The American People: Volume 1: Search for My Heart

by Larry Kramer

  Jews are in America very early, as they are in many places early. They just appear. You did not need a passport or papers in those days so it was not a big deal to sneak in, although that is what most did. Getting anywhere too early is not always a good thing. You have to wait around forever until someone else shows up. You get lonely.

  The first Jew in America has been identified in one place as Joachim Gaunse, who came from Prague to serve as a metallurgist in Virginia in 1585. A year later he sailed for England to shake up Britain’s copper industry, only to be put in prison for blasphemy for being a Jew. Another source says the first Jew was in 1654, one Jacob Barsimson, who came to New Amsterdam as the first of twenty-four Jews fleeing an Inquisition in Brazil. New Amsterdam’s governor, Peter Stuyvesant, calls the Jews a deceitful race who should not be allowed to infect this new country. What does he know about infection, this Peter? Peter Stuyvesant sends Jews back to his country of Holland with instructions that they be drowned in the canals. He hates not only Jews but homosexuals and drunks, the French, and of course the English, but he is ordered to allow Jews entry to America. So for ten minutes it is a good time for Jews to come here and stay here and even own property here and to support worthy causes, like helping to finance the American Revolution, which is coming. Think of that. Jews helped America to be free. They put down their good money to bet on America. With little to show for it, unless you count the opportunity to remain here without rights but with the freedom to make money, which of course they do and which is further held against them.

  But no minority is safe for very long when the land in the colonies passes so quickly, back-and-forth, helter-skelter, hop-skip-and-a-jump between France and England and Spain and Holland and Portugal, depending on who is on one throne and when. For every South Carolina that welcomes Jews there is a Maryland that kills us. Why is it that also in histories of early America there are no references to Jews, much less to the great number of cruelties committed against us? I could never find reference to the 1698 ambush and murder by Catholics of fifty-seven Jewish boys who had their penises chopped off in their Maryland school, a Jewish academy to which children from the earliest settlements were sent to study with rabbis. The rabbis were murdered too; their long religious locks, their payos, were shaved off and they were strangled with them. The archbishop’s reason: “lest they all seed further of their ilk.” I never forget this citation. What, please, is ilk? I remember the book it was in as well. The Catholic Book of Dead Colonials.

  I am still learning. Even by the North Pole I must not stop learning. We must all never stop learning. For Jews learning is the ganze magillah, everything, the whole story. The head guard, who is as old as I am, patted my tuchas today and said to me: “Even with this but you manage to be unattractive.” Tell me please what does this mean, this “but”?

  HERMIA: AND FURTHERMORE

  And, Frederick, is it not interesting that my most knowledgeable cousin has not seen fit to embrace the concept of evil in her delineation of the many excruciating barbarities perpetuated on and by the early American Indians? Surely this is an oversight no true expert, such as myself, would allow? But then I live in the real world, not shut off from everything, even her family. And I’ll wager the good Dr. Jerusalem, when he is able to chime in, will also overlook this concept of evil as he rails on about the destruction of his own people.

  We know that the Aztecs penetrated north, from Mexico to the Pacific to the northern Rockies, and eastward toward Arkansas and Kansas. Aztecs were strange ones, understandable perhaps because they are an intermixture of the Spanish and the Pueblos, the Hultapecs and the Chick-chaws and the Pfunamis (who had more men than women), the Dree-o-Dragees (they had more women than men), the Valdrawnees (you can’t expect to recognize them all), the Mohawks, the Oneidas, the Cayugas, the Canarsies, the Rockaways, the Lenape, the Bantams, the Sequoias, the Seneck, and the Cherokees (who would form what amounted to a powerful kingdom surrounding Texas and who would somehow come to think of themselves as the most civilized of all tribes), to name but a very few. They were each different and strange in their own way, and they were not often friends with each other, even when, especially when, it would have behooved them to be so. Over the centuries they have disappeared.

  The great historians of the Spanish in America and their conquest of the Mexicans—Prescott, Nervi, De Antrobus, Ventle and Vye—write almost as an afterthought of those sacrificial Indian bonfires. from church to church, from cathedral to cathedral, these great sacrificial bonfires spread across vast stretches of the North American continent ending only around 1450. By the time Europeans begin (again?) to come to America around 1500, the Indians are divided into more than a thousand independent tribes or groupings or societies, belonging to more than twenty unrelated language families. It is not love at first sight for Europeans and Indians, each of which insists on ownership of where they settle. And the Indians either kill or are killed. Some things never change.

  By 1600 there are more than one million Indians from coast to coast, and representatives of each major European culture and language are settled in what will become the United States, from the Spanish in Florida and Texas and California, to the English from Virginia to New England, to the French sprinkled almost everywhere else. By 1640, in Manhattan alone, there are some twenty different nationalities speaking some eighteen languages, and 20,000 people already call the Massachusetts Bay Colony home.

  Your country is fast becoming a dumping ground for other countries’ malcontents, stymied adventurers in a rut, innocent hopefuls yearning for fresher air, indeed all the glue necessary … for what? For which new plague indeed!

