The American People: Volume 1: Search for My Heart

by Larry Kramer

  What had Anne said and done that was so awful? Being a good person was salvation. The Holy Spirit in the hearts of true believers relieves them of the responsibility of obeying the harsh laws of Puritanism. Its ministers were deluding their followers by declaring that good deeds would get you into heaven. But Anne was the unauthorized minister of a dissident church discussion group. She held Bible meetings in her house. She invited her friends and neighbors, at first all of them women, but soon to be joined by men. Participants felt free to question religious beliefs and to decry racial prejudice, including enslavement of the Indians. She explored Scripture much in the way of a minister, allowing different interpretations. She had a strong concern for women’s lack of rights. It was also charged that by attending her gatherings women were being tempted to neglect the care of their families.

  The General Court of Massachusetts, presided over by Winthrop, brings her to civil trial. She is forty-six and advanced in this fifteenth pregnancy. It is whispered that one of John Winthrop’s congregants is the father and that he raped her in an effort to silence her. She is forced to stand for several days before a board of male interrogators as they try to force her to admit her blasphemies. She is condemned, awaiting Winthrop’s disposition. The First Church in Boston on its own conducts a religious trial. They, too, accuse Hutchinson of blasphemy. They, too, accuse her of “lewd and lascivious conduct” for having men and women in her house at the same time during her Sunday meetings. “Your opinions fret like a gangrene and spread like a leprosy, and infect far and near, and will eat out the very bowels of religion,” her old buddy John Cotton, who had taught her to listen to Jesus speaking within her—“the Spirit of your Father that speaketh in you”—now condemns her as she is consigned to the mercies of the wilderness. She suffers a miscarriage. The Puritan leaders and preachers, from all their many pulpits, gloat over her suffering and that of Mary Dyer, who also suffers a miscarriage, and call it the judgment of God. When Dyer becomes a Quaker, and goes back to Boston to recruit others, she is hanged by Winthrop for this. A real troublemaker Hutchinson was, with her implacable self-certainty, and now, because of these two Johns, the most hated woman in America.

  The Colony continues to persecute Hutchinson’s followers who don’t go with her to Rhode Island, where, with Roger Williams, who’s already there, she became the first woman to found a state. Winthrop and all who stood with him sanctimoniously cited her subsequent tragic misfortunes—her deformed stillborn baby, and the scalping of six of her fifteen children and her own murder by Indians—as proof of God’s judgment against heretics.

  This was a great man? A Modell of Christian Charity is considered his “great” work, the one that includes that “cittie on the hill” baloney.

  Looking back, it can be seen that John Winthrop and Roger Williams were two strong, smart, obsessive men challenging each other’s beliefs, trying to chip away at them, without success, which made their bondage to each other (for that’s what it was) even stronger. The irony is that in this battle they somehow loved each other, because of this very fight. Their correspondence and dealings were not dissimilar to how Melville and Hawthorne will dance the same ritual dances around each other, each in awe of the other, each afraid of the mightiness the other’s passion represents, Hawthorne incapable of saying anything out loud to him at all, Melville imploring desperately, I want you with me, please, I need you, and together we could make the world understand. Winthrop did do something for Williams he’d never done for anyone, not even his own son: he tipped him off in advance of the verdict against him so he could escape his imprisonment and get to Rhode Island safely. Those letters Roger wrote to Winthrop sound like the ones Melville wrote to a terrified Hawthorne, imploring Winthrop for his love on his, Williams’s, own terms, not God’s, but man’s. Williams calls the Boston church “the dung heap of this earth.” Hawthorne surely knew what this was.

  “THERE IS EVIL AT THE CORE OF LIFE”

  That is what Hawthorne will tell Melville. All Melville wanted was Hawthorne’s love. Not this pearl of wisdom. But that’s all that Hawthorne gave him. And pretty much all that Melville found anyway, on his own. What a sad, unappreciated life he led. It was a hundred years before someone took him seriously.

