A Friendly Letter, The Blog.

Liz Yeats

[Reprinted by permission from The Best of Friends, Vol. 1, a collection published by the Fellowship of Quakers in the Arts, in 2000. A lot of interesting mysteries have been published since then, but this is a good starter.]

I know no better relaxation than curling up in my favorite chair with a nice cup of tea and good murder mystery. Make it a well written religious, murder mystery that delves into spiritual, theological, and social concerns, and you have my perfect afternoon; my Sabbath from the cares and drudgery of my personal and professional life; a time and space suspended from reality. Yes, a virtual time and space in which I can exercise my mind trying to determine who done it and why!

Early in my adult life, just before I became a member of the Religious Society of Friends, I began reading murder mysteries. It became a regular practice during my sojourn in rural Vermont where I worked for the American Friends Service Committee. I had always loved theater, even settling for that which was not particularly high grade on television or available Off-Off Broadway. But Rutland, Vermont had very little theater and living between two mountains there was no television reception. Besides, I had to catch my leisure time between my many meetings and phone calls. Wanting a more interruptible but engaging form of entertainment, I turned to reading mysteries.

Mysteries fit my needs. They are cheap, even free if one has access to a good public library, readily available, most often short, thus light in weight and intensity. They travel well, especially the paperbacks and you can hold them up in bed even after a long day.

More important, the good ones reflect some interesting aspects of past or contemporary culture, religion and/or politics. They deal with human good and evil. All mystery authors are posing a puzzle and sketching a solution to the puzzle through the thoughts and actions of the characters. To me, the better authors are those who use their mysteries to ask questions with which they struggle themselves, and through their characters explore how the human mind works, especially how people treat one another, care for one another, and solve problems. A well-crafted mystery is a puzzle of the human spirit. Who did it, how did they do it, and, most important of all, why?

The most wonderful thing about mysteries is they aren’t real. In fact, I shy away from the ones that are too realistic. This is part of what makes reading mysteries a spiritual activity for me. They are a Sabbath for my soul. I spend too much time weighed down by the incredible level of real violence in this world, wondering how humans can be so inhumane to one another. I struggle to develop tools to educate toward ending such evil. Often, I grow intense and discouraged, but I still find the issues involved with human good and evil fascinating.

How wonderful to be able to ponder those same issues in the make-believe of the murder mystery. I can sit back fully in control and wonder why one character has killed another. If the book upsets me, I can put it down and leave its world. I don’t have to live with the characters or wonder what I could do to prevent the next murder. I can examine the way the author portrays the human interactions, see just how diverse human thought and behavior can be, and then move on.

At times, a mystery has actually “spoken to my condition” in the same way that a message in meeting for worship sometimes presents a new insight or a path to ponder. This was true with some of the first mysteries I read, those of Dorothy Sayers.

Sayers lived in the first years of the twentieth century when most women were not permitted careers, even in academia. Yet Sayers created the character of Harriet Vane, assistant and eventually wife to detective Peter Whimsey, as a strong, intellectual, caring woman who seeks an academic career. Growing up in the fifties and sixties in the United States, I often felt marginalized as a strong and competent young woman. Sayers’ characterization of Vane spoke to me far better than the stereotypical female heroines in the required canon of my high school and college days.

Amanda Cross was another author I discovered. A feminist, Cross created Kate Fansler, a 50ish, intellectual, New York City English professor, part-time detective and loving wife to a law professor. When Kate’s friend Sylvia begs her to take a temporary teaching position in Boston so that she can investigate a murder in Death in a Tenured Position, Fansler affirms her relationship with her husband, Reed, saying, “Reed always knew I had to have times without him. I always knew that he never bored me when I was with him. Though I miss him, I don’t pine for him when we’re apart, nor pine for solitude when we’re together. Greater tribute hath no woman.”

Now, there’s an image of a strong, faithful, but independent woman, the kind of woman that at thirty, I could hope to become.

Another set of mysteries that intrigued me early on were those of husband and wife, Maj Swojall and Pere Waloo. These Swedish authors wove violent, suspense-filled tales in the Stockholm of the 1960s. But in between the blood and gore they put wonderful scenes of Swedish family life. I remember one scene in particular, though I have not been able to locate it, where the detective and his wife engage in a pleasant interlude of early morning sex, unashamed when their young children enter the room.

Something I probably never considered reenacting, but a slice of real life presented with such warmth and whimsy that I began to think about the family life I did want to create. The plots of these mysteries have fallen away but the alternative family behavior Swojall and Waloo depicted has remained with me for over 20 years.

Closer to my experience was the suburban Jewish community in Harry Kemelman’s Rabbi Small series. These books, named for days of the week, pair the young, scholarly Rabbi Small with the older, seasoned, Roman Catholic police chief Hugh Lanigan. Rabbi Small often finds himself defending his community, a group that does not always embrace Small’s role as judge and scholar, not pastor, of his congregation.

Kemelman uses the books to explore and educate about modern Judaism and its place in suburban America. A professor and philosopher of education by vocation, he sometimes seems less involved with the plots of the murders than with the aspects of society out of which they grow and the theological concerns which they raise. In fact one might see the Rabbi mysteries as parables on modern life, each one carefully constructed to raise a social/psychological issue, explore its theological implications and teach a careful lesson about the morally and ethically correct life.

Coming as I do from a Jewish family, Kemelman’s learned but accessible exploration of Jewish law and its application to twen-tieth century life drew me into pondering my own religious convictions. In the end, these well-written and enjoyable stories affirmed my choice to leave American Judaism. Kemelman’s Rabbi Small articulates a Jewish religion that is a “code of ethical behavior,” not a faith in a God who is active in this world. This described well the Judaism of my parents and grandparents.

Yet, I have always felt that the only fully observant Jew I knew as a child, my Great Grandpa Welikson, lived with a faith in a God who was mysterious but active in this world. I was never able to explore this fully with him as he died when I was about seven and this faith filled kind of Judaism seemed unavailable to me as I matured religiously in my twenties. By the time I read these mysteries, I found myself experiencing a faith in a God within, an experience that was fully honored among Friends where I found my spiritual home.

After discovering the Rabbi series, I looked for more religious mysteries. Writing in his extensive study of this genre, Mysterium and Mystery, The Clerical Crime Novel, William David Spenser says “My theory is that the modern mystery novel is a secularized form structured on the ancient mysterium or revelation of God’s judgment and grace…The mystery story itself, in its quest for the criminal and interdiction of evil and restoration of the good, images the quest through a fallen world for the great good God.”

As a Quaker, I might say it a bit differently, talking about the ocean of light overcoming the ocean of darkness, as George Fox did. In the religious murder mystery this theme is particularly clear. In a sense, good wins out every time the detective solves the case, making the whole genre a very positive one. Perhaps that’s why I like and read religious mysteries so much. So I have read a great many, too many to review them all here, but I want to discuss some of the best and particularly those written by and about Quakers.

The best written religious mysteries I’ve consumed to date are by Ellis Peters (a pen name for the British author Edith Pargeter). In these 20 short books Cadfael, a 12th century, socially concerned herbalist, Benedictine monk becomes a practiced detective using common sense and a bit of prayer to root out evil in and around the English town of Shrewsbury. The medieval setting is beautifully researched and described. Best of all, the Abbey of Saint Peter and Saint Paul actually existed in Cadfael’s time and you can still visit some of the buildings today.

The first of these books, A Morbid Taste for Bones, illustrates well Cadfael’s propensity to stray from the strict Catholic rule of his order and follow common sense to help good triumph over evil. The tale centers around the discovery of the bones of Saint Winifred in Wales, not far from Shrewsbury, and the attempt by Cadfael’s superiors to transfer these relics to their abbey church.

Cadfael is dispatched with the procurement party because of his facility with the language, not because he has much interest in relics. In Cadfael’s mind there is much question about transporting the bones of a Welsh saint to England and even some skepticism about the practice of honoring relics at all.

In fact, Peters portrays many of the monks of Cadfael’s community rather negatively as slaves to their practices and hunger for power. Cadfael, on the other hand, readily admits his own and others frailty but seeks a just, and in this case wonderfully surprising end, even if it means some infractions of the community discipline.

I greatly enjoy Peters’ portrait of life in medieval Shrewsbury, her well-drawn and often humorous characters, the romantic themes that run through all of the stories and her depiction of human conflict as a universal problem through time. I sometimes wonder though if Cadfael might be a bit anachronistic in his thoughts and behavior, more the ideal twentieth-century healer of the spirit and champion of justice than the simple, kindly, herbalist monk of medieval times. Even given the background Peters creates for him as a soldier in the crusades and a lover of many beautiful women before he joined the order, he seems a bit worldly at times.

But never mind. These books are great fun and I would be looking for more, but Pargeter died last year and with her Cadfael, a great loss to me and many others.

Another author who explores religious themes through mysteries is Faye Kellerman. I find Kellerman’s mysteries real page turners because of well-crafted plots and good descriptive narrative. In one of her most recent books, Prayers for the Dead, she explores the responsibilities of men and women to the family through a contemporary Catholic, Protestant and Jewish lens.

Kellerman does not use a cleric as detective. Instead her main character is a police detective, Peter Decker, who has reclaimed his Jewish heritage in the process of a romance with an Orthodox widow named Rina. In the first few books of this series we watch the recently divorced, insecure, lonely, and alienated Los Angeles policeman, Peter, who grew up with adoptive Baptist parents, get convinced and converted to Orthodox Judaism, marry Rina and become a happy, though harried, father and family man.

