Ann the Word by Richard Francis

Author:Richard Francis [Francis, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-61145-643-1
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.
Published: 2011-02-23T05:00:00+00:00

9

Black Guards

Ann and her entourage arrived at Petersham in snowy mid-winter. They had not been to the town before and wanted to see some of their converts who lived there. It was evening when they arrived at Thomas Shattuck’s, where they found the family waiting for them. The Shakers were experts at making an entrance. Ann said, ‘It is good to watch, and you should always watch.’ William chimed in: ‘Ye watched, for ye knew not which hour we would come.’

The gospels come through to us as texts in which all speech and actions have clarity and significance; somewhere, inaccessibly behind the language, there is the contingent reality of actual people with their awkward, improvised behaviour. The Shakers, though, came from a tradition that laid emphasis on the biblical story as an oral transmission, and Ann Lee was herself illiterate. They would not therefore have possessed our modern sense of the gulf that lies between language and the world; and perhaps as a result, they seem to have had an extraordinary ability to live life in the gospel mode, so that in their case the word implies not a record after the event but the moment-by-moment experience of encountering reality. They were helped, of course, by the fact that the puritan tradition of New England encouraged the inhabitants to see their own lives in allegorical terms.

Ann’s party went on to David Hammond’s to spend the night. The next day was the Sabbath, and James preached from the epistle of his namesake: ‘Cleanse your hands, ye sinners’ (iv, 8-9). Ann rarely seems to have led meetings, though of course she attended. Far from diminishing her status this would have the effect of adding to her mystique and emphasising her authority. Many outsiders (‘people of the world’) had come to the Hammond house out of curiosity, but they behaved with civility.

On the evening of the following day there was another meeting, again at David Hammond’s, and again led by James. Once more numbers of outsiders had come as spectators. The meeting-room was partitioned off within a larger one where the ‘world’ were to sit, but as so many had turned up, James said that those who wished could come into the inner room with the believers. It was an intimate arrangement. Ann and Elizabeth Shattuck were sitting on a bed, with other Shaker sisters nearby. James was standing with a candle in his hand and had just begun to read from the Bible when there was a sudden cry: ‘Knock out the lights!’

The room had been infiltrated. All the candles were knocked out except for the one James was holding. In the panicky darkness, three men rushed through from the outer room. Their faces were disguised with black paint - appropriately enough, since they were members of the self-styled Black Guard Committee, lewd fellows’ from the middle of the town. They grabbed hold of Ann and tried to drag her away, tearing a strip out of the new gown she was wearing (perhaps the very one woven for her by James).

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