  THE FIRST PLAYWRIGHT?

  You would not note me walking down a street [he wrote] unless you are one like me, or you desire to see me perhaps only when you are drunk or far enough away from pervasive and disapproving eyes. I look like any other man.

  You might even want to know me. I am friendly. I walk with unthreatening gait. I’ll shake your hand firmly and with neighborliness.

  Yes, I am willing to know you. I am lonely, as all Others are, and desire a Friend.

  Indeed, my eyes will look at you most beseechingly to know you. To accept you as you are, if you will do the same for me. Yes, like every Other, I am lonely. These days, loneliness is ill spoke of. Folks do not know what the cure may be. Folk are frightened of that which is full of pain. Loneliness has not yet come into its own as Blight. There is no cure, is there, for Blight, or Sadness? Cure is a word perhaps too new.

  For now, the sad Loneliness of Man is called, only, an ill-Humour.

  There is a cure, of course. Another body’s warmth.

  Where find the ones who will not savage your soul, or pilfer your purse, or take a knife to your member or your throat? Where find the ones to talk to? The ones who are able to love?

  Where find the One?

  Where are the words to explain such feelings as these? Who understands these things?

  I am a Playwright!

  I speak Tongues rich in variation and innuendo. So easy is it for me to summon the Feelings of Mankind.

  I have been Performed! I have heard my words spoke before a crowd and seen tears and heard laughter and, most joyously, cheers. How grand are the feelings that swell inside one when people shout and cheer. Applause! Is there anything so full of balm? Then pride sweeps over one—, yes, pride in the power given me to summon words and devices to string these words together and evoke such Wellcome.

  But Wellcome does not come from all. In this new land, filled with new people who are frightened of the New, there is often opposition to the Play, to any Play. There are places where arrests are made, where incarceration comes from performance of the written word in public by actors who speak such lines as I do write. More and more laws are made against “Publick Performances.”

  I do not know what to make of this Chagrin. Not to earn a livelihood from the Calling of the Heart and not to make a marriage from the same are great woes.

  And so comes the loneliness.

  * * *

  This boy is dressed most proper neat, as for some school far off.

  “Are you lost, my lad?”

  “I am, sir.”

  “Can I aid you home?”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  “Where do you live, then?”

  “I lived in Stuyvesant Square.”

  “Are you then Dutch?”

  “I am. And you are English?”

  “We are all from somewhere. What brings you to St. Tom’s?”

  “It is a peculiar story, sir.”

  “Will you tell me?”

  “Would you like that?”

  “Why, to be sure.”

  “I was witness to a signing most important. A treaty, my father said. To pour the wax, and to emboss it with the signets of all our family, required my parents and my aunts and uncles to withdraw into a chamber distant from the main altar, where I was left and told to pray. ‘You must wait here for my summons,’ my father told me. ‘You must kneel.’ And so I did. ‘You must pray.’ And so I did. For ever so long. But no one returned. I ran in their direction. I searched each alcove and behind each door, until there was only street beyond. So far, you are the only answer to my prayer.”

  “That I will try to be.”

  “I confess a certain fear, sir. And I am tired and I am hungry and I am chilled and ne
ar to tears. I am too old to cry, do you not think?”

  “There is never an age too old for that. Come, let us look together.”

  The elder holds this Youngster’s hand as we march forth. Does that not sound Promising, and Grand? Out of the churchyard we start to walk, away from the tombstones, toward some Light of Day. The elder’s thoughts fill with the Youth:

  I would kiss your lips. I would kiss you a thousand times. Everywhere. Everywhere. I would hold you in my arms, but would you return my embrace? How would you receive what these feelings, my tremors, my needs, must certainly convey to you, of warmth, of loyalty, of devotion and conviction and reality, of—who knows, perhaps of Love?

  “Are you still frightened, lad?” We are still within the churchyard’s walls.

  “Sir, I am.”

  “Is it I who frighten you?”

  “You, sir? No. Though I am puzzled by your … agreement.”

