The Magic Kingdom E-Book

Russell Banks

• Herausgeber: No Exit Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 645

Beschreibung

A dazzling tapestry of love and faith, memory and imagination, The Magic Kingdom questions what it means to look back and accept one's place in history. With an expert eye and stunning vision, Russell Banks delivers a wholly captivating portrait of a man navigating Americana and the passage of time. In 1971, a property speculator named Harley Mann begins recording his life story onto a reel-to-reel machine. Reflecting on his childhood, he recounts that after his father's sudden death, his family migrated down to Florida's swamplands - mere miles away from the future Disney World - to join a community of Shakers. Led by Elder John, a generous man with a mysterious past, the colony devoted itself to labor, faith, and charity, rejecting all temptations that lay beyond the property. Though this way of life initially saved his family from complete ruin, when Harley began falling in love with Sadie Pratt, a consumptive patient living on the grounds, his loyalty to the Shakers and their conservative worldview grew strained and, ultimately, broke. As Harley dictates his story across more than half a century - meditating on youth, Florida's everchanging landscape, and the search for an American utopia - the truth about Sadie, Elder John, and the Shakers comes to light, clarifying the past and present alike.

Leseprobe

CRITICAL ACCLAIM FOR RUSSELL BANKS

Praise for The Magic Kingdom

‘Russell Banks’s new novel is eerily timely. Can what’s gone wrong in the past offer keys to the future? The Magic Kingdom confronts our longings for Paradise; also the inner serpents that are to be found in all such enchanted gardens’ – Margaret Atwood

‘As always happens when I read Russell Banks’s work, I couldn’t put it down. That is the Banks magic – the propulsive force of the narrative, even as his stories twist and turn through various diversions, asides, and introspections – for the narrative voice is always constant, and that constancy never fails to hold the reader in its grip. Banks is still working at full blast, creating work as good as anything he has ever done and – is it possible? – perhaps even better’ – Paul Auster

Praise for Foregone

‘Imaginatively structured, this seamless meditation on ageing and mortality, memory and guilt is a late career high from an American master’ – Mail on Sunday

‘Gripping’ – Sunday Times

‘Gripping, human, beautifully written – Foregone is there with the best of Russell Banks’ work. I loved it’ – Roddy Doyle

‘A thrilling and unputdownable masterpiece’ – Joseph O’Connor

Praise for A Permanent Member of the Family

‘Banks is one of those precious writers like Twain or Salinger who creates a voice so wonderfully real that the experience of reading them is like a conversation with an old friend’ – Sunday Times

Praise for Lost Memory of Skin

‘Russell Banks knows everything worth knowing… and much, much more’ – Washington Post

‘Russell Banks is a writer of extraordinary power’ – Boston Globe

‘Banks may be the most compassionate fiction writer working today’ – New York Times Book Review

‘If you’ve never read Russell Banks it’s time you acquired the habit’ – Elmore Leonard

Praise for The Darling

‘Urgent, passionate, compelling... deserves to stand beside Conrad and Greene’ – Guardian

‘Magnificent… Banks is incapable of writing a false word. His all-seeing fiction triumphs because it possesses truth’ – Irish Times

Praise for Cloudsplitter

‘A startling work of vision… A great American novel’ – Independent

‘An utterly compelling story, a tragedy of near-classic proportions with extraordinary resonances’ – Financial Times

‘Cloudsplitter is a masterwork’ – New Yorker

‘Only a few contemporary writers have the kind of vision one has come to expect from Russell Banks; one thinks of Robert Stone, Don DeLillo, Joyce Carol Oates, Joan Didion, and perhaps William Kennedy and E. L. Doctorow’ – Houston Post

Praise for The Sweet Hereafter

‘This beautifully written book’s most brilliant strategy is… to explore the complexity of grief and hope’ – Vogue

‘Mr Banks creates a mosaic like study of the ways in which a community copes with tragedy… It is often gripping, consistently engaging and from time to time genuinely affecting’ – New York Times

To Chase, the beloved,

And for my brother, Stephen Banks

FOREWORD

The late Harley Mann, a semiretiredspeculatorinFloridareal estate, toldthisstorytoataperecorderoverseveralmonthsin 1971. As the reader may wonder from time to time who edited and shapedthecontentofMann’snowfifty-year-oldtapesintoamoreor lesscoherentnarrative,itmaybestatedthatitisI,RussellBanks, the namedauthorofthisbook,whohavetakenonthat task.

The reader may also wonder why the publisher of the book chose not to bypass said author and simply transcribe Harley Mann’s narrative straight from the tapes word by word, just as Mann himself spoke them in 1971. Anyone who has read verbatim transcriptions of recorded memos, conversations, meetings, and phone calls or transcripts of wiretaps by the FBI and other intelligence agencies of conversations between suspected criminals and terrorists will understand the need for a figure like the author to stand between whoever has been taped or wiretapped and the reader. Unedited transcriptions convey neither the voice nor, in many cases, the meaning of what was said or the intent of the speaker. Also, the reader should keep in mind that when the late Harley Mann recorded his story, he was in his early eighties, a somewhat eccentric, crotchety, impulsive, and garrulous old man fond of digressions and personal asides, who, like all of us when speaking at length without a written text, could be repetitive, self-correcting, inexact, profane, irrelevant, and sometimes inaudible.

For those reasons, and since I am the person who discovered the tapes twenty-two years ago in a storm-soaked cardboard box in the basement of the St. Cloud, Florida, public library, the publisher thought it useful to have me edit, cut, and when necessary overwrite, annotate, and summarize the content. There may have been a bit of legal anxiety as well, which is why I was advised by counsel to change the names of certain still-living individuals.

