The Frog Prince

By: Frances McGrath

Mary Jones, an indentured servant in the Pullman household, finished her sweeping just as the sun set. She waited for Mr. Pullman to give her further orders and when he didn’t, she sighed in relief. Perhaps today would be an easy day, tonight would be an easier evening. It had been a long day; as the air continued to warm and the household spent more time in the gardens and the fields, the dirt in the house was constant and the work felt never-ending. Mrs. would yell at Mary if there was any dirt on the floor at all, so Mary was constantly watching people walk through, making more work for her.

It had been a long day.

At dinner, she sat to the side in the kitchen, her worn heels on the stone floor, while the family ate their dinner, bread and cheese and stew. Mary had her own bowl. The bread was crunchy and chewy and delicious, soaked in the juices of the stew.

And so night went on. The family went to bed, and Mary tucked herself into her own pallet and was snoring moments after she blew the candle out.

Suddenly!

The door slammed open. Her master ran in and looked terrified. Mary didn’t know what was going on but then– she heard it, now, too– a terrifyingly loud noise coming from up the hill.

He grabbed his musket from the closet behind Mary and ran out of the house, nightcap still on his head, boots on under his nightgown. “They’re coming for us!” he shouted, “but we’re going after them first!”

He ran out the door, and the neighbors too, and the group charged up the hill. The noise coming down was thunderous and terrifying. The men believed, knew, that the tribes led by Chief Uncas must be coming for them, tired of the colonists taking over their land. Relations between the Indigenous tribes and the Windham colonists had been friendly but strained, and Mary knew that the colonists lived in fear of the other shoe dropping. They were constantly pushing Uncas to give more and more, to let the colonists plant crops and graze their animals on what had been free land. There was no way of knowing if King Philip’s War would see another round.

The men started up, disappearing into the dark after a moment, and it was all Mary and the rest of the women of the house could do but wait. The walk up the hill was not normally a long one, but this night it seemed like it took forever.

Soon they heard musket shot after musket shot, muffled bangs again and again until, eventually, the terrifying noise, what sounded like shouts and screams, died down. What had been that noise? Perhaps it didn’t matter, because at least it was over. At least whatever it was had ended.

Eventually, in the renewed quiet of the night, the men returned down the hill to their homes. They all tried to calm themselves, returning to bed with hopes of sleep before dawn, but the whole village was wide awake. The noise was gone, but the nerves were not. Mary lay awake on her pallet, trying to will her heartbeat back to normal.

Mary was shocked. What had these men done? These animals didn’t deserve this treatment. All they had wanted was water, and whose fault was it that there wasn’t enough in the pond for them all? The colonists, of course, had been taking water from the pond to water their gardens and boil for their tea. Mary knew it was their fault, and she couldn’t believe that the village had taken it out on the frogs.

The men and their families eventually wandered back down the hill. To them, the carcasses meant nothing. The event was over, something humorous to look back on. To Mary, it was a tragedy.

She couldn’t tear herself away. She sat, not worried about the mud on her dress, wanting to let these animals know that someone cared, that it mattered to someone that they were all dead.

And then, something stirred. She saw something move. A frog was still alive!

She ran over. The frog was struggling to move, under the weight of so many other bodies. She helped it out and, for some reason, wasn’t that surprised to hear it whisper, “thanks.”

“Of course,” Mary replied. “I’m so, so sorry. I can’t believe this happened.”

“All we wanted… was some water” he managed to say. “My name is Joseph,” he continued. “But you can call me Joe.”

Mary introduced herself and asked, “what should we do? How can I right this wrong? We should never have taken the muskets to you all. How unfair. You’re just a part of nature, you’d never hurt anyone, you’re just jumpers. We should be kind to you.”

Joe blinked in acknowledgement. He struggled to his feet, and gave a feeble hop. “Follow me,” he said. “Let’s find who’s left.”

Mary followed slowly as Joe hopped along the side of the pond. He turned his head to her and said, “you need to disguise yourself. If you look too human, after last night? They’ll never talk to you.” So Mary ducked under a bush, scooped up some mud from underneath, and smeared it on her hair and across her face.

They kept on down the path, twists and turns and through the dense forests on the top of the hill. Eventually, Joe led her around the final corner and she saw them: frogs as far as the eye could see. Well, at first, all she saw was lush green. And then, some of that green started to move. And she realized; a lot of that green was actually frogs.

