by Dana Spiotta
I draw upon this verse from Romans as my guide, which is very well known to you: “And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.” I try to be humble and yet have the will to not be conformed. I must discover what it means to renew my mind so that I can be good.
As joyful as I am for my new life, I already miss you terribly. I miss the garden. I miss sitting with you by the fire. On the Sabbath, I can see everyone gathering after supper to hear Papa read from the Bible. Please tell him not to worry after me.
When I am settled, I will write with my address and all my news. Until then, please be patient and try to understand God’s plan for me. You and Papa have always said that I was different, that I had a too curious mind for a girl. You were right, Mother.
Yours humbly,
Clara
2
15 January 1869
Dearest Mother,
Today, on the eve of my seventeenth birthday, the time has come for me update you and reveal where I live now; for the past three months I have been living in the Oneida Community near Sherrill, not far from Oneida Lake. I know there are many rumors about this place, but it is simply like no place else, a community built on love instead of greed. We believe that through confession in Christ, we attain Perfection, which means we can have Heaven on Earth; we renounce the pride and evil of ownership and private property. It is a matter of upmost importance that we share everything. We try to radiate the goodliness of true Christian life unmarred by competition or striving for material things. Instead we strive for spiritual exaltation, for the sublime in ordinary life, and regard everything that distracts us from that as petty vanity. We live in the midst of daily ecstatic expression; we discover the glory of God in ourselves and one another. Moreover, Mama, I am part of something bigger than myself; living here has untangled me from worldliness, from servitude, and from the degradation of a woman’s lot in life.
Do you remember my friend Nellie Wallingford? She lives here, and I consider her one of my sisters now. She wrote me about this place and invited me. What a life girls can live here. We can study what we want. We get to wear pantaloons instead of long skirts; we cut our hair short. We don’t waste time longing over styles, jewelry, and fancy dress. We get to do any occupation God draws us to: teaching, working in the wonderful, extensive library, cultivating the garden, child tending, cabinet making, cooking, but also type-setting and operating our printing press, editing and writing stories for our circular, and even designing products for our metal manufacture business. We rotate the work. The drudgery doesn’t take up your every day when all the labor is shared.
O Mama, the mansion house is so beautiful! It has a Mansard roof like a grand house in Paris. We are building another wing as we grow. I have my own pretty little room, but none of us stays too long alone. We rejoice in our community with one another. No one is hungry or poor. No one is excluded. It is as if a family could grow to be a whole village, with everyone caring for everyone. It is so clear to me that is what God wants for all of us. I see that Heaven can be ours if we want it. Suffering is not required for life; it is the wages of greed and pride. We don’t have to fight other people or jealously guard what poor things we grab in the material world. There is enough on God’s great Earth for all to prosper if we share equally. Possessiveness and ownership make one mean and small. What have the recent years taught us? No one should be possessed by another or ruled over by anyone but God.
I wish I could send you a photograph. This year I will sit for an Ambrotype; one of the older women here, Elsie More, makes such portraits. Until then, I enclose a drawing that Nellie made of me. I think the likeness is accurate. I have become as healthy a girl as you will ever see. We are all very active and go out of doors every day, even in the winter. Women don’t faint in the parlor here. Women don’t wear corsets or other binding attire. I can dance. I can breathe. I can sit cross-legged on the grass if I want. I have never slept better. We eat the food we grow right here on our farm. We don’t eat animals. We make a delicious, healthful basket cheese, though, and I am never wanting for anything. The Community is famous locally for its straw-berry shortcake, and anyone who doubts the divine in the everyday here need only taste it to believe! Remember the special Gold Cake with pink boiled icing you made for me on my last birthday? As wonderful as the baking is here, I will miss your cake tomorrow. As I write this, I indulge in a lunch of sweet-cucumber pickles and Graham Flour biscuits. Truly, I have a wonderful appetite from all the activity, but I don’t overindulge. None of us, not man or woman, smoke tobacco or drink ardent spirits. At night we listen to music in the grand piano room. Sometimes we perform plays and always we read Scripture. My life is filled with beauty and love.