  Everyone is murdering each other. People do tend to play follow the leader. Hearts continue to be scooped out with knives. People all possess certain core beliefs that vary only in intensity and monstrosity. Yes, some of them even drank each other’s blood and ate each other’s hearts out, and somewhere or other still do.

  And everyone worships a god. Why is all of this never considered evil, early American evil?

  EVIL

  Attention must finally be paid! Hermia says so!

  History is about evil. If it isn’t, the historian has lied to you. Almost all of them have.

  The power of good and the power of evil are both believed in these days, with an interest in one considered as worthy as an interest in the other. But while, yes, you can see masses of good around, you cannot deny that good never does as much good as everyone wishes us to believe, whereas evil is as destructive a force as exists. Good has nowhere near that kind of power.

  Evil is difficult to discuss. Too many people approach it as something occult. A similar overabundance of people believe it exists somehow tied in with God, or with good, as if evil is the other side of the coin.

  Evil is part of nothing nor related to anything except evil. It exists unto itself, totally and utterly, and horridly.

  Frederick, you must say this is a book about evil.

  And ask: What is to be our definition of evil?

  And …

  DAME LADY HERMIA’S QUESTION ON THE TABLE

  … if a person is involved in a historical evil, is that person an evil person?

  FRED JUMPS ON BOARD

  Yes, yes!

  But what means “involved”?

  FRED ON THE VERY HEART OF MANKIND

  The following is fascinating stuff.

  A penis is called a “penstrum.” A person who gives his penstrum to another person who also has a penstrum that he gives back to the first, both of these are called “huschees,” from the early Dutch word husch, for “violet” or “purple,” from the observation that a penstrum quite often engorges itself with blood, which phenomenon is reported in early Dutch-American medical literature, or what precious little of it has been located.

  A penis is also called a “yard,” as in “he showed me his yard,” certainly a generous description. Indeed, in the Oxford Unabridged Dictionary, there it is: 1693 Blancard’s P
hys. Dict. (ed. 2), “Penis, the Yard, made up of two nervous Bodies, the Channel, Nut, Skin, and Fore-skin, &c.”

  A penis is also a “roger.” He “rogered” her and he “fuddled” her are terms in general use.

  “Huschee” will transmute into “hushmarked,” not a particularly graceful word, but then participants in same-sex activities have never had an easy ride in the nomenclature department. A hushmarket—this word is etymologically related to hashush, an Arabic root not unrelated to “hashish,” and also linked to a bastardization of the Belgian word for “the Movement”—is what today would be called a gay area for meeting other men, and it can more neatly be traced to some Dutch words that mean “be quiet in the outdoor market,” the inference being, “Be quiet, you’re making too much noise.” The term itself went out of fashion in the early twentieth century.

  A man who sells his penstrum to another is called a “hookur,” from the observation that a penstrum hooks into the “vaulta,” or vagina, and/or the “vaultum,” or rectum. A woman who gets hooked thusly is also called a “hookur.”

  Women do not call their private parts anything, at least not out loud or so men can hear them. “Women had nothing. They were not only subservient to men but they were untimely ripp’d of any history.” Indeed, wives were forced to be fucked when their husbands wanted it, and it was legal for husbands to beat them up if they did not comply. It was also legal for husbands to dispose of their wives when they were not “rendering pleasure sufficient.” “Dispose” could and did mean any which way, and was often horrible to behold.

  Men, if they had a coupling that was pleasing, had pet names for their women’s privates, but since these were private and legion and they didn’t usually share them with their friends, and nobody wrote stuff like this down, none of them rose to prominence in a vernacular that was constantly changing and growing.

  The concept of private words for private things, or “dirty” words for “shameful” things, is, as Hermia tells me, as old as Adam and Eve. The interesting fact to note is how few words stand the test of time. Last year’s mouthwasher is next season’s “duh.” That is why these are not called “first” words, but “early” words. Nothing of Dr. Sister Grace’s Seneck sexual vocabulary made its way down into American argot, early or otherwise. (Which illustrates another point: Indians did not meld into our culture.)

  Of course, since “dirty” or “private” words form a mammoth wholesale warehouse of the English language (talk is cheap and dirty talk is cheaper), we’ll not be free of these front-and-center usages. Nor should we be. Our lives and our imaginations would be the poorer for a staid, stolid, unchallenging, squeaky-clean vocabulary. It is just too bad that most dirty words from yesterday’s bawdiness have been lost to history, even though Grace tries her best to keep a good face on it.

  When does American man know he has a penstrum or a roger or a yard? This is not an idle question. When does penstrum become penis? That first OUD citation for its appearance is 1693. On “official” history’s playing fields it shows up late, as does American man. The world is settled before either is standing tall. Is American man stunted? Since so much is new to him, is he sexually challenged? Men and women are doing what they are doing and there aren’t any classes or manuals. What effect does tardiness have on he who would become cock of the walk? What does it mean to be an American man? Does his definition, if such he has of himself (of course he has a definition of himself!), connect with his penis? Does just being over here make he who comes here from elsewhere feel in any way different in relationship to his penis? Or to the penis he left behind? How did he feel about his penis before he came here? Presumably he’s done nothing but think about it, wherever he is, since he was born, wherever that was. A penis is not something a man picks up and puts down and puts away idly without consideration. A penis is an awfully hard thing to ignore. Or to put down. In any sense of that expression. Did they think about penises differently in different parts of the world, in different parts of America, in different centuries, in different, you should pardon the unintended metaphor, tongues? Did thoughts, rules, regulations, superstitions imported from foreign soil rub off, or drop away? Which ones? And which ones were kept? What complicated and unstudied questions all.