Harley Mann’s story came to my attention in the following way. Back in October 1999, when Hurricane Irene passed over the Florida peninsula on its way to wreak havoc on upstate New York and New England, the lakes of south and central Florida overflowed, and much of the city of St. Cloud was flooded. A month after the storm, at the end of a solitary weekend fishing trip at East Lake Tohopekaliga, before returning to my home in Miami, I stopped in St. Cloud for a lunch at Crabby Bill’s, a local lakeside restaurant I favor. An hour later, emerging from the cool air-conditioned gloom of the restaurant into the sweltering glare of the midday sun, I was unexpectedly struck by the look of a building at 10th Street and New York Avenue surrounded by a clustered mix of live oak trees and cabbage palms on the far side of the parking lot. There was nothing especially attractive or architecturally interesting about the building, but I was somehow drawn to it and wondered why I had not noticed it before.

It was the Veterans Memorial Library, a foursquare tan-brick building that looked like a 1950s bank from my Massachusetts hometown. In south Florida in the final decade of the twentieth century, it seemed an architectural outlier, oddly out of place and almost antique. It would have seemed more natural, more authentic, I thought, in a Disney World Potemkin village, embellished by transplanted elm or maple trees in a mythic New England suburban diorama, than here at the heart of the postmodern semitropical city of St. Cloud, Florida.

Curious and mildly intrigued and inexplicably agitated, and for vague and unnamed reasons wishing to examine the building more closely, I walked across the parking lot and entered the library.

The dimly lit lobby and main reading room were cooled by airconditioning and appeared to be deserted, except for a slim young pony-tailed female librarian wearing a flowered skirt and pink blouse and luminous, bright-blue running shoes. A hand-lettered cardboard sign taped to the wall at the east end of the lobby said Free Books. A drawn arrow pointed down the wide stairway to the basement.

The basement was dark and damp, twenty degrees warmer than the lobby above, due to a bulkhead door open to the backyard. Mildew and black mold crawled up the poured concrete walls. A dozen or so sodden cardboard cartons and banker’s boxes filled with old books and magazines and quarterly periodicals were stacked nearby. Beyond the bulkhead door was a dumpster on the gleaming green lawn. The rotting books and magazines and periodicals were evidently set to be tossed into the dumpster and trucked to a landfill.

Casting a glance over the contents of the boxes, I saw nothing of interest – until I noticed at the top of one pile a packet of what looked like old-fashioned quarter-inch reel-to-reel tapes. The box was soaked through, but the tapes themselves appeared to have been protectively wrapped in clear plastic and undamaged by water. Someone with a wide-tip marker had written ‘The Magic Kingdom’ on the packaging.

Whoever had been lugging the boxes of books and magazines from the cellar to the dumpster seemed to have gone on a lunch break. In any case, no one was present in the basement to see me slip the package of tapes into the wide side-pocket of my fishing vest and walk up the stairs to the main reading room.

The librarian asked if I had found anything of interest down there among the rubble.

Bringing her attention to the packet of tapes might make her want them back, I thought, so I said, ‘No, everything’s waterlogged.’ I then departed from the library and returned to my parked car and boat trailer and drove back to my home in Miami.

In a limited sense, then, the tapes were stolen from the St. Cloud public library. I had no way to listen to the old-fashioned reel-to-reel tapes, however, and for several years they sat stacked forgotten among unread books on a shelf in my office. I did nothing with them. I did not even unwrap them. Finally, while reorganizing my personal library, I decided to put the tapes in the trash. But something like an invisible hand on my sleeve kept me from throwing them out.

Reluctantly, since I would likely never use it for any other purpose, I went ahead and purchased via eBay a working vintage reel-to-reel tape recorder. When the machine was delivered to my condominium and I was able to listen for the first time to the recorded voice of Harley Mann, I learned that my machine was uncannily like the Grundig TK46 recorder described in Harley Mann’s Reel #1. It was in fact the same make and model. Purely coincidental, of course, but only the first of many unsettling parallels and resemblances between my own story and Harley Mann’s and no doubt one of the reasons why I have gone to the trouble of transcribing the tapes and bringing that transcription to the public.

Harley Mann himself is presumed to have died shortly after completing his account. A few months after I first listened to the tapes, on the last of my several return trips to St. Cloud seeking biographical details from the life of Harley Mann that, for reasons of modesty, discretion, or guilt, he may have omitted from his account, I made the surprising discovery of what appeared to be his grave site.

By then the young librarian in the blue running shoes had become my part-time unpaid research assistant. She was especially helpful in locating the records behind the purchase of seven thousand acres of land in nearby Narcoossee in the 1890s by the Shakers of Mount Lebanon, New York, and the eventual mid-twentieth-century purchase of that same land by representatives of the Walt Disney Company. She prefers not to be named in this account, however.

From her I learned of the existence of what we initially thought was the Shaker burial ground. The true location of Harley Mann’s body is unknown, but his death has been memorialized by someone who must have loved and admired him and somehow knew his story. In a northerly corner of the land where the Shaker colony called New Bethany once stood, there are three small, barely visible bronze plaques, one of which bears his name and dates, ‘Harley Mann, 1890–1972,’ and the word ‘Shaker.’ The second is inscribed with the name ‘Sadie Pratt’ and the dates ‘1883–1910’ and, below the dates, ‘Shaker.’ The third marks the grave of Eldress Mary Glynn, 1838–1911.

One must assume that Harley Mann’s grave is empty. Possibly all three are empty. Nobody has been buried in that cemetery, if it is indeed a cemetery, since the last of the Florida Shakers returned to upstate New York over a century ago. They are the opposite of unmarked graves. The land is now owned by the Walt Disney Company, and the burial ground itself is protected by Florida state law from disruption or appropriation or resale.*It is overgrown and difficult of access, located in the Animal Kingdom on a low hammock at the edge of a marsh several hundred yards southwest of the Rainforest Cafe, where no one but Disney security guards patrols the area. The guards are mainly concerned with keeping interlopers from sneaking into the Magic Kingdom by way of the Animal Kingdom without paying.

* Section 497.284, Florida Statutes

There was no further information there or elsewhere concerning the lives of Harley Mann and Sadie Pratt and Eldress Mary Glynn. It was almost as if, except for the words on the purloined tapes and on the grave-site plaques, the three had never existed.