In Prayers, Peter investigates the murder of a prominent surgeon with evangelical leanings whose large family includes a son who has become a Catholic priest. Kellerman poses the question among others, “how does one lead a balanced life in light of modern demands of profession, family and personal interests,” a question with which I struggle often. Peter, the priest, several colleagues of the doctor and even Rina struggle with their responsibility to their family as opposed to other commitments.

As do other good authors I have read, Faye Kellerman asks questions, explores the implications through the thoughts and actions of various characters but never presents a perfect solution. She leaves you to ponder the question long after you have finished the book.

In recent years I have discovered that a few Quakers have written murder mysteries. Some, like Sarah Smith of Friends Meeting at Cambridge, New England Yearly Meeting, write wonderful novels full of murder, suspense and social commentary but do not focus on religion or Friends at all. Sarah Smith has published two, The Vanished Child and The Knowledge of Water, but neither mentions Quakers. Other Quaker authors, such as Stanley Ellin, who won the Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America three times, have written many books, one or two of which have some Quaker content.

In the 1970s I often enjoyed sitting on the porch at New York Yearly Meeting and chatting with Stanley Ellin, member of Brooklyn Monthly Meeting. Though I knew he was an author, it wasn’t until after his death that I discovered he wrote mystery/suspense stories and that in 1973 he had published a mystery about Quakers titled Stronghold. After many years of searching for a copy and viewing a rather disappointing video version, one of two available, Chuck Fager loaned me a copy of the book for this review. I recommend it highly as a good read and perhaps the best advertisement for the Quaker ideal of overcoming violence through group prayer, discernment and nonviolent action.

The story takes place in rural, upstate New York, in fact an area Ellin had become familiar with while attending Yearly Meeting. The wealthy, leading family of a tiny monthly meeting comes under siege by a group of heavily armed ex-cons, one of whom they had taken into their home as a wayward teen. After violently assaulting both men and women in the family, the ex-cons demand millions of dollars from the family-owned bank and take the women hostage until the money and transportation are provided.

Drawing from their experience with nonviolent resistance and Friends’ practice of corporate silent worship to discern correct action, the whole meeting pulls together to face this psychopathic murderer and his three henchmen.

Ellin’s Quaker characters are very real. I know every one of the members of the meeting he creates because they are in my meeting and in every meeting of which I have been a part. As they gather for meeting for worship with attention to business to decide how to handle the situation, the members of the meeting reveal themselves: Anna and Elizabeth, two elderly but tough spinsters who want to take the place of the women hostages, the Quimbys, a young couple who are pressured by the demands of work and family life but are still the peace and social action Friends in the meeting; and Uri, a Nazi concentration camp survivor who at first lacks the faith that evil can be overcome by the nonviolent action proposed, especially since it involved telling lies.

The necessity to lie is explored extensively through the thoughts of Marcus Hayworth, the head of the family under siege, who tells much of the story. Suspense-filled and quite bloody to the very end, Stronghold does an excellent job of exploring the central Friends concept that although people behave in evil ways, there is some of God in each of us, even the most disturbed and violent.

Stronghold has become my favorite mystery to recommend to a seeker trying to grasp Quaker faith and practice. It does a more complete job of communicating Friends testimony and practice than Chuck Fager’s attempt in Murder Among Friends. On the other hand, Fager has a flair missing in Ellin’s work. Though it seems as if Marcus in Stronghold is modeled partly after the man Ellin aspires to be, the character is missing the wit and humor of the author. One of the best things about Murder Among Friends is the way Chuck Fager has modeled the central character after himself, capturing some of his best elements, his humor, his love of history and his desire to get the story.

Fager sets Murder, his first mystery, at a pan-Quaker conference in the western Virginia hills. All types of Friends gather for an exchange of ideas, but end up witnessing the murder of a prominent evangelical preacher who has been invited to address the group. The book is made richer by the inclusion of local Virginia and Quaker history and one well drawn character, a Quaker elder named Lemuel Penn. Our narrator, a rather innocent, hapless, gentle reporter, a Fager seem-alike, hangs out with Penn as they both try to limit the violence and understand how and why the murder was committed.

Unfortunately, the plot seems somewhat far-fetched and Fager has a strange way of portraying women, especially strong Quaker women. He has a long way to go before he reaches the skill of Daisy Newman, the New England Quaker author of a series of novels about Friends. The women and men in Newman’s novels ring so true to my experience that I’ve often wondered which came first, the people or her portrayal. Nevertheless, I think Fager succeeds in his attempt to write an enjoyable book that provides some information about contemporary rifts in Quakerism and teaches non-Friends and seekers a bit about Friends.

I’m not entirely sure what Fager is attempting in his second mystery, Unfriendly Persuasion. Again the main character is a mild-mannered Fager clone, this time a postal worker, Chuck’s former bread labor. Again the women behave strangely. They all seem to be pressed from a stereotypical mold and have very little initiative or brains. There is much less Friendly content here than in Murder but I still found Unfriendly an enjoyable read as it tackled some questions about integrity in our modern world. I look forward to the next Fager mystery and feel he has a much more positive future as a fiction writer than as an investigative reporter stirring up controversy among Friends.

The final set of mysteries that I want to review: Quaker Silence, Quaker Witness, Quaker Testimony, and Quaker Indictment, were all written recently by Irene Allen. Allen became familiar with Friends in Cambridge, Massachusetts while she was doing graduate work at Harvard University. She attended Friends Meeting at Cambridge and ultimately became a member of the Society. Three of her four mysteries are set in Cambridge and all have Elizabeth Elliot, Clerk of the meeting, as the detective and central character. The fourth mystery takes place in Washington State, where Elizabeth goes to visit a former college roommate and ends up investigating a murder near the grounds of the Hanford Nuclear Plant.

Allen describes Friends’ practice extensively in all of the books, all the plots revolve around issues of concern facing contemporary Friends in their meetings and personal lives and most of the well developed characters are Quakers. This plus the familiar, well-described settings (I attended Cambridge Meeting for 5 years and lived in the Northwest for two), made these books an enjoyable read for me.

However, I would hesitate to recommend them enthusiastically to someone as capturing the full spirit of Quakerism. For a long time I have pondered why this is so. One reason is that Allen’s descriptions of Quaker faith and practice sometimes become ponderous and preachy. Perhaps this is because she is a new Friend.

In addition, I find she dwells too much on the negative, ending each of the books with Elizabeth Elliot weighed down with concerns about members of the meeting and the world. Especially in the last book, she dwells overly on Elizabeth’s age and the physical limitations that she suffers. We are left with the sense that Quakers are stodgy, handicapped, dour, old people who carry the cares of the world on their shoulders.

This is not my experience. One of the reasons I am a Friend is that most Friends know how to have a good time, expressing joy often and moderating their serious intent to do good by exercising a healthy sense of humor. In this way, I find Ellin’s and Fager’s mysteries paint a better portrait of the Society of Friends. More important, they provide a better chance to kick back and relax.

Let me conclude this review with the following paraphrase, “So many religious murder mysteries, so little time,” and the hope that you will find some of those I have discussed or others, please read them relaxation, fun and sometimes, a little bit of spiritual growth.

A Story by Chuck Fager
Copyright (c) All rights reserved

PART ONE: Four Days Into Lockdown

It was hot. The summer of 1970 was burning scorched-looking brown spots in the green Pennsylvania hills, and made the wide cornfields around us crackle, as if their just-forming ears were going to swell up and start popping any minute now.

Inside the wall, humidity condensed and trickled down the walls of our cells, and the smells of mildew and old sweat were everywhere. It occurred to me that it must be something like this in the rice paddies of Vietnam. That was an irony for you: I had refused to join the army and go the rice paddies, so rice paddy weather had come to me.

Naturally, the U.S. Bureau of Prisons didn’t believe in air conditioning, except of course in the guards’ lounge and the warden’s office. Worse yet, the bureaucrats had been spooked by the news from Attica, three hours to the northwest of us in New York. A week earlier the men there had rebelled and taken hostages, until the state troopers blasted them out. Dozens had been
killed and wounded as law and order, as the governor liked to say, were restored.

But Attica was in a different state, and a different system –hell, a different planet almost. This was a medium security joint, and after a year here I thought I had a good ear for the tension level in our block at least, and it felt like we had about as much fight in us as a damp potato chip. The heat wrung it out of us, simmering us in the depression and despair that are more usual among caged men.

The worst of it for me was that the lockdown order had come the day before my next visit to the library. Reading was the one pleasure I could legally retain inside, and now I was caught without it. There were only two books in my cell, a Horatio Hornblower novel and the Bible the visiting committee from the Meeting brought me.

I’d read both already. The Bible hadn’t been as bad as I thought it would be; but I wasn’t ready to start on it again. The Hornblower had mostly been a bore; did I really care what happened to some British naval commander in the Napoleonic wars? Besides, there was no sex in it to speak of.

The only parts which really held me were the descriptions of the sea. They made the ocean sound cool and wet, with a breeze, and sometimes tantalizingly close.

I dreamed about the sea twice while reading Hornblower. After the second dream, I decided that as soon as I made parole, I was heading for the beach, and nobody better try to stop me.

