The American People: Volume 1: Search for My Heart

by Larry Kramer

  Such a group, remarkable or otherwise, cannot go forever unnoticed in a pioneer community, no matter how many freaks are parading by. Strode, Destog, Bledd represents to any man who wants to call himself a man too much of an unresolved nature. There is much talk heard, and growing in volume, of this woman’s rise much too high for the good of man. Many women are just as strong in their jealousy. How is this woman and her cadre allowed to live so high off the proverbial hog when there is not a family among them? Is she fucking with all these men who protect her? That, too, is certainly whispered about, also giving rise to jealousies.

  Soon it is known that all her guards are women. Somehow this secret has been let out. It was bound to happen. She knew it was only a matter of time.

  She now considers hiring some armed men to help them. But a vote among them determines this is not what’s wanted. More women? More women might only exacerbate what is now a growing threat to their continuing safety.

  Bledd determines upon a surprising next move. She sells everything at great profit and divides the receipts equally with her thirteen protectors. One day they are all here and the next day they have all disappeared during the night. No one has seen them leave. No one knows where they have gone. Once again they have been most clever. Where will they surface? Will they split up or remain together?

  Let us pause to consider the possibilities. Where can fourteen women go with a hope of safety and success? They are not farmers. They are not wives and mothers. They do not want husbands. Most important, they are rich. These are days when there is no safe place for cash. There are no banks to speak of, certainly not for travelers. They all have an enormous amount of cash. It is no wonder that their sudden disappearance elicits such interest. If these girls are out on the open road, then that is of supreme interest to the marauding male. There are not a few who set out to seek trails that might lead them to their fortune.

  Where did they go?

  There is no news anywhere of a group of fourteen women glued together as one. Had they been remotely visible, someone would have picked up a scent. This is a land of many newspapers filled with any and every scrap of gossip to alleviate arduous and boring lives. This is certainly a story for them, but they don’t get it. Strange as it might seem, or perhaps not so strange, newspapers and reporters considering this story do not pursue it. Their own historical files admit to this, with “grave disbelief bordering on the hokum.”

  Our own story picks up a few years later in southern Delaware. Delaware has had a personality problem not unlike New York’s. It was Dutch and then British, and still occupies an uncomfortable and unwelcome secondary position as part of the land bestowed most generously by Charles II, in one of the largest land grants ever, on William Penn, who, even though he wanted frontage on the ocean, nevertheless favored the portion that he’d named Pennsylvania. Delaware is an area more abandoned than popular, though those living here are known to be of hardy stock.

  Yes, she was a Nuncie and a Marjie and a Strode and a Bledd and a few others besides before she took up her new life and calling here in Delaware. Now she is known as Lois, a simple name. They are all together still, Lois and her thirteen protectors. Now they are even safer because of a small army of men in their employ who guard their fort, for that is what they have built here in this wilderness. They make spirits from the local water, and they send the men out to peddle them to the countryside. They pay them well and supervise them with strict attention. The men are not allowed inside the fort. They do not know what goes on inside. They obey because they are paid to behave. (When did women stop behaving like this!)

  Lois was inspired by reading the Bible story of Nadie. Not the Christian Bible, but the Bible of the Anapalpa Indians who are their neighbors and partners in this new endeavor. Nadie was a woman who protected herself with her own tribe of women warriors, who in turn were protected by a tribe of men. Lois is impressed that this tribe of Indians is still ruled by women.

  Yes, almost without knowing it, Lois has started a strong tribe of women with a fearlessness that is solid and invincible. She decides to expand on a good thing by welcoming additional women agreed upon by all. There are many women longing for what they have to offer. Every woman in this New World lives in some kind of unhappy slavery. Carola and Zantippe are the first to join. They are the youngest and they convey their enthusiasm to the others.

  The women take to birthing their own children. Many different sires father these children. Carefully picked men are invited in occasionally, one at a time, to do the honors. They have a birthing ward where the women tend each other lovingly. If a boy is born he is sent outside the gate to live among the fathers. Only the girls are kept inside, and by now, with all of them going at it as fast as they can before they dry up, they have some hundred females. The number increases, but increasingly slowly. They feel that so many sons out there with their fathers only gives them more protection for their lives and their desires. Lois comes to believe that some of the men outside the walls have taken to loving each other as the women do inside them.

  The women believe they are safe: they are now a self-perpetuating community of women. Lois knows now that this is what she wanted from the day she left England. There is now a story of Lois in the Anapalpa Indian Bible. The Anapalpa revise their Bible as they live. Lois in their tongue now means “mother of mothers.”

  It is amazing how lavish and generous the fineries they allow themselves. They sleep in beds fully garbed in linen and lace, on pillows stuffed with feathers from their softest geese. They wear clothes woven with the finest threads, and shoes fashioned from animal hides that are soft but strong. All of which attire is decorated with bits of gold. Their combined money now totals over $500,000. New income arrives daily with the sale of more spirits to farther regions by their army, now composed of their boys as well as their fathers.