REEL #1

This is Harley Mann talking. I don’t know why I said that. The words just fell out of my mouth. I guess I’m not accustomed to this mode of communication. I’m recording myself on a brand-spanking-new Grundig TK46 machine that I purchased yesterday after I drove up to Orlando from my home here in St. Cloud for the official opening of Walt Disney’s gigantic amusement park, which is what inspired me to finally tell everything I can remember of certain events that I experienced and witnessed in my childhood and youth in this region south of Orlando and west of Lake Okeechobee, this sprawling district of lakes and swamps and creeks and sawgrass savanna and pine and live oak woods and palmetto that once upon a time was the headwaters of the Everglades.

That’s my statement of intention. I’ll probably tell about a lot of other things, too. In any case, instead of writing it down, I’ve decided to talk the whole damn thing into a tape recorder, because I’m a talker, not a writer. Everyone says that about me, sometimes with admiration, sometimes not so much, although they agree that my letters and postcards and personal notes and even my business correspondence are very expressive and descriptive. Just not as interesting as my talk. Which is probably because when I speak I almost never know what I’ll say next, but when I write, since it almost always concerns business, I do.

There will be a batch of tapes when I’m done. Maybe whoever inherits my house and the rest of my personal property will someday transcribe them. I’ve got a last will and testament sworn and written, so I know who’ll end up with my money. But I have no idea who will end up with the tapes. I hope that whoever does, he or she will make a faithful transcription and donate it to the St. Cloud Veterans Memorial Public Library or one of the local historical societies, so that after I have departed this world for the other, the true story of the Shaker settlement called New Bethany†and the people who lived there nearly a century ago will be known. It’s a scandalous story almost completely forgotten now, and when remembered at all is lathered in lies and error.

† See John 11:1– 46

Also, having recently turned eighty-one years of age, although still of more or less sound mind and body, my departure time is fast approaching. It’s why yesterday, after attending the official opening ceremonies of Disney’s amusement park, I got back into my Packard and drove down to the Montgomery Ward store in St. Cloud and marched in and purchased the recording machine and two dozen reels of blank tape. It’s why this morning, after I made and ate breakfast, I set it up on my front porch, and as if talking to a trusted friend who knows nothing of these events and remarkable personalities, I have begun talking into it. It’s early and the sun is still too low to bake away the morning dew, and nobody has walked by the house yet, but soon enough they will, and when they do they will likely think old Harley Mann is talking to himself in a steady stream and must have finally lost his marbles from all those years of living alone.

I suspect I’ll be out here on the porch for many days before my story gets told, as it’s a long and tangled tale, and the world today is so different from the world of my youth that I’ll have to swerve away from its main thrust often and at length to describe it properly, so that whoever eventually listens to it or reads a transcription – assuming one gets made – will understand why certain people back then, myself especially, behaved as we did, both badly and, on a few occasions, well.

Human nature doesn’t change, but contexts and circumstances do, so let me set the context and describe the circumstances. It’s been close to seventy years since my family settled among the radical Ruskinites at their utopian colony called Waycross, and we found ourselves living in communitarian squalor alongside White swampers and Blacks in the marshes and piney forests of southeast Georgia. This was where my family began its long pilgrimage from light to darkness to light again, as it seemed to my childish eyes, and then in later years to still deeper darkness that I thought would never end. And then it did end, leaving me alone here in St. Cloud for most of a lifetime, ending up on the front porch of this old clapboard shotgun house talking to an electric-powered plastic box about a world that existed before the common use of electricity or the commercial use of plastic.

I could begin there, with our arrival at the Georgia commune in 1901. Or even earlier, with our family’s life in the original Ruskinite colony of Graylag up north, outside Indianapolis, where I was born. But it’s not my story that I need to tell, it’s the New Bethany Shakers’, so I’ll begin instead in 1902, around the time when we first met the Shakers, when my twin brother, Pence, and I were twelve-year-old boys and we Manns were living like slaves on Rosewell Plantation, sixty miles south of Waycross, over by Valdosta. Maybe later on, if I see the need, I’ll return to Waycross, and tell how my parents got all the way to the Okefenokee Swamp from their native Indianapolis and the Graylag colony and so on, how they went from being American followers of John Ruskin’s anticapitalist teachings to founding communitarians to schismatic Ruskinites – an interesting account in its own right, but a whole other story for a whole other occasion. For now, I’ll just talk about how we got over from Waycross to the Rosewell Plantation, which is where we eventually connected with the Shakers.

We were four children, me and my twin brother, Pence, and our brothers, Royal and Raymond, who were two years younger than me and Pence. They were also twins, a coincidence that in the eyes of the women in both the Graylag and Waycross colonies made Mother the object of an ambivalent mix of envy and pity. With two sets of twins, she could be said to have got her childbearing done in half the time of most women, but the work of raising a single baby from infancy to childhood had been doubled twice. This was before our sister, Rachel, was born. When we buried Father and set out from Waycross for Rosewell, we boys had only just learned that Mother was newly pregnant and that Rachel, the last of Mother’s children, would be born fatherless at Rosewell.

It may go without saying that we and all our fellow communards were Northern White people. Nonetheless, we had associated plenty with Blacks before we got to Rosewell Plantation. Out of habit I call them Blacks. I suppose it would be preferable to call them African-Americans, along the line of Italo-Americans, but that’s probably got too many syllables to catch on.

Mostly, the Blacks we knew at the Waycross colony were workers and drifters and peddlers and small farmers, some of them ex-slaves, whose paths often brought them into proximity with us White Northern communards. But until Father died and the rest of the family decamped for what Mother believed would be a refuge at Rosewell Plantation, we had never actually lived among Blacks, or for that matter among Southern Whites, either. We children simply thought of ourselves as Yankees and spoke our English with our parents’ Indiana accents. I still do, I’m told. It’s hard to erase an accent acquired in childhood, and from birth we had lived solely among White Northerners and even a few from Canada, England, and Scotland, people who were well educated and socialist to the bone and more or less high-minded, like the Shakers we later came to live with.

