by Larry Kramer
“We are not wanted. And we must attend to this fact. That is clear.” It is Brutus who says these words, without realizing that in saying them he becomes their leader.
“I would be careful, I would,” says Hiram Holderness, one of the highest born among them. “We talk as if we are many when in fact we are but few.”
Most among them nod. They are still not quite a hundred strong. But the population of Jamestown, including this new shipload and the several that preceded it, now approaches certainly one thousand and probably more. Hiram posits they might be nearing two thousand. And still no women! How many of them have yet to look about and wonder who among them in fact are, or could be, friends? Outright friendships are still not favored in this lonely outpost; these are still the few who, by the softness of affection, have adorned their friendships with love.
Mr. Cleve takes it upon himself to visit as many of the hushmarked couples as he has learned about. Many have built their own small homes. Yes, the coupled are now considered by the uncoupled to be full-blown hushmarkeds, no longer akin to normal men. He warns them the worst is brewing. “Your group is become too brazen.” Is it true, he asks, that they hold communal suppers, with fiddle dancing after? Is it true, he asks, that several couples have adopted Indian orphan children, indeed have paid money to obtain an Indian child? Is it true, he asks, that several among them are of mixed race, and one a full-blooded Indian?
Yes, all of these are true.
“Is it not possible to more conceal your … affection for each other?”
No, for most of them now this is not possible. They are learning to take strength from each other.
“Then I am even more filled with fear and trembling for you than before I asked these questions,” Mr. Cleve says as he turns and leaves them. “I fear for your lives, you fools,” he is heard to mumble.
That night Hiram Holderness is murdered. It is he who has coupled with an Indian, Ogetsu, whom he was teaching English. Ogetsu, finding his beloved dead, runs away into the forest. They know he will never come back. He does come back, though. He comes back in a coffin. His tribe has sent him back in a black box, in pieces.
Polski and Rummengrad are next. They are found strangled in their bed. It must have taken several sets of hands to quiet them both.
When a dozen men come for Strang and Hebrew, the invaders are shot to death. All of them.
For a while, a truce of sorts quiets the air.
The next several ships do indeed bring women, though not so many as are wanted or needed. Mr. Cleve’s wife, Jane, joins her husband at last. He has written her about the hushmarked couples, and over their first dinner in the private apartment he has had built for them in the newest of the community cabins, he informs her of the most recent explosion of hate against them.
Jane is blind. Mr. Cleve did not want her to come to this wilderness, but after a while both her insistence and his longing got the best of him. He has found a companion for her, Ogetsu’s sister Petalahtra, who speaks English.
After dinner Jane asks to be taken to the cabins and introduced to all the men. Mr. Cleve guides her. It takes her many evenings to meet each and every one of them. She holds each man’s hand and says a few words to him. Sometimes she says things like, “Isn’t it a shame what has been happening to the hushmarkeds?” even though Mr. Cleve advises her that this may not be wise.
Jane invites the women friends she made on board ship to tea. Three dozen women have come to live here now. Many have already been spoken for. She tells them that as women they must somehow restore harmony to “this community of men, all of whom need the love a woman can bring.” She means her words to include all the men. She hopes the women will not discriminate harshly against anyone.
The next day, while Jane and Petalahtra are walking in the warm sun along the water’s edge, a man falls into step with them. Petalahtra asks him who he is and what he wishes.
“My name is not important. I am a man who could wait no longer and now finds love with another man. We are both terrified for our lives. My brother in England writes me that he knows your brother, who is one of us.”
Jane stops.
“Missus, let us go back now.” Petalahtra takes her arm and tries to turn her around.
“Not just yet, Petalahtra. Is there anyone else about? Anyone who can see or hear us?”
“I do not think so, my lady.”
“I have known this about my brother since he was twelve years old. I love my brother very much. He was almost hanged twice. He fled England and now lives in Italy, where fortunately my family can afford to keep him. It is a crime because he was an exceedingly brilliant solicitor and now his skills are useless. What are we going to do, sir, about the sorry state I hear of in Jamestown?”
