The American People: Volume 1: Search for My Heart

by Larry Kramer

  In the very heart of mankind, man knew what he was doing. It might have frightened him, but this didn’t stop him.

  So history after history is written ignoring his very heart, the very heart of mankind.

  WHO ARE THESE PEOPLE?

  Has American man arrived and we haven’t even noticed, or named him “American”? Who are these men walking and stalking our land? Can we call them American men yet? Have there been any of the major migrations across the sea from what will soon enough be called the Old World to what is already called the New World?

  What makes an American man?

  It has been recorded about the shortly-to-arrive early white settlers in Virginia that one man murdered his pregnant wife, threw the unborn child into the James River, chopped up the mother, “powdered” (salted) her before eating her, and that John Smith made light of this spousal cannibalism by saying, “Now, whether she was better roasted, boiled, or carbonated, I know not, but of such a dish as powdered wife I never heard” (Ted Morgan, Wilderness at Dawn).

  JAMESTOWN

  The men, ninety or so of them, live all together in two long cabins. They are almost warm and almost comfortable enough. They have built themselves separate spaces that are private only in that you cannot see into them from the next compartments, although you can hear the loud snorings and the occasional muffled sound of men trying to masturbate. They have been here on to eleven months and no one has yet strangled a neighbor to shut him up in the middle of the night. The smells are almost more intrusive than the nocturnal snorts. By morning the long cabins are ripe with the nighttime fartings and the urine in the slop pails, if indeed these were reached. Baths and clean clothes are a not-too-often thing. The Virginia Company had counted on women to keep men and matter tidier.

  They try to ignore each other; they are not kind or gentle or particularly polite. There is much suspicion among them. They had not lived politely in England. Mostly they were workers in rough trades, on the docks, in the forests, in the mines. Many had been idle. Many had been criminals. A few were formerly rich men now impoverished, an easy state to sink to in an England whose skyrocketing population could not be supported. They had all heard about this New World place and it could be no worse than where they were. A few came to it of their own volition. Many came to it by order of the Crown. So they departed England, often leaving behind women and children.

  But these are not men who care enough to pine. So far the life here has been harsh. They had not been told there would be only men. They had not been told the winter weather would be so brutal. They had not been told they would have to plant and harvest their own food in addition to clearing and building during every daylight hour. They had not been told the Indians would not be friendly and would just as soon see them starve to death as help them grow crops or share their own crops and food. They had not been told they might get sick and die. Of the first 104, only 38 are still alive. Of the next 220, only 60 are left.

  So the atmosphere is surprisingly quiet, too quiet, as men adjust, or try, to their disappointment and loneliness so far from a home they cannot return to. Mr. Cleve, who is in charge of them for the Virginia Company back home, feels the unspoken frustrated energies and wonders when they will erupt. For so many men in one place it is, but for the snoring, very quiet and for too long.

  At the beginning of the twelfth month Brutus nods hello to Carston as each returns to his cabin from clearing yet another field for farming. It has been a particularly hard job because the earth is freezing. Carston is a slim young man, though tall, and hard-muscled from the work. He has blue eyes and blond hair and he always seems to Brutus to be untroubled. Carston is in fact far from it. He lost his wife and his child and his home and his job, in York, all in one morning when the master tailor’s establishment where he worked and they all lived burned down. Brutus, no more than eighteen or so, is as he is called. He is big and lumbering and mean, a young brute, the others have deemed him, which is how he comes to be called Brutus, at first behind his back, although by and large the men don’t know each other’s names, and certainly not their Christian ones. When he heard they called him Brutus, he laughed out loud and nodded acceptingly. Men alone nod a lot. Men alone are mostly silent with each other. At least these are. Hello and good morning will do most of the time.

  So Carston is surprised when Brutus nods hello. He has seen Brutus, true; it would be hard not to see him, huge goliath of a lumberman that he is. Why he is thought to be a brute Carston doesn’t know. It’s just that he’s so big and strong. He can fell and lift whole logs by himself.

  Carston nods back. They are at the crossroads between the two cabins now, and each must walk to the other. When the paths diverge, Brutus says, “Good night, then.” And Carson nods back. Words said out loud sound strange. But no one else is there to note this. Each of them senses it is a good thing that this is so. There is not much ability to talk to anyone in a friendly fashion.

  For almost another month they do not see each other. Work in a far forest keeps Brutus away, often for days and nights at a time. Carston looks for him. He has been given to thinking about him often, not a few times masturbating himself with his eyes scrunched closed and seeing the big man with his head of pitch-black tumbling unkempt hair. He is some twenty-five years now, Carston is, and he has only just come to know what masturbation is. Once, he came upon several older men out in the far pastures doing it to each other. He came upon them too quickly and like a trapped animal he was caught and couldn’t back away. They quickly stopped, poking their organs back into their trousers. “When there is naught else why’t not?” one of them shouted at him as he ran away. He heard them laughing behind him.