At Waycross we resided in one of the colony’s small, windowless cabins, cold and drafty and dirt-floored, with little enough room for the six of us. Father was already sick. I did not know it at first and attributed his lethargy and seeming lack of interest in the governance and administration of the colony to his disappointment in the decrepit state of affairs there. The Ruskinite colony at Waycross had lost its way long before we Manns and over fifty other men, women, and children from the original Graylag colony came down by train from Indianapolis. We were a remnant of a remnant, a lost tribe wandering in the wilderness of the southeastern United States, guided by a misinformed belief that we had been led there by men who were wise and informed, men like Father, brought to a place sanctified by a people who adhered more closely to the revealed truths of communistic living than those lapsed Ruskinites we had left behind at Graylag.

My brother Pence and I were old enough and had overheard enough of the adults’ discussions to understand roughly the cause and purpose of our departure from the only home we had known so far, the place where we had been born and had gone to school and learned to read and write and compute at a level higher than the children in the Indiana villages and farms that surrounded our commune at Graylag – higher, indeed, than most of the local children’s parents. Until the financial and ideological quarrels that fatally divided the community into two warring parties, our life at Graylag had been a pleasing mixture of freedom and order, play and work, reflective solitude and organized group activity. Holding no worries over how to fund this communal life and no need to advance or defend any social theory, we children were given all the benefits of socialism with none of the deficits.

I was never again as happy with life as in those early years at Graylag. Until Father and Mother became ideological schismatics and split off from Graylag and set out for Waycross, my life was pastoral bliss. I was old enough to have acquired a bit of conscious personal history, eleven years of it, or at least the nine years or so from when I emerged from the cloud of infancy and began to form my first memories. Year in, year out, my life at Graylag had been a gradual, steady, happy opening-up to the world that surrounded me, a process encouraged and protected and led by Mother and Father and the other adult members of the community. And what a paradise it was!

I wonder now if the dream of utopia, whether secular or religious, is only the dream of an adult who has never ceased resenting and grieving over his imperfect childhood and as a result spends his life trying to start it over and make it perfect this time. But what of someone like me, who actually had a perfect childhood? Someone for whom the transgressions and imperfections of life arrived later, but not so much later that his memories of idyllic perfection got displaced. Someone who could look to the past for perfection rather than to the future.

When we settled into our Waycross shanty – for that is all it was, a shanty – Mother hung a blanket down the middle of the cabin, and she and Father slept on a narrow bed on one side of the blanket and we four boys shared a pair of folding cots on the other. She soon appeared to be pregnant, and one memorable morning she felt compelled to announce it to us boys, though not with much joy.

‘You’ll soon have another brother or a sister,’ she told us. ‘I’ll be taking breakfast here,’ she added, and instructed us to join the others at the communal dining hall. Father had been ill for weeks and had not eaten with the other colonists for several days by then.

‘How soon?’ I asked.

‘By end of winter. Now run down to the pump and wash.’ She laid out the day’s chores for us and retreated behind the cloth wall where Father still lay abed. We could hear his rapid phlegmy breathing and restless turning in the bed, as if he could not make himself comfortable no matter how he lay. The younger twins, Raymond and Royal, were to spend the day scouring the abandoned, half-sunken railbed for bits and chunks of coal to burn in the tin stove that heated our cabin and boiled our water and cooked the little food Father could manage to keep down. Pence and I were charged with walking after breakfast back along the railbed to the main railhead in the crossroads village of Waycross to buy salt and sugar at the trading post, which Mother said Father needed to help him purge his sickness. We were pleased by the chance to get away from the sad decrepitude of the colony and briefly see how the rest of the world was getting by, but tried not to show it.

Mother no longer believed Father was suffering from malaria, she said. It was typhus.

‘I didn’t know he was sick from anything,’ I called to her. Pence said nothing. I was the talkative twin and usually spoke for the two of us. ‘I thought he was just…’

‘What? Just what?’ she asked sharply from behind the curtain.

‘I dunno. Tired. From malaria. Sumpin’.’

Mother came back to us, her hands on her hips. ‘Speak clearly, Harley. Say you “do not know.” Say “some-thing.” You’re starting to sound like the swampers and the Negroes.’

‘I do-not-know,’ I said and pointed out that it happened to be a knowledgeable woman from a Black family named Calliphant, an old woman known as Partitia, who had made the tea from the sweet Annie plant that Mother had been using to treat Father’s malaria. Partitia claimed it was a medicine she had learned from the Indians, and many of the settlers said that it had cured their malaria.

‘Knowing that is how I know he does not have malaria,’ she said. ‘Because he’s no better for it. I don’t want to talk with you any further, Harley. You’re too smart for your britches. Go, go,’ she said, and she shooed us boys from the cabin, waving her hands as if at mosquitoes. She was red-faced and looked like she would cry.

It turned out that she was right and Partitia was wrong. Father did not have malaria, and soon it became evident that the rash and red spots on his body were signs of typhus, what they used to call ague and the local people called swamp fever. More than we knew, the colonists at Waycross had been enduring an epidemic of typhus. It was one of the reasons their population had diminished to such a degree and why those who had not died of it or fled back north because of it were so enervated and lethargic, why so many of the children roamed free and half-clothed as if returning to savagery, why the fields were not planted and old crops lay rotting on the ground.

I tell this from memories of events and conversations that took place nearly seventy years ago, and an old man’s memory of his childhood is generally not to be trusted, especially when he has told his story many times over the years and has had numerous opportunities to embellish and elaborate it and excise from it anything unpleasant or that reflects unfavorably on him, until his story ends up displacing his memory. But these happen to be stories I’ve never told before, in most cases not even to myself. As a result, my memories are relatively untainted by repetition and revision.