  “What means you by ‘agreement’?”

  “I don’t know, sir. I don’t know what I mean by this word. I don’t know whence it came, though I spoke it. I think I mean that I sense you and I are like.”

  “You are no more than a dozen years and I am twice that.”

  “I am made of other things than years. And I am a full fourteen.”

  “Speak more of your thoughts. Fear not.”

  From what depths came what I felt, to make my heart a thumping drum?

  The lad looks me full in the eye. “I perceive why I have been abandoned by my own. I believe my family has left me and shipped back to Amsterdam, now that my father has made his fortune here. I am justly amazed that you come in their stead. Tell me, from your heart, please, what you want from me.” He has his fingers on my lips, reaching slightly up to touch me. “I want such honesty as you have never uttered, such that there is nothing more pure within your being.”

  He is most provocative, and precocious, and perhaps mature, my new fourteen-year-old friend.

  “I offer you, young gentleman, a love.” I say these words softly, and I say them fast.

  “My mother always spoke of love.” He is being wily.

  “It is a different kind of love. A love of Own for Own. Do you know of such?”

  We are still in this damnable graveyard where New Amsterdam buries its bodies. There is a rain. Since time began I’ll wager there is always a rain here.

  The lad is silent. As Playwright, would I not provide Youth Soliloquy here!

  “Yes,” the Youth replies at last. “I know of such.”

  “And you do not walk away?”

  “Where have I to walk?”

  “You could run.”

  “Yes, I could run.”

  He speaks this bravely, this Youth.

  It is I who try to hide the tears.

  “What do your tears mean, sir?”

  “I promise never to abandon you.”

  “A promise, and so soon.” He looks at me carefully. “I am suspicious of promises. I have heard many promises of the Everlasting. And those who made them are gone.” He smiles. “You silly man, you have no idea how to ask your questions of me.”

  I shake my head, perplexed. “You are indeed most mature, and I the elder.”

  “But I am only just alive. I know why I have been abandoned. I have been named One of Them. I have been named Sick, and Ill, and Diseased, by my own father, who took me to his bed and put his body into mine, then to throw me down in his after-drunk.”

  Now it is his turn for tears, and he lets them come. We are just outside the graveyard now, in the open. We hold each other close.

  “What is your name, lad?”

  “Thaddeus, sir. Thaddeus Ignotum Harsh Arbuthom Lees. It is a long and posturing half-English and half-Dutch name that brought me much embarrassment in school.”

  “Now that you are about to begin again, you may choose any name you wish.”

  Such anticipation brings him a happy look.

  “Then might I choose a new name, yet again, as often as I desire?” He sounds like a little boy.

  “I see no reason not to.” I feel like a little boy.

  It is he who takes my hand. It is he who leads me out of the graveyard and into life.

  It is this lad, barely grown toward a man, who teaches me, at last, to love.

  “I shall start as I am, as Thad.”

  Thad. Tad. We call him both and either. Tad. My little bit. My little bit of Everlasting Love.

  * * *

  The soliloquies I write for him turn into an Ode.

  What happy Circumstance of Fate brought each to each? Why was I there, in a graveyard? And he, just rising from prayer? What messenger sent him to my arms? What utter cruelty disallowed his return to those who bore him there, and thence to me? Will those who sired him reappear? Were they, too, guided by some Higher Force? No. No Higher Force looks after them as it does Thad and me. Should they, or those who act for them, ascertain our ardour, would they have me—us?—removed and killed forthwith? My boldest question yet remains, as ever it must. What brought such Beauty to my arms? How did this boy decide, here, now, at this moment in Time and of our History, beside this monument to God that is one step only down from Heav’n, to wellcome Everlasting Love and bring the same to me?

  Such an Ode of Questions!

  * * *

  I took him, first, to where I lived, my small retreat from the Outside World, my home, at Number Three, Revender Way, which is by the Wall Street, and by foot only moments from City Row, where I earn my bread.

