A DISTANT THUNDER

by H. A. Covington

  I noticed something else that, to me, was odd. No one was drinking alcohol, not even beer. I had never been in a non-alcoholic home before. In fact, I had been in very few homes of any kind other than mine before. My folks weren’t exactly the sociable kind and down on Dead Dog Road we didn’t get many invitations to fashionable country club soirées. Although I knew intellectually that individuals and whole families existed who lived without booze, still it was a bit of a shock actually to run into one. Here was a whole group of people who didn’t get drunk every night. How was such a thing possible? How did they triumph over the horror of the world we lived in without that whole-grain crutch?

  In order to save time, I’ll go ahead and run down what I eventually learned about the family. They arrived in Washington from South Carolina, but Carter Wingfield was originally from Florida. Although I didn’t know it at the time, Florida rednecks are considered to be just about the best of the breed. In that same interview where General Robert E. Lee was once asked by a reporter who in his opinion had been South’s best general and he named Forrest, he was also asked who had been the toughest, hardiest, and most dangerous troops the Confederacy had, and Lee replied, “The men from Florida,” which surprised me as I might add it has surprised generations of chagrined Texans.

  Carter Wingfield was born in a place called Mariana, on the Florida panhandle near the Alabama state line. In March of 1865 a large American force comprised of many thousands of blue-coated negro freedmen troops of the United States Army marched inland from the newly captured city of Pensacola. Mariana had no military value. When the Federals came Mariana had nothing at all. All the blacks had run away, and the women were doing almost all of the work in the home and in the fields. The town was destitute and barren of any man between fifteen and fifty, all of whom were in what was left of the Confederate army scattered from Virginia to the banks of the Mississippi. There was no seed for planting, there was no corn for bread, there was no money, no medicine, no nothing. There wasn’t even a single healthy horse or mule left in town; the local people had to run physically from home to home and farm to farm to sound the alarm that the Yankees were coming. But sound the alarm they did, and when the blacks in blue marched into Mariana they were met with barricaded streets and they found themselves looking down the barrel of every Southern rifle and shotgun remaining in the district. Every white male in the area who could make it had come with some kind of gun, even if he had no ammunition. There were almost two hundred rebels, teenaged boys and elderly men. The only exceptions were a few wounded Confederate soldiers who were home on leave. The youngest of the town’s Confederate defenders was eleven years old. The oldest was eighty-one, a veteran who fought under Andrew Jackson at the battle of New Orleans. From this the defenders of Mariana, Florida, gained the name “The Cradle and The Grave.” They were commanded by a Major Armitage who did so from a chair, because he’d caught a cannon ball at Gettysburg and both his legs had been amputated above the knee. With nothing at all to fight with, outnumbered almost ten to one, the people of Mariana still held off the Americans for two days, fighting house to house until all but eighteen of them were dead or dying and the whole town was burned to the ground. Armitage died in his chair on the porch of his burning home, the boards around him littered with empty pistols and rifles and on the street before him a mound of blue-clad negro corpses. This was the Wingfield family’s heritage.

  I know that Carter did some time in prison as a young man, and he had some tattoos that even then I recognized as home-made prison tats. This included one on the fleshy part of his right hand between his thumb and forefinger, with a diamond and the letters AB, which I learned stood for Aryan Brotherhood. I never asked Carter about his prison time and he never volunteered any information, with one possible exception when he once told me, “You ever feel like you just have to commit a crime, Shane, kill somebody. Don’t steal. Stealing from poor people like ourselves is disgraceful, and stealing from the rich is too dangerous. In this world the god Mammon reigns right alongside the god Judah. Money is power, and The Beast is jealous of its power. The Beast doesn’t really care about killing so long as you don’t kill any of its own pets or servants, but if you try to lay your hands on money, the very source of its power, The Beast will crush you.”