  Why was everyone, including himself, so embarrassed by this encounter? Why was it not all jolly, like a game? Oh, he knows the answer. He is not that simple. But he also knows how horribly lonesome everyone is. They all complain about it constantly. He thinks about all this over and over in his own daily workings, which include shearing lambs and converting their wool into cloth. He is also adept at cutting patterns for clothes and building shutters for windows. His work is more solitary than that of the men in the fields and forests who work together and even there don’t converse much with each other. The silence of this place is grinding. It’s as if the men are frightened of each other. No one knows what to do with anyone. No one has ever lived in a place with no women before. Carston had been told he would find a fine young woman in this new Virginia, in this New World, to take the place of his dead Constance, and to bear him a new family. He has not masturbated thinking about this new and fine young woman, though he wants her; but then, he did not know about masturbating until he came upon the men in the far pastures. He is surprised it is Brutus he thinks of instead. Perhaps it is because Brutus is real and the promised fine young woman is not, yet.

  It is the fourteenth month before they meet again. There is more noise in the air. It is not so quiet as before. Seven more men have died and two have gone off to live with the Paspahegh Indians, hoping to fuck their women. The bodies of the two men are sent back scalped and castrated by order of their chief Powhatan, Wahunsenacawh.

  Dissatisfactions are growing more verbal and more overt. There is more rudeness between them and much cursing in disdain. They push and shove each other as if each is walking in a solitary world and has no room for anyone else. A third long cabin is almost finished. Mr. Cleve has never stated that it’s to be for women, but that’s what everyone is expecting. When a ship arrives with fifty more men, Mr. Cleve quickly announces that another ship is only just behind. When ten days later pieces of shipwrecked vessel float up to shore, the location of the newly arrived women is revealed. Mr. Cleve tries to get the men all to pray. A newcomer, Mr. Horace, a minister back in England, is called upon to lead them. But he leads scarcely half a dozen; the others walk, muttering, away. Mr. Cleve confides to Captain Relph, commander of the newly arrived ship of men, “I feel something ill is coming. Mind you, I have felt it co
ming for some time and wonder why it hasn’t.” Then he hands him letters, speaking urgently: “Please tell them we shall all be dead for want of women.” Captain Relph prepares to depart with his ship empty, not filled with Jamestown crops and handiworks for sale in England. The Virginia Company will not be pleased. This community is not paying its way. Suddenly Captain Relph takes ill and dies. Mr. Cleve is forced to send Mr. Horace back with the ship to England.

  By chance Brutus and Carston meet in the same pasture where Carston saw the group masturbating. Carston is not aware that this pasture is now known for this, that it’s a place of retreat when just this relief is required. It is empty tonight. Carston has come for branches from the soft pine trees that hover protectively over the place, to use for shutters he is fashioning for the newest cabin, for the women who never arrive. He is hacking branches away when Brutus stands before him.

  “I ask you can I be of help?” Brutus lifts his hatchet up like a challenging spear and laughs at his gesture. To hear him speak is vaguely unsettling to Carston. His fantasy now has a voice and can no longer be a fantasy.

  “Why do you not answer me?” Brutus frowns. He is aware that too forward a presentation of self in the close quarters of their settlement is grounds for suspicion. Each new day each man is more and more concerned for his image as a man among men. It is not safe to register even minor friendly interest in another. So in saying as much as he’s just done, Brutus knows he’s gone too far with this pretty man. His own thoughts of late have been twisted away from fancies of young wives arriving in favor of young flesh already here. If put to the fire he would not deny it. He wants to fuck young Carston’s ass. He saw this done when he was but a lad, and he did it and had it done to him many a time in the dark depths of coal mines in the north of England where men were the color of pitch and invisible and no-named. Brutus is really not interested in women, or in another man. He is interested, once in a while, in relief. When he has relief he can go on for a while longer. The torments of whatever makes his moods so black and solemn come back soon enough. He knows there is no way to live with another when such black moods come upon him. That is when he is mean to the others, rude, and why they named him Brutus. He is not prepared for the softness coming out of him at this moment. “I know not my own voice,” he hears himself so strangely saying.

  “How can that be so,” Carston asks, “when you are the one who is using it?”

  “But my voice is harsh and gruff.”

  “Yes, that is why they are all afraid of you.”

  “I did not know they are all afraid of me. Are you afraid of me?”

  “Not now.”

  “But you have been?”

  “No, in thinking of it, I think not.”

  Brutus nods. “I have no wish to frighten anyone.”

  They find themselves walking out into the field and then beyond it into the farther groves of pines. It was forest not so long ago, but it is being thinned down now, to build the third and then a fourth new cabin, although more are dying now than need beds. Carston walks first when the path narrows, and Brutus picks up his pace to keep up with him.

  “Wait! I am short of breath, you walk so swiftly.”

  “How is it you cannot keep up?”

  “I have worked too many years underground, in the mines, and my lungs do not breathe the air so well as they once did. I no longer have the cough. I trust that is because of this new Virginia air. I will be back to running fast soon enough, you wait.” He has not said so many words out loud since he can’t remember when.

  “You speak well for a miner.”

  “I am so hungry to take you in my arms and hold you there,” Brutus says. He shakes his head in wonderment. Where do these words come from?