“I was going to ask you the very same, ma’am. I will not return to the celibacy necessary to calm waters and quiet hate. Nor will I leave my husband to partake of a woman. If trouble arises I will murder before I allow myself and mine to be murdered.”
“These are strong words.”
“We meet tonight. Will you join us?”
“No!” Petalahtra says.
Jane has nodded yes. The man gives both women directions to the remote location where the meeting will be held.
It is past midnight when they all assemble. Mr. Cleve attends his wife but she makes him wait outside. Petalahtra takes her in. There are only fifty in this unfinished boatshed on the waterfront. The others are too frightened to come.
Brutus is the spokesman. “We welcome you, Mrs. Cleve,” he begins.
“She is Lady Cleve!” Petalahtra interjects.
“I did not know that. I apologize, my lady. And to your husband, who must be Lord Cleve, though he never said as much.”
“It makes no difference. Here we are all meant to be equal, Mr.…?”
“They call me Brutus. My own beloved was murdered. It is dreadful to be alone without him. Whatever we plan to do tonight, and we must do something or else we are all doomed, I dedicate my actions and energies to my Carston’s memory. If I am killed I announce that I must be buried by my beloved’s side. The others know where he is laid to rest.”
“This sounds most impending, this action you are planning. What is it, if I may inquire?”
And Brutus lays out his plan. When he finishes he says, “I swear you all to secrecy. If there is a traitor here tonight among us, may God send him and his unfaithful tongue to hell.”
But it is not Brutus’s plan that surfaces first on the following day.
It is summer, and exceedingly hot. There is a shortage of drinking water because of drought. The hushmarkeds have gone farther afield than ever before, ostensibly to have a picnic and to fiddle-dance. There are now some fifteen children among them, some Paspahegh, some half-breeds born to Indian women inseminated by these men, who paid for the child in advance. Children are swimming in the river. A dozen men, with Eldred Punic in the lead, paddle swiftly toward them in canoes, waving in a friendly fashion. “Come, children, let us take you for a ride!” Punic calls. The children splash themselves nearer in their doggy-paddle way. The men stand up with their rifles and shoot them one by one until each child is dead and floating in the water.
The hushmarkeds take up their own rifles and start to fire back. But more armed men fast appearing from out of the trees surround them. There are many casualties on both sides but there are soon none of the hushmarkeds left alive.
The bodies of all the men and children are carted back to the community, stacked in a pile, doused with oil, and burned.
Then Lady Jane Cleve is led forward, her hands bound behind her. A man who has not been noticed before takes a long needle and thrusts it through her tongue. “As you do not see, so shall you never speak again,” he says as other men chain her to a post. Nor will she eat or drink. Lord Cleve, if he was that, whose back has been broken on a wheel, lies dead not far from her, but just beyond her reach. Petalahtra is spared because a man already wishes to marry her.
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The men now celebrate their freedom from the past. Though each professes great relief and looks at his brothers with what appears to be a smile, who among them can really be trusted to be a man?
There is a little whiskey left in the stores, and it is broken out and passed around, with ladles of what cold water remains to be drawn up from the wells.
Eldred Punic makes a toast. “Men of Jamestown. Men of this New World. We must congratulate ourselves for ridding our settlement of this plague of evil and sin. More women are coming! Their ships are on the seas. I am informed of this on good authority. God will bless our patience as we wait, to wait no more.”
But the well water has been contaminated by brackish water, and those who drink it—all the men who are left—themselves now die, from salt poisoning.
And so ends this early Jamestown community. There will shortly be others. The British do not give up so easily. Between 1607 and 1622 the Virginia Company will transport some 10,000 people to Jamestown, but only 2,000 will still be alive there in 1622.
But this first Jamestown comprised the first homosexual community in the New World.