We live in miraculous times. We are not cloistered here. I eagerly follow the news of the day. I read the New York papers, which are mailed to the library every week. At last wretched President Johnson has been over-ruled, and this year I know we will see real emancipation and true civil rights for the former slaves. Soon we will address other forms of bondage and inequality. All of us deserve to be free, to be safe, to be fed, and to express love. How could God not want us to work for that every day? In this small Eden, I hope we will show others it is possible to live communally.
Please write to me here. I have enclosed the address. I am anxious for news of you, Papa, and all my brothers and sisters. I miss Ella every day and pray for her. I think she looks down from Heaven and rejoices over the life I chose.
Yours faithfully,
Clara
3
January 15, 1869
Father Noyes has suggested that I keep a journal of my spiritual practice and my Perfection with God. I have done that with earnest and regular obedience. He has looked on it and been satisfied with my progress, although he is careful to say only God knows what is in anyone’s heart. “He knows us better than we can ever know ourselves.” In my daily contemplation, I discovered that I have need of a more private accounting. How does one understand anything in this life unless one uses language, either spoken or written? And how can one tell the deepest truth if she knows it will be examined by others? I need to work toward my own clarity.
Yesterday, Henry had to sit for Mutual Criticism; it was a hard thing to witness. Father Noyes accused him of excessive self-esteem, and Henry nodded in agreement. I sat in the very back of the Great Room and felt tears of shame come to my eyes. Father Noyes has told us we would be free of shame. I am confused.
I have not yet had to sit for Mutual Criticism, but in truth I wonder if I ought to suggest it myself. I am guilty of a terrible vanity; I feel especial love for Henry. I know that Father Noyes says we must resist exclusive, possessive longing. I know that we all belong equally to one another. Yet when he comes with me to my room, he is Henry and everyone else slides away from my eyes.
It was only six weeks ago that Father Noyes—John—invited me to his bed for my very first time with anyone. He knew I was ready for deeper Fellowship because of my spiritual joy. “Joy is you, Clara, and you are joy. God’s Perfection radiates from you.” He was careful with me. We lay naked together under the blanket, and he gentle touched all the slopes and valleys of my body. He let me do the same for him; how odd male bodies are. His beard so full and wiry. I liked the tickle of it on my breasts. “Surrender everything to the spirit, for we are truly beyond sin.” He stayed with me until I was released of all my suffering and sadness. He practiced the discipline of male continence and held his own pleasure back. This allowed amative, spiritual coitus instead of procreative coitus. We were liberated from the fear of pregnancy and childbirth.
After, when I told him how nice it felt, John said what you have experienced is a celebration of God, a manifestation of Heaven on Earth. “As we are told in Peter, ‘ye rejoice with joy unspeakable
and full of glory,’ ” he said to me. Truly, I was happy and at peace. He laughed at my expression.
“Why do you laugh?” I asked, drowsy with the warmth of our bodies’ heat.
“Dear Clara, why do people settle for worldly tribulations? They pray over the after-life, over the future, yet they chase trivial things. Here we are, with the bodies God gave us, in Heavenly ecstasy, already in Paradise.”
This recalled to me what he preached the first night I stayed here. He is a magnetic and, in truth, mesmerizing speaker. He spoke to all the younger members, but I felt as if he were speaking directly to me. To my spirit. He smiled as he preached, and his eyes twinkled in the candle-light of the high-ceilinged Great Room.
“What if what you are waiting for has already happened? What if happiness is yours if you want it? Do you think God wants us miserable? Our happiness celebrates God, honors the gifts He hath given us.”
In my first interview with him, he spoke with such feeling about the slavery of pregnancy and childbirth. How cruel it was to make women suffer over and over when it did not have to be this way.
