Staging Ground. Leslie StaintonЧитать онлайн книгу.
as did Trinity Lutheran Church a few blocks up the street. It lacked the stained-glass windows and stately pews of the city’s Episcopal and Presbyterian sanctuaries, but Yecker’s hall did have an unmistakable grandeur. The beveled stones at the base of its façade evoked the mansions of Florence, its arched windows the lagoons of Venice, its Gothic lines the cathedrals of northern Europe. Everything conspired to lift your eyes up to the top of the building, where a gabled roof erupted in tiny crenellations pointing heavenward. “Whenever men have become skillful architects at all, there has been a tendency in them to build high,” John Ruskin had written a decade before Yecker bought his hall, “not in any religious feeling, but in mere exuberance of spirit and power—as they dance or sing—with a certain mingling of vanity—like the feeling in which a child builds a tower of cards.”
A white building in a red-brick city, a pleasure palace in a workaday world—Fulton Hall was indeed exuberant. Cross our threshold, its doors seemed to proclaim, and you will find harmony and goodwill, laughter, the strangeness of other worlds. Above all you will encounter actors, men and women possessed of a curious energy, whose resonant voices and powerful bodies recount the myths on which our lives rely. “Those days are gone,” the curtain inside Yecker’s spacious auditorium read, “but Beauty still is here.” Beauty, yes, and hope, an image of the epic future.
Here too was the ghosted past. If you were to tunnel down through Yecker’s hall, from its pitched roof through its wood floors and timber joists to the stone foundations of the building and beyond, into the earth, you would find arrowheads and clay pipes, the precolonial beginnings of the country, and if you were to dig further, into the soft, erosion-prone bedrock of this place, you would touch the skeletons of fish swimming in stone. Long before Blasius Yecker bought Fulton Hall, before the magistrates of colonial Lancaster picked this site for their jail, before Charles II granted this land—with all its “fields, woods, underwoods, mountains, hills, fenns, isles, lakes, rivers, waters, rivulets, bays and inlets”—to William Penn, long before Susquehannocks walked here in search of berries and deer, water covered the surface of this particular earth, and pale creatures glided along its currents in the dark. It was even then a place of enchantment, a penumbral world where anything could happen, and from its depths would come a continent whose immense, unstoried wilderness took your breath away.
THE KILLING OF THE CONESTOGAS: 1763
Black braids frame her face. She wears a colorful headband with an even more colorful feather, a brown dress, a choker strung with plump red beads. I was seven when I sketched her, in crayon, for the frontispiece of “My Indian Book,” an illustrated collection of one-sentence stories about Native Americans who pray for rain, sing songs, build birch-bark canoes, and await the end of “hungry time.” I was infatuated with Pocahontas and almost certainly had her in mind as I drew. Perhaps I imagined this young woman and I had been sisters in some prelapsarian world. More than forty years later her startled eyes look straight into mine, and she smiles as if to say, It’s all right, you may have my land. My bed. My home. My food. I understand.
On the booklet’s orange cover I drew what I took to be Indian symbols: a cloud fringed with lines of rain, a geometrical tree. Decades later I learned that shapes much like these are etched in giant schist rocks in the middle of the Susquehanna River at the southern end of Lancaster County, where I grew up. The carvings are perhaps a thousand years old and still visible, though you need a boat to get there, and the short voyage is not without its hazards. It takes muscle to get a purchase on a thigh-high ledge halfway up Big Indian Rock, then hoist yourself to the top of the huge boulder, whose surface is scarred with petroglyphs.
Perhaps you are wondering what this has to do with Yecker’s Fulton Hall. There is, I believe, a connection, and it has to do with stone.
On the ground floor of the Fulton Theatre, around the corner from the lobby and just outside the women’s room, a smooth interior wall parts to reveal a portion of a second wall, made of limestone, which dates back to the eighteenth century and belonged to the city jail. Downstairs in the theater’s labyrinthine basement, further portions of the old jail wall wind through the greenroom, the dressing rooms, the bathrooms and ushers’ quarters, under the stage and beside the file cabinets that hold financial and other records. When masons first coaxed these chunks of stone from the earth almost three centuries ago and hauled them here to build a prison, the town of Lancaster barely existed (it would not become a city until 1818). A pair of streets, King and Queen, met in a square that held a courthouse and market; a log cabin served as a Catholic chapel, and a stone building with a spire as a Lutheran one. There were a hundred or so private homes, most of them wood. Along the western wall of the new stone jail, a stream rumbled on its way to the Conestoga River, which fed into the Susquehanna, some ten miles distant, whose waters gave rise to mammoth rocks inscribed with sacred messages.
Pushing south from its crop of Indian petroglyphs, the Susquehanna empties into the Chesapeake Bay, mapped by the English Captain John Smith, of Pocahontas fame, in the early 1600s. Smith pronounced the area a revelation and called the Indians whom he met at the mouth of the river “Susquehannocks.” They seemed to him giants, with calves that measured three-quarters of a yard around, though twentieth-century archaeologists would conclude that the average Susquehannock male stood just under 5'4". Of the Indians’ language, which he did not understand, Smith wrote, “It may well beseeme their proportions, sounding as a voyce in a vault.” The Susquehannocks wore animal skins and carried gifts, including swords and tobacco pipes. At their first encounter, they raised their hands to the sun, broke into song, and embraced Smith, who tried to push them away. They laid objects at his feet, and around his shoulders they placed a painted bear hide as well as other skins and a necklace of heavy white beads. They begged him to protect them from rival tribes.
Smith published his Map of Virginia in 1612, and for the next sixty years this document was the primary means by which British explorers understood the Chesapeake and its precolonial inhabitants. Among the Indians Smith identified was a group called the Conestogas. These too were Susquehannock people, whom French fur traders had labeled “Andastes” or “Gandastogues.” They lived east of the Susquehanna River, many in and around what would become Lancaster County, and their footpaths crisscrossed the land. Smith and his compatriots anglicized their name and eventually used it to denote the places where these Indians dwelt.
I grew up in a suburban neighborhood in eastern Lancaster County, a few hundred yards from Stauffer’s Run, a tributary of the Conestoga River and by extension the Susquehanna. Without realizing it, I was treading on Indian ground whenever I went outdoors to play. I was intrigued by arrowheads, to be sure, and envied the few people I knew who’d found one. By rights I should have been among them; our neighborhood was under constant construction while I was growing up, with pits of earth ripe for excavation, but I wasn’t interested. By the time I graduated from high school, the field across the street from my parents’ house had become a grid of manicured lawns, two with swimming pools and one with its own tennis court. The Conestoga River meandered along a golf course on the far side of the neighborhood, and I often crossed it on a footbridge on my way to the country club to go swimming. I knew nothing about the origins of the word “Conestoga,” except that it had lent itself to my high school, Conestoga Valley, and a century before that to the huge red, white, and blue wagons that helped settle the American West. Other than “My Indian Book,” I don’t recall learning much of anything about Native Americans in school. History began with the Pilgrims, and I sketched them over and over again, cheerful faces in funny hats and stiff white collars. But at some point it catches up with you. Fall in love with a building, and the next thing you know, you