A good many hours were passed wondering which beach was closest to here –Cape May, New Jersey? Rehoboth Beach in Delaware? Or what about Cape Cod? It was farther away, but the beaches were nicer, or so I’d been told. Maybe Nantucket; yes –Nantucket, being an island, would be surrounded on all sides by that cool dark water and its breezes.

That’s one of the ways you pass time inside, thinking pointless thoughts about pointless things. It’s a waste of your time, a waste of your life; but don’t let me get started on that.

If the Hornblower book had been a mistake, there was another war novel I was anxious to read, The Captain, by Jan de Hartog. It was about the sea too, and rescue boats in World War Two. Quaker pacifist that I was, that was a war I could relate to. The Nazis were evil, and I knew which side was supposed to win, even if I wouldn’t have joined in the fighting. Or maybe I would have; lots of Quakers did. A copy of The Captain sat in the prison library; I’d seen it there last time, looked through it, and put it next on my mental “gotta read this” list. But when would I get my hands on it?

We were four days into the lockdown when the warden decided, in a fit of charity I suppose, to let us have our mail. A guard brought it around, pushing a cart with a squeaky wheel down the outside hallway. It got quiet when the cart started its rounds. I lay on my bed, like everyone else, listening to its progress, wondering if it was going to stop by my cell.

It did. “Harrison.” The guard’s hand pushed between the bars. Two envelopes.

One was from the visiting committee. They had planned to see me the previous weekend, the clerk wrote, but the lockdown kept them out. They were sorry, they hoped I was minding the light and keeping up my spirits, they wanted me to know they were behind me a hundred percent in my conscientious resistance to the draft, they quoted George Fox, etc., etc.

It wasn’t much to lean on against the pressures of that place; but it was better than nothing, which was what most of the rest of the prisoners had.

The other letter was from Art. I opened it with interest. My younger brother didn’t write often; what did he have to say, I wondered. Did I forget his birthday or something?

It was dated almost a month earlier; it was just like Art to write a letter and forget to send it; mother probably found it and prodded him, gave him a stamp.

“Dear Hal,” he wrote, “I hope you’re doing okay there. We’re all fine here.”

After this rather stiff opening, he went on for two more labored paragraphs about stuff happening back home: Eddie Meyers had gotten engaged, Morty Haverman bought a big new Corvette, and some other people we knew were about to graduate from college. That kind of stuff.

Halfway through this catalog, I could sense that something else was really on his mind. Art wasn’t given to this kind of social chitchat; I got it from my mother. Was there something he was having trouble getting around to saying?

My hunch was right. “All that’s not the really major news,” he wrote finally. “The biggest item is from me, and I hope you’re sitting down.”

Of course I was sitting; there wasn’t enough room to do much more.

“You know how much I hate school,” he began, “but I did finish the year at community college. Just barely. I passed the math okay, but history, geography and Zoology–jeez, I could hardly ever stay awake. Two years of that is about as much as I can put up with. And Ed down at the shop said they’ll take me on fulltime, you know, as soon as I’m free.”

I turned the handwritten sheet over. There was no news here so far. Art looked studious, even nerdy, thick glasses and all; but he had never been much for schooling. Instead, he had tinkered with motorcycles since he was a kid. Ed’s shop was the Honda dealership back home, and Art had worked there on and off since high school.

“The only problem,” Art went on, “is that since I’m not in school anymore, I’m real live draft bait now. So I had to get that figured out.”

Suddenly there was an empty, ominous feeling in my stomach. I guessed what was coming.

“The Air Force recruiter,” he wrote, “told me about this program they’ve got where you learn mechanics, and it’s mostly on the job too, not that much boring classroom stuff.”

No, I thought. He didn’t do this.

Yes, he did. “So,” read the next sentence, “I signed up.”

That was it, the point of the letter.

NEXT: Tapping On the Bars

Another Midsummer Night’s Dream

PART TWO: Tapping On the Bars

“Hal,” he wrote, “I hope you’re not mad about this.”

I threw the letter down on my cot and leaped up. Two steps forward and I was at the bars, gripping them with both hands, not seeing anything beyond them.

Mad wasn’t quite the right word for what I was feeling. Betrayed was closer. Sold out.

I had spent 397 days behind bars acting out beliefs we had both been taught all our lives: “Keep clear of war and preparation for war,” that’s what it said in Faith and Practice, and Hal knew it as well as I did.

But then, when push comes to shove with the war machine, my own brother signs right up.

He didn’t file for CO. He didn’t even try to stay in school, take the student deferment route. Go to Canada? He wouldn’t know where to find it on the map.

Was I mad? Damn right. But also ashamed and humiliated. They gave the kid a crescent wrench and the promise of a few lessons, and walked away with his soul. So what if, in the process, it made his older brother in the slammer look like a fool. Gee whiz, bet he never thought of that.

I stared out at nothing for a long time, my mind seething. Didn’t he know that recruiters routinely lied about what was really going to happen once guys signed up? Hal could still end up in Vietnam; did he think there weren’t any mechanics working on the helicopters that were shooting up the whole damn country?

Finally I turned back to the bed, and picked up the letter again.

The rest of it was anti-climactic; our parents were pretty much okay with his decision, he said. He was scheduled for a physical and some placement tests in a couple weeks, and then by the end of August, he’d be shipped out for basic training. He repeated that he hoped I wasn’t mad about it.

There was a notebook and a pencil in the little amount of stuff allowed me, and a few envelopes. I couldn’t stop Hal from this foolishness, but I didn’t have to be quiet about. I flipped open the notebook and began writing in a kind of fury.

“You stupid fool,” I wrote. “Doesn’t everything you’ve been taught mean anything to you? What kind of a coward have you turned into?” And that was the friendly part.

I scribbled several pages like this, my rage building as the blue lines filled up. Finally I saw I was down to the next-to-last sheet in the notebook, so I closed by urging Art to go see a lawyer I knew, who could help him get out of his enlistment. Why I thought he’d take that advice from me after all the abuse in the rest of the letter I don’t know; but that’s a big brother for you. Carefully ripping the pages from their spiral binding, I folded them into one of the envelopes, leaving it unsealed, as prison censorship rules dictated. As soon as they let us out for exercise, I’d mail it.

It was getting dark now. They brought us supper in our cells, some greasy hamburger- macaroni concoction with instant mashed potatoes and tired looking green beans. It came on flimsy plastic trays too lightweight to be broken up and sharpened into weapons, shoved through a narrow slot in the bars. I ate without interest.

After the trays were collected, the block settled back into a near silence. Soon a guard somewhere below settled into his chair, and turned on a portable radio. It wasn’t on very loud, but the sound drifted up through the gloom. He was a country music fan, not my favorite kind of music, but a welcome relief from the enforced quiet of the lockdown. There’s a melancholy overtone to much country, especially the steel guitar riffs, that fits well inside a jail. And there used to be a lot of prison songs too, before country went slick and uptown.

The last song I remember was by Merle Haggard: “If We Make It Through December,” about a guy who’s unemployed talking to his little daughter about how maybe times will get better after Christmas. After next Chrismas I’d be close to my next chance for parole; and by the Christmas after that, I’d be out regardless. A long time, but not quite forever. Then I’d make my run to the ocean; as I drifted into sleep, I realized that it might be the dead of winter when I got there? Did I care? No.

A tapping on the bars of my cell woke me up. It was almost pitch dark, but as my eyes adjusted, I could see someone outlined by the dim glow of the security light below us.

I sat up instantly, fear sliding with the sweat down the back of my neck. Nighttime visitors to your cell were almost always trouble. That’s when guys were beaten or raped. The guards had to be in on it, for bribes or grudges or something, to let people out of their cells, and unlatch the bars to yours.

I thought fast. I wasn’t on anybody’s hit list, as far as I knew. I kept quiet, stayed out of trouble, and steered clear of the guys with the reputation for prison sex. But you don’t always know about these things. People can be watching, making you a target and biding their time, without you realizing it until the last fatal moment.

“What do you want?” I whispered at the figure, and started to get up.

NEXT: Do You Understand?

Another Midsummer Night’s Dream

PART THREE: Do You Undertand?

But then he was inside my cell, his pale hands barely visible spread out before him, showing me they were empty, no weapons. He was also whispering something back at me, it sounded like, “Freunde, freunde.”

I recognized a German accent. “Who are you?” I asked, still tense. I didn’t recall hearing any German accents among the men here. But people came and went all the time.

“Ich bin Hans,” he answered, still in a low tone, and then corrected himself. “I am Hans Berger. My English is not very well. But I am here to speak with you.”

“Yeah?” I was skeptical. “About what?”

“Deine bruder,” he muttered, “Your brother.”

“What do you know about my brother?” I demanded.

“Ich weisse genug,” he muttered. “I know enough. The letter. Your letter.”

“Those letters?” I hissed. “How do you know about them?”

He shrugged. I could just make out his face now. Blond hair that hung down over one eyebrow. A gray, lined face. Pale eyes. “In German some call would me a wandergeist,” he said. You might call it a being who has no resting place.” He waved a hand dismissively. “But that is nicht important. I have come to ask your help.”

“Help?” I asked. “What can I do for anybody, locked up in here?”

“Ach,” he said. “You can listen. There are not many who can do that. Not for me.” He stepped back. “But if you refuse, then I will go.”

He took another step back, up to the bars.

