The American People: Volume 1: Search for My Heart

by Larry Kramer

  We are here but a few months when Mrs. Sary Peyser dies. She has been very brave in keeping her pains to herself. She signs over her property to me on her deathbed, in the presence of her preacher, Rev. Tillman Tighe. “Take care of my children and welcome more when there is room and teach them how to love each other” are her instructions to me, in the Reverend’s presence, and to the Reverend himself, who has been most attentive to Mrs. Sary Peyser in her terrible decline. He blesses her as “a great gift from Our Lord.” When she dies, he asks if he can move into her bedroom and live with us. The boys take a vote and decide against it. The Reverend Tighe is not a man who smiles much. Messie points out to me that he has seen him fondle some of the boys in too familiar a fashion for someone of his age and calling. Then I see it too.

  Now comes forward a Miss Ethel Prance. She comes through our front door without so much as knocking. We have not met officially, although we know she lives next door. She embraces me and kisses me and without so much as a condolence for Mrs. Sary Peyser’s passing. She tells us the time has come for all of us to visit her in her community of love. “My House of Blissfulness,” she calls it. She and her family and friends live in several large houses not far from here. No one in this town lives far from any other. We have seen in our travels that in towns everywhere houses are built close together. Why, with so much endless land, do people use so little of it? I fear people everywhere are afraid. I understand.

  Miss Prance, still holding my hand, tells us she is concerned that all our young boys are a drain on the community’s peace of mind. “You are motherless now.” She squeezes Messie’s hand to emphasize her words. It comes clear to me at this moment that she would like to be our mother and to combine us into her House of Blissfulness.

  My boys are suddenly frightened of her, as am I.

  OH, ONEIDA!

  Like some steam valve screwed on too tightly for too long, the strict religiosity of Puritan New England is finding new ways to blow its head off in this newish nation. In Massachusetts, Ralph Waldo Emerson is writing, “We are to revise the whole of the social structure, the state, the school, religion, marriage, trade, science, and explore their foundation in our own nature … what is man born for but to be a reformer, a Re-maker of what man has made; a renouncer of lies, a restorer of truth and good; imitating the great nature which embosoms us all.”

  Like many great thinkers, Emerson leaves out the details of How, What, When, Where, and Why, and, of course, Who. You know, the Basics. The nitty-gritty. He leaves out his subtext too, that he is in love with a young man and it pains him mightily. Revise and reform and remake and embosom indeed.

  In 1838, in upstate New York, John H. Noyes starts his Oneida Colony. He is twenty-seven years old and had studied divinity at Yaddah, where he had been refused ordination because he did not believe in sin. He had reduced the Gospels to sinlessness. He fills in a few of Emerson’s blanks. What John Noyes is saying is this: The fear of, and sense of, sin is the cause of all the world’s ills. People must be freed from sin. (He was to run his colony until 1881.)

  Indeed, in the air there is increasing talk about the dissatisfactions with established religions of which Noyes speaks. Is this to be the death knell of Puritanism as we have seen it?

  It should not be wrong to love one another, Noyes is saying, fully and completely, and that includes brothers and sisters and children. Men and women should be free to love each other without benefit of marriage, he is saying. “The marriage supper is a feast at which every dish is free to every guest. There is no more reason why sexual intercourse should be restrained by law, than why eating and drinking should be. I call a certain woman my wife; she is yours; she is Christ’s.” This is hot stuff: communities should be established in which all are free to couple and to raise children jointly, overthrowing such outmoded notions as marital fidelity and incest, and hushmarkedry. He is saying that all this is natural and fundamental and eternal and that Jesus would approve.

  Yes, in upstate New York, John H. Noyes is saying all this. “I am conquering the devil’s last stronghold. It has got to be taken down.” It is 1848 when John flings open his doors in Oneida. Some three hundred people will eventually join him. Soon there will be similar places in Wallingford, Connecticut, in Newark, New Jersey, in Putney and Cambridge, Vermont.

  To repeat: John H. Noyes is saying Oneida Colony members are required to exchange partners. He is saying: Equal Access to All for All. He calls what he is espousing Perfectionism. And, let it be noted again, he is saying that Jesus would approve.

