Hubert Haddad - Rochester Knockings - A Novel of the Fox Sisters

That sunny Sunday, the Hydesville church was stormed the moment it opened by everyone the district counted in its more or less zealous flock; added to that were a number of Protestants from other parishes, all wildly curious about the event, including local personalities, politicians, men of law, doctors, officers in uniform. And even, arriving that morning from Rochester in a convertible pulled by four horses, Henry Maur, the rich trader of furs and opium, flanked by Miss Charlene Obo, the famous actress and curious specimen with a beautiful waxy face, dressed all in black under her vicuña cloak.

Reverend Gascoigne did not go up to the pulpit alone. Alexander Cruik, a brilliant preacher in the Methodist Church formed at the University of Oxford, came expressly for the occasion from the Adirondack mountains, the barren territories of the adjacent Hamilton County, where he was trying to convert surviving Indian tribes: Cruik, who claimed to descend from George White-field and the Great Itinerants, had called in reinforcements with a choir of young black women that the public received in a mixed uproar of delight and fury. After the reverend’s sermon on excommunication, which his own sermon would have to follow under the banner of the Great Awakening, the evangelist intended to pay a visit as discreetly as possible to the seditious family. An annunciator of the return of Christ would not be able to misjudge the unceasing gift of His Blessing. Alexander Cruik considered the crowd assembled between the brick walls, under the nave ceiling. Never at church had he seen such a diverse landscape. There was, beyond a majority of Methodists, all species of Puritans come from the neighboring villages, Sunday Baptists, Adventists, Lutherans, and even a sampling of dumbfounded Quakers, with some Negroes sitting in the back released from the corn plantations for church.

The reverend swiftly defied heresy: “There is no obstacle between God and his faithful, no border, no customs, and the New Jerusalem is open to all Christians keeping faith and good will. Each of us draws conscientiously from his own reading of the Scriptures. However, didn’t Christ declare to the Apostle Peter that what binds us and what unties us on Earth will bind us and untie equally in Heaven? That is why we condemn without appeal dialogue with the dead as senseless and heretical. The occultists are all imposters who are ill-advisedly seizing and using the memory of the departed in order to feed the demons of evil and resentment with a putrid blood. These misguided ones conjure the dead from out of their own terrors and ramblings. But necromancy is the opposite of spiritual experience. There is no place for our dust and ashes in the afterlife! Yesterday again, without success, we warned the incriminated loud and clear, we have implored them to abandon their nefarious practices. As it is taught by the Apostle Matthew:

‘Moreover if thy brother shall trespass against thee, go and tell him his fault between thee and him alone: if he shall hear thee, thou hast gained thy brother. But if he will not hear thee, then take with thee one or two more, that in the mouth of two or three witnesses every word may be established. And if he shall neglect to hear them, tell it unto the church: but if he neglect to hear the church, let him be unto thee as a heathen man and a publican.’

Therefore, by ecclesiastical decision, we find ourselves solemnly obliged to put the fate of the family of John D. Fox back in the hands of God; from this day forward they will be considered as banished from the Episcopal Methodist Church. They will no longer take part in our brotherhood! Whoever would follow their example or be tempted to accompany their erring will swiftly suffer a similar ostracism. .”

The crowd of farmers and stable boys gathered at the back of the room could not restrain an animal grunt of satisfaction that made Pearl, seated in the first row, turn back to look. In this worried gesture, after staring down several faces with low foreheads and thick jaws, she crossed glances with William Pill seated five rows back in the span of men. Embarrassed, she blinked her eyelashes and gave a vague polite smile that she immediately regretted. That man had an unpleasant way of fixing his steel-blue eyes on her, as if with his silence he was speaking crudely and in his full right. Pearl turned back around and hunched her shoulders. Her neck was burning. She had no doubt that he was studying the back of her head and each stray hair that had fallen loose.

At the pulpit, the minister of the Holy Gospel was finishing his curse. His daughter, her throat tightening, was already frightened of the consequences of this strictness on the Fox sisters, their elderly mother, and that ignorant farmer who, with the help of alcohol, believed himself to be invested in a supreme mission: consoling all the mourners on Earth by opening up the secrets of the other world.

At the signal of Alexander Cruik, anxious to appease everyone’s spirit, the choir of young black girls started to sing:

I am free

I am free, my Lord

I am free

I’m washed by the blood of the Lamb

You may knock me down

I’ll rise again

I’m washed by the blood of the Lamb

I fight you with my sword and shield

I’m washed by the blood of the Lamb

The guest speaker experienced slight vertigo at the moment he stood to approach the pulpit. Those hymns of incorruptible faith born in the cotton fields had risen viscerally, with mouths closed, among the millions of slaves evangelized by his church, who on the horizon of their martyrdom aspired to nothing other than freedom. And what then were the impecunious white farmers aspiring to who were whispering into the ears of the dead? Thinner than a rail and with the lividity of a revenant, the preacher was amused by the fright that ordinarily occasioned his appearance amid a crowd of believers. If, by an exception in the Methodist Church Council inclined to sobriety in all things, his outspokenness and inspired wise-man fantasies had been allowed for services rendered, he knew from experience that there was almost nothing held in balance among these crazed settlers, who were pioneers and sons of pioneers with barbaric inclinations and, notwithstanding, were sworn opponents of superstition carried out with the candor of crusaders. With these people — the severe Gascoigne seemed to have forgotten for the moment — a single word too much could make things worse.

Intuition more than reason guided Alexander Cruik in situations like these, and he let himself go off in a loud voice about numerous parables of his own creation, which his listeners imagined were taken from the Bible and that the wisest took accurately as apocryphal. But both the illiterate and the learned were under his spell. Under the fur trader’s wide shoulder, a dark figure decked out like a Byronian privateer had the frustrated outburst of a scholar confronted with an undateable document. If Charlene and Harry Maur had rushed to these fields, allured by the story, he, Lucian Nephtali, had agreed to go along with them as a way to find out more about whatever rarified process of excommunication was fomenting under the leadership of a district pastor and a visionary who’d risked his scalp with the Nagarragansetts or the Oregon Indians. Since the young Quaker Mary Dyer had been tried and hung in Boston now almost two centuries ago, trial by opinion was no longer acknowledged in the Union. But where did this strange bird of a preacher find this story of a corpse brought back to life in the bottom of a cave containing jars filled with scrolls of Hebraic manuscripts?

Now he was quoting the book of Psalms with the same casual fervor:

“I was nothing more than a lunatic made of water and clay and your eyes saw me!”