  I say “first,” for the instant his hand was in mine, before I even tasted his lips or sucked his flesh or licked him top to toe like some mother cat, I knew that I—that we—must betake our precious cargo from this world of danger. I am no fool. I know that what we do is Death, not only in these parts, but I surmise—No! I know!—in most others as well.

  I do not know where Safe Harbour lies. Every town and direction, every country, I have heard is Woe. I am only twenty years myself, and have known my direction since no more than five, and have practiced my proclivities, albeit covertly, for one learns early what is Deemed and what is Demon. But since the Age of Tad, I have done so, I now see, most recklessly and fearlessly, uncaring, then, if Death should come my way.

  Now Self in me cries out: Beware!

  I have never felt as this. Great love comes so entwined with fear to test it.

  There were, this very year, in these territories alone, so I have heard, some hundred deaths for Self-Love. There is no official name for what we do. Some say we see only half the world, and from such so-called blindness do we lose our sight. This punishment—the banishment of sight—is the most commonly rendered. One sees the blind men walk the streets, young in years, their spirits dead, their hands reaching out for warmth and comfort and wellcome, of which there is none. It is beyond pity, it hurts so to see. There is many another punishment. To be boiled in a vat of oil. To be skewered through and roasted on a spit. To be cast into a bottomless pit. To be hacked to pieces and thrown to wolves. To be sold as a slave to places beyond Far. To be thrown into Prison, or Bedlam, and be buggered to death. To be bled to death by chopped-off Member. To choke to death when forced to eat this Member. To be tongue-tied by rope to toe. To be tongue-cut. To be throat-cut. To be rendered deaf. To be beaten to death by clenched fists of hate. And burning. There is so much burning.

  These deaths are always most dramatic, so that all may see.

  There is no such thing as easy death for Love of Self.

  Yes, this must be punished most theatrically.

  Why? Why? Why? So many Whys.

  How did They find these Hundred Self-Loves? Does some Invisible Ruler pay an Army of Spies? How high the Bounty on these Heads? What does the Law require as Proof? What cares the Law at all?

  Rarely is there more than one man’s Word for Condemnation. Rarely is there more than a claim by One against Others. I know of those killed for what they did not do, nor are.

  Now I am frightened.


  Where can we go?

  “Be careful,” comes the Warning from the Master in New Fleet, he whose journal of daily news and happenings I do my remunerative writing for, who is my only Friend among Them. “You walk most dangerously. The walls have ears. The walls have eyes. Not only for such as you and yours. For us all. In one way or another.”

  Such parlous Times. To try men’s Souls.

  Where can we go?

  New World indeed.

  “At least my father let me live,” says my Tad. “Where I was born, in Holland, one of my friends, one too of my brothers, together were boated out beyond the dike, and thrown in the sea, and drowned each with a hundredweight after they were found each in each other’s arms as you and I are here together now. What we do in the face of all these punishments is most brave indeed, do you not think, my William? I am proud to be most brave with you, in this new world.”

  New World indeed!

  The last name of William, our first playwright, is never known, but a play, Facing the Music (author unknown), was performed throughout the colonies for some fifty years beginning in 1648. (See When the American Theater Was Young, by Steiner and Steiner, published by Rittenhouse Trinity, 1934.) The first white man to be hanged in Virginia for sodomy, in 1670, is a playwright named William Haythorn. Also, in New Amsterdam, after an on-again, off-again attempt to do so, it’s once again prohibited to put on, write, and appear in a play. The penalty is imprisonment. For writing a play. Even a comedy. The first playwright so imprisoned is named William Hawthorn, in 1670. Authors remain shadowy figures, with good reason. We know the titles of 1,500 plays performed between 1590 and 1742, of which only a few hundred survive. Did our guys know about what had happened in England, where Christopher Marlowe, a gay playwright, was murdered in 1593, the same year that the playwright Thomas Kyd was tortured? After the great Ben Jonson had his thumb branded for being too opinionated, it is said that Shakespeare himself kept a low profile.