentleman. It was Randy; who didn’t recognize me right off (I was a bigger and had a whole lot more hair then the last time we had seen each other), but was curious about the “Mashpee Wampanoag” vanity plate on the front of my van. Randy didn’t know that I as there to be interviewed, but gave me a quick history of the building. He had been instrumental in the design and construction of the temple. It would be at the subsequent meeting, when the lodge voted on my application that he would find out why I was there, and apparently disclosed the fact that my grandfather had been a member.

That would prove to be an interesting evening, as I waited to be interviewed, Jibreel showed up to wait with me. Over the next hour, I ended up meeting most of the brother’s in the lodge who for one reason or another happened past the lodge. Having had experiences with my college fraternity, I began to wonder if this was all part of the interview and to this day I’m not really sure. That’s the funny thing about rites of passage; most of the time you only realize that you’ve experienced them when you reflect back on an experience.

Chapter Three

At our last parting, it was June 29, 2002 and I was sitting in my van in the parking lot of The Prince Hall Masonic Temple on Cottage Street, home to Union Lodge #4, JW Hood Chapter 12 of the Order of the Eastern Star, and at the time, annex classroom space for the West End Day Nursery. Union Lodge #4 (formerly Union Lodge #7, in the 1800’s) was formed in 1857. It remains the lodge with the largest number of Grand Masters in the jurisdiction of Massachusetts originating from it’s membership. The current lodge was erected and completed in the 1990s. They used to have a lodge on Kempton Street which was burned down in the 1960’s during a Black Power rally, (can you say “Irony?”)where the only two buildings threatened was the temple and a Black church (Which the pastor and members persuaded the so-called revolutionaries not to burn).

The current temple looks a little like a labyrinth from the outside. I could see that the upstairs windows were open, as the curtains blew in the breeze. As I had mentioned, my Grandfather had been a member of this lodge. In fact, most of your local Wampanoags who had been Prince Hall Masons came through this lodge, including several prominent members of the New Bedford community, such as attorney’s Andrew Bush (who served as Grand Master in the 1800’s) and Edwin B. Jordain (Who was an attendee and participant in W.E.B. Dubois’ catalytic Niagara Movement meeting in 1905). This summer, the lodge is celebrating it’s 150^th anniversary (1857 to 2007).

In the two years that preceded this June morning in 2002, two of the lodges members, at different times, had told me about the lodge and discussed the consideration of membership, the first being Jibreel Khazan (meeting him the first time is an article in itself); the other being one of those strange chance meetings. From 1998 to 2001, I ran a youth theatre program in New Bedford and would often stop at the Staples in Fairhaven to make photocopies of scripts, flyers, grant proposals, etc. It seemed that each time I was in the shop; I’d meet this man who would be busy photocopying a variety of documents. We often conversed about current events, music (it turned out that we both grew up in the Bronx and have a love of Afro-Latin music), and so forth. His conversation and range of interests revealed him to be a true renaissance man.

After months of these meetings, he asked what I knew about Freemasonry. As a history buff and occasional reader of conspiracy theory literature, I knew a few things about the craft, and was particularly intrigued by the history of Prince Hall masons and the roles that the order’s members played in the advancement of disenfranchised people of color. Curiously, most of the conspiracy theorists did not include Prince Hall masonry as a part of the quest for world domination, albeit the order has had a fair number of Black nationalists among it’s membership, including Hall himself, Alexander Crummell, W.E.B. Dubois, Marcus Garvey, and Elijah Poole (Muhammad). The gentleman, John Cole, gave me his phone number and after a weeks worth of contemplation, I was sitting at his dining room table, filling out an application for membership to the lodge…

The front door of the temple opened, and a large, bald-headed man with a moustache, wearing a tuxedo, beckoned me to come in.

Chapter Two

Continuing on the paths… my grandfather, Steven A. Peters, Sr., had passed away fourteen years before I was born, and it was tales and stories from family and non-related elders that gave me a sense of what a complex character he was. One person’s statesman is another person’s opportunist; one person’s visionary is another person’s mad-man; and one person’s bon vivant is another person’s reprobate. If I believe all of the tales that I’ve heard about my grandfather, he was all of these things.

One of the tales involves his being inducted into the army in World War I. The regiments were segregated, and one of the privileges afforded Native American inductees was the option of going into a white unit. My grandfather saw this as divisive, stating, “In this country if you’re not white, you’re Black.” As a man of color in Massachusetts, he knew the general attitudes of white people towards Wampanoags was not much different than their attitudes towards Blacks and saw that this ‘privilege’ was just another way for the powers-that-be to deepen the divisions between Blacks and Indians. He chose to go into a Black unit as did several other Wampanoag inductees who decided to follow his example. Likewise, his choice to join the Prince Hall branch of Freemasonry was influenced by the historically white lodges refusal to recognize them as masons.