“Wait,” I said. What he was doing in my cell was still unexplained. But he didn’t seem dangerous, and I hadn’t talked face to face with anyone for four days. “All right,” I said. “I’ll listen to whatever it is you’ve got on your mind.”

“Eine schwermut erzahlung,” he murmured, “a story. My story.”

I leaned back. The cell wall felt damp, but cooler than it had been. “Go ahead,” I said. “I’m listening.” And he began to talk.

“I am born in Berlin, in 1922. My father, Heinrich Berger, works in a bank, and my family is Quakers. There are not many of us, but we believe. I am raised to know war is wrong. When Hitler comes, it is hard for us. Gestapo listen to our meetings. Many Friends keep very quiet; but some of them go to prison. Others leave Germany.

“I now have two little sisters, and my father is asked, does he want to leave, and he says it is his duty to stay. Quakers suffered before, he says, and we may suffer again; it is in God’s hands. I am young, but I understand, and I am proud of him. I know time will come for me to do my duty also.

“When the war starts, the army is drafting the young men. I am a student, in science. But I also study the Bible, and George Fox. In the Bible, Jesus says we must not resist evil, but must speak the truth and take up the cross. In Fox’s Journal, I read the peace testimony of 1660: we do not fight for the kingdom with carnal weapons. I believe it. I believe it all. I am ready to say no to the Nazis and their army. Even if they kill me, I will say no. It is in God’s hands.”

He paused. “Verstehen sie?” he asked. “Do you understand?”

“Yes,” I said. “I think so.”

He nodded. “Gut. In 1941, your country joins the war against Germany. The Nazi army wants more and more young men. They send me a letter. I throw it away. They send me another one. It is full of stern talk about saving the fatherland and obeying the will of the Fuhrer. This time I write back, and tell them I am a Quaker and a follower of Jesus, and I will obey him and not be part of their war, and I am not afraid of them. There is much prahlen, er, boasting, in the letter.

“Then some weeks later, I am coming home from the hochschule, and a black sedan stops me in the street. Two SS officers get out, and tell me to come with them. They take me to an office, and leave me sitting alone in an empty room that has only a chair in it for an hour.

NEXT: Wherever It Leads

Another Midsummer Night’s Dream

PART FOUR: Wherever It Leads

“I know the SS are dangerous men, who do evil things. But I am not afraid. I sit and wait quietly. I pray. I even fall asleep Finally one of the men is shaking me, and shouts that I am to follow him to see Ubercommandant Schmidt.

“We go into a large office. Ubercommandant Schmidt is sitting behind a large dark mahogany desk, with the SS insignia on his uniform lapels. On the desk there is only a telephone, a lamp, and a single folder. The officer who brought me in clicks his heels, gives the Nazi salute, and leaves.

“Schmidt does not look up at me. He puts on a pair of spectacles, opens the folder and looks at a sheet of paper. Herr Berger,’ he says, you wrote this?’

“I can see it is my letter. I answer, ‘Ja, mein Herr.’ Yes, sir.

“‘So you do not believe in war,’ he says.

“‘Nein, mein Herr’ I say. No, sir.

“‘And you are willing to die for your belief,’ he asks calmly, ‘just as a soldier is willing to die in battle?’”

“‘I want to obey God,’ I answer.

“Now Schmidt begins to smile. ‘But.’ he said, ‘God many times commanded his people, the Israelites, to slay their enemies, nicht wahr?’ Isn’t it so?’”

“This question surprises me, but it has come up before, when I studied the Bible. ‘Mein Herr,’ I say, ‘that happened under the old covenant. When Jesus came, he put an end to that. And I want to be a Friend of Jesus, and to follow him.’

“Schmidt nods, as if we were in a classroom and I had given the right answer to a professor’s question. Still he is smiling. The smile is beginning to make me nervous. It feels like he is playing a game with me. He takes another sheet from the folder, and asks another question.

“‘Did you also read in your Bible, Herr Berger, the Letter of Paul to the Romans, which says that the magistrate is ordained of God as a terror to evildoers, and that he does not bear the sword in vain?’

“‘Yes, mein herr,’ I answer. ‘I have read it.’

“‘I thought so.’ He stood up. He was about an inch taller than me. ‘Well, Herr Berger, where the Reichsarmy service law is concerned, I am the magistrate.’”

He handed me the sheet of paper. It is a Reichsarmy enlistment form. There is a line at the bottom where I am to sign. I hand it back to him.

“‘Very well,’ he says. ‘Your defiance is to be dealt with by me. And you know, I presume, that the penalty for such a refusal as yours is death by firing squad.’

“I realized that my knees were trembling slightly. So now perhaps it was my moment to face this penalty. Suddenly I wanted to see my parents and my sisters again, at least to say goodbye. But they also knew what was involved when I wrote the letter.

“‘Ja, Herr ubercommandant,’ I say. Yes, I know.

Now the smile left his face. ‘Are you ready to reconsider your decision?’ He asked it calmly, but there was no mistaking the seriousness in his voice.

“‘Nein, mein Herr,’ I say, and my voice is trembling too now. ‘No. I must follow my conscience, wherever it leads.’ It is very strange; I am trembling, but I am not afraid.

“He sits down again. ‘Very well, Herr Berger. But it is my duty to inform you that we have no intention of shooting you.’ He lifted another sheet from the folder. ‘I have examined your record at the hochschule. It is very superior in all the fields of science you have studied. The Reich cannot afford to lose your abilities.’

“He dropped the sheet, and tapped it with his finger. ‘No, Berger, the fatherland is at war. We need the mind and the strength of every able man for her defense. And as the officer charged with obtaining your service, I have been given wide discretion by the Fuhrer to command it.’

“Now he reached into a drawer of the desk and pulled out a leatherbound notebook. He turned several pages, then spread it on the desktop. He drew a fountain pen from a pocket and began to write on the page.

“‘When you speak of the willingness of the soldier to die in battle,’ he said, ‘didn’t you also consider that this is only half of the soldier’s task?’ He glanced up at me. ‘The other part of a soldier’s duty is not to die, but to kill.’

“I watched the pen moving. ‘No, Herr Berger,’ he repeated, still looking down at the notebook, we have no intention of shooting you.’

“Then he put the pen carefully to one side and stared up at me. ‘Instead,’ he said slowly, we will shoot your family. I shall begin with your sisters.’ He picked up the pen. ‘Their names are, I believe, Helga and Hilda, ja?’

“I did not believe what I was hearing. ‘And then,’ Schmidt said, still writing, ‘next I will shoot your parents. Who shall it be first, Berger — your Mother? You get to choose– tell me.’

Hans got up as he told me this, and turned away, toward the bars. He turned back a moment later, rubbing his eyes with pale knuckles. “That,” he said, “was when I fainted.”

NEXT: Conclusion - Bad Eyes & Exercise

Another Midsummer Night’s Dream

CONCLUSION: Bad Eyes & Exercise

The cell was silent for a long moment. Both of us seemed to be letting Schmidt’s words sink in. Finally, I couldn’t keep quiet. “What,” I asked, “did you do?”

Hans shrugged. “What was there to do? I woke up a few minutes later, back in the white room with the chair. One of the guards was there. When he saw me stirring he handed me the enlistment form and said, ‘Ubercommandant Schmidt requests your answer in one hour,’ and walked out.”

Hans stopped and turned his face away. After a moment I asked,

“What did you do?”

He shrugged, then turned back toward me. “What do you think? I was ready to die for my beliefs, not to kill for them. And especially not to kill those closest to me. I sat for awhile, in a kind of paralysis. When I heard the guard opening the door, I signed the form.”

He took a slow deep breath. “They let me go home long enough to say goodbye. My father did not understand at first. I said only that it was what I had to do, for all of us, and I hoped he could forgive me. His last words to me were to quote Jesus, ‘Go in peace.’

“I never saw them again. The Reichsarmy trained me as a doctor, and I was sent to the eastern front. In the end, I did not kill anyone in battle. But I treated many soldiers who did.”

He sighed and rubbed his hands together, as if he was cold. In the winter of 1944, I was with troops who were withdrawing from Russia. It was a terrible time: ice and mud, disease and destruction all around. One night there Russian bombers attacked. I felt the ground shake, heard the explosions approaching, and then there a great flash of light.”

Now he raised his hands, gesturing around the cell. “Since then,” he said, “ I wake up, and I am in places like this. Dark, sometimes cold, sometimes hot. I find others, like you. I tell them this story. Then, somehow, I can sleep again.”

I didn’t know what to say. “is there something you want from me?” I wondered. “I’ve got a little money.” I felt sheepish suggesting it.

He shook his head. “You are kind,” he said. “But nothing of the little you have can help me. Except,” he paused. “Except for perhaps one thing.”

Suddenly I thought I knew. “If I say to you, ‘Go in peace’?”

Now he smiled, and nodded. “Yes. That is what you can do. Danke, mein Freunde. Thank you, Friend.” He reached out and shook my hand.

As soon as he touched me, I began to feel very tired. How long had I sat there, I wondered vaguely, listening to this harrowing story? It must be almost morning.

I only half-heard him stand and walk away.

Then it was light, and a jangling bell warned that it was time for what they called breakfast. Soon the plastic tray was shoved in, and behind it came a rumor, whispered down the block: “Word is the lockdown will be lifted today. With luck, we’ll get to see the sun again today.” I could feel the stirring of hope; even an hour in the blazing midday light would be welcome after this forced stretch of group solitary confinement.