And I remember that particular day at Waycross clearly, because it began when Mother told us boys that she was pregnant with her fifth child, who would turn out five months later to be our sister, Rachel. And it was the morning we learned that Father was sick with typhus, not malaria, and realized that he was probably going to die of it. It was the morning when I first saw how terrified Mother was of losing Father and of having to take care of her four, soon to be five, children alone in the wilderness.

It was the same morning, as I learned later that day after Pence and I returned from Waycross village, that the man who managed Rosewell Plantation for Mr Hamilton Couper had ridden sixty miles north to Waycross to recruit disillusioned and desperate members of the Ruskinite colony to go back with him to the plantation to live and work there as skilled laborers and household staff. And when Pence and I returned with the salt and sugar we’d been sent for, we found Father and Mother in deep discussion of Mr Hamilton Couper’s manager’s offer.

Father lay in their rope bed, feverish and gaunt, his face and arms covered in a rash with raised red blotches blooming like phlox. He spoke haltingly, with great effort, but firmly nonetheless, as if his mind were focused on one thing and one thing only, which was to have Mother and his four sons and the expected fifth child transferred to Rosewell. He did not say it outright, but it was clear to me that Father would not be going with us.

Not ever. At that moment I believed that I could read the future. I was the eldest, born ten minutes before Pence, and I knew that my childhood was ending and Pence’s would soon follow. Mother sat beside Father on a stool and with a spoon administered salt and sugar diluted in warm water. She spoke to him in a low voice, as if not wishing to intensify their disagreement, but not willing to let it go, either.

‘I would feel better if we stayed put,’ she said, ‘until you are well again. And then we’ll all go together.’

‘No. You and the boys go now. While you are still healthy. I will follow.’

‘There’s no one here who’ll care for you if we leave.’

Father named five or six people who had come from Indiana and joined the Georgia colony with us.

‘They can barely take care of themselves,’ she said.

‘Go now. Or others will get there before you. They’ll fill up the positions and take the housing.’

Mother was known as an accomplished seamstress, one of the skills supposedly needed at Rosewell for making and repairing the field and mill workers’ clothing. Father’s experience as a smith was also much sought after. Pence and I were regarded as old enough for small household tasks and some of the field work, and soon our younger brothers would be available to work alongside us. We were told that the plantation was an enormous agricultural and industrial enterprise, practically a town on its own, with many hundreds of employees and their families residing there. I wanted to go there. How could it be worse than Waycross? But I wanted Father to go with us.

Father at that moment turned his body and practically flung his gaze at me. ‘Harley, you will be the man of the family,’ he declared, as if it were a discovery, a sudden revelation, not a charge or command.

Mother said, ‘No. He’ll be a child for a long time yet.’

Father then closed his eyes and seemed to be smiling at something only he knew and understood, something too profound and true to be shared with us, something unwanted by his family, but something he nonetheless desired both for himself and for us. And wanted especially for me, his oldest son. Then, during the night, while my brothers and I slept and Mother kept watch at his side, Father died.

And so dutifully, even though Father was no longer able to enforce it, we followed his final bidding, and within hours of the lightly attended service at the colony’s nondenominational chapel, where three or four of my parents’ compatriots spoke admiringly of Father’s character and his blacksmithing skills, they buried his body in the colony’s marshy, overgrown graveyard. We packed our personal belongings and left on foot for the railhead in the village of Waycross.

It was close to a half day’s walk under a winter sun and a blank blue sky. Like refugees, we carried our clothing and blankets and a few cooking utensils and a day’s worth of food in twine sacks and a canvas tote. Having sold Father’s blacksmithing tools and the last of the family furniture and household goods to the remaining settlers for pennies on the dollar of their true value, Mother carried a small amount of cash that, after paying for our train fare from the Waycross station to Valdosta, she hoped would suffice until the first monthly payday at the plantation. She had been promised a dollar plus housing and food for a six-day week’s work as a seamstress. In addition, Pence and I were to receive twenty-five cents per week for our sunrise-to-sunset labor in the fields or at one of the mills and factories and shops that clustered about the main plantation house, where the Couper family was said to reside in old-fashioned pre–Civil War splendor.

We had not seen Rosewell in person, but had heard about its scale of operation and high level of prosperity from our colonist neighbors, some of whom envied our move and promised soon to follow. The swampers residing in and around the village of Waycross and the Blacks living nearby, like the Calliphant family and their mother, the medicine woman named Partitia, spoke less admiringly of Rosewell. Which we Manns attributed to envy of the rich by the poor and ignorant and, in the case of the Blacks, to superstition.

I say ‘we Manns’ when I mean Father and Mother and their fellow adult colonists at Waycross, because when you’re a child you passively accept your parents’ and their friends’ view of reality, no matter how distorted by ideology or religion, and I was still a child, even though Father had made me the man of the family. But I remember Partitia Calliphant, when she was treating Father mistakenly for malaria with the sweet Annie plant, interrupting Father’s praise of Rosewell and telling him, ‘That place a slavery plantation, Mr Mann. Even White folks shouldn’t go there for any business at all. Might never come back.’

This exchange occurred some days before Mr Couper’s manager came to recruit the malcontents. It was back when Father had first spoken of going on his own to the plantation to see if his services as a smith could be hired out on a part-time basis. It was one of the few ways he was able to generate cash money in that communistic society, where all the necessities were supposedly provided by the community or purchased with Ruskinite scrip. Members with outside sources of cash were free to embellish their necessities with luxuries, but only as long as those outside sources did not require an exchange of labor. An inheritance or a packet of cash sent by a relative back in the capitalist world was permissible, but Father’s hiring out his services to a local farmer who needed his horses shod was forbidden. According to the writings of John Ruskin, it made him a labor slave. My parents and their associates were close readers of Ruskin’s Unto This Last.‡

‡ The founding texts for the Ruskinite utopians in the United States and England, John Ruskin’s Unto This Last, four essays published in Cornhill Magazine in 1860 and as a book in 1862, and Munera Pulveris, published in 1872, were broadside attacks on the classical economics theories of Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill.