  Oneida is a complicated place. Everyone can fuck with everyone, but men have to control their ejaculations lest too many children be born. Boys entering puberty must confine their intercourse to postmenopausal women until they can prove their ability to control their ejaculations. The young girls are introduced to sex by the older men. Too much love is frowned upon, and exclusive romantic or sexual relationships are frowned upon. There are lots of rules, with twenty-seven standing committees and forty-nine administrative sections.

  It doesn’t sound like much of a fun place. “Spirituality” is what binds them together and “spirituality” can turn out to be as big a problematic bummer in Oneida as it was for all those Puritans. And is for those once again wandering Disciples of Lovejoy, led by Tom Lovejoy its founder and Ezra Furst his second, who have been expelled from Montrose because the locals find them just too weird. But not before Tom Lovejoy is murdered by several of his own and Ezra Furst has declared himself the First Disciple of the Church of Lovejoy. Yes, Tom Lovejoy, who as a youngster wrote out on golden plates the religion he dreamed of, is murdered and martyred. This will be one of many examples of what YRH will come to call the “Fuck the Founding Father” syndrome, which becomes so much a part of The American People.

  It takes a few years for word of what’s going on in Oneida to trickle over to the ears of Ethel Prance, farther south and west in New Bliss, Ohio. All of it is heady stuff to a strong woman desirous of coupling, desirous of children, desirous of increasing her town’s population, desirous of having her own way in a bigger arena. She figures she can do without all those committees, and put a little less emphasis on Jesus as blessing all activities, and be in charge of everything herself. She shivers as she establishes her house of free love in New Bliss, which she naturally can’t resist calling Blissfulness. She calls herself the Foundress. She can tell she has a good product when one by one and two by two and three by three newcomers settle in New Bliss and sign on, even though they are members of Milton Prance’s large extended family whom he has invited “to join in Convocation of our New Desires, as the great Transcendentalist Emerson has urged upon us.”

  But the existence of two neighboring New Bliss households embodying, in essence, free love can be nothing but trouble. Ethel just knows that all those boys next door are sleeping in the same beds and coupling with each other. She is right. They are all coupling with each other, at first simply lying in each other’s arms, but these embranchments lead naturally to coupling fully and completely. No one inside Mrs. Sary Peyser’s house makes much of it. Messie, who is familiar with the behavior of young boys in groups, smiles benevolently. Oh, boys do have crushes on each other, which occasionally presents problems when the crushes move around from boy to boy. Consistency is not a trait of youngsters. But all in all, what’s going on is working well enough, just as it should in Ohio, where nobody thinks that anything much is wrong. That what is going on in Mrs. Sary Peyser’s house is not antithetic to what John Noyes is espousing up there in Oneida is immaterial to Ethel Prance. What she smells in the full house next door is competition.

  Apparently she hasn’t noticed that the ambulatory amatory couplings in her own house are causing much more fuss. Many are the fits of screaming that waft through the New Bliss air from the House of Blissfulness. It’s a wonder the neighborhood doesn’t complain, but that may be because a few of the neighbors have joined Ethel’s movement. Messie observes a number of people from
around town dropping in on the Prances. Lucid and Messie try to shut the boys’ ears to all the racket, but closing the windows doesn’t work. When they’re not fighting in the House of Blissfulness they’re having sex, which of course is louder than the fighting.

  Lucid determines that enough is enough. But how to approach this touchy subject? He is uncomfortable in Ethel Prance’s presence. Each time she passes him on the street she grabs him in an embrace and invites him “over.” Lately her kisses have come to involve her tongue and her saliva. Their last encounter elicited from her demure mumblings about “affiancement,” whatever that is.

  Matters come to a head when six of Ethel’s adults kidnap six of Lucid’s boys while they’re out playing kickball. “I am just borrowing them,” Ethel calls over to Lucid from her yard, waving her hand as if it was nothing. “I need them for our next Voluntary.” Lucid, standing there helplessly, wonders if he should summon the Reverend Tighe. As he is starting toward the church at the end of the town green to do just that, Ethel bolts out and announces loudly, “I would not make a fuss if I were you. God is on my side. It is against the law for young boys to be kept in houses without parents.”