  Carston nods silently. His heart is thudding so loudly he fears it will pop out of his body. He takes the other man’s hand and places it over this noisemaker.

  “Do you not feel this?”

  Brutus nods. “Then it is all right, then?”

  “It is all right, then.”

  They reach out gently to touch each other. It is more than each can bear. They tremble.

  Yes, they make love, more tenderly than each expected. How do they know to do it so? But they do.

  They fall asleep in each other’s arms, under the far pines, wrapped in each other’s clothes for additional warmth. In the middle of the night Carston is awakened by the noise of Brutus chopping down trees.

  “I am building us our house,” he says when he sees Carston is awake. “If we live far enough away from all the rest they will leave us alone.”

  “I do not think so,” Carston says.

  “I will take care of you,” Brutus says.

  Carston nods, but his mind is not filled with such romantic thoughts. It is filled with perceptible fears.

  “I know not of anyone who lives like this, anywhere, ever.”

  Brutus nods. He raises his hatchet like a spear again, challenging the unseen world.

  “We are pledged land for our hard labors. I claim this land as ours.”

  They are surprised by being called aside, separately, by one or another of half a dozen others who confide in them. There are some dozen couplings hidden amid this community of men tired of waiting for their women. Carston is surprised that no violence has occurred. He is most frightened of that. He has heard enough guttural snickering to sense that what they do is not approved by many, and this tortures his sleep. He has dreams of being castrated. Brutus takes to everything more easily; he is happy and shows it, and is distressed when he sees that his beloved does not share his acceptance of their lot as happily. He does not know how to talk about this with him.

  So it is the big, burly Brutus who falls apart when his Carston disappears and cannot be found anywhere in this small settlement. He hurls himself through the fields and forests, thrashing branches on the ground with fury, tramping them down like thunder with his huge booted feet, lunging at whatever stands in his way. Where might anyone go to get away from here? his mind keeps asking. There is no place he can be but here!

  But there is another place and Brutus finds it soon enough. He finds his young man hanged from a tree in a far stand of pines, so far away that Mr. Cleve has not sanctioned explorations there as yet.

  Brutus takes down his Carston and cradles him in his arms. “Oh, my wife, my own dear wife,” he wails.

  The other couplings hold a service together. There are now some two dozen of them. Together they bury Carston far away up the river’s edge. They all stand there crying and moaning, some fifty men wailing for one of their own. They remain standing there, upstream. They do not want to leave. It is as if each is afraid to return to an outside world that might do this to him. There is certainty that Carston did not hang himself. They are suspicious of a man named Eldred Punic. “He is harsher to us than most” is the consensus. He was overheard saying to another: “I am proud to have done it.”

  They are too petrified to leave this spot. They are missed, of course. Work in some areas has stopped because of their absence. Mr. Cleve finally comes with a group of the biggest men, each with a rifle, and orders them back to work.

  Another boat is arriving. Perhaps there are women on this one, Mr. Cleve announces, no longer convincingly. Has London heeded his warnings that unless women are sent here he cannot answer for the consequences?

  But there are no women on this boat either. The grumblings now turn to outright mutinies. Many men now refuse to work at all. This only angers the men who want to work and the men who aren’t bothered by the sexual arrangements of others. Brutus used to tease them back when they teased him. “Oh, you would like it! You would truly like it!” And they would push and shove him in return in jocular opposition, shouting, “No! No! No!” To which he would shout back, “You would have it if you could, my uglies!”

  It is a group of half a dozen of these “uglies” who stand at the dock when the new load of men arrives. It is a bigger load than ever, for word has travel
ed back to England that the wages are worth it and that land will be apportioned to each for every year of completed labor. They arrive all fired up and prepared to build this Jamestown into the firmest stronghold in the New World. These new arrivals know for a fact that the boats following theirs are womaned.

  The uglies will have none of this. They no longer believe there will ever be any women for Jamestown. They no longer believe in wives, and several of them even choose one of the new arrivals for their own. Of course the newcomers will have none of that. Yet.

  “We will give you time,” Nordsman calls out. He was one of the first settlers, and he is more than ready to settle. He is another big man. They all seem like big men, bigger every week from working so hard and so long. “You will seek us soon enough,” he continues. “Wait until the winter comes, the long nights of winter, when you are so lonely you would fuck a bear.”

  “Will you look at them?” Herbison says of the newcomers. “There are no fellows smaller in size than me.”

  And it is true. This new crop arrives all of quite full growth and muscle.

  “I think we’ll learn to make do with them, is what I think,” says Tourelay, a big Irishman newcomer. “We’ll just build sturdier bedsteads.” He laughs out loud at his joke.

  They cannot be so willing already.

  This makes it all seem jolly, all this acceptance and jocularity, just as Carston thought it would be when he came upon the men in the pasture. Forgotten is Carston’s death. What has not been spoken of either is what has happened to several other couples. Strang and Hebrew have received anonymous letters threatening their lives for sinning against nature. Polski and Rummengrad have found their dogs choked dead. Allen and Walgers have twice found dead chickens in their coop, their heads chopped off. There have been other experiences of a similar nature, and it is not until all the coupled sit down together again that the extent of these acts is shared.