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

“May the Lord preserve our sorcerers!” cried out Mrs. Freeman, a fat woman with a hairdo in the form of a crow’s nest.

“So natural and so candid,” the preacher continued in the same tone, “little Kate is a sort of shaman who is unaware of it which, however, grants her the powers that the first apostles must have had. She is an intercessor between two spaces of perception and comprehension usually hermetically separated, a kind of. . of medium, if you will allow me the neologism. .”

“Medium, medium. .?” Leah exclaimed. That’s the word they were missing! “But allow me to explain that modern spiritualism, if I may use your expression, is as much the business of Margaret Fox and of myself, not to exclude our dear Kate, nor my mother or my old father. .”

“It’s a family business!” joked the corpulent Barry Nursery from a distance.

“Do you consider yourself to belong to the current Religious Revival?” her neighbor on the right, the magnetizer Andrew Jackson Davis, asked more cautiously.

“Assuredly,” stammered Leah, a little sorry to see her soup growing cold. “We are, my sisters and I, passionately enflamed in our faith, and this mystical fire spreads especially today, waking in each of us our piety for the afterlife where our dear lost ones continue to exist. The dead are our angels, believe it. Wasn’t the resurrection of our Lord the first manifestation of spiritualism?”

“There have been plenty of others since Osiris, Dionysus, or Orpheus,” sighed Lucian Nephtali wearily, mopping his brow.

“And the prophet Elijah!” boomed the preacher with an amused zest. “Remember the widow of Sarepta in the time of Ahab, the idolatrous king: ‘And it came to pass after these things, that the son of the woman, the mistress of the house, fell sick; and his sickness was so sore, that there was no breath left in him. .’ Housed in a room above the widow, Elijah brought the little corpse up to his room, stretched himself three times over him, and cried to the Lord: ‘Yahweh, my Lord, will thou also hurt the widow hosting me, for that you make her son die?’ Immediately, the soul of the little boy was returned to his body by divine will. Elijah brought him down to his mother and declared: ‘See, thy son liveth.’”

“But this isn’t about reviving the dead! We have, God willing, much humbler ambitions than prophesying the Messiah. Our mission is simply to put mourners in the presence of spirits, thus enabling consolation, opening the world finally to hope. .”

The women present, wives and celebrities, loudly applauded Leah.

After dinner, Wanda Jedna, charmed by this new cause, prioritized it now in her mind just after those of Negros and women — for didn’t our virtuous dead participate in the full rights of the great human family? — and caught the hostess off guard, who pushed passed in surprise on her way to open the baby grand to perform a recent air from Paris. The martial harmonies were so stirring that Charlene Obo and the banker with the fine moustache started to clap their hands.

L’homme, ce despote sauvage

Eut soin de proclaimer ses droits

Créons des droits à notre usage

À notre usage, ayons des lois!

No one asked any explanation of Pearl Gascoigne when she presented herself one summer night at the doors of the commune. On the way back from haying, tools over their shoulders, the Perfect Ones stared with amazement at this sublime mare and her thoroughbred, still intertwined in the same energy, both of their manes flowing, the woman and her horse visibly out of breath. It seemed like this girl was fleeing a fire, the lightning of God, and some band of Algonquin cannibals all at the same time. While the frightened horse raced back and forth between the fences and log cabins, several young women wearing short dresses for evening service appeared.

Pearl found herself staggering in the middle of a strange assembly of bearded farmers looking like magi, of farmwomen looking like old queen regents draped in dark colors, an indefinable smile on their lips, in their lightweight dresses or frocks with straps, and very young children suddenly frozen in their games. Pearl had immediately noticed the short hair of the teenage girls, their cheerful and at the same time defiant air, and a type of hierarchy belonging to animal herds in the physical appearance of the males, according to age, but also a sort of relaxed quiet on their faces. This pastoral tableau, worthy of a genre painting of the epoch from the thirteen colonies, inscribed itself upon her, a little unreal, after that entire day of galloping aimlessly in the dust of the roads.

She had left Hydesville without explanation, mind on fire, on a stormy night. Suddenly following a clash with her father on the question of her clothing and the expense of lace ribbons, she had turned away in silence. Running to his stable after putting on her riding clothes, Pearl didn’t have the least concern about the following day, like someone anesthetized, abandoning without the least regret both her little treasures and large responsibilities. The thoroughbred, an extremely rare White Beauty bequeathed by a farmer of the county, was the sole luxury of Reverend Gascoigne. Submerged in anger, having decided impetuously to flee as far as possible, she didn’t think twice about whether to instead seize the ordinary horse hitched to an English wagon. And it was with a worn out bridle, in the sweltering midsummer night, dizzied by the scents of the thatch and the bland exhalations of stagnant waters, that she’d traveled half of Monroe County and all of Wayne, before galloping erratically the days that followed between mountains and forests, then through the endless plains, in Oswego and Oneida territories where, thinking she was lost in an Indian reservation, Pearl had unwittingly found herself hostage to a most curious tribe of pale faces.

She will remember for a long time the welcome given by the women her age under the hungry eyes of the men, once over the general amazement upon her arrival — a beautiful equestrian archangel filthy with sweat and dust but dazzling in the twilight. Several of them grabbed hold of her after a few words. Pearl was hungry and thirsty, she wanted a deep sleep after her hypnotic ride. Once she slid off the saddle, the women, almost carrying her, led her to the bottom of a narrow valley where a river flowed. Laughing, they took off her boots and completely undressed her while the patriarchs stood above at a proper distance. Then they immersed her like those statues of Durga, inaccessible goddess in the waters of the Ganges, half-naked themselves, soaping and scrubbing her down from head to foot, kissing her hair and her mouth, saving her from nearly drowning. Dripping wet with her long hair plastered to her hips, there was a murmur of almost religious admiration around her. Washed, the statue had the beauty of seraphim and demons, a mortifying perfection, marble sculpted in the fire of a desire that blinds the overexcited. Even children pale with emotion came to the hillside.

At that moment, more than ever, with one hand on his heart, John Humphrey Noyes must have thought about the humanity, pure in blood and soul, that his community had the mission to create, by passionate attraction, beyond the abominable sacrament of marriage. Her glorious anatomy, exempt from the tortures of procreation, reminded him painfully of his former wife, with a body deformed by successive aborted pregnancies.

But there was in this improvised baptism an intolerable bacchanalian release. With the title of spiritual guide, he severely inquired about the disorder caused by the intruder, then summoned her into the reflection room. After these water games, dressed now in a short, sleeveless frock furnished by the laundry women, Pearl, her eyelids heavy, had to face a curious interrogation of a paternal firmness, close to a sermon. The man reminded her of the reverend with his austere bearing, his grave voice, and thin face with strong jaws poorly concealed beneath a beard. But John Humphrey Noyes took on a whole other tone when it came to the question of the Celestial Free Spirit and Universal Love, of the sanctity of work and voluntary confession. There was in his eyes then a great persuasive sweetness. Pearl, helpless, accepted the protection and the lessons of the mentor.