So there you have it, yet again.
FRED’S FACTS ON THE TABLE
Early American history is most always a New England one, northeastern in its proprietary concerns for its own “facts.” The English did journey to and from what would become Virginia earlier than they hit the coast of Massachusetts, but these forays were disastrous. They were failures of the most harrowing sort, evidently so embarrassing that the recording of our New World’s beginnings had to be gussied up with northern successes. In 1587, 117 people from England landed on the coast of Virginia and in no time at all vanished with hardly a trace. To this day no one knows what happened to them. Killed by the Indians? Killed by the Spanish? Double-crossed by the English back home? Murdered by their own, as was to happen a few years later in Jamestown, for loving each other?
Huge failures of any sort are rarely set down with anything approaching the detail and depth and honesty of the actual event. That’s why Puritans as first comers and their landing on Plymouth Rock as our first settlement make such a popular sentimental myth in all the history books. How else can “inspiration” be set loose to impregnate the future? Certainly not by sordid catastrophes.
Rare is the historian who has acknowledged the existence of hushmarkeds in early America (or in early anywhere else, for that matter). Rare is the historian who has paused to consider that in the predominantly male environment of Jamestown it would have been natural for men to turn to each other for companionship and sexual release. Archaeological discoveries indicate that the fort inside the walls at Jamestown occupied only some 1.75 acres, a finding that underlines how so many occupants would literally have been tossed into each other’s arms.
The next contingents to arrive continue to be predominantly male by, it is estimated, roughly anywhere from six to one and, later, four to one over women. There was no protection against the charge of sodomy, however, and since sodomy is the only game in town for many, it’s only a matter of time before it comes before a court of law. In 1624, William Couce, twenty-nine, his cabin boy, or steward, or perhaps even his indentured servant, charged that Captain Richard Cornish, in an early landmark case, had, by force, put him upon his belly, “and so did put me to pain in the fundament and did wet me.” Captain Cornish was hanged.
And in 1624 the company went bankrupt and its charter was annulled.
There was never any punishment for lesbian activities, although such relationships were visible when women actually arrived in numbers. It appears that the law preferred to base convictions upon whether penetration had occurred. No cock, no intercourse, no semen, no problem.
Such were the founders of 1607.
Am I not becoming quite the historian! —Your Roving Historian (YRH)
* * *
STOP PRESS:
In 2113 evidence is excavated of cannibalism: a young girl’s bones showing her remains had been chewed on. She was fourteen and was presumably eaten by starving men and women during the harsh winter of 1609. She had come to Jamestown on one of the boats that finally brought more women.
DARKUS THE FIRST
The little baby, hardly born, is alone in the wilderness, abandoned. Because it is black it’s left right where it is by the occasional Indian or passing inhabitant of the colony. Finally a white man picks it up. It’s a boy, he notes. Well, I could use a son. Life is brutal in Virginia. The child will be good company. As he scoops him up and cradles him to his chest to keep him warm, he’s already deep in plans. How nice to have a son without all the problems of a wife. The baby, who had not been crying, now begins to do just that. “It will be a good life. Why are you crying? Do you know the difference between us already? Well, you’ve been abandoned by your own. You’d best get accustomed to letting a white man try to take some care of you. What would you like your name to be? You are very dark. I’ll call you Darkus.”
TORTURA
She etched her thoughts on pieces of parchment in blood, with the feathers of turkeys. It is heartbreaking to read these documents in the Greeting vaults at Nearodell. They are so fragile and ancient that they are sandwiched between sealed plastic sheeting. It must be tears that explain the many spots, often smearing the blood.
The parchments were handed down through the family of one Raftis Bonaventura, a self-taught indentured slave. Bonaventura painstakingly deciphered them and standardized their pidgin English as best he could in his History of My Momma and Her Mommas, published finally in Savannah, Georgia, in 1839.
