The American People: Volume 1: Search for My Heart

by Larry Kramer

  Many black men and white men look at us as the horse pulls us. They laugh. Some point guns at us and say out loud, “Bang bang.” They laugh more.

  We reach a house in the trees. White Man takes Darkus and me to the shed and locks us up. It stinks here, like pigs. White Man carries a long knife he holds up in the air back and forth in front of our faces.

  We are not alone. Many other white men are here. They make places to sleep outdoors. They look at me all the time.

  White Man brings us out and throws us on the ground. He takes off the ropes. Many men tear off clothes from Darkus. They tear off clothes from Tortura. I see Darkus look at me different. His franger is very big. White Man shows Darkus my frangia hole. Darkus does not understand. I think he never fuck a woman before. Men whip him with a long piece of leather. His franger is soft. I feel sorry for him. I take his franger and smile at him and make him hard and show him how to put himself inside me. I move side to side so he feels good in his franger. He starts to smile back. It is nice to fuck with someone my same color. All the white men begin to yell and clap hands. Darkus makes sounds of pleasure loud and more loud, and the men cheer loud and more loud, and it is over. Tears are on my face. Is this why I was brought here? I thought I would cook and clean and make a nice home for nice White Man. Darkus and Tortura are forced to fuck many times each day. White Man gets money from people to watch us.

  I get real sick inside. Everything I eat and drink makes me sick inside, so I stop eating and drinking. Soon I skin and bones and can’t stand up. White Man bring back the big black man sold me to him. The black man shakes his head no, he does not want me back to sell again. White Man ties me to the back of his house. Darkus also. His rope is not rope but chains. His ankles are sores and blood.

  White Man comes back with another black man and woman for men to come and watch them fuck. No one looks at me and Darkus.

  Darkus says soft to me, “You got to get strong so we can run from here. Stop vomiting. Eat the food he bring us. Please.” I make myself do this. He takes his hands and rubs my legs and my arms and all over. He makes me strong again.

  One night I wake up and Darkus is gone. It is real cold. It feels like snow to come. Where his chains were is a hole in the wood. No one is here, no white men, no one. After two nights he comes back. He carries a big knife and a big gun and tells me White Man is dead and we have to leave fast. “We must run before they find us.” I understand more now of what he says.

  But no one comes after us. No one likes this White Man. No one wants to go farther and farther into the forest. They think we will die there. Or that before long we will come back because it is easier to be a slave and eat.

  The forest is filled with black people dead. They are hung from trees, strung up on ropes, hanging out for big birds to peck-peck their flesh. The farther we go we see more dead on the ground. He pulls me and I keep looking at all these deads to make me go faster.

  Darius used to say to me, “History is white man’s history. History is only from when white men came to this land. There is no history about this land before. Lies is what we are taught, from the very beginning. My blood is here before white man’s blood. Why does white man proclaim a truth black men can’t call truth? From the very beginning white men hate us. Black slaves get whipped to death. I will be dead soon. If not tomorrow, day after for sure.”

  Darius gone now.

  No one knows that Tortura is a queen. There is an old woman here who says I was made queen of the Tura before I was a year old. No one talks to her anymore. The lips of this old one’s frangia are huge flaps of flesh that stick out like two hands praying. They ooze with sores and pus. She has no more teeth because her old Catholic pulled them out to use her mouth when her frangia became useless. Now she can only grunt. She is blind in one eye. A white man tried to take her eyes out so she wouldn’t look at another man after he left. He used a hot poker, but one eye survived.

  I think I am safe. I have given birth to twelve boys, each called Darius by my Darius. But no one would call them anything but Darkus. My Darkus, my Darius, he disappeared or was kidnapped or murdered. He tried. But more and more he was afraid. The boys were all sold away from me, all except the one last Darius who stays here with me. He is the oldest and has become the manager of the slaves on this plantation. The owner is a good enough White Man who has been kind to me and is in love with my Darius. He buys many slaves each year. Now there must be several hundred.

  One day the old lady grabbed me and ripped away my skirt to read the name scrawled inside my frangia. She screamed out in happiness. At first I didn’t understand her cries, but I finally made out the words. She was saying. “I am Tura. I am your mother.”

  Raftis Bonaventura reports in his book that his great-grandmother told him that the Darkus who loved Tortura lived to be 110 years old. He was kidnapped away from Tortura and sold back into slavery until he escaped again. He vowed to father enough kin from his seed and from the seed of his seed that they could all live apart in their own community. It was a revolutionary notion, which of course was not fulfilled. They say he walked around muttering, “I’m gonna create a whole race of niggers just to pay you back.”

  NEW YORK, NEW YORK!

  Nieuw Amsterdam is established in 1625, although outposts of the Dutch West India Company are already in place as far north as Albany and as far south as the Delaware River.