Mother explained to Partitia Calliphant that this is the twentieth century and slavery has been illegal since the Emancipation Proclamation.

Partitia said nothing in response. She was a very short, round woman with smooth dark-brown skin and heavy-lidded pale-blue eyes that she kept half-closed, as if holding back a secret. She was of indeterminate age, somewhere between fifty and sixty. She knew, of course, that slavery had been made illegal and that she had been a free woman for nearly forty years, even in the south Georgia wilderness. But my parents were educated White Northerners with an affection for abstract thought. There was much in the real world that escaped their notice, much that they no doubt would have noticed if, like me, they had lived their whole lives in the Deep South. They would have known, as Mother and her four sons would soon discover at Rosewell, that at the end of the nineteenth century and even well into the twentieth, in many parts of the South the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution had not been implemented.

I probably shouldn’t say it here, but I have seen and heard things in my time, seen and heard them right here in my town of St. Cloud, Florida, that make me wonder sometimes if slavery has ended yet. Or if White people have managed merely to call it by another name. When defending their allegiance to their Ruskinite socialistic credo, my parents constantly railed against what they called ‘slave-wage capitalism.’ If they were alive today, what would they call Mr Walt Disney’s vast enterprise up there southwest of Orlando, where a Black man or woman seeking legitimate employment at the theme park need not bother showing his or her dark-complected face? Everything changes, yet everything remains the same, as the French say. Slavery is as slavery does, I say. The Whites get to exchange their labor for payment, even if only for a tiny fraction of its worth, and the Blacks are chained and put to work for nothing in the prisons and on roadside gangs that people speed past every day in their air-conditioned cars.

All right, maybe I exaggerate. An old man’s privilege, I hope. A consequence, too, of that early exposure to my parents’ need to see the world through the cracked lens of political ideology. It’s like religion. The lens clarifies, but the cracks distort the image.

I don’t normally look at the world through my long-deceased parents’ eyes, however. I don’t ask myself what would Mother or Father think of Walt Disney’s amusement park, for instance. Or of today’s plutocrats living off the labor of others just as readily and profitably as the plutocrats of my parents’ time or John Ruskin’s. I almost never ask myself what my communist parents would think of me, their eldest and sole surviving child, who by the time I turned forty had made a small fortune buying and selling real estate and then lost most of it in old age, thanks to my greed and pride and the superior intelligence and education of men hired by Mr Disney to buy my property at a cut rate under false pretenses, property that I probably never should have owned in the first place. What would Father and Mother say if they knew my story? What would the Shakers’ fount of wisdom and piety, Mother Ann Lee, say? Or the late Elder John Bennett and Eldress Mary Glynn, those clearheaded, high-minded, dedicated communistic Shakers? What would they say to me now? If they could speak each to each, what would they say about me?

Theirs are the antique inner voices I’ve been hearing since I began telling my story, the story of my childhood and youth among the Shakers at New Bethany in Narcoossee, Florida, including everything that led up to the dramatic events that unfolded there in 1910 and 1911, after I became a man, and the sorrowful consequences that followed from those events. When I speak into my tape recorder, the voices of those long-dead men and women fill my head. They’ve even begun to infiltrate and shape my own voice, the words and sentences I’m using to tell my story. It’s as if I never learned to speak like the man I have in fact become, one of those White, lifelong, small-time Florida businessmen with no noticeable religious or political enthusiasms and no discernible class affiliation. I’m the kind of Republican or Democrat who registers as an Independent, the lapsed Protestant or Catholic who checks Christian, the Anglo-American who thinks of himself simply as American, the male human being who thinks of himself merely as human, the White man who believes he has no color.

That’s the person I have been for most of my adult life and who I have over the years come to sound like. But when I flip the switch on my Grundig TK46 recorder and rewind and play back today’s account, as I have just finished doing, I don’t hear that person’s neutral, all-purpose, modern American voice. Instead I hear a voice that’s never been recorded before, not even by Thomas Edison, a voice spoken in another century, the nineteenth, and another country, the south-central Florida wilderness, a voice from long ago and far away. A voice I can barely recognize. My voice.

REEL #2

Since I closed my office downtown I’ve told folks that I’m retired from the real-estate business. But I still dabble a bit in buying and selling property whenever a choice lot comes my way and no one else seems eager to take a chance on it. I keep up with the market news and gossip and rumors passed around by onetime colleagues in the trade. Which is how I learned this morning that, seventy years after my fatherless family first arrived at its doorstep, Rosewell Plantation still exists.

The information came in the form of a colorful brochure forwarded to my post-office box from my now defunct office address, inviting me to refer interested clients to a new development of luxurious Southern ‘great houses’ built around an eighteen-hole golf course designed by Arnold Palmer. The development, to be called Rosewell Plantation, is said to be located in south Georgia twelve miles from the charming city of Valdosta amid lakes and a thousand acre pine-and-cypress forest on the grounds of a legendary antebellum plantation.

I read the brochure carefully and examined the four-color photographs of the neocolonial column-fronted brick mansions – they’re called ‘great houses’ and ‘homes,’ not ‘houses’ – with their threecar garages and kidney-shaped swimming pools and manicured, mint green lawns. I noted the bicycle lanes and riding paths looping through open forests, the fairways and greens of Arnold Palmer’s golf course, the photographs of happy-seeming, fit, elderly, White men and women, affluent and semiretired – in other words, people like me. Except that they pedal bicycles and ride thoroughbred horses and dine on moonlit patios at the clubhouse and whack golf balls over water hazards and sand traps. As I read the brochure, I remembered the arrival at Rosewell Plantation in October 1901 of my visibly pregnant mother and me and Pence and Raymond and Royal, thirsty and hungry and footsore, sombered by the loss of Father, but confident that in turning ourselves over to the plantation, we had improved our lot.