  I hope you see how little difference appears to exist among these questions. Little difference is the kind of stuff scholars usually love, enough to spend a lifetime arguing with rivals, yet so little academic work has been done here. Nobody studies penises with any thoroughness, even medically. (Especially medically, as we shall see.) Who is the scholar of penises? No one steps forward. Such a large field, such room for having it all to yourself, and not a little notoriety—not always a bad thing if one knows how to handle it—and it’s going begging. True, a Professor of the Male Member or a Professor of Penis Theory would not get tenure or grants, except, perhaps, from condom companies. No academic institution desires to be associated with condom companies. Or with penises. It is embarrassing enough for them when a beer baron builds a dormitory. Or, in the case of Yaddah, when its rare book collection is regally housed in a building built from S&H Green Stamps. As I write this I cannot escape the feeling that many who read this may think it’s a joke. There was, for a brief moment in time, an expert at NITS on Nocturnal Emissions and Undescended Testicles, Dr. Jeff “Chick” Raisins, but he was fired when a Rep. Truslove Plume of South Carolina discovered him God knows how. Is this amusing to you? But these are important developmental matters. Nocturnal emissions and penises are a part of life, like rosebuds and lumber, Tudor kings and Gypsy Rose Lee, all of which you can easily study anywhere.

  What differences in penises can be noted among whites, Indians, slaves, free Negroes? It is the white man who always writes the history and he isn’t writing nonfiction about his penis. How has this colored the history of everything? One man’s penis is like another man’s penis; one man’s penis is also not like another man’s penis. Contour, size, heft, smell, ambition, interest, all weigh in on different scales. Is it any wonder that the penis is euphemistically referred to as man’s “private part”? His yard.

  When did each man’s penis become each man’s secret? Sexual bragging has always been common among men. Women now talk openly about their breasts, and periods and menstrual cycles are topics of open conversation. But a man still only wants to use his yard, not talk about it. His braggadocio, when he displays it, is usually just and only that.

  Why are we so especially quiet about it now, when it’s obviously implicated in a great and raging plague?

  As Professor Pauline Persha has written in The Loincloth in Fashion and History, even the earliest Indian finds it necessary to cover his privates. “Protection from draft, from flying arrows, from ticks and mosquitoes, is not the prime reason for men to cover their private parts. They cover them because they are private.” As the late, great classics professor Bernard Knox taught me at Yaddah, we know that penises have been considered private as far back as ancient Greece. Homer reminds us of this in both of his great works. In the Odyssey, the hero laments, “Oh woeful loss that turns my manhood back on me when I am forced to flee my native land and bed. I am truly private then and must make do with just my private friend.” In the Iliad the plaint is more general: “Oh we who maul our privates o’er the sea and land and surf! Oh privates we, oh privates we!” (Garfinkle/Swedenborg translations).

  Dr. Faraella Tundra-Ziti, of the University of Mantua-Reggio, outside of Syracuse, New York, writes movingly about what she calls “the male penile inferiority complex.” She devotes much of her discussion to the small size of the male organ in various countries, if you can find her book. “There is no question that men are born knowing they have a penis, and that all this questioning about when such realization dawns is really silly.” As the University of M-R is a convent college, an end has unfortunately been put to Dr. T-Z’s work and public appearances.

  It’s regrettable that this subject, this field, is enveloped in such “attitude.
” We shall have too many occasions to point out the danger this places all of us in.

  When did the penis become an item of barter? When did American man first say, “Mine is bigger than yours, so there”? Was the caveman with the biggest thing the leader? Or was the small penis in the hand of the man with the biggest club all that counted? Was there ever a moment in time when small was better? It is a great lack that no fossil that has ever been exhumed has captured a man’s sexual organ.

  Why has no one had the courage to realize, all titters notwithstanding, that all of this is not unimportant? When does American man first say: “Hey, look what I got! What’s it worth to you? Or me? This country’s all about buying and selling. How much do I have to pay [or ask for] to touch [feel, suck, taste, be fucked by] it?” In other words, to use it. To put it to use. Out there in the big wide world. Why does the most important part of me have to be such a big fucking secret?

  Women continue to be shafted and not by the penis. If they are for sale, they receive none of the proceeds. If they are attractive there is no way to appreciate it. Compliments are unknown. Get back to the kitchen, woman, or I’ll swat you one. In almost all places, it really was as crude as this. Also remember that it was acceptable for a man to drink, to liquor up, and he was not responsible for his actions if these should get out of hand.

  Again and again the criticism pops up: Why are you going on so about sex? Surely we had a period of innocence once upon a time.

  Innocence?

  How could innocence exist in all of this?