They came out of the greenery, furious at Joe. What was he thinking, bringing a human here, especially after last night??? But Joe quickly explained to them that there was something different about Mary, something worthy of trusting. She’d stayed behind and mourned their fellow frogs, and not laughed when she’d seen the wreckage of the battle scene. She’d actually wanted to help. Eventually the other frogs came around and started to talk, to tell stories of the loved ones they’d lost in the fight over the little water that was left. They told her about how hard life had been without enough water for the whole community. It was tough, not having enough of their only required resource. Their world with more and more humans in it was getting more and more difficult, especially because these humans didn’t understand the frogs and the water and the natural world the way that the humans who’d been around before did. The Native Americans were careful and sparing and treated nature with respect, so life had not always been hard like this. But this was not so the case with the settlers, who treated every resource like it would automatically renew. And that made life for the frogs hard. Mary listened, and she empathized with them, and told them that she, too, found life with the settlers challenging. They didn’t treat her, or other indentured servants, with any respect, either. So they began to trust that Mary was, indeed, someone who understood their plight.

Joe eventually pulled Mary away from the crowd. He wanted to speak to her on his own. The sky was clouding over, and he said that a thunderstorm was on its way and he wanted Mary back in the village before the lightning, for her safety. She agreed, mystified that this frog was so concerned for her wellbeing, and so trusting of her in the first place. So they started the long journey back to the frog pond, talking all the way about all that Mary had heard from the frogs. Mary wanted to help, and she tried to create solutions with Joe.

  Joe was right, a storm was brewing, so they walked hurriedly. The grey clouds scudded across the sky, obscuring the blue.

But they didn’t make it in time. The storm began, first with ominous distant thunderclaps. Then the rain started, a gentle almost mist at first but the rain began in earnest soon enough. “Hurry!” Joe said to Mary and Joe hopped with a renewed purpose as the rain began to wash the mud from Mary’s face and hair.

Suddenly, a bolt of lightning streaked across the sky. Mary gasped, it was so close. She looked up towards the sky, where the lightning had come from, as if to see if more was on its way. But when she looked back down at Joe, he was gone. In his place, was a man.

“WHAT IS GOING ON??” said Mary.

The young man simply beamed at her. “It’s happened, it finally happened!” he yelled, and jumped with joy, unusually high for a man of his size. “I’m human again!”

Mary gaped with shock at him. Who was this man? Was it Joe???

Joe laughed. “Now,” he said, “let us save the frogs! Let us tell these settlers just what they are doing wrong! Let us teach them that frogs do no harm, just jump and live! And all they want is to share the water! Be kind to the frogs!”

So that is what they did.

Joe, as it turns out, came from a family with land, who had been missing him for many years, and they bought Mary out of her indentured servitude and the two traveled, making it their purpose to learn what they could from communities that knew how to conserve water and be kind to nature. They met with Pequot tribes and Mohegan tribes and Nipmuck tribes and they met with Uncas and they talked with his son Joshua, who had always worked closely with the Windham community. Joshua wanted to care for the land, wanted it to last, so he was eager to help Mary and Joe. They wanted to learn all that they could from people that had lived on the land for much longer than Mary had. And they made it their life’s goals to teach those ways to the settlers, however they could, so that these new inhabitants of the same beautiful land as the green frogs of the Frog Pond could learn to love it and treat it with the respect it deserves.

About the creator

Frances McGrath is a librarian who focuses on her work with children. She has long been frustrated by the story of the frogs, and leapt at the chance to reimagine it. To do this story justice, she worked with many of her fourth grade students at Sweeney Elementary in Willimantic, who helped her imagine the rest of the story. What would happen with this frog who survived? And so, he became a rich prince trapped as a frog, which then was drawn by a talented second grade student. In the students’ retelling, there is a castle and a wedding and a moat with frogs, but we ran out of time during lunch to get all that written down. Check out these behind the scenes notes from their brainstorming session.

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Let's Discuss!

1. Why is it important to conserve natural resources?

2. Who do you know who does a good job taking care of their land/plants/garden/culture? What could you learn from them?

3. Why do you think history is often so careless with smaller characters?

There's always more to do!

• The Frog Prince Wordsearch

• Frog Connect the Dots

• Frog Coloring Sheet