I told him about watching my sister Ella die; he told me about his four premature babies when he first married; God was showing him the need for “male restraint and continence.”
I admire Father Noyes’s mind and his generosity, I do. How grateful I am that he spied me reading the newspapers in the library; he recruited me to edit his articles for “The Circular,” from which I have learned so much. His complex ideas on well-ordered procreation are our future. He gave me Darwin and Galton to read. I have so many ideas about stirpiculture and human cultivation, on how to make our species deliberate and not mistaken, furtive, and indentured to chance.
We grew so close, but now I think he has changed toward me because he senses my attachment to Henry. But also because of a change in our own sexual congress. We are told we can say no, but can we really, and to John, God’s own emissary on Earth? What an ingrate I am to write this, but we are also told that God wants us to pursue the light of truth wherever it leads us.
Fellowship with John was and is precious and loving. He is a great and good man. But it was with Henry that I understood the true Godliness in our human bodies. It was with Henry that I felt the “joy unspeakable.” Henry is not as ascended in Fellowship as Father Noyes. He is practically as young as I am, but despite his youth, he is master of his ardor. Usually the young men must be paired with the older women because they need to master male continence. But Henry has ascended fast. John himself had identified him as being of a special spiritual category. Even the Committee on Stirpiculture had chosen him as someone who should be allowed to procreate. How can he be so harshly criticized when he did everything right? Henry asked Father Noyes if he could have Fellowship with me, and Father Noyes took it to the Committee, which allowed it despite Henry’s youth.
My confession: how often I revisit in my mind the very first time Henry and I lay together. It bewitches me; it intoxicates me as if it were happening to my body as I remember. Henry came to my room, and we were soon naked like the children angels we knew ourselves to be. Henry is sturdy and much taller than I am, yet he is soft to touch. All of his skin is as smooth as my inner wrist, or the nape of my neck, where he first kissed me. We simply stroked each other and whispered for hours with no coitus. We kissed, and our bodies grew less and less foreign to each other. Then he told me to lie back, for he wanted to kiss me everywhere. I said, “Yes! But I will have my turn too, to kiss all of your body.” When we finally had intercourse, it was as natural and gentle as those easy kisses. Then I felt it, a mystical quickening—as if the spirit came to a pinpoint inside of me and then flowed and stuttered out to every part of my body. I knew it was God, it was Heaven, my body had a divine gift. After that first night, all I have to do is look at Henry; think of Henry; and I feel the same light of God in my body. They call some people Old Lights and other people New Lights. I don’t think that is right. My light is new and old at once. Inside me but beaming out to the world too.
My confession: I long to realize my own Perfection. I pray, but it is very hard for me to want anyone but Henry. When others ask for Fellowship with me, I want to say no, but I feel that I should not. I should love them all, especially Father Noyes. I should be open to them. Yet it must be some weakness in me, for I cannot stop the feelings I have. I confess that when I see Henry with the other girls, my very sisters here, I grow faint and get a terrible pain in my stomach. Father John has noticed; he gave me a look of disapproval when I left the dinner table last week, looking faint and unable to swallow anything.
I fear for what will happen. I have to hide my heart from everyone but Henry. He too wants only me. If we confessed it to anyone, they would make us stop laying with each other. I cannot bear that, wanting only him. But even those words, “wanting only,” is a form of enslavement. Why would God make us so confused? Can God make us need to deceive? But what if it is possible that love between two can also be Perfect and a part of Heaven on Earth? Can it be possible that Father Noyes is wrong? Writing these words, thinking these words, will lead to expulsion. I must stop if I can. Tear this up. I do not want to leave here and go back to the worldly ungodly cruel life that lay ahead for me in Syracuse.