For once, the rumor mill proved right. The bells went off again an hour before they were supposed to for lunch, and the announcement came over the PA system: “Lunch will be distributed in the cafeteria by cell blocks, followed by exercise time in the inside yard. Mail call will be held at the conclusion of lunch.”

I stuck my arm through the bars and bent it around to slap high fives with my neighbors on each side. After days of silence, we talked some, about this and that. Finally, the bells jangled again, and for the first time in a week, the doors opened.

I got ready to step outside, waiting to be counted before heading down to the mess hall. Then I remembered something. I stepped back in, and picked up the envelope addressed to my brother. It could be dropped in the guards’ box for screening as I went into lunch. They’d mail it; prison was a meat grinder for family relationships, and tirades were tediously common in the mail that went in and out of here.

But then the image of Hans came back to me. His hollow eyes, the weight he seemed to be carrying. Was it a dream, or what?

I pulled out the sheets and tapped them against my other palm. After what I had said to Hans, what did I really want to say to Art?

I looked at the first page, and found myself shaking my head. Slowly but deliberately, I tore the letter into very small pieces. I flushed them down my commode, and put the envelope carefully back in the small stack; no sense in wasting the stamp.

I don’t think the food that day was cooked any better than usual. But it sure tasted better in the mess hall than it had in our cells. The noise level was high, as men began catching up with conversations and rumors that had been held in suspension for nearly a week. The guard who did mail call tried to shout, but then had to turn to the PA system to read the names on the letters.
Harrison was one of them, and I went eagerly up to him after turning in my tray. He handed me a single postcard.
It was from Art, dated only three days ago.

“Hey Hal,” it read, “Guess what? I flunked my physical, man. Bad eyes! The recruiter was really pissed, but so it goes. There’ll be no Air Force for this guy! See you at the shop!” There was a glossy photo of a Honda cycle on the back.

I grinned, and then laughed, as much at myself as at Art. “No sweat, bro,” I thought, and headed for the exercise yard.

Historical Note

Another Midsummer Night’s Dream: The story told by the German visitor to the narrator’s cell comes from the historian Hans Schmitt, author of the book, Quakers and Nazis, an account of the experience and sufferings of Friends in Germany during the Third Reich. I heard Schmitt tell this story in a talk to the Friends Historical Association in Philadelphia.

Copyright (c) by Chuck Fager. All rights reserved.

Copyright © By Chuck Fager

Part One: Trying to Catch the Bus

San Francisco - 2006

Kate was racing the Muni bus toward the stop at the corner. She was wet and out of breath. It was bad enough, she thought as the bus slowed, that the skinheads had ripped up her peace poster. But why did they have to drench her with ice water?

The bus stopped and the doors flapped open. Kate leaped onto it, flashing her bus pass and shivering her way toward the back. A sudden San Francisco fog had rolled over the peace rally just as it was breaking up, quickly turning a sunny afternoon chill and dreary. The skinheads had jumped her when she rounded a corner, away from the others, headed for the bus and home.

Kate was used to quick changes in weather here; the variability was part of San Francisco’s appeal. But she wasn’t accustomed to being out in it soaking wet.

She also hadn’t been afraid of the skinheads, at least not at first. There’d been a lot of that trouble since the election, and the rise of the “Surge” in Iraq. She’d taken nonviolent self-defense workshops at school. The training kicked in automatically, and she didn’t resist when they surrounded her and grabbed the poster. She backed up when they called her a “stupid Commie bitch,” but didn’t see the one crouched behind her and fell over him, sending them into harsh laughter. Kate was still scrambling to her feet when they dumped a bucket of icy water over her, and pushed her down again.

Then she was scared. The shock of the water left her gasping, but energized. Jumping up, she shoved the nearest skinhead aside and ran past him. He snatched at her and caught hold of her backpack. But she slid out of it and raced back around the corner. They started to give chase, but she was fast and had a good lead. By the next corner she saw the bus coming, and knew she could get to it with time to spare.

The bus was only half-filled. Kate sank into an empty double seat near the rear exit, leaned against the window, and watched her breath make small foggy ovals on the glass. Traffic was slow, and the bus lurched along fitfully, rubbing Kate’s skin against her sticky damp shirt.

She wasn’t sure what bus line it was, hoping it was the 28, headed out past Golden Gate Park and toward home. But it didn’t really matter; there would be a transfer stop coming up somewhere, or she could ride downtown and catch the M-Ocean View trolley there. She needed to get changed and over to SF State by seven, to meet Sal and get to their women’s history class. She was behind in the reading and had hoped to catch up today. Not very likely now; the textbook was in her lost backpack.

A flurry of motion outside shifted her gaze through the glass, and then Kate drew back. The skinheads were trotting along the sidewalk, still trying to catch up to the bus. She crouched down, shivering now with fear. The bus had seemed like a refuge, but it could easily become a trap. Why was the traffic so slow?

The bus swung around a corner, and the pursuers disappeared. Kate scrunched down in the seat; still cold. She felt the bus slow for a stop, shut her eyes and held her breath; she couldn’t watch.

The brakes hissed and the doors thumped. After standing for what seemed like an hour, the bus jerked and rumbled slowly on. Kate stretched to glance quickly out the window: nothing. She lowered her head again; don’t take any chances.

There was a rustling sound, and someone sat next to her.

Part Two: Scratchy but Warm

. . . There was a rustling sound, and someone sat next to her. Kate squeezed away, toward the wall of the bus; the metal was cold against her wet shirt.

“My goodness, Friend,” said a voice, “Thee’s soaked. Here, take this shawl. Thee’ll catch thy death of cold.”

Kate’s eyes blinked open. Beside her was a woman in a flowing gray dress, carrying a canvas tote bag, with salt-and-pepper hair tucked into a small white bonnet. She was sliding a woolen shawl off her back, and in another second had deftly wrapped it around Kate’s shoulders. It felt scratchy, but warm.

“I-uh, thank you,” Kate stuttered.

The woman’s dress looked like it came from a museum. By itself, Kate knew, this was nothing to wonder at — in San Francisco you could run across people in any kind of strange getup or antique costume just about anytime, or anywhere. But this woman seemed different; it didn’t feel like she was role-playing or camping it up, despite her odd form of address.

“There,” the woman said, “that’s a bit better, til thee gets home. What on earth happened,” she added, “if thee don’t mind my asking?”

Under the warming shawl, Kate found herself mumbling something about the peace rally and the attack. As the woman listened, shaking her head and tut-tutting sympathetically, she dipped into the tote bag, pulling out long wooden needles and a large cream-colored ball of yarn. Fingers moving expertly, it seemed she knitted half a square before Kate had finished.

“Good for thee, standing up against the war,” she said when Kate finished, nodding approvingly. “And beat them to the bus, too? Quick thinking. And fine running, too, um –?” Her gaze was inquiring.

“I’m Kate,” she said. And you?”

The woman smiled. “Call me Lucy. All my sisters did. And we had our share of close scrapes too.” She lifted a needle to pull some yarn from the ball, and furrowed her brows. “I believe it was `43 when I almost got tarred and feathered. Near Wilmington. And then, of course, that dreadful business with Pennsylvania Hall. Burned it to the ground, they did.”

She shook off a memory. “But then, those were all steps along the path of progress, I suppose.” She paused again, her needles going as she pursued some thought.

Kate’s curiosity was stirring now. “What are you making?” she asked, touching the nearly-finished square. The stitches were neat and tight.

“Oh, this,” Lucy said, waving one hand dismissively. “Just squares. Make a stack, and stitch them into baby blankets for AFSC to send overseas.” She smiled again at Kate, then tied off the square, dropped it into the bag, and started another one. As the needles began moving again, she lapsed back into her reverie. Soon she was shaking her head.

“What?” Kate asked, feeling a little bold.

Lucy glanced up, one eyebrow raised. “I was thinking of those poor boys,” she said.

“Which–?” Kate began, but then she knew. “The skinheads? What about them?” Her voice was rising. “They were pigs!”

Lucy’s head was still shaking. “Yes,” she said, “I can see how thee feels. But think of it: what has been done to them, to fill them with such hate and anger? How can that ever be healed? It never ceases to trouble me, after all these years, how society can twist and pervert perfectly fine human beings, bury the light in them, in them all, under so much muck.”

She sighed. “Where is the radical reform? But,” she added, turning to Kate again with the beginning of a smile, “we must never lose hope.”

Kate began to wonder if Lucy was about to launch into a sermon, and still wasn’t sure she liked her sympathy for the attackers. But then the bus stopped again and she heard the doors open. Loud voices came from the front.

She looked up — and there they were, three of the skinheads.

Part Three: A Very Challenging Climate

. . . She looked up — and there they were, three of the skinheads.

“What–?” thought Kate, and shot a glance out the window. They were passing an orange construction sign, its yellow warning lights flashing, and she realized that the bus had hardly been moving the whole time she had been talking. Now what?

She started to shiver again, and turned to Lucy. “It’s them,” she muttered, and tried to shrink down behind her capacious skirt.

Lucy put down a needle and patted her shoulder. “It will be fine,” she whispered.

Kate didn’t believe it. The bus rocked forward, and the voices in the front started again, this time in a raucous chant: “USA! USA! USA! USA!”