  Whatever the prison beef had been, when it was over Carter and Ma and the family moved up to the South Carolina Low Country to be near her people for a while. At some point along the line, I never knew exactly when or how, the Wingfields had come across Commander Rockwell’s White Power, and it had taken immediate place after the Bible as the second Book in their lives. Right on the heels of that they had bought their first personal computer and discovered the Northwest Migration movement on the internet, and with their Biblical orientation it seemed right and proper that like the children of Israel they should go forth into the wilderness seeking the Promised Land. They headed for Idaho, but when they got to Hayden Lake one of the Christian Identity pastors there convinced them that they would do better acting as missionaries in a new and untried province, so to speak. He persuaded Carter that western Washington was the place they needed to settle. Maybe that pastor honestly thought that, and then again maybe he decided he didn’t want any competition from more alpha males in his congregation.

  Whatever the reason, the Wingfields arrived in Dundee with one ancient Oldsmobile, one pickup truck, a Ryder van containing all their worldly goods and very few dollars in their pockets. As you may have gathered, the economy wasn’t too hot in the Northwest back then.

  Hell, the economy was bad everywhere. It never really recovered after September 11th, 2001. It was rough at first for them, like it was for many new Northwest settlers, but at least the Wingfields had a trade. Ma could cook short order at a diner with the same expertise she gave her own family, and the men were demon mechanics on any kind of engine. When the Wingfields first arrived in Dundee, Carter went the rounds of the local garages and truck lines looking for work. He was invariably asked by the hiring manager, who for some reason always seemed to be female (that was a standard ZOG social engineering practice, as part of the policy of humiliating the white male) “Uh, Mr. Wingfield, no offense but you sound kind of, ah, Southern, and we got a memo from the home office in Seattle that we’re supposed to be careful about hiring new people who don’t have a, ah, local track record. You’re not one of these out of state racists who are moving into the Northwest from all over the country, are you?”

  “No, no, not at all, child!” Carter chirped with a big Elvis grin on his face. “I just love niggers to death!” Needless to say, no gainful employment there. After a few days of this, Carter drove out to the nearest truck stop on I-5 and asked around in the coffee shop to see who was having some trouble. He fixed an electrical problem on a trucker’s rig for fifty dollars, which the trucker was glad to pay out of his own pocket, since taking the vehicle into his line’s shop in Fresno would cost him at least a week off the road, plus the Mexican and Chinese mechanics would probably have screwed up the works worse than they were. Carter then passed out his home number on business cards that the ten-year-old Rooney had hand-printed out for him. By the time he got back to Dundee that night he already had two messages on his answering machine. For the next year, Carter got up at five in the morning and drove down and hung out at the truck stop coffee shop with a small CB handset so he could natter to incoming eighteen-wheelers. Word got around that you could get almost everything up to and including a full engine re-build from Carter and his boys, and for cash you could get it at least a third cheaper than anywhere else on the west coast. After a year they had enough to open their own place just off the same exit. For independent owner-operators, sometimes Wingfield High Performance was all that kept them on the road. By the time I met them, Carter had maintenance contracts from four or five major trucking lines and was employing almost twenty people.

  Ma kept the books so creatively that they never paid the IRS a penny and did so legally. Carter also use
d his extensive teamster contacts to spread Party propaganda nationwide. You couldn’t go into a single men’s room stall or coffee shop or motel at any truck stop in the country without finding some literature with a Tricolor on it.

  After dinner that night I wandered into the living room and took a closer look at the décor. In addition to the flag, hanging on the wall was a poster-sized broadsheet or proclamation on pale yellow paper. They were the Principles, which of course are now world famous and something every schoolchild in the Republic has to memorize. But at the time I had heard only very vaguely of the Party, and I had never read a single piece of literature or had any personal contact with the independence movement at all. I read over the poster:

  Fundamental Principles of Northwest Migration

  I. The White race in North America is in danger of literal, physical extinction. If current destructive demographic trends continue, White people will be a minority in the United States and Canada by the year 2050, and we will have vanished completely from North America by 2100. The real point of no return, however, is far closer. Within a very short time, the median age of the White population of North America will have become so high that we will no longer be capable of reproducing ourselves in sufficient numbers to overcome the tide of mud-colored Third World immigration.