  Lucid hears the ring of Hooker vocabulary. He comprehends the position she is putting him in. He comprehends that in so casting her cards down on their connecting greensward she is endangering all the lives that he has come to love.

  She turns back sweetly and yodels, “If I were you I would come and visit.”

  When the boys don’t return for supper, Lucid pays a call.

  “What do you want?” demands Milton Prance.

  Ethel’s father is standing in the frame of his front door, barring Lucid’s entry with his own big frame. He is dressed in a flowing white gown adorned with gold braid and pearl buttons and billowing down from his shoulders is his cascading white hair. On that hair is perched the headdress of a Hopewell Indian chieftain, scarlet and orange feathers pointing up to heaven. Ethel, sans headdress, is wearing the same voluminous and she believes voluptuous robe, as is her sister-in-law, Millicent Fardue, a tall and skinny lady who has come from Akron with her husband and four grown unmarried sons, all gowned and gilded and headdressed, though with not so many feathers as Uncle Milton. They all stand in a phalanx confronting this new young man whom Milton may or may not be letting in. Twenty or so others, all dressed similarly, bring up the rear.

  Let us recall that Milton Prance has studied abroad, in Copenhagen, in Scandinavia, in a part of the world where, even then, the exchange of bodily tempests is better coordinated into daily life. Let us recall that he studied with world-famous experts the important bones buried in Denmark’s bogs, imbibing not only the excitement of such discoveries but also the dream of untold riches and fame. Had not the Drs. Thomsen and Worsaae been knighted by their country’s sovereign and handsomely pensioned off for life? Had not their good student married the lovely flaxen-haired beauty related to one of them, with her huge voluptuous Scandinavian breasts (a trait he identified, from his own fieldwork, as indigenously Scandinavian)? And had she not deserted him after some dozen years in the New World of boredom and bonelessness, leaving him with a harridan of a daughter and a bit of her fortune “to muddle through with to the end of your dull and dreary life”?

  Milton Prance is more than ready to embrace his daughter’s House of Blissfulness. He will outdo the Danes, as he remembers them from his youth. He will out-Oneida Oneida. Free love, here he comes!

  Lucid cannot sight his six young boys. When he inquires of them and declines Ethel Prance’s invitation to enter, the door is shut in his face.

  The “Voluntary” that Lucid and Messie watch through a side window astounds them. Its sheer perversity reminds them of Fruit Island. As far as they know, no one here has been infused with potions, though everyone is participating ambitiously. The participants seem very assured in what they direct their bodies to perform. There is not so much nervousness as one would expect, even in Ohio. They must have been practicing.

  Milton Prance, now completely naked and featherless, his big ungainly body all covered in brown bumps and lumps, stands on a long raised platform on which sits an exceptionally large bed. He summons to the stage his three sons and their wives and Millicent Fardue’s four sons and of course his daughter, Ethel, as well as several townspeople new to the neighborhood (yes, word is getting out). Each drops a plain white robe and approaches Milton in nakedness. He taps each head with a wand of startling heft, and each then goes to stand encircling the bed. Ethel, also a bit lumpy without her clothing, steps forward and lies down in the center, and leans back into the many pillows as if she is a queen.

  “I choose first my brother Alfred,” she proclaims loudly. She points to him.

  Alfred, the youngest and best-looking, nervously steps forward.

  Milton taps his head and he lies down with his sister.

  Ethel lunges and kisses him full on the lips, to scattered applause from the crowd.

  But wait. Alfred cannot achieve an erection. His impatient sister takes his penis in her hands and attempts to make it hard, which it soon is. Then she sits up and sits on it and Alfred begins to get into the swing of things. Ethel is not a quiet woman. Nor is the audience, increasingly more vocal.

  “Gaze upon this wonderful act. Look! Look upon it!” Milton proudly announces. “We shall never have heaven till we can joyously witness this beautiful exhibition on our stage of life. Look upon it without shame!”

