Ben Marcus - Notable American Women

1968

The first official version of the “Promise of Stillness,” a vow against motion, appears in January in Albany. The document argues that motion and speech disturb the atmosphere and must cease before a “world storm” is generated that could destroy America. The Women’s Congress, which fled to Albany from Boston in December, has commissioned local radio announcer Katherine Livingston, twenty-six, to risk her job by reading the document on the airwaves while, throughout the country, the signatories take their final positions, mostly in their homes, before ceasing all motion and speech. Emily Walker, the most vocal of those women to take the promise of stillness, issues a statement, declaring, “If I die, it will not be of hunger. I am not hungry or thirsty. I refuse the false promise of motion. I stop.” She dies in six days after shedding a brittle layer of skin, the Walker Pelt, which hangs still in a New Jersey home. Her cause of death is listed as starvation. In the years to follow, Walker Pelts will be marketed to families as small body rugs to be thrown over children, either to immobilize them or to reduce the falsity of their motion.

1971

Silentists attack Fort Blessing, Texas, July 19 and kill five members of the Listening Group before kidnapping seventeen-year-old Caroline Ann Parker. She will live peacefully with the Silentists for four years (until “rescued” against her will by the Texas Mounted Police), marry Quiet Boy Bob Riddle, and stage spectacular, noiseless demonstrations in the Texas desert. As a professional Listener, Parker will be employed by the Silentists to discover an American territory with broad parameters of silence, a region where silence will not only be possible but required. They will settle in Ohio.

1972

Martha Ferris develops Women’s Sign Language and tours the country, demonstrating the technique at schools and churches, proposing a women’s bilinguality that will not only allow for private utterances but possibly enable new forms of thought not available under current systems of grammar and syntax. Her younger sister, Katherine Ferris-Watley, has pierced her own eardrums during a local show of silence and refuses to learn American Sign Language, keeping her hands swaddled in cloth, and often “signing in tongues,” a form of gibberish sign language thought to have religious significance. It is from Katherine’s blunt and frustrated semaphore that Sign Language for Large Hands emerges, a system of forceful prop-aided sign language meant to be read from a great distance, utilized by Silentists who have injured or burned their own hands in protest but who still must enact a basic language. Women’s Sign Language will be rejected by the deaf communities, since much of it requires that the hands of a woman be pinned against her hips while she jumps and spins in the air, actions that deaf women, with their compromised sense of balance, are unable to perform safely. The Listening Group, seeking further difference from the Silentists, will establish a new but troubled relationship with the deaf communities, believing that their skin is receiving the sound that their heads cannot, leading to the Deaf Pelt Thefts of 1974, an action of massive scalping and skin theft against deaf persons.

1980

Sernier kills Burke and is acquitted. He says that if he had it to do over again, he would have killed Burke more slowly. He wishes he could “continue killing Burke.” Burke’s family silently walks through their Akron neighborhood while people jeer at them with the chant “Burke is dead.” Burke’s scholarly works are no longer widely stocked in bookstores. The grammatical tense that Burke has proposed — Burke — is rejected by the Omaha Language Council on the grounds that it renders improbable things too plausible, because it “makes no linguistic distinction between what can and cannot happen. ” In August, Sernier’s students attack seven men and women who were said to have been students of Burke, forcing them into a Thompson Box, a clear cell with a speech tube attached, where the input of language disrupts the rhythm of their bodies, leading to seizures and ultimate physical arrest. Sernier applauds his students in an editorial, asking readers not to forget that he killed Burke. He promises that the word “Burke” will hereafter create a “lasting wound to the skin.” Jane Dark promptly adopts the word as her first language weapon. She demonstrates that by shouting “Burke!” at a small dog, it will not be able to walk and will soon collapse with fatigue.

[Erin]

THE ERIN IS A KEY GIRL in many American houses. It is often misnamed Julie, Joanne, or Samantha, and sometimes it is clothed as a man. As a man, it is still beautiful, although less visible, and prone to lose color during sleep. It makes love and has slender legs, while persons that see it are eager to palm the spot where the woman parts would be, to sweep and pan their hands over the heat of the man that is hiding her. Persons pry a finger into its mouth and feel weak and sweet in the legs, deriving pleasure through this gateway into Erin, breaking through the husk of a man’s body into an inner body named Erin, sometimes breaking past that also to touch at the smooth core and stain their hands on it. There are text versions of Erin, as well. Reading them is similar to seeing Erin. It takes a day to read the full version of Erin, and the process is exhausting. The text cannot be memorized and sometimes the ending comes abruptly and frightens the reader. The first lusciously bright pile of Erin that the others feed from is located in Denver and kept warm by a man named Largeant. It must be swallowed quickly or it will cut and wound the mouth.

Statistics for Erin: My sister refused all clothing but an old beige throw rug. She crawled around under the rug, mostly at night. No real language was exhibited, though she made rudimentary attempts at Burke. She seemed concerned to exhibit clean geometries with her body beneath the rug: circles, triangles, squares. We could not get her to wear a sleep sock. If she fainted, she did so without our knowledge.

[Tina]

The Tina will die. It will emerge in Chicago and reside in chipped white houses of wood and warped glass. It will die quietly. When it does not emerge in Chicago, there will be something uncertain and weak to its shape, a rough tongue, and hair that a father has unjustly handled. It will die on a Tuesday and the hands will go blue. There is promise to the newer Tina shape. It is blackened through ancestral practice, but it can be watery in color. There is a milky storm nearby this Tina figure, and girl versions often dive into the heart of the wind for cleansings. Nothing by way of an answer is ever found in it. On its back is a mark, a freckle, a blister, a scar.

Statistics for Tina: My sister walked upright and spoke basic English. Her face approximated gestures of “happiness.” Her nocturnal actions were mostly low-level postures of sleep. Excellent wind resistance. She showed confusion when we stopped calling her Tina. She had already decorated some of her belongings with this name.

[Patricia]

It isn’t the most willing shape to swim or lunge or use force to motion over the road. The body prefers the easiness of a chair and a stick to point at what it likes. It is most fully in the Patricia style in the evenings, with brittle hairings and admirable mouth power. They have a Patricia everywhere now, sometimes many. There is no conflict in an abundance of it, which can be considered the chief difficulty. There are many and yet it seems as though there are none. It will be born in America and will exist most successfully as a child. Often the Patricia system lives well into the last posture before demise, beyond the view of childhood. Age falls all over it and makes it walk down into the ground and sleep as though it lived in a grave. It calls out from its grave phone, but the ringing sounds only like a sleeping dog and is ignored. It is then allowed to witness itself as an earlier thing, a thing best seen young. The older Patricia fights off the young girl Patricia. It will kill it down again and again, achieving nothing, but killing it nevertheless, creating space for something else that is new and wildly bodied. The young Patricia eats a large bowl of corn for pleasure. It weeps at the sight of water.