We trudged north from the Valdosta railroad stop on the old Ochlockonee River Road between two parallel hedgerows of white Cherokee roses, past fruit orchards and almond and pecan groves and flooded rice fields and glittering green fields of sugar cane, cotton, corn, and grain, and vineyards overloaded with dark red grapes ready to be harvested. Black workers, men, women, and children, with some White workers scattered among them, bent over the crops, all the while watched by Black men and one or two Whites on horseback, overseers who carried rifles and whips. We heard the buzz and hiss of a steam-powered sawmill somewhere in the distance, and the whistle and chug of a train arriving or just departing.

The dusty red-clay road ended at a piled-up heap of sweet-smelling honeysuckle and clusters of wildflowers and an open gate that led us onto a long, white crushed-stone driveway with a row of red cedars on both sides. The driveway circled before a wide shaded portico that fronted a true antebellum great house surrounded by a broad rolling lawn with flower beds shaped like scallops at the base of each of its high twelve-paned windows. The building was larger and whiter than anything we had ever seen before. We felt very small waiting there on the portico at the base of the towering columns.

It was exactly what we had hoped to see, a vast, well-organized, rich plantation, and it made us feel relieved, if not exactly happy. It took our minds briefly away from our grief. So when Mother knocked at the tall oaken front door of the great house, we were not prepared for the greeting we received.

A small White boy opened the door. He was sour-faced and seemed not in the slightest inquisitive and only mildly surprised to see a pregnant White woman and two pairs of twin boys standing before him on the polished marble steps with all their worldly possessions at their feet. The boy was pale, as if he’d been permanently shielded from the sun, and red-lipped, with an inverted bowl of blond, nearly white hair. He wore green velveteen trousers and a flouncy, widecollared white shirt like an adult dandy and made me think of that old song about the frog gone a-courting. He was barefoot, and his feet looked soft and trim, as if he rarely wore shoes and never left the mansion. He appeared to be about my age, ten or twelve, but his cold blue eyes and papery skin made him appear much older.

‘I saw you coming up the lane,’ he said to Mother in a flattened voice. ‘We don’t tolerate no beggars or peddlers. You got to move on.’

Mother said, ‘Mr Hamilton Couper’s manager told my husband, Mr Harrison Mann, the blacksmith up at Waycross colony, to come if we wanted work and housing. We’ve come from Waycross.’

‘Why ain’t your husband doing the speaking, then?’ the boy said, rather impudently, I thought, and I began to hate him a little.

‘He passed,’ Mother said. ‘Three days ago.’

‘Just the same, ain’t no work for no White woman and her children here.’

Mother explained that Mr Couper’s manager had told her husband that Mother’s skills as a seamstress were especially wanted at Rosewell and that her two older boys could work in the fields and the younger two in the house doing small chores.

In a lowered voice I said to Mother, ‘Don’t explain to him. Ask to see Mr Couper or the manager.’ I spoke as if I were now indeed the man of the family, anointed by Father from his deathbed, and was saying only what Father would have said.

Mother looked at me with slight irritation and tightened her lips.

‘Go round to the kitchen and one of the people there will take you to the quartermaster’s commissary,’ the boy said, and shut the tall door in our face.

A minute later a young Black woman suddenly appeared at our side and delivered us in silence to an unpainted wooden warehouse a half mile from the great house. She told the White man there that Master said to put us to work, nothing more, and she left us standing before him and returned to the kitchen.

I record and linger over these small scenes, trivial in themselves, because during the seven months that we lived and worked at Rosewell Plantation, that pale boy and the quartermaster were practically the only White people that we exchanged words with. There were a few White managers and overseers who gave orders, but they did not converse with us, except to make commands. Most of the managers and overseers were Blacks; and nearly all the workers, except for us Manns, were Blacks.

Even the White quartermaster, when we presented ourselves to him, did not speak to us directly. He sat behind a wide desk strewn with ledgers and loose papers on the further side of a ceiling-high wooden rack of small divided mailboxes. Evidently the commissary also served as the plantation post office, and the quartermaster doubled as postmaster, the man who controlled the bits of news from the outside world that came in and the little that went out.

He was small and bald and pale and his glasses reflected the fading late-afternoon sunlight like large coins. He opened a ledger and ran a crooked finger down several columns of figures, then hooked his spectacled head toward the elderly Black man behind him, who was stacking blankets on a shelf, and without saying the man’s name or ours told him to put us in tent number 47. ‘Set them up and show them where to be at sunup,’ was all he said to the man. He said nothing to us, as if we were newly delivered livestock.

The old Black man was somewhere in his late sixties or early seventies and bent nearly in half with arthritis. He handed each of us a thin gray blanket and a metal cup and plate and spoon off the shelves and said to follow him. We did as told and asked no questions of him or of anyone else.

It was strange, and is stranger still to recall these many years later, that we so quickly and easily acquiesced to the authority of the place – not to any individual person’s authority, the boy at the door, the woman who led us to the commissary, the quartermaster, or the old man who distributed our necessities, but to the authority of the plantation itself. It was as if the plantation and everyone on it were together a great machine, and my family and I had instantly become integral, inseparable parts of it. Simply by appearing at the door of the great house and asking for work and shelter, we had turned our lives over to the needs and rules, the protocols and priorities, of Rosewell Plantation. We had crossed a line that divided one world from another, as if exchanging planets, and now our sole concern was to learn the rules and principles that governed this new world.

The planet we had once called home was situated in another universe. It was as simple as that. The old rules and priorities and principles and the old physical laws no longer applied, even as a measurable point of comparison. To survive we had to learn as quickly as possible a new logic and coherence that were making themselves known to us at every turn, for the plantation was nothing if not self-defined and self-enclosed and rigorously logical and coherent. It was like a vast, self-sufficient factory with no other purpose than to exploit the thousands of acres of land surrounding it, the entire known world, in the manufacture and sale and distribution of a hundred different products – of cotton and sugar and lumber and turpentine and tar, of almonds and pecans and peaches, of rice and grapes, of rope and smoked meats and butter, of pumpkins and yams and peas.