  Here are some things you should know about what will become America’s largest city. Here are some things you should understand about the one place in the world people will one day flock to in droves with the single purpose of becoming rich. It’s founded by white trash. Low-rent types who booze and fuck and piss and shit and fuck some more in what pass for streets. They’re Dutch, mostly, and lazy. Boston and Philadelphia will get the better folks because you can buy land there. But you don’t go to places with lots of available land in order to get rich. You go to places where there’s hardly any for sale and you find ways to fight over it and the strong arm is the winner. Not all the land here is claimed, of course, because no one’s quite certain how much land there is and how far up it stretches. And of course it doesn’t occur to anyone that there might be prior claims. While rich Dutchmen are smart, they’re not adventurous. Sure things are what they look for. Wilderness in a foreign country isn’t a sure thing—it’s a lot of trouble. So the populated downtown is bought and claimed and resold and fought over from the very beginning, and the Dutch then pocket their profits and go home, leaving these rowdy and untrustworthy types to guard what they’ve left here. And few are the Dutch willing to take a flier on anything north of Twenty-third Street, which is why there are many Dutch names on downtown parks and roadways and subway stops. These few acres are still being fought over to this day, so twisted are the machinations and ramifications of early on-site and/or absentee landlords, crooked crooks from everywhere. The Dutch have lots of experience being world-class con men and hijackers, of the land and sea. The American People never think of the Dutch this way, with their Rembrandt and Van Gogh and all those pretty tulips and quaint wooden clogs, but it was so; for a while there’s no one here smart enough to better them, and so for a while Holland owns a good deal of Manhattan and maintains a stern grip on the overseas investments of its citizens. Peter Stuyvesant doesn’t pack it in until 1664, and the Dutch who stay here with him are not very hardworking, too busy boozing and fucking, which is why New York, as it will soon be called, becomes one kind of town and Boston another.

  One day the Dutch call everyone back home. Then the real free-for-all gets started.

  The British who come next can’t understand why anyone would want to live in Nieuw Amsterdam in the first place, much less spend good sterling on land on which no one will actually live. So they go to Boston and Philadelphia. Nieuw Amsterdam stays messier, more dangerous, and for the moment less populated. It doesn’t get the start in life that Boston and Philadelphia make for themselves. Of course, some people don’t stay here very long; t
hey leave town trying to find something a little more to their liking, where death at the hands of, now, both drunken Dutch and English men isn’t quite the daily possibility. There are, for instance, 183 murders in Nieuw Amsterdam on one day, July 3, 1665. It’s because of these early years and inhabitants that New York acquires its rough-and-tumble patina, which it never really loses. A lot of people don’t know that New York is older than Boston, which somehow managed to establish itself as the first American city. But these strange permutations of early commerce, all the pushing and shoving and buying and stealing and, yes, murdering, turn out to be what is making New York the capital of the financial world.

  And it’s a sexy town, New York, from its very beginning, something it never loses. Sex helps grease a town that is primarily interested in money. When the English start filtering in, the Dutch make fun of them. A young Dutch physician named Nicolaes van Wassenaer publishes a sort of diary of his observations and reflections, which bear out what we’ve just observed. “No Englishman talks about his penis. I like to talk about mine. I think about mine all the time. I even talk to it. I want to look at other men’s penises to see if they are the same as mine. Do they do what mine does? Does an Englishman say, as I often do, hello, penis?” There is no love lost between the Dutch and the English, although the English, in their quiet way, are no doubt talking to their penises, too.

  What remains here when the English finally take over is a strange combination of the covert and the in-your-face. The covert ones start making the laws to govern the place, and the in-your-face types continue to break them and rule the roost. No one really remembers why the Dutch came and left so quickly. Was there some kind of a war the British won? Not even the great Francis Parkman got down all the skirmishes. No doubt, as with most of history, you had to be there.

  “Social, political, religious, and economic conflict increasingly polarized New York: Dutch against French and English, Puritan against Royalist, fur traders against port authorities, American merchants against European ones, Catholic against Anglican, Reformed against Lutheran, rising generation against the establishment” (Christoph, De Halve Maen, 1994). The palette is definitely being set for all time.

  And we haven’t even talked about the French. If any men fucked outrageously, it was the French. It’s interesting how they have managed to steer clear of the who-brought-syphilis controversy. Very slippery, the French. Yes, they are here too, but they are careful about covering their tracks. Since no one likes them, and they seem to be farther west and to the north, no one’s paying them much attention.

  Sex, hushmarkeds, whores, illicits of every kind and form and fashion flourish. How could they not? It’s almost as if New York from its outset, two centuries before Emma Lazarus, is crying out with open arms, I want you, I need you, come to me, come out, come out whoever and whatever and wherever you are. And let’s find a way to get rich together. Or at the very least to have a fuck. God knows where they placed all the newborn babies. As we head into future centuries it will be interesting to note how many, how very very many, are the foundling homes set up by generous donors.

  As noted, these early days of Dutch dominance—we are talking about a population still fewer than two thousand—come to an end when the British take over in 1664. Their conquest seems to have been relatively peaceful. Various “minority” populations have appeared: the Jews beginning in 1650, visibly; the hushmarkeds surfacing in waterfront locales where they cruise and drink in special taverns, more or less unnoticed; and the slaves, who have been here since the beginning, and remain, and hugely outnumber the white population, now being sold by the Dutch to the British.

