Old graveyards are found throughout the New England landscape. Gravestones like the one on the cover, its winged head symbolizing escape from the flesh, remind us of the Puritans for whom this was the sole allowable form of figurative art. In symbol and words, these gravestones are memento mori: remember, as I am, so shall you be. Sometimes—as with Cuffe Gibbs's stone in Newport's Common Burying Ground, signed by its carver Pompe Stevens—they express pride in survival. Given the Puritans’ contempt for the body, their rebellion against the Catholic and Anglican concept of “hallowed ground” meant that their family lands were often their last resting places. For the poor, the enslaved, the displaced, there are few markers.

Though their passing may have left no trace, the dead are restless and the world is changing. Hidden languages are emerging, rising again like rocks after the winter. Wampanoag, Mohegan, and other Algonquian peoples are reviving their once-lost languages, reminding us that the first Bible entirely printed in North America was John Eliot's Wampanoag Bible. Rhode Island is acknowledging its secrets of slavery with medallions like the “stumbling stones” (Stolpersteine) Germany uses to mark houses where its slaughtered Jews once lived. In the Gothic mode, the past is ever present, and nothing buried can remain undisturbed—not sins, bodies, or secrets.

For nearly fifty years, I have been addressing historical societies, family associations, and other genteel New England audiences, telling them the stories they did not want to know about their ancestors and their contemporaries. I’m rarely invited back. The descendants of New England's founders have more than their share of family secrets. The Hale Family Reunion in Beverly, Massachusetts, in 1992 did not want to hear what Reverend Hale in 1692 said about women as witches. According to the docent at the John Brown House in Providence, home of the first benefactor of Brown University: “If you say your ancestor was in the Caribbean Trade, it was slaves; the China Trade, opium.” (Brown's wealth came from both trades.) The Gothic mode is about abjection; in Julia Kristeva's terms, “what is abject, […] the jettisoned object, is radically excluded” (2).