* * *
The white man steal all the black people. They take all our tribe. I never seen so many white people before. I am wrong about the stealers. They are all colors, including black people stealing other black people. Negers and Moors, the black people are called. So many new words. So many new people. So many colors of black.
I am far away from home. How will I get back there?
My mother took money for me. She said I on my own now, going off to Somewhere. New World. Car-o-li-na.
White Man who takes me lets me name myself. I name myself Queen Tortura. In memory of Tor, my tribe, and Tura, my mother, who borne me when she is ten years old. She is so beautiful. Mostly her teaching to me is don’t fight back and do what they tell you. If I speak good it is because of White Man. If I speak good it is because my mother was so beautiful. White Man stays with her and plays with me.
When a girl baby is born, right away you must scratch letters of her mother’s name on the tiny baby’s body in case little she is stolen away, and also so she will always know her mother’s name because taken away is always a certain sureness.
There are Longing Songs about being taken away, Mooning Songs sad to hear.
I miss you, ma maman,
I miss you as much as I love you.
Do you think we ever meet again?
In this world.
I hope you are safe and happy.
I kiss you forever now and always
From wherever I am to wherever you are.
Why do we never know where we are?
They steal more girls than boys. Girls have holes in front and back. Pretty girls are twice worth boys, who have holes only in back. White Man carries his favorite girl with him from place to place. If the girl be small and young, she is less heavy to worry about. If she grows too fat she is left Somewhere. White Man sucks on boy’s front when he loses his pipe.
Yes, I am Queen Tortura. A queen is when you take a man for the first time front and back. If he say “good,” then you call yourself queen. If he don’t say “good,” you get killed or left or sent to Somewhere. Mostly “good” comes when his thing in front get hard. White Man get real mad when his franger don’t get hard. I see one friend get her head cut off. I see one friend get her tongue cut out. God Tututu blesses you or he don’t bless you. I am a pretty thing. I know that. I am real dark, which is wanted more than light. I love the color o
f my skin. Deep inside my skin I see stars. Stars are my Somewhere. My nose and ears and all my face and body, my fingers, my feet and hands, all perfect. That’s what my White Man says. My White Man is called Catholic. He is happy in my holes. He is from a place called Spane. He lived in Africa for years and has much money. He is the One who first does it to me when I am four and he owns me and sticks his franger in me when he wants to, hurting, pushing, harder. He tells me I look like a Chinadoll.
I see some of the frangers other girls get stuck in them and I am glad my White Man has a small franger. Once I call his franger small and he drinks too much and beats me with a thick stick.
On the boat to the country of New World we almost starve to death. Then white men give us meat from the monkeys on this boat with us. It makes some girls very sick. Maybe fifty they throw over into the ocean. They take us to the shore of Carolina. Then they take us off our boat. We stand in a big group. They take our clothes off us. Many black and white men come and feel us all over, even my frangia. A big black man gives my White Man many pieces of gold and takes me from my Catholic, who I never see again. He leaves his Chinadoll.
The big black man puts me in the arms of a man who is the same color as me. We are cold and hold each other hard. It is strange—to hold a man of the same color.
The big black man calls the man in my arms Darkus.
“My name is Darius!” Darkus says. No one listen to him.
He wants me to understand him. I see that in his eyes. The big black man starts to take him away. Darkus vomits. I think he vomits because he is afraid. On the boat to the New World many people vomit. The big black man waits until Darkus finishes his vomit and then takes him away. He calls him Nigger. He comes back with a White Man who calls me Nigger. White Man uses Nigger word a lot. He gives the big black man money and takes me away. I am frightened but I do not vomit.
White Man takes me down the street where Darkus is tied to a post next to a horse. White Man ties me and Darkus by ropes to the horse. He makes us walk behind the horse while he rides. We follow behind for a long time. Darkus helps me stand up when I fall down. He holds my hand and don’t let go. This makes White Man laugh. We walk more and more. My shoes are no more. We get no water or food. The horse gets water and food.