  II. We as a people have wasted the past century on pointless, futile and impotent right-wing and kosher conservative organizations and strategies. The majority of these past organizations and movements refused to recognize the vital central importance of race in all issues, and they refused to recognize the urgent need for state power in order to preserve the existence of our race. The few attempts which have been made to resist racial extinction by groups and personalities of an openly National Socialist or racialist nature have been led by men who were stupid, incompetent, dishonest, or some combination of all three. The result of the past hundred years of right-wing failure and impotence is that we are now out of time.

  III. There is only one strategy remaining to us which may be able to secure the existence of our people and a future for White children. Our last remaining hope to stave off extinction is the establishment of a sovereign and independent nation on the continent of North America for White people only.

  IV. Considerations of demographics and economics, as well as a history of commitment and martyrdom in the persons of Bob Matthews, Sam and Vicky Weaver, and Richard Butler dictate that the territory for this sovereign Aryan republic must lie in the Pacific Northwest.

  V. The first step toward the establishment of the Northwest American Republic is a mass migration of the existing racially aware White community to the states of Idaho, Oregon, and Washington. It is a matter of the utmost urgency to make this vitally important commitment to the future of our people, that you do so now, and that you come to the Homeland with only the minimum delay necessary to raise sufficient funds and put your affairs in order.

  “What’s all this?” I asked Rooney, pointing at the poster.

  “White people have to get our own country,” she told me matter-of-factly. “If we don’t get free of the United States, the niggers and Jews and Mexicans are going to kill us all off because they hate us so bad, and there won’t be any more White people in the world. Our new country’s gone be here in the Northwest, and that’s why we came here.”

  “Where did you come from?” I asked.

  “Roper’s Crossroads. I was born there. That’s a little bump in the road back in Florence County, South Carolina. We took the gap about five years ago.”

  “Took the gap?” I asked, puzzled, never having heard the term before.

  “We Came Home, here to the Northwest, which is where God appointed the Homeland of all Aryan nations to be,” she explained.

  “Oh, you mean you’re spuckies!” I said, sudden enlightenment dawning. I had a very vague idea what spuckies were. Every now and then the TV would complain about racist whites moving to the Northwest, and they’d show film clips of really geeky looking skinheads and weirdos with tattoos wearing strange costumes and trying to goose-step and give Nazi salutes.

  “Well, yeah, but we don’t like being called that,” said Rooney primly. “We prefer to call ourselves settlers or Incomers.”

  “Uh, aren’t you guys all supposed to be out in the woods in Idaho living in compounds or something?” I asked.

  “No, silly, the entire Northwest is our Homeland, and we hope when the time comes we can take Alaska and Montana and a big chunk of Canada too. That’s our flag.” She pointed to the Tricolor on the wall. I recalled seeing weird graffiti spray-painted on walls and highway underpasses around the county. Three vertical stripes, like three lines or tick marks, blue, white, and green. All of a sudden I had this vision of Rooney out spray-painting at night and I could believe it.

  “What do the colors mean?” I asked.

  “Blue for the sky above, green for the land below, and white for the people in between,” said Rooney. “I think they originally wanted the colors running top to bottom, but the kaffirs in Sierra Leone already had that for their flag, so we ran the three colors European-style, left to right.”

  “Pretty simple symbolism,” I said.

  “Yeah, the movement adopted that pattern because we want to keep it deliberately simple. Some folks, like us, wouldn’t mind seeing a Celtic cross or something Christian in that white field, and the NS people want a swastika, of course, and the Odinists want a raven or a Thor’s hammer or something, but our new country has to be for all white people everywhere regardless of their religious belief, or else it won’t serve its purpose of bringing all the Aryan nations together so that all can survive. Also, once the revolution starts you can take apart a Tricolor real quick and all of a sudden it’s no longer an act of treason, it’s just three pieces of cloth.”