  Suddenly Lois dies. She dies in giving birth to a girl she was too old to bear, named Eve. Eve brings no happiness. For with her mother’s passing, and after the great moanings and mournings of her devoted family, there is such a void that no one knows how to fill it. Strode she so deeply into all their lives, this woman of so many names, that no striding by another can fill her place. Oh, several try. They hold elections and choose one or another. But no hearts are in it. It all seemed so easy when she did it, whatever her name was, whatever they call her now. They decide indeed to give her one name once and for all. Elena Delaware. She will be buried as such and worshipped as such, for she is as good a god to recognize as any.

  Lois’s death is kept a secret from the men outside the gates. It is better, is it not, that her passing be unknown? How long such a secret can be kept begins to worry her survivors. Fear, which has been unknown for years, returns. Leakey and Quadree, as the two longest in residence, attempt a joint management, and for a while they are successful enough. They are still strong enough to keep the others calm and the men outside at arm’s length. But there is an epidemic of some sort outside the walls, and many of their sons and their fathers die. The women inside sense immediately the vulnerability that these losses bring. Soon there are not enough men out there to peddle their spirits. Soon there are not enough men out there who knew Lois, and who understand, albeit naïvely, enough to let her family be. There have been times, in this country’s wilderness, when a certain respect was allowed to difference, if only because no same is ever everywhere the same. Indeed, people in Delaware have prided themselves on this. Are these times coming to an end?

  Slowly, as months turn into years, it would seem so. Their male protectors are fewer in number. The stills are allowed to slacken off in their productivity. Even the Anapalpa are moving westward. Our women must go into the outside world to perform chores, and they go bearing arms. Inside the walls they are not so loving and attentive to each other. They try to discuss what they come to call “our deterioration as a people,” but talking gets them nowhere, and there is no Lois to be the beacon of enlightenment. Their treasury is diminishing.
Their treasurer, one of the newer women, Anolpha, becomes depressed and infirm and less attentive to her duties. She has what we would call a nervous breakdown and tries to slash her wrists.

  Eve is now eighteen. She is old enough to claim a leading role, and she does so. She, who has her mother’s sense and strength, if not her calming ways, does well enough, invents a plan to attract some of the increasing number of men always wandering the wilderness of this country, rootless and aimless, yet hopeful for some answer that will still their restlessness. Word gets around again that there is still money to be made working for an army of women who are living armed, so don’t get any wild ideas. Many men come to investigate.

  One of the men who appears is more handsome than any Eve has ever seen. His name is Arundel, a last name he says without offering any first. Leakey and Quadree, who have seen so much, recognize in Arundel a courier of trouble. They see in Eve’s eyes the hunger for something they had thought was long bred out of them. It had been easier for some, more difficult for others, but had they not all weathered their sisterhood with nobility enough?

  Now it is Arundel’s moment to know a good thing when he sees it. Whether he loves Eve or not, or respects the sanctity of Harmony, he makes known his desire to move inside and live with her. Eve, on her own, agrees. There is much upset that she takes this decision upon herself without consulting all. When confronted, she nods but says nothing. She is not enough her mother’s daughter to realize there are times when the group must come first.

  Once inside the walls, Arundel can’t believe the good fortune that resides within. It is not only the money, coins now worth close to one million dollars, but also the hundreds of hungry eyes, now set free by Eve’s capitulation. He can have his pick, and does. Eve does not take this easily or well. When is all this happening? What year is it? How long has everyone been here? There are few anymore who know, they have been sequestered from the outside world for so long.

  Soon enough Arundel is followed into the once-forbidden haven by other men. The delicate balances observed so harmoniously for so many years are gone. Male babies are allowed to remain inside, and family units begin to form, at first at one end of the fort but soon expanding throughout. Within a dozen years or so the women who remain together and with each other’s love alone are laughed at. The first time this happens Quadree disappears and is found dead from drinking a draught of poison. She is buried but with no hint of the nobility that attended her beloved Lois’s passing. Few remember Lois or that moment anyway. The other remaining originals, Georgia and Ishmaela and Nottie and Manila and Nodotla and Achilla and Zenobee (the others must have died by now), bury her quietly and with many tears.

  The men entering now at an increasing rate do not loot and kill and run. The established way of doing things is too fertile a gold mine. There are a few of them who want to kill off all the lady-lovers but they are overruled. Arundel, to Eve’s surprise, takes decent hold of matters. He convenes the first Council of Elders, all of whom now of course are men, and they determine that the remaining single women may withdraw a share of the treasury and go off where and when they will. Georgia and Ishmaela and Nottie and Manila and Nodotla and Achilla and Zenobee do just that. Each leaves with a heavy sack of coins. They go out once again into the wilderness on their own. They are robbed and murdered, as they knew they would be. Word of their deaths at the hands of the very men inside the compound reaches Eve. Soon the walls of the fort come down and the official founding of the village of Arundel, Delaware, is announced. Arundel pronounces himself its mayor and erects a statue in his likeness and in his honor as the founding father.

