Becoming a Rhode Islander

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I came to Rhode Island from Washington state thirty-five years ago, in August 1978. There were some obvious differences. Rhode Island is a tiny provincial state with a long history; Washington is a large diverse state with a much briefer history.

It took me a long time – almost until the present day – to figure out the subtler differences between the two.

I was puzzled (at first) by people who kept asking me if I was “one of the Rhode Island Williamses.” I had no idea what this meant. I finally realized they were asking if I was descended from Roger Williams, who founded Rhode Island colony in 1636. I am not one of his descendants, so far as I know. But I wasn’t here more than a year or so before I became acquainted with someone who was. See? The Roger Williams family is still here. Everyone's still here. People here stick around.

They seem to like it here.

They like it so much, in fact, that a lot of people never cross the state line. I saw a cute bumper sticker in Frog & Toad the other day: THIS CAR NEVER LEAVES RHODE ISLAND.  (That’s not a joke, for a lot of people.) The Rhode Island border is a little permeable here and there – into Attleboro, Mass. in the northeast, and into Seekonk, Mass. in the east, and maybe just a little into Stonington, Conn. in the southwest – but it is generally a very watertight little enclosure, in which everyone bounces around, but which no one ever really leaves.

Which leads to the next thing: everyone knows everyone here. 

In Washington, you know the people in your community, or at least a few of them. In Rhode Island, you know everyone. Of course you do. You keep running into the same people over and over again. How can you not know everyone?

But Rhode Island is a very private club. It takes a while before you’ve really been accepted.

Now I’ve been here for more than thirty-five glorious years. People smile and wave at me in the street. I say hello to everyone, and they say hello back, because they know: deliverymen, cashiers, business owners. Even one of the homeless people downtown greeted me the other day with casual familiarity.

I’m a local, at last. A real Rhode Islander.

And it only took thirty-five years!

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Rhode Islandiana

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There is a little curiosity shop just down the street from our apartment.  It is called “What Cheer Antiques.”

 

 

Okay, I’ll explain. 

 

 

Back in 1636, when Roger Williams first rowboated over from Plymouth Colony to set up his own little homestead hereabouts, he’d taken the trouble to learn some of the local Native American language, and he knew the Narragansett word for friend was “netop.”  So he greeted the local inhabitants, upon arrival, with: “What cheer, netop?”  (“What cheer?” was a perfectly okay seventeenth-century English way to say “How ya doin’?”, by the way.)

 

 

It resonated, somehow, through the years.  The motto of Providence is still “What cheer?” (I love the charmingly primitive version of the city's seal given above.)

 

 

And one of the things What Cheer Antiques sells, according to their own advertisements, is Rhode Islandiana.

 

 

No, this is not a cross between Rhode Island and Indiana. 

 

 

It is Rhode Island memorabilia.

 

 

It is West Cranston High t-shirts.  It is promotional material for the Rhode Island Reds hockey team, long defunct.  (My friend Apollonia was hit in the head by a puck at a Reds game.  Beat that!)  It is Rocky Point amusement-park merchandise.  It is cookbooks and city guides printed by the Providence Journal in the 1940s.  It is old postcards showing Providence’s downtown area looking, in 1920, not so different from today.  It is costume jewelry with the word “Coro” traced in fine script on the back.

 

 

This is why we love Rhode Island.  It is dowdy and loveable, like a fat shaggy dog. 

 

 

We were founded by pretty much the only colonial-era personage I ever heard of who bothered to learn the local Native American language.  (He even wrote a book about it.)

 

 

We Rhode Islanders are cranky, and wary, and proud of our history, every little scrap and crumb of it. 

 

 

And it brings us great cheer, netop.

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