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

Kate thought she could sense some irony behind this digression — was it an allusion to the Fox & Fish Spiritualist Institute? More glaring in her eyes was the moral desolation at heart that this man seemed to be struggling with. And then she knew none of the authors he mentioned, but on the other hand had read Longfellow’s Voices of the Night and followed for months Harriet Beecher Stowe’s series, so moving, in the National Era, that abolitionist newspaper Wanda had loaned her.

“What do you think my friend died of?” Lucian abruptly asked the adolescent.

“He was murdered,” she responded in a lost voice.

“You’re mad! What allows you to say such a thing?” he said, losing his temper, before recovering: “Nat Astor, my only friend, my soul mate, killed himself with a bullet straight to his heart on Harry Maur’s property, I know it, I was there. .”

Some snowflakes flew over the graves without Kate allowing herself, pupils fluttering at the milky pulsation, to openly marvel as was her usual custom on the first snowfalls in winter. Lucian noticed this delightful burst of childlike surprise and couldn’t help but smile. This girl just-become woman was as alive and distracted as the snow, everything in her mind surged thrillingly only to be erased in an opaque mirror. A reflection of Edgar Poe rose to his lips: “This terrible way of life nervous people suffer, when the senses are cruelly sharp and the faculties of the mind dull and drowsy.”

“What are you saying? What people are you talking about?” Uncomfortable, Kate considered in turns this hypnotizer’s smile and the swirls of snow now so prodigious that they were erasing the inscriptions on the tilted stones. Turning back toward where her family was just assembled, she could see only the same curtain of whiteness swaying between the occasional cypress, and was suddenly frightened of being absolutely alone with this man in the wax mask whose gaze insinuated itself within her.

Across the territory — from the Champlain Valley to the Great Plains, from the mountain states to the Gulf Coast, or from New England to Main Street America — the new doctrine that wasn’t yet a religion, but rather a credo combining devotion and an aspiration toward the scientific, spread with the quickness of a brushfire that, like a thousand voices in the wind, gave greater credence to the Messianism of the Quakers, Seventh-Day Adventists, or the Mormon pioneers in the West fleeing persecution. They all denounced hell, that pagan invention, and likewise rejected the purgatory of the Catholics, longing for an intimate communication with God and his angels, without counsel or arbitrator of good and evil. Under the clear-sighted protection of the Spirit, spirits could very well populate spaces and worlds.

This providence of Modern Spiritualism very quickly touched hundreds of thousands, millions of Americans rich and poor in an age when the Grim Reaper spared no one in his vast harvests, let alone children of all ages, who were more likely to disappear than to one day follow their parents’ path. One thus saw the emergence of countless mediums, like so many frogs born in the rain, a new species of preachers with their props, a number of whom discovered themselves: pastors at odds with their congregations, itinerant apothecaries, hypnotists dragging along Mesmer tubs in their wagons, retrained street peddlers, rodeo jugglers, professional cheats, and other conjurers. They officiated in every imaginable place after a media campaign or a circus parade, in churches, private homes, convention halls, covered markets, public spaces. Each in his or her manner promised a variety of shivers to gullible crowds for a dollar or a cent per head. These post-mortem communications became so popular in town, where turning tables was the fashion, that it was common among the bourgeois to gather in the evenings around a pedestal table, and anyone could improvise being mediator of the other world, provided that the rest didn’t die laughing.

Encouraged by the aura of the Fox sisters led by Leah and their most fervent disciples, including the poetess Anna Blackwell, the actress Charlene Obo, the miraculously healed rheumatic Achsa W. Sprague, or the enigmatic Wanda Jedna, American women finally held a new way to take their turn speaking without being booed at like those feminists in municipal assemblies advocating the right to vote, or else persecuted and threatened with death, in the wake of intrepid abolitionists like Lucy Stone, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, or Susan B. Anthony, who were running from hills to valleys preaching a holy war against supporters of slavery and males, those predators of a similar breed.

In order for Modern Spiritualism not to be taken over by charlatans and to remain pure of any commercial alloy, as well as to keep away conspiracies and virulent charges from universities and scientific institutions as much as from the leagues of orthodox Puritans with figureheads like Ellen White, a sworn opponent of irrationalism, the sensible followers of the Fox sisters introduced missions of mediums in charge of enlightening the masses. Following the first Spiritualist Congress that took place in Cleveland in 1852, several independent societies were established, financed by wealthy philanthropists, which founded propagandist newspapers and dispatched missionaries with proven psychic skills across the Atlantic to conquer the Old World.

At the initiative of Leah who had hired a manager answering to the name of Franck Strechen, a Scotsman of apparently common strain, the Fox sisters traveled through the great cities of the Northeast: Newark, Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Washington, Buffalo. . Often hosted by local spiritualist societies, they multiplied demonstrations of mediumship with uninterrupted success, inspiring vocations everywhere and giving rise to emulators.

In Boston as in New York, Paschal Beverly Randolph, having returned still young from a tour of the world as the self-proclaimed Prince of Madagascar, alchemist, and Grand Master of the Fraternity of the Rosy Cross, had acquired an unusual glory thanks to his mixture of genres. Egalitarian and abolitionist, struggling for universal rights including those of sexual freedom, this child of slaves had founded a Bureau of Freedmen and made a reputation as comforter to the poor by invoking spirits specifically chosen to provide the best advice to all the oppressed. He took advantage of his powerful magnetism to connect bereaved widows with their dead companions, giving women access to interesting nervous sensations. Rushing in from all over, his public listened devotedly to his invective: “Remember, oh neophyte, that Goodness is power, Silence is strength, Will reigns the Spirit, and that Love holds the root of the All-Mighty. .”

A little by chance, William Pill found himself one day listening to him while chewing his cigarillo and, by an even bigger chance, later shared the same carriage and fraternized with him along the ride. Now at Paschal Beverly Randolph’s service for the past several weeks under the title of bodyguard, he’d had the time to assimilate certain aspects of his art of persuasion as well as several beautiful phrases. Like, “The only aristocracy is the aristocracy of the mind,” which rang pretty true. However, Pill was not the kind of man to wear a collar for long, even a solid gold one.

Taking refuge in Rochester following a flagrant offence of fraud in a Boston gambling room where he thankfully escaped with his life, William Pill — who had learned unbeknownst to the black medium several mechanisms of suggestion to abolish the will or simply to put an entire assembly to sleep — then launched a new career, after several failed attempts in the realm of clairvoyance, as a merry necromancer.