Along Route 6, between the cape and New Bedford there are a few bars and taverns. It’s my understanding that there were once even more of these establishments, and my grandfather was familiar with and to them all. He was known as a likeable and humorous sort of person; very easy to get into a conversation with. According to legend, when my grandfather decided to enter politics and run for a seat as Selectman in Mashpee in the late 1920’s, he was introduced to a man in a New Bedford watering hole who was doing grassroots organizing for the Democratic Party. At that time, Wampanoags, like most people of color in the post-Lincoln era, were mostly Republicans. A major part of the Roosevelt campaign for president involved organizing traditionally disenfranchised groups to switch to the Democratic Party in the years before he would run. Subsequently, my grandfather became the first Wampanoag candidate to run as a Democrat in Mashpee and won by a land-slide. Using these connections he was also able to access a myriad of resources for the folks in the Mashpee community, including electricity. He also saw a need for the Mashpee community to establish a relationship with the NAACP.

My grandfather’s ways were, at times, a little too metropolitan for the (then) very remote and rural Mashpee community. For some, the explanation was his going to high school and college in the big cities (New Bedford and Boston) that led to his coming home with a taste for tailor-made suits and grand ideas. His awareness of race relations was shaped by his days and experiences as a teenager in New Bedford, a major seaport and hub of social, political, and economic exchange. The Native, African American, West Indian, and Cape Verdean communities in particular were interconnected by the bounds of segregation and it was these experiences, that I’m sure began to shape my grandfather’s views.

My van reached the parking lot of the lodge on that hot morning. I could see all of the windows in the lodge’s ritual room were open and I sat in the lot waiting to be called in. Yet another path of my father was about to be traveled.

Chapter One

When I was around twelve or thirteen, I used to have this recurring dream about this building. It was a Greco-Roman forum looking structure on the outside, with giant columns in front. I remember the interior being mid-twentieth century styled offices upstairs with lots of wood paneling and the like.

A friend of mine from the Rocky Boy reservation in Box Elder, Montana once said, “We instinctively travel the paths of our fathers.” A brief look at my own experiences would indicate this to be true. It was a hot morning, that 29^th of June in 2002, as I started my trek from Mashpee to New Bedford. I was about to be initiated into Union Lodge No. 4, the Prince Hall Masonic lodge in New Bedford. I had found out after making application that Union Lodge had been the home lodge to many a Wampanoag Freemason, including my grandfather during the 1920’s to the ‘40’s. I didn’t even know that my grandfather had been a mason; then realizing that my father, who had joined a lodge while stationed in Germany, was the only of my grandfather’s sons to enter the craft. Union Lodge No. 4 has been the home lodge to a large number of Wampanoag people from all of the tribes, all the way back to it’s formation in 1857.

That morning, I chose to take Route 28 across the bridge, into Buzzards Bay and use Route 6 to go to New Bedford. Why 6 when I could’ve taken 195, you ask? It was the route that my grandfather used to get to New Bedford. According to my elders, the numbered routes that pass through the towns of Massachusetts (28, 44, 123, 6, etc.) are based on the trails and paths of the Wampanoags, Narragansetts, and Nipmucs traveling to all of the places that our people lived. Route 6 was a well worn path for many Wampanoag people, traveling back and forth to visit families, bands, and tribes along the coast. Over time, I came to find that the paths and locations of significance to my familiar antecedents would also have special meaning to me.

Some Mashpee families have lived in New Bedford for many generations; their ancestors coming to the “big city” for greater opportunities in employment, education, and the like. In the early part of the 20^th Century, my grandfather came to New Bedford to go to high school, as it was the custom on Cape Cod to dissuade students of color from continuing past the eighth grade, directing them towards menial and manual jobs. Afterward, he went to Boston to attend college. For me, New Bedford was a place to hang out in my teens, a place to do my youth theatre programs in my early adult years, and now I’m a full-fledged resident (closer to my job), who still often goes home to Mashpee.

For native people, April is our New Year, which makes a lot of sense since spring is the season of rebirth and renewal. This New Year was particularly significant for Mashpee Wampanoags, receiving federal recognition and opening a satellite tribal council office in New Bedford. Interestingly enough, it’s located on the second floor of a building that I used to dream about as a child. People who I’ve been seeing around the city over the years turned out to not only be neighbors, but in some cases, relatives. The things one will find when they travel the paths of their father’s.