They made their way slowly down the aisle, shouting their three-syllable manifesto at one row of passengers after another. A few joined weakly with their chant; most moved away, alarm on their faces.

Then the chant stopped, interrupted by one skinhead poking another with his elbow, and gesturing toward the back. Toward Kate.

She grasped Lucy’s arm. “They’ve seen me,” she hissed. “Lucy, I’m–”

The older woman signaled silence with a finger to her lips, and then abruptly stood up. As she did, the ball of yarn fell off her lap and bounced unrolling down the aisle.

“Oh, dear,” she said, and began following it, needles aloft and waving, right up to the skinheads.

“Excuse me,” she said to the first one, “Can thee help me, please? My yarn–”

Behind her back, Lucy’s free hand was gesturing at Kate, pointing toward the rear exit.

“Here,” an alert passenger said, coming up with it. “I got your ball, Miss.”

“Oh, thank thee,” Lucy said, and then turned to the lead skinhead, holding out her needles to him. “Would thee mind holding these for a moment?” she said. “This ball’s almost completely unraveled, and I must get it back together.”

The skinhead hesitated, then took the needles. Lucy gave him a big smile, and began turning the ball in her hands, wrapping the loose yarn back around it, talking as she wound.

“These squares I’m making are for refugee children in Afghanistan,” she said to him. “It’s a very challenging climate there, as thee must know; so hot in summer, bitter cold in winter. Has thee been there, friend, with the army perhaps?”

The skinhead opened his mouth to answer, but Lucy rushed on.

“My sewing circle makes these blankets for Iraqi babies, too. It’s the same there, I’m told, extremes of temperature. And so much destruction from that awful war.”

She paused for a moment in her winding, and fished a square from the tote bag. “Does thee think this color is satisfactory?” she asked, handing it to a second skinhead. “My sister Martha tells me my yarn is always too dull, and I should try some scarlet or even black. But plain is all I really know, I guess.”

Kate was watching this one-sided conversation unfold with such fascination that she didn’t feel the bus stop, just saw the rear exit door light blink on. She quickly got up, pushed through it, and then was out on the street.

Instinctively she started to run, up the sidewalk. Then she slowed, and stopped as the bus rolled slowly past her. Through the window she could see Lucy’s white bonnet, bobbing to one side, as she continued talking earnestly and cheerfully to the baffled skinheads.

Kate thought she saw a gray arm rise in a gesture of farewell, but she couldn’t be sure; then the bus turned the corner and was gone.

Part Four: I Thought You Liked This Class

. . . Kate thought she saw a gray arm rise in a gesture of farewell, but she couldn’t be sure; then the bus turned the corner and was gone.

Kate stood for a moment, trying to take in what she’d just been through. But the metallic wheeze of trolley wheels snapped her back to the present. There, just ahead, was the M-Ocean View trolley car, waiting for a tractor trailer truck to make its tortuous way across the next intersection.

Kate wanted to cry with relief. This car went straight to San Francisco State, so she could make it to class, even if she might be still be a little damp. She climbed on gratefully, and looked for a seat.

And there, even better luck, was Sal, waving to her. “Kate, babe, hey!” she called through the milling riders.

Kate pushed through them and plopped down next to Sal, who looked closely at her, brows furrowed. “Kate, babe, like what hit you? Your hair is a wreck.”

Kate found herself grinning. “I ran into a skinhead shower,” she said, ready to tell her the whole story. But then she had another thought. “Tell you in a minute. Do you have the book for women’s history?” she asked. “I need to so some cramming for class.”

“Sure,” Sal said, and reached for her backpack.

Kate took the book. “What chapter was it?”

“What chapter?” Sal teased. “Chapter Ten. Hey, girl, I thought you liked this class.”

Kate grinned sheepishly. “I do!” she protested. “But I’ve been — well, I got distracted.”

She paged through the book until she found it. “Chapter Ten: The Road to Seneca Falls.” Facing the first page of the section was a photo of a woman, in a grey dress, and a white cap.

“Omigod, it’s Lucy!” Kate almost shouted.

“What?” said Sal.

“I just –” Kate started to explain, then stopped. No, Sal would just tell her she was nuts.

Kate gazed at the photo again, and the caption underneath it:

“Lucretia Mott, 1793-1880. This outspoken Quaker woman somehow managed to combine raising a family, helping her husband in business, and acting as a nationally-known advocate for woman’s rights, antislavery, peace, and other reforms. More than an eloquent speaker, she was also fearless, and faced down mobs that burned down Pennsylvania hall in 1830, and threatened her with being tarred and feathered.”

Kate closed the book and looked off into space. How could this –? she wondered. Then she shrugged. Well, San Francisco was that kind of place: anything could happen here.

Sal tapped her arm, breaking the trance. “Hey, babe,” she said, “this is like a very cool shawl you’re wearing. What thrift store did you find it at?”

Startled, Kate glanced down at the wool, and fingered it. “Oh,” she stumbled, “an-an old old friend from Pennsylvania gave it to me. I’ll tell you about her sometime.”

She stroked the shawl again; scratchy, but so warm. “I know it’s kind of plain, Sal, but it works for me. And every time I put it on, you know, I get this irresistible feeling that it’s time I learned how to knit.”

Story copyright (c) by Chuck Fager

A story by Chuck Fager
Copyright © by Chuck Fager

Note: While this story is fiction, it is built around actual history. Nothing described below is beyond the range of real events of the time among Quakers.

I: One Committee Too Many

Nantucket Island, Massachusetts, 1828

When the Committee from the Women’s Meeting emerged from the parlor, they stopped to collect their long shawls and say goodbye to Esther Swain’s mother before leaving the house. Esther followed the two older women out, then went toward the stairs to go up to her room.

As she turned she saw a slice of grey skirt sticking out of the closet under the stairway. No dresses were hung there, and at once Esther knew it was her sister Piety, trying to hide. Piety, the little brat, had been listening to her interview with the committee!

Bristling, she stepped off the stairs, whirled around the bannister and pulled the closet door open. “All right, Magpie,” she muttered using the nickname her sister disliked most, “what does thee think thee’s doing?”

With a muffled squeal, thirteen-year old Piety slipped past her, followed by a brown-clad bundle of arms and legs topped with a curly red fringe, brother Jonah, eleven.

The pair raced behind the parlor, through the corner of the kitchen to the back stairs, then thumped frantically up its winding flight; but Esther, lifting her long skirts with one hand, was close behind, and followed them to Piety’s room. Jonah tried to slam the door behind him, but Esther forced it open, pushed through the doorway, then shut and stood blocking it as she confronted her puffing, red-faced siblings.

“What did you two think you were doing,” she demanded, “listening at the door down there to what was none of your business?” The fury in her voice was more than the offense warranted, but these two smaller Quakers were convenient targets for her first reaction to the Committee’s message, which was just beginning to sink in.

Jonah, who had yet to assume the sprouting bravado of adolescence, shrank away from his eldest sister, who at twenty-one and brimming with anger looked very imposing and grownup to him. But Piety was too full of what she had heard downstairs to be intimidated.

“Oh, Esther, we couldn’t help it, we had to know what was happening,” she admitted. Then, ignoring her sister’s ire completely, she stepped up and caught Esther’s hands in her smaller ones. “Esther,” she said, looking up at her gravely, “they can’t make thee do it, can they? They can’t make thee refuse to marry Will Macy just because of the trouble in Meeting. They wouldn’t dare. I won’t let them.” Her tone was as firm as her declaration was irrelevant.

This unexpected expression of support and affection caught Esther completely off guard, and instantly dissipated her wrath. She moved away from the door and sat down on Piety’s bed, staring at the floor.

“I wish thee could stop them, Piety,” she replied weakly, “but thee can’t. They are right, I suppose. To marry an Orthodox would be the same as marrying a Presbyterian, or even a Catholic.” She was now speaking as she had in the parlor with the Committee, flatly and submissively, overwhelmed by the authority they represented.

Jonah, emboldened by the sudden change of atmosphere, spoke up, imitating their father’s most solemn tone, the one he used for discussing weighty matters in Meeting for Business. “Yes, Esther, I’m sure thee will find true peace in resignation to the Divine leading,” he affirmed soberly. “Besides, as they told thee downstairs, thee must think of the reputation of Truth and the Meeting.”

Now Piety flared. “Oh hush, Jonah,” she snapped, “thee doesn’t know what thee’s talking about.” She mimicked his tone: “‘The reputation of Truth’, ‘Resignation to the Divine leading.’ Thee doesn’t even know what the word resignation means.”

Jonah, who was vain of his wide reading and vocabulary at such a young age, and especially his familiarity with Quaker history, retorted quickly. “I do so know what resignation means. It’s when you quit something, like when many Friends in the Pennsylvania Assembly in 1756 resigned rather than vote to support a war against the Indians.”

Piety rolled her eyes elaborately at his misconstruction. “Oh, please, that isn’t the meaning here at all, Jonah. And spare us thy sermons. Thee isn’t old enough to be a recorded minister yet.”

Esther looked up at them, her voice still soft. “It is all right, Jonah,” she said. “Thee was partly right about the word; but it also means, in this religious sense, to submit or yield to a higher power.”

Now she sounded as well like the friendly but precise schoolmistress she was during the day. “And thee is also correct that we must weigh our impulses according to their effect on the Meeting and the Society of Friends in the world. Our own creaturely desires will often tempt us to do things that would injure ourselves or others.”