  Little was known until fairly recently about the existence in early New York of numerous hushmarkeds. In 1977, Dikla Everts and Monk Pious excavated twelve toilets from waterfront neighborhoods, and their report on the dytoxinization analysis done at the Rupertt Laboratory of Early Dutch Remains in The Hague should have been definitive in establishing what has long been suspected by gay archaeologists still too timid to speak up. Fossilized male turds from these toilets contain not only intestinal parasites but irrefutable traces of semen.

  * * *

  And I am in that semen. I will do better with the English, when they stay for a while, than with the Dutch, who don’t seem to get ass-fucked as much, at least not in this New World, as they did, and do, in Holland, where they seem to like it more, and will like it even more and more. I am still trying to figure out patterns, if you will, of behavior. Human beings are not an easy bunch to figure out. I understand that is what you call yourselves. I thought I was a human being also.

  One thing gets clearer to me by the minute. I bet you your bottom dollar that it will be hundreds of years before the amount of me can be measured in any of you. I am so much more than just a “pretty trace.”

  What is a bottom dollar?

  What is a pretty trace?

  THE FIRST HOOKERS

  Freddie, ours is a sad story, an awful story. No one ever tells it right. As a result Hooker and Mather asses are still being kissed and licked to this day. Their scorpion tentacles still choke our whole wanking world and poison it to death. I love you and I hate you for making me dredge up the Hooker history for this history, our history.

  “We are all sinners: it is my infirmity, I cannot help it; my weakness, I cannot be rid of it. No man lives without faults and follies, the best have their failings, ‘In many things we offend all.’ But alas! all this wind shakes no corn, it costs more to see sin aright than a few words of course. It’s one thing to say sin is thus and thus, another thing to see it to be such; we must look wisely and steadily upon our distempers, look sin in the face and discern it to the full.”

  My ancestor, my great-great-great—crap, I always forget how many greats it takes to nail the shit, cousin, my great-whatever cousin Thomas Hooker (1586–1647) said this in a sermon from his pulpit, shortly after he came to what was to become the United States. He’d settled first in the Massachusetts Bay Colony until he realized he was too Puritan even for snot-nosed Massachusetts; besides, his followers, who stuck to him like lint in a belly button and followed him like honking geese, lusted for more land. He led them all to Hartford, which he founded in 1636, if anyone wants credit for that blighted town, where he built his family a house with very few windows. He had married his patron’s maid, buried one daughter at birth, suffered an agonizing soul-searching breakdown that led him to the ministry, and gone on the run from England for criticizing church and Crown, first to Holland, then to America. Lucky fucking frigging us. He was called, after his death, “the father of democracy,” for reasons no one can remember, because God knows Tom wasn’t in favor of anybody’s freedom. He was a mighty Puritan in an age of them, all of them combining an utter trust in the Almighty’s Power and his Assured Rightfulness and Victory over Everything Evil. All this is capitalized because that’s the way those fart catchers spoke, with every harsh quality of life writ large, as if that could make it desirable, desire of course being a great big whopping fucking Sin. God forbid anything should be, if not enjoyable, at least tolerable. Perhaps it was just as well life was dead to them, because it was hard to find much to rejoice over; it was easier to complain about all the big things and get on with it—“it” being the ceaseless anticipation of the results of constant praying for some redemptive salvation in another world, another time, another place, where there might be, after all, a party with a fucking goddamn cake. Some Englishman said to them before they left England, “We call you Puritans not because you are purer than other men but because you think you are.”

  Freddie, this is beginning to hurt. Memories can hurt. Shit.

  Puritans were not interested in freedom for all, only in salvation for themselves. Freedom and salvation, it turns out real kick-ass fast, have asswipe nothing in common. Puritanism is probably just what this waddling baby country needed to keep its tiny tots in line; otherwise everyone might have been burned up by desire like in Sodom and Gomor
rah. It’s just that Puritanism is so harsh. The irony of this transformation from dissenters to lawgivers is filled with the deep and painful truth, an awful one: they came here to get away from conformity and once they got here they forced everyone else to be just like them. And it has been ever fucking thus.

  There is no love in Puritanism. It turns out that these monsters that won’t allow any deviation from their rigid orthodoxy are obsessed with frigging, fucking, wanking, twatty sex. Don’t do it, they screamed, while that’s exactly what they did. My mother’s cunt was all bent out of shape to prove it.

  Yes, I am related to Tom Hooker. I am descended from Cotton Mather. I carry the blood of two of the oldest families in America. Like many things people think enviable, it isn’t. When I first read what Cousin Cotton actually said, and Increase, and all the various Mather preachers, of which there were too godawful many, and the various Hooker preachers, of which there were the same, and heard all my momma told me about my father before she knocked herself off, and him too, because she was driving, I became a Catholic. If you’re lonely enough, and unloved, and abandoned, and hate the people who left you, and all who came before them, you become a Catholic. It’s essential in becoming a Catholic convert that you feel truly and utterly useless; then you can believe something called a Jesus loves you and something called a Mary loves you and something called God loves you, and as opium-addicted Mary Tyrone said, you are happy … “for a while…”