We had expected to find other Ruskinite refugees from Waycross there, for we had known of at least a half dozen who had abandoned the settlement for Rosewell before us, several of them personal friends of Father and Mother. Eventually, we would learn that they either had fled the plantation for parts unknown or else had died at Rosewell. It was unclear which, for whenever Mother asked after the absent Ruskinites, their flight and their deaths were spoken of in the same way:

‘They gone. Took sick and gone.’

‘Gone off.’

‘Not here no more.’

There were among the workers a few White people, women mostly, and some children of various ages, but none seemed willing to acknowledge any racial kinship with us. Nor, for that matter, were we eager to acknowledge it with them, either. I remember feeling early on something like shame for my and my family’s presence in the Rosewell work force, and that the origins of my shame, if that is what it was, somehow lay in the color of our skin. This was an entirely new experience for me. Up to that point, I had felt like a member of a tribe, one that I believed made me and my family culturally superior to most other tribes, regardless of race, and in fact having nothing to do with race.

I believe this is typical of groups bound together by a shared commitment to an egalitarian ideology. Or perhaps to any ideology or religion. My family and I had felt as superior to the White swampers in and around Waycross as to the poor Blacks and Indians living there. But it was based on our superior education and our freedom, as we saw it, from superstition and religion and our dedication to the ideals and principles embodied in the teachings of John Ruskin and certain other enlightened philosophers, poets, and scientists. Even toward the many other communistic groups and sects that thrived in that era, like the Fourierists and Shakers, we Manns, as Ruskinites, felt culturally, and therefore morally, superior.

But when your worth as a human being is reduced solely to the value of your body’s capacity for labor, you tend to overvalue meaningless physical characteristics, like your body’s skin complexion or hair texture or the shape of your nose and lips. And to find ourselves suddenly in a situation where the old familiar cultural distinctions no longer mattered, where everyone was essentially the same, except in terms of the degree of power wielded in the plantation hierarchy, was disorienting. It focused our attention on our racial difference from the other workers. That in turn generated a strange new sense, not of pride, but of shame, for we knew in our hearts that those differences were meaningless.

White-skinned or black, we were not slaves, of course. Not chattel slaves, anyhow. We were more like indentured workers, albeit for an indefinite and lengthening period of time, thanks to the accounting system used against our poverty by Rosewell and many other plantations and mining and lumbering companies throughout the South in those years. But unlike the Blacks, it was not our skin color that had made us criminally poor in the eyes of the state. It was Father’s and Mother’s longtime foolish dedication to the Ruskinite dream of a ‘coming nation.’

I don’t speak for Mother and my brothers, only for myself. But it was clear to me that all of us quickly began to give off a tense, withdrawn affect and acquired a slumped, defeated posture, even Raymond and Royal, who were only nine then. Like the Black workers who surrounded us and the few White workers who toiled alongside us in the fields and forests and shops and warehouses and barns of Rosewell Plantation, we moved without alacrity or enthusiasm. To the degree that our identity as Ruskinite colonists was drained of meaning, our kinship with the scattering of Whites was somehow strengthened. But as there were no advantages or privileges granted for being a white-skinned person at Rosewell Plantation, unless one’s name was Couper, we looked upon our color as a badge of shame, as if we had failed to live up to our racial prerogatives, privileges, and responsibilities. And worse, we could not know or say how or why that had happened.

Over time we learned indirectly, through rumor and gossip, that the White men and women living and working alongside us were almost all convicted criminals and their illegitimate offspring. They were petty thieves, pickpockets, and prostitutes, or they were White men and women arrested for cohabiting with a Black man or woman, or they were people who were what were called in those days sodomites. All of them were poor people unable to pay their fines or court costs. Their fines and costs had been paid to the county sheriffs and judges across the state of Georgia and even into Mississippi and Alabama by Mr Couper himself. The convicted man’s or woman’s debt was to be paid by the convict at a dollar a day until such time as the balance was zero. Which could easily be postponed into the indefinite future, as Mother learned by the end of our first month, when the cost of the food and shelter and necessary goods that she had purchased on credit at the company store to feed, clothe, and house her children was deducted from our pay. There was always a negative balance. That negative balance was considered a loan from the plantation, and she was charged interest on the total. Month by month, her indebtedness increased. It never decreased by a jot.

We were housed in tent number 47, one of many dozens of what appeared to be US Army surplus tents left over from the recently completed war against the Spanish in Cuba. It was as if a battalion of American soldiers had pitched their camp in a cottonwood forest close by the plantation and dug their latrines and built their fire pits and then had suddenly decamped for some distant battlefield, leaving behind tents, cots, mosquito netting, latrines, wash stands, and outdoor kitchens for the use of the refugees whose homes and villages had been destroyed by the war. The tents provided adequate privacy and shelter against the rain and autumn winds, but not the chill of Georgia nights as winter came on. We did not freeze, but we were never warm, except when at work.

It was harvest time when we arrived, and a great force was needed in the fields, or we might have been given jobs more suited to our abilities, for unlike most of the other workers, we were literate, and Mother was an excellent seamstress. We were given three narrow canvas cots, one for Mother and the others for us four boys to share head to foot, two to a cot. The tent was the size of a small room pitched on bare ground and tall enough that Mother and Pence and I could almost stand in the center. There was an outdoor dispensary where our daily ration of potato gruel and pork bits and lard and coarse greens was ladled onto our tin plates, but no common dining hall, so we followed the example of the others and retired to dine in our tent.

The interior of our tent was always dark and mostly silent, for we worked sunup to sundown and owned no candles or lanterns, and after the first day of our arrival from Waycross, the five of us more or less fell silent. That’s what people do when they are utterly defeated. They stop talking. To complain would be to express hope for an improvement in the situation. We had no such hope.