Piety, scowling under her plain white bonnet, took her sister’s hand again and stared into her face. “Thee said it, but I don’t think thee believes it,” she whispered. “What’s that got to do with getting married, anyway? It isn’t as if thee was trafficking in slaves or joining an army at war.”

“Joining an army?” scoffed her brother. “A girl?”

“Thee hush!” Piety exclaimed, cutting off his snicker. “Thee understands what I mean, doesn’t thee, Esther? We have known the Macys all our lives. They have been Friends on Nantucket for a hundred years. And now just because of tiresome notional arguments in Meeting, some old women want thee to treat Will, thy own true love, like he was some heathen stranger.”

“‘Her own true love,’” Jonah now mimicked. “Talk about tiresome notions, that’s one for sure.”

Piety simply glared a response to his boyish cynicism. But Esther smiled wanly at it, then spoke to her sister. “I am afraid that however airy and notional the arguments have been, their effects have been very real. Most of the elders are Orthodox, and it is said they plan to disown everyone like us in Meeting who will not join them. They even want to keep us out of the Meetinghouse and force us to worship elsewhere.”

She stopped and sighed. “And Will’s father Thomas Macy is one of the hottest heads among them. To him and the other elders it is we, the ones they call Hicksites, who are the heathen.”

Now it was Jonah’s turn to be shocked. “Put us out?” he questioned. Unlike many other boys his age, he liked Meeting, and the big old Meetinghouse had been part of his life for as long as he could remember. “Could they really do that, Esther?”

“I don’t know, Jonah,” she replied. “But I believe they are going to try. It is said they are even ready to go to law to get rid of us if they have to.”

Jonah’s eyes widened, as if his soft-spoken sister had suddenly blasphemed. “Go to law? They wouldn’t, would they?” He had not suspected that this silly dispute over someone’s “true love” could possibly end up with Quakers, especially elders, dragging other Quakers into a worldly court. That would be a public violation of one of their oldest, most honored customs. That prospect suddenly made this discussion a much more serious matter than it had been to him.

“I don’t know if it will actually come to that,” Esther replied, “but the Orthodox in Philadelphia have already gone to the law. They even had some of the other Friends arrested in a quarrel over use of a burial ground.”

She shook her head. “It is an ugly business. That’s why the Committee came. A separation here is now certain. Our elders are already setting up another Meeting, and the women came tonight to say they are simply not comfortable with a marriage between members of the two groups. They say the Orthodox have shown themselves to be no longer really Friends at all, so it would be the same as marrying out.”

She paused again. “There is a session tomorrow night of the two sets of elders to see if they can agree to divide the Meeting property without going to court. Thomas Macy is sure to be there, and Will too most likely. You probably heard that they want me to go and tell him privately that under the circumstances our plan to marry is no longer wise. They are sure his father has said as much to him.”

“What about mother and father?” Piety asked. “do they agree with the Committee?”

“I’ll bet they do,” Jonah put in. “I have often heard father tell other grownups how much he dislikes the Orthodox notions and their high-handed ways. Just last month he told Reuben Starbuck that he figured there was trouble coming because of them and it had been coming for a long time. I didn’t understand what he meant then.”

He smacked his lips in anticipation of an exciting fight. “Don’t worry, father won’t let them turn us out of the Meetinghouse.”

“I hope not,” Esther said, “but Jonah is right about our parents, Piety. They met with the Committee last First Day informally, and are in unity with them. They have been doubtful about Will anyway for awhile, and not only because of the separation.”

“Then what about thee?” Piety wondered. “After all this, does thee still think the two of you could be happy together?” Now the younger girl was beginning to see how complicated the situation was.

“I-I don’t know anymore,” Esther confessed. She frowned, put her hand to her forehead, and looked at the floor again.

“We have talked about this more than once,” she said from behind her hand. “While Will agrees with his father on matters of belief, he has often told me that love among Christians is more important than uniformity of doctrine among Friends, as Jesus taught. And he assures me that he loves me, whatever my own notions might be. He says he feels it is God’s will that we should marry.”

“Does thee think so too?” Jonah inquired curiously. He was less interested in the marrying than the part about God’s will. He had not, in truth, ever felt much of anything that he could identify specifically with that mysterious supernatural motion which was supposed to provide a Friend with clarity and energy. To him it was like the hidden mechanism of a grandfather clock, and held much the same technical fascination.

Before Esther could answer, there was a knock at the door. “Esther?” came her mother’s voice. “Is thee in here?” She opened the door. “Come out now, Esther, it is time thy brother and sister went to bed.” Both Piety and Jonah started to protest, but she waved their complaints aside and ushered Jonah and Esther out into the narrow, candlelit hallway. “Go on now, Jonah,” she coaxed, shoving him gently toward his room.

“But mother,” the boy objected, “it’s not that late.”

“Go on,” she repeated firmly.

“Oh, all right,” he murmured reluctantly. “Goodnight.”

When the door to Jonah’s room had closed behind him, her mother turned to Esther and said, “I know this must be hard for thee, dear. Would thee like to share a cup of chamomile tea with me and talk about it before thee retires?”

Esther looked at her: the greying hair neatly tucked under the creases of her bonnet, the lines of worry and love that rayed out from the corners of her eyes and lower down framed her mouth from nostrils to chin.

It was probably the most familiar face in her world; yet when her mother spoke, Esther suddenly realized that the evening’s events had left her feeling distanced from her mother, guarded, as if the offer of tea and counsel came from a stranger, or someone she once trusted but could no longer. The awareness made her afraid, but it was inescapable.

“Thank thee, mother,” she heard herself saying carefully, “but I think I would rather think about this alone for awhile and then go to bed.” She turned toward her room to avoid the disappointment that began to cross her mother’s features. “Goodnight,” she said quickly.

“Goodnight, Esther,” her mother said.

In her room, Esther sat down at her desk, opened a wooden drawer and pulled out a large ruled ledger marked Journal. Jonah’s last question still rang in her mind. Opening the book, she read quickly over a few entries, then marked the date: “Tenth Month, 7th, 1828.” with a pen and began to write:

“Tonight I was asked to break off with Will because of the separation in Meeting, which is now underway. I told the Committee I would tomorrow evening.” Here she stopped, the pen still poised in her hand, unable to go on. Again she looked back at several previous entries, then pulled down from the shelf above her desk a copy of the New Testament. It had been given her by the same Meeting which was now splitting apart over, among other things, the meaning of that little book. But after leafing through it restlessly, she still found nothing that spoke to her.

Finally an impulse came. Putting back the New Testament, she picked up the pen and resumed writing, this time with more energy:

“O God and Father of us all,” she wrote, “can it really be that the following of Thy leadings by Friends has brought us, and me, into this confusion? If so, then what will lead us out of it? Amid the contentions and even hatred, how am I supposed to find the right path for me? Yet I am told I must now leave the path I had chosen for my life, and take another one, and be on that strange new path before I sleep again tomorrow. I have agreed to do it. but is that really Thy will for me?”

She hesitated here a moment more, and then continued: “I have been taught all my life to seek out Thy will for me, and then to follow it as early Friends did, no matter what the cost or hardship. I want to know that will tonight. My parents and the elders think they know it, but I have no real clearness in my heart about it. Am I simply to accept their word, as I always have? I am not a child any more. Will Thee not guide me now Thyself? Let me know thy will and give me the strength–”

She weighed the next phrase, then decided to put it down:

“–And the resignation to do what thee bids me, disregarding any obstacle, including my own will. I ask this in the name of Thy Son, our Saviour Jesus Christ.”

She underlined the last “Thee,” then laid the pen down and closed the book. For a moment she felt an impulse to cry, but she quelled it. Now was not a time to give way to emotion, she told herself; she would need all her composure for the day to come. There was school to face, and her parents at dinner before the meeting, and Will after that. And then?

She rose, and turned down the counterpane on her bed. Once tomorrow was finished, she concluded, then there would be time enough to grieve, if she must.

Next: The Dangers of The Unseemly Practice of Mirth

II: The Dangers of The Unseemly Practice of Mirth

Dinner the following evening was a somber and largely silent affair. Esther’s parents seemed ill at ease and said little, never mentioning the evening’s plans. Jonah wolfed down his food as usual, but punctuated his gulps with significant glances at Esther. Piety had developed an unspecified stomach distress and stayed upstairs.

Afterward, her father offered to drive her to Meeting in the wagon, but Esther declined, saying she preferred to walk. She threw her long knitted shawl over her cap and went out quickly, before her parents had a chance to say anything further.

It was autumn on Nantucket. Out on the island’s moors the heather and scrub oak had carpeted the low hills with deep red, magenta and brown. In town, the street Esther walked up was flecked with the fallen yellow and orange leaves of the young maple trees that line it. The evening was cool and still, and the dusk gave a purple tint to the grey cedar shingles on the plain houses.

Two blocks from home a lane cut across to the next street, on which the Meetinghouse stood several blocks further down. The lane was quiet and shaded by thick bundles of shrubbery that climbed over the back fences of the houses along it. Esther liked this lane, and she often walked it when going to town or to her school, which was a few blocks beyond the Meetinghouse. She and Will had taken it many times too on their way home.

She took it now, thankful for its secluded course. It fit her frame of mind; she was still deep in thought, waiting for clarity about the task before her.

