Show notes
It is my birthday week so today I am talking about my new favorite queen, the American poet and writer who became an activist demanding better treatment of Native Americans from the United States government. Her name was Helen Hunt Jackson, and I will share some of her poetry throughout the story.
We will start the story with Deborah & Nathan Fiske, in Amherst, Massachusetts. The couple both suffered from chronic illness through their lives. Nathan was a Unitarian minister, author, and professor of Latin, Greek, and philosophy at Amherst College. Unitarians did not believe in the concepts of sin and of eternal punishment for sins. Appealing to reason, not to emotion. They believed that God is one person. They did not believe in the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, the God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit.
Their daughter, Helen Maria Fiske, was born on October 15 of 1830. Deborah encouraged Helen to have a cheerful disposition and Helen was smart and she worked hard to live up to her father’s expectations. As a result of their parent’s disabilities, Helen and her younger sister Ann often stayed with relatives.
Deborah died from tuberculosis when Helen was fourteen. A few years later, Nathan Fiske was also suffering from tuberculosis. His doctor advised him to find a new climate to alleviate his symptoms. He arranged for Fiske’s education to be paid for and left on his last adventure. He was in Palestine in the summer of her 17th year when her father died of dysentery. He was buried on Mt. Zion.
Helen’s maternal grandfather, Deacon David Vinal, assumed financial responsibility for the sisters. Julius A. Palmer, a prominent Boston attorney and state legislature representative, took on the role as their guardian, and the girls moved into his puritan home. Palmer sent Helen to the private schools and while she was away for education, she formed a long lasting friendship with the young Emily Dickinson.
After school, Helen moved to Albany, New York. The following year, a Governor’s Ball was held in Albany. Helen went, and met Lieutenant Edward Bissell Hunt, who was also in attendance. Hunt graduated from West Point, was an Army Corps of Engineers officer and a civil engineer. The couple married on October 28th of that year. She lived the life of a young army wife, traveling from post to post. Helen said she was almost too happy to trust the future. A woman’s intuition is often right.
Helen gave birth to a son the year after the wedding. His name was Murray. Sadly, Murray was born with a disease attacking his brain and he did not live to see his first birthday. She became pregnant soon after and had a second son, Warren, a year after they lost Murray. They nicknamed him ”Rennie”.
Eight years later, Helen’s husband was testing one of his own designs of an early submarine weapon for the military when he fell and suffered a concussion, overcome by gunpowder fumes. It was a devastating loss. The perhaps most profound loss next. Up to this time, her life had been absorbed in domestic and social duties. Her son Warren, her last living family member, soon died due to diphtheria.
When she was young, her mother had encouraged her to expand on her vivid imagination by writing. Helen also suffered from chronic illness like her parents, and she took inspiration from her mom and started to write poetry, withdrawing from public view to grieve. Two months later, her first poem was published. She emerged months later dressed in all too familiar mourning clothes, but now determined to pursue a literary career.
“And every bird I ever knew Back and forth in the summer flew;
And breezes wafted over me The scent of every flower and tree:
Till I forgot the pain and gloom And silence of my darkened room“
Most of Hunt’s early melancholic work grew out of this heavy experience of loss and sorrow. Like her mother, she continued turning negatives into positives in spite of great hardship. She was 36 years old and writing had beco
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