Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell

Author:Sarah Vowell [Vowell, Sarah]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Presidents - Homes and Haunts - United States, Assassination, Homes and Haunts, United States - History, Local, Historic Sites - United States, Vowell, Assassins, Historic Sites, Sarah - Travel - United States, United States - Description and Travel, Presidents - Assassination - United States, Presidents - United States, United States, History, Assassins - Homes and Haunts - United States, Presidents & Heads of State, Presidents, General, Biography & Autobiography, Assassins - United States, Biography
ISBN: 9780743260039
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2005-03-29T04:00:00+00:00

One winter night in my kitchen, as I poured peppermint tea into my friend Lisa’s cup, she said that she liked my teapot. I told her that my happy yellow teapot has a kinky backstory involving a nineteenth-century vegetarian sex cult in upstate New York whose members lived for three decades as self-proclaimed “Bible communists” before incorporating into the biggest supplier of dinnerware to the American food-service industry, not to mention harboring their most infamous resident, an irritating young maniac who, years after he moved away, was hanged for assassinating President Garfield.

It goes without saying that in order for me to buy my teapot on the cheap at the Oneida, Ltd., outlet store at the Sherrill Shopping Plaza, the second coming of Jesus Christ had to have taken place in the year 70 A.D. To the Oneida Community, 70 A.D., the year the temple in Jerusalem was destroyed, marks the beginning of the New Jerusalem. Which means we’ve all been living in heaven on earth for nearly two thousand years. Everyone knows there is no marriage in heaven (though one suspects there’s no shortage of it in hell). So, the Oneidans said, we’re here in heaven, already saved and perfect in the eyes of God, so let’s move upstate and sleep around. (I’m paraphrasing.)

John Humphrey Noyes, the founder, leader, and guru of the utopian Oneida Community, wrote in 1837, “In a holy community, there is no more reason why sexual intercourse should be restricted by law, than why eating and drinking should be — and there is as little occasion for shame in the one case as in the other.”

Any theologian who assured his fellow Victorians that fondling one’s neighbor’s wife is as ordinary as frying an egg was bound to attract a following. In 1848, Noyes and forty-five cohorts moved to Oneida to pursue what they called “group marriage,” eventually building the three-story brick mansion house that remains today as a combination museum, apartment building, and hotel. My sister Amy, three-year-old nephew Owen, and I spent a night there.

Owen recognized the mansard-roofed mansion straightaway — not as an old religious commune, but as a building he’d seen on Scooby-Doo. “Haunted house,” he whispered as Amy yanked him from his car seat, oohing like a cartoon ghost all the way through check-in. After dinner at a nearby steakhouse, in which my sister pleads, “Owen, please, please don’t use your hair as a napkin,” Amy eventually returns to our room to wash the ketchup off her sticky son while I sneak around the dark and quiet halls, vainly hoping to bump into fornicating specters, or, if this really were Scooby-Doo, high school kids dressed up like spooks to scare away nosy interlopers like me. I sit at a desk in the comfortable library, perusing the complete works of Dickens and an old book about China by an American advertising man entitled Four Hundred Million Customers. “It probably never occurred to you,” he wrote, “that banditry around the head waters of the Yangtsze would affect the quality of an English toothbrush.

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