At its far end, the lane rambled past the new Unitarian church. As she approached the corner, Esther heard singing, and the clean white clapboard building was made brilliant by the many glowing candles reflected off the brass chandeliers and shining through the big clear windows. The Unitarians were just beginning their midweek Meeting; by the doorway she saw the minister, her own cousin Seth Coffin, greeting people as they entered.

Something about the scene made her stop. She stepped to the side of the lane, near a large clump of ivy overhanging a fence, from which she could observe the church unseen. What drew her was not the music, though she had always, somewhat guiltily, enjoyed hearing the hymns that so often filled the air around Nantucket town’s other churches. Rather it was the people who were walking up the street and turning into the gate, pausing at the door to shake hands with Seth Coffin and let the men take off their hats.

Esther had suddenly put together two incongruous pieces of awareness about the figures in this scene: first, they were heathens; both parties in her Meeting, Thomas Macy and her father Micah Swain alike, agreed on that. But second, she, Esther Swain, was personally acquainted with many of them, and was related to most. This combination was what made them suddenly fascinating to
her.

As she watched, another feature of the group struck her: many of these people had been raised as Friends. Some still wore a modified but recognizable version of the plain dress. It must be hard, Esther mused, to change suddenly from three or four generations of Quaker grey, brown and white to the gaudy and sinful colors of the world.

Hard, yes, but perhaps exciting as well. Seth Coffin’s congregation was growing steadily, that much was evident. Maybe the singing made the transition easier.

The minister went inside, closing the door behind him. The singing swelled to a final chorus, then died away. Esther waited another moment in the ivy until she heard Coffin’s deep voice begin to speak to the group; then she stepped out and turned past the church toward the Meetinghouse.

At that point a man emerged from the shadows across the street and came toward her. “Esther,” he called. It was Will.

Without thinking, she raised one fist in a gesture of mock anger. “Will Macy, was thee spying on me?” she demanded.

The tall, slender man, his face shadowed by a wide-brimmed hat, grinned broadly. “I most certainly was,” he affirmed. “I had a leading thee would come this way, and waited for thee.”

“And as usual, thee was rightly led,” Esther said.

He fell in step beside her, still smiling. “As usual,” he agreed with feigned modesty. “How is thee, Friend Esther?”

This would not do at all, Esther told herself, even as she smiled back. All he had to do was say her name, and at once she was giggling and wanting to play, forgetting why she was on that darkening street. But then, it was Will’s ability to be playful with her, without neglecting the serious parts of life, that had as much as anything drawn them together in the first place. “After all,” he had said when they first talked of marriage, “what good is a husband who thinks that all of life should be like Meeting for Worship?”

“Or a wife,” she had added, and they both had laughed.

Indeed, from the looks her mother sometimes gave her, it seemed they spent altogether too much of their time together laughing. If there was nothing in the Discipline specifically warning against the practice of mirth, still there seemed to be an unspoken limit to how much it might properly be engaged in, a limit they seemed regularly to transgress. But, she realized, I haven’t laughed since I last saw Will.

Esther put out her hand to take his arm; but then she hesitated and drew it back, instead catching the bottom of her shawl and twisting it between her fingers.

Will understood the nervous gesture, and with only a slight change in tone spoke her thoughts. “A committee visited thee, did they?”

She looked at him, startled. “How did thee know?”

He grinned again. “Ah, our Orthodox spies are everywhere,” he bantered. Then, more soberly, he said, “It’s a small island, Esther. Besides, father has spoken to me, too. And that is Committee enough for us Orthodox.”

Esther’s stomach suddenly felt hollow. The lightness and pleasure of their meeting vanished, blown away by Will’s last words like a scud of cloud in a gale. She walked in silence for a moment, her thoughts tumbling over themselves and blocking her words inside her. Finally she forced some out, in barely more than a whisper: “What is thee led to do, Will?”

They had arrived at the Meetinghouse gate. Will swung it open for her, then followed her through. “I have prayed on the matter,” he said, “and my leading has not changed, Esther.” He opened the big oak door, and she moved past him.

Inside, the unadorned Meeting room seemed more severe than usual in the yellow light of the spermaceti candles. Esther was unsure at first where she should sit; the two groups of elders had each taken one side of the aisle, with the Orthodox, which Will joined on the women’s side.

Esther felt strange sitting down in the section which had, all her life, been a male preserve. But that was where the Hicksites were clustered. It was evidence of how deeply the group was split that they were now divided by faction rather than by gender.

The meeting was already underway, and the tension was tangible. She slid onto a bench behind her father and Reuben Starbuck. Reuben was just rising to speak.

Next: Not Within The Walls of This Meetinghouse

III: Not Within The Walls of This Meetinghouse

“I don’t think we need to waste any more time on formalities,” Reuben Starbuck declared in a deep gravelly bass. “Our canvass of the members shows that at least two-thirds are among those that have been called ‘Hicksites,’ although that name is not one we choose. The fairest settlement, in our view, would be to sell the Meetinghouse and the surrounding property, except the burial ground, and divide the proceeds according to the numbers in each party. The burial ground could be transferred to a separate corporation, which interested people would join and maintain through their own contributions. What say you to that?”

Thomas Macy stood to answer. The proposal did not seem new to him, and his reply also seemed prepared. “Thee is right, Reuben Starbuck,” he said coolly, “we should not waste time. So I will say plainly that among the world’s people such proposals might make some sense. But among Friends, who are charged with preaching and preserving the gospel of Jesus Christ in a world of darkness, they carry little weight. The Meeting’s property is in the charge of the elders. And it is our duty to see that it is kept for use in Christian worship and service. We have no intention of selling it to anyone for any other purpose.” Beside him the wide hats of the other elders were now nodding; and under their brims, their faces were set and stern.

Esther’s father got to his feet, anger showing in his cheeks and in the way his hands gripped the bench in front of him. “Do the beliefs and feelings of more than half the members of this Meeting carry no weight, either?” he demanded. “Who appointed thee pope over us, Thomas Macy?”

Obed Gifford, an aged elder, answered him curtly. “There are no popes here, Micah Swain. Thomas Macy speaks for the body of elders, according to the practice that has long been used among us. This Meetinghouse will not be sold. Nor will it be made over into a platform for the unsound and unbiblical doctrines of freethinkers like Elias Hicks and others so misguided as to be taken in by him.”

A Hicksite woman, Mary White, was now standing. “By that last remark, I assume thee is referring to us?” she fumed.

“‘Thou hast said it,’” Gifford answered sourly, quoting the Scriptural text with satisfaction.

“If you are not willing to sell the Meetinghouse,” asked Reuben Starbuck, “then what do you propose to do with it? Share it with us, as a few divided Meetings are doing?”

Obed Gifford smirked. “We will be more than happy to welcome into the Meetings of Friends convinced and faithful Christians. We will also unite with any Hicksites who admit the error of his obnoxious notions and are ready to accept the blood of Christ. But we will have neither unity nor fellowship with any others.”

Reuben Starbuck had flushed red as Gifford spoke, and his voice in retort was even deeper.

“The Society of Friends never had a creed, or any ruler besides the Light of Christ within its members,” he said loudly. “George Fox could see that Light in everyone, Catholics, Jews and Mohammedans, as well as other sorts of Christians. I daresay he could even see it in us so-called Hicksites, Obed Gifford, which is more than thee is able to do. And anyway, who set thee up to decide what and who is worthy of sharing fellowship with thee in this Meetinghouse?”

He pointed at the shuttered window. “I have been a member here since birth, and my parents and grandparents before me. They are all buried in our cemetery, without even a stone to mark their graves. I have contributed to the Meeting’s stock as I have been able, and borne its Testimonies as faithfully as I could.”

He thumped the top of the bench with a big, gnarled hand. “Am I now simply to give up my Christian liberty to a group which uses the cross of my Saviour as a cover for nothing more than their own pride and love of power?” He raised a shaking finger at Gifford. “I say no, I will not!”

Micah Swain was now up again, and Esther could see his lips pulled thin and tight. The fury in his expression was greater than she had ever seen, and it frightened her. “I have sat here silently long enough,” he shouted, “in meeting after meeting for many years now, listening to such as thee condemning innocent faithful Friends as infidels and freethinkers.”

He shook a fist. “It is not Elias Hicks who is changing the ancient doctrines of this Society. It is thee, Obed Gifford, and the rest of you who have yielded to the spirit of domination and division. If you have your way, there will no longer be a Friends Meeting here, but a church with creed and bishops and an inquisition to enforce it. Fox and Penn would not even be welcome, because they preached and suffered against just such powers.”

Gifford was shaking a fist now. “George Fox and William Penn and all the First Publishers of Truth affirmed the blood of Christ as the purchase of salvation,” he cried. “It is you Hicksites, with your rationalistic and freethinking notions who would deny Christ and the Scriptures any value for Friends.”

In his agitation his raised arm knocked the broadbrim hat from his hear. There was sweat gleaming on his temples. “ If these corruptions are not stopped now,” he said, “there will be nothing left of our religious profession but an empty shell, open to all the atheist and heathen doctrines that are now undermining our Christian civilization.”

He stooped to retrieve his hat. “And stop them we are determined to do,” he said more quietly, “at least within the walls of this Meetinghouse.”

Next: Where Such Damnable Trash Belongs