  “Uh, okay, so when does the revolution start?” I asked.

  “It already started before we were even born,” she said. “Did you ever hear of Bob Matthews?”

  “Uh, no,” I admitted. “I don’t know much about all this racial stuff.”

  “Then it’s time you learned,” spoke up Carter from behind us. “Shane, you know Mr. Morehouse from your high school?”

  “The biology teacher?” I asked.

  “That’s him,” said Carter. “Well, he doesn’t just teach biology, he teaches history. The right kind of history.”

  “Huh? I never heard anything about him teaching history,” I said curiously.

  “Not at Dundee High,” said Rooney. “We got a group of students from Dundee and Centralia who meet after school, here and in different people’s houses, and sometimes when the weather’s nice we get together for field days up in Millersylvania Park. We have classes, with a blackboard and everything. We even get homework.”

  “You’re telling me you get together after school just to get more homework?” I asked skeptically.

  “This homework washes out the taste of the other kind. It’s fun. We use books that the public schools don’t use any more because they’re politically incorrect. We study about the real history of our race and our civilization, and we learn the things that the ZOG government doesn’t want us to know. We also have Mrs. Barrett from Chehalis High who comes in and teaches us real English literature, not that PC crap we get dished out from that yenta Ms. Abramowitz in our own school. We’re reading Kipling’s suppressed racial poems now, and for a novel we’ve got some copies of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The White Company we’re passing around. Once everybody has read it we’ll be doing an essay on the Aryan values portrayed in the book.”

  “I’ve read it,” I said with some pride. “It’s the second Sir Nigel Loring novel.”

  “Then you can help us analyze it in discussion group,” she said. “This is kind of an unofficial way of getting us an education in spite of the public school system. Our class is meeting tomorrow night. You want to come?”

  “Sure,” I agreed. If it had meant getting to see her again I would have come to an appen
dectomy. I had no idea at the time how important that night was to prove in my life, but I had just been introduced to the Party and to the Northwest independence movement. My childhood was over, and about damned time. It really sucked.

  The Rising of the Moon

  The Rising of the Moon

  “O then tell me, Sean O ‘Farrell, where the gathering is to be?”

  “In the old spot by the river right well known to you and me.

  One word more: for signal token, whistle up the marching tune, For the pikes must be together by the rising of the moon!”

  -Traditional

  I’ve seen a lot of movies and televids that are supposedly about the early days before the revolution. They show people getting sworn into the Party at the stroke of midnight in some secret hideout, along with some dramatic Mafia-style blood oath ceremony, with candles and Tricolors and swastika banners and pictures of the Führer all over. Hey, maybe it actually happened like that in some places. But not in Dundee, Washington. In Dundee we just had our own crowd who accepted the Principles and wanted our own country with jobs and medical care and no Mexicans and no Leon Sorels beating on people. Out of that grew little teams and affinity groups of people we trusted. That was the Party in Dundee, and when time and place served, we became the local NVA.

  Besides, by the time I came along the Party had abolished formal membership anyway, because the government kept trying to make it into a criminal conspiracy case. I understand that in the old days before Northwest Migration, and even for a little while after the Migration got started, there were so-called white racist groups that would let any Tom, Dick, and Harry fill out a membership application and send it in by mail, of all the insane things, and so long as you also sent in your ten dollars for your first month’s dues you would get a membership card, sight unseen. Some even would let you apply online and use your Visa or Mastercard to become a real live white supremacist extremist. Hell, with some of those ripoffs if you sent in enough box tops you got a secret decoder ring as well. I mean, Jesus, how stupid is that? What kind of revolutionary movement takes Visa and Mastercard? I always wondered why white people in those days couldn’t tell that all those little Fearless Leader types weren’t really serious. Or why no one seemed to care.