* * *
—
I wrote Mother tonight. Father Noyes insisted. I explained that she may try to get me if I tell her where I am. He told me that many mothers suffer from the pride of motherhood. That I can resist her, but not to shut her out. He told me to guard against my own “philo-progenitiveness.” My phrenology was similar to hers, and we should know our own weaknesses. Many women get too attached to their own children, when all your fellows deserve your attachment and love. We are all God’s children. No one is your child, your possession.
I listen to what he says and obey him; but he does not know my mother. If she knew the full story of this life, she would see it as wanton. She would not see it as a sacrament; she would not see that conventional marriage is akin to slavery. She would not see that. I remember when we talked about the Free Love Society and what they espoused. She viewed it as Jacobin Godlessness. But other times she conceded that women were no better off than slaves if they married the wrong man, or if they had pregnancies they couldn’t bear, like Ella did. Is there a chance that she would reconsider if it wasn’t Godless? I long to talk to her. I miss her. But I can’t go back. Twice I watched my mother almost die in childbirth. I had seen her pale and writhing in pain. I had wiped her brow and prayed. Both times she recovered. She lost one of the babies she had in those terrible cruel births. Samuel, born breech and still as a doll. Mother let me hold his little body. We wept together. All of it is part of life, especially the life of a woman.
None of it prepared me for my sister Ella dying. She was too young, too slight, but she was healthy. She could have lived a long life. The two miscarriages before this pregnancy were a sign that everyone ignored. This pregnancy was painful and mistaken from the start all the way to the end. She vomited every day of it. Maybe some women’s bodies are not meant to give birth; with birth as a constant possibility, how can women tolerate sexual congress at all? No one asks those questions. Perhaps some women may not want to give birth, regardless of health. Our options are so narrow. That or be a wayward, shameless woman or a loveless spinster. Susan B. Anthony is a Quaker schoolteacher who never married and never had children. She lives the life of the mind. Women must renounce physical love, giving up the life of the body, or we can give birth over and over and be a slave to the body, be haunted by death, our own and our children’s. I don’t want to leave Oneida, this God-struck paradise, no matter how I love Henry, no matter how confused I am.
Thank God for Nellie writing me of this place, where women have equality with men. The women don’t get pregnant unless they want to, and they are able to have sex with whomever they want whenever they want and not only dwell in God’s light b
ut become God’s light. I must remind myself of why I came and not squander this haven.
The morning after my sister’s funeral, I packed a small satchel and hid it under my bed. I took the little money I had from the sewing and embroidery I took in. In the very middle of the night, I woke up. I was not tired, and I was not scared. I dressed quietly in the dark, and I crept out of my room on stocking feet. Only my dear Jack heard me, but he is a sleepy old dog. He watched me but never made a sound.
I crept out into the city night. The gas lamps made James Street beautiful and lonely. I sat on a bench in front of our house to tie my boots. I brushed leaves off my stockings. Thank Heaven it wasn’t very cold or wet. I pulled my satchel onto my back; I was ready. I walked to the train platform and climbed the steps. I could see my house and my street in the distance below me. I bought a ticket for the 5 a.m. train. As the train pulled away from my city, it still felt like an ordinary trip, not quite real. I reached Oneida an hour and a half later, just as the dawn was starting to break.
I had the directions from Nellie in my bag. It was a half hour walk to the Oneida Mansion.
I walked and the sky grew pink and bright. After I passed through a little village, I saw in the distance a grass-covered hill and the beautiful new building that surely must be the Oneida Mansion. I didn’t yet have bloomer pants or comfortable boots. My hair was still long. But I untied and removed my little bonnet and started to run.
I ran fast and my legs felt strong. My hair came loose and I could feel it flying behind me. Faster and faster I went toward that hill, my lungs burning and my breaths coming hard. When I finally got there, Nellie would greet me at the door. She would exclaim at my rosy cheeks. I would laugh and embrace her. She would take me to the kitchen, where I would be given a slice of bread, soft butter, a small dish of prunes and raisins, and a big glass of sweet milk.