  Oh, how this group now hollers its approval. Lucid is familiar with the mysteries of group dynamics.

  Milton Prance removes his son and takes his place. He fucks his daughter. He has no trouble with his erection. He is beyond exhilarated with this discovery. If it takes fucking his own daughter to finally give him such a firm and strong and lasting erection, praise be to John H. Noyes.

  “Atta girl!” Milton is heard to cry out several times.

  “Daddy!” Ethel shrieks as another daughter-in-law, this one from Chicago and named Trish, leaps up and pushes Ethel out of the way and takes her place. Milton’s violent arched lurchings and thrustings never miss a beat. Occasionally he leans over to kiss his sons, one of them Trish’s husband.

  Lucid watches (he has sent Messie home as “too young to witness this”). He sees his six young boys ushered in to kneel before the fucking couple. They are painted bronze, their faces covered with Hopewell markings. Each wears a crown of local apple blossoms. Each wears a loincloth and carries a small tomahawk. The first is summoned to strip as a woman appears to draw him into copulation.

  Milton Prance bellows loudly when his orgasm is finally reached: “I dedicate my gism to John Noyes and his valiant pioneers in our neighbor Oneida!”

  AN END TO BLISS

  The next day at dawn Rev. Tighe comes to our door to return our six young boys. Their war paint is streaked and their bodies soiled. The Reverend will not look me in the eye. I inquire if anyone has complained about the ruckus last night, but he does not answer. Later in the morning a large gentleman in a black uniform arrives, identifying himself as “an officer of the law in this county.” Behind him stands a stern woman, also in black, who the officer tells me is “in charge of orphaned children in this county.” He says that we are to be evicted from this house, that I am not its rightful heir, that Messie and I must leave New Bliss this very night, and that the boys have been declared wards of the state and will be removed to the care of the Prance household next door. “Orphaned children must be placed in parented homes,” the stern woman pronounces. “It is the law.” They try to come inside but I prevent them. The officer says he will wait outside while the children gather their belongings, by which time he will be joined by other officers and they will enter by force.

  Twenty boys have been living here. Last night ten of them ran away, frightened that fear has returned. The remaining ten are determined to fight. “This is our house!” they all yell. “Mrs. Sary said so! Forever and ever!” I cannot convince them that we have but mo
ments to make our escape.

  There are two rifles hanging on the wall over the mantel, and down they come, into the hands of two boys. Peter and Paul? John and James? I cannot keep all their names straight. Only Messie knows them all.

  I try to take the guns away. I have never held a gun. I know that guns are of increasing importance and that I should by now be proficient with them. I know that in releasing my hold on these guns as they leave the house in the arms of my boys I am inviting death.

  What ensues is an armed war between my boys and certain citizenry of New Bliss. Eight of the boys are wounded and are carried away howling by the police. The remaining two turn their rifles on themselves.

  Messie has been shot dead by Miss Ethel Prance. She approaches me, still wearing her white robe. It is stained with blood and semen.

  “You will come and live with us?” she asks somewhat sternly, implying that if I do not, it will not go well for me. Again she tries to take me in an embrace. I stand quiet and wordless.

  Now she says awful things. I am sick and I am illegal and I am a molester of little boys and an “incentor” of little boys, and much else I need not catalogue. She offers me “one last time, salvation in my House of Blissfulness.” She promises, “I will program a Voluntary just for you.” When I still do not speak, she attempts to have me arrested. But the officer says I am free to go so long as I go now, and far away.

  I lift up my dead Messie and head out. I bury him under his favorite wantag tree, in the dead of night when no one will see where he is laid to rest. I sneak back and set fire to the empty house of Mrs. Sary Peyser, a torchbearer again.

  One of the boys catches me up under the rising moon. He has managed to escape. He has managed to collect Messie Voiceless’s ashes in a tin box. I had buried him too close to the house. He takes my hand. He asks me to call him Messie too. When I start to cry he puts his arms around me tight. He is young and I no longer am. Getting us to our next chapter is now my goal and gives me strength.