  One day Atona, a daughter of Nottie, becomes sick with a strange illness. Nothing can stop her coughing and then her vomiting of blood. She dies, but not before her “husband,” Franklin Gorsby, begins to vomit blood as well. In fast order that entire quadrant of what had been the west end of the compound, but is now open to the world, becomes a violently retching population of fast-expiring men and women and babies. Eve herself patrols this quadrant and has the sense to put up barriers to keep others from coming near. Then she herself falls ill and dies.

  One of Eve’s daughters, Alicia, now faces up to the rage that is growing inside her. On the day of the Arundel Banquet to officially celebrate the town’s founding, this young woman awakens from her afternoon nap and goes into the communal kitchen, where she covertly deposits into that evening’s meal poison sufficient to kill everyone who eats it. She summons every one of the fifty-seven remaining women to her chambers and asks them to bathe her and to plait her hair with flowers, and to perform these same acts upon each other. She addresses them. “My sisters, the name of our true founder has been lost to history. We must return our community to the life that was led here when once there were walls tall and strong enough to protect us. Our husbands and men now return from their travels carrying back the sicknesses of the outside world.”

  To her amazement and relief the women support her plan.

  Alicia, her grandmother’s true heir, has taken care of the future as only her grandmother could. She advises the women to refrain from eating, and the following morning they begin to reestablish their domain and dominance. The bodies of all the dead men are burned in the hope that whatever disease they brought would be purged along with them. Once again the high walls are erected and sealed, built by arriving men who are given the take-it-or-leave-it arrangement of an earlier time.

  Thus are the names of Harmony’s founder and the noble qualities she stood for returned to history. Alicia Strode, a vital, vibrant bearer of her grandmother’s spirit, ensures this effective memorial to her presence on this earth. Harmony, Delaware, is rechristened in her honor. And, in 1787, this very state will become America’s first.

  I was young when I wrote all this, a junior at Smith. It wasn’t a bad piece of work, and when I showed it to Strode after we married, he said it did seem to touch some chords of remembrance. “I always thought every woman around me was a bit strange.” I wish he hadn’t said that. What woman has a man who can say all the right things? That wasn’t the response I was seeking, but that’s what a political marriage was, and still is. Abigail Adams was one lucky puss. It took me a while not to sound so timid. Indecisive. Wimpy. The me I’ve cherished building myself into.

  GRACE: This is the fucking pussy stuff you promised me? God, Freddie, you’re moving along so suckhole slowly, I’ll be dead before you can really give us equal time.

  FRED: I hadn’t thought to include lesbian inclusionary equality, as Grace directs me to call it, because UC has become so gay-male identified that co-joining lesbians into its history seemed a bit presumptuous. I certainly didn’t think they’d feel discriminated against if I left them out. I was wrong. Gay men never know much about lesbians anyway, or women either; that’s just been a sorrowful given. I remember many a meeting where the lesbians actually asked gay men to leave the room while they conferred on their own. They always considered themselves light-years ahead of us in terms of enlightenment and self-empowerment, and they were. Gay men were only interested in getting laid. It was almost as if there were two different opposing teams on the same side, if that makes any sense; we were joined together by a word, homosexual, and not by much else. Loving the same sex almost didn’t seem part of the ball game. No, lesbians have always seemed something … well, another country, if you will.

  UC will change all this. We’ll get along better and many walls will come tumbling down. But at this stage in our history, we’re a long way from that.

  GRACE: This shit is not good enough, Freddie. Sweet, Freddie, sweet. And dear Ianthe, my dear D.C. buddy, nice try for a het. I don’t believe for an eighteenth-century minute that those girls weren’t brutalized at every block and corner, bodyguards with shivs or not. Among many other things, the smell of money turns men into pigs. Not enough real pigs in this story.

  THE GREAT AWAKENING

  In Enfield, Massachusetts, in 1741, Jonathan Edwards, who has been
called too many times by too many people “colonial America’s greatest theologian and philosopher,” reaches heretofore unparalleled heights of oratory and rhetoric with his famous sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” in which he describes man as abominable in God’s eyes, a sinner so hideously wretched that eternal damnation is the best he can hope for.

  The coalescing of Edwards’s fans into a movement of fanatics begins in New England in 1734, and grows onward and upward, despite fierce doctrinal disputes among his competition over just how abominable is abominable. No previous preacher among these early Puritans goes as far as Edwards in calling men shits, and the huge crowds he’s packing in certainly don’t go unnoticed by the other traveling God shows. But there’s no one out there who preaches or wants to preach or is capable of preaching at such a peak of nihilism as our man Jonathan. Across New England, at first in church after church and in meeting halls, and then, when no building can contain him, at crossroads, in fields under sunny and thundering and downpouring skies, Edwards ignites combustions. Souls explode. Screechings abound. Bodies writhe and limbs bend out of shape. Faces contort. Weeping’s supreme. Agonies of every sort display themselves unbridled and uncorseted. Shrieks of terror, in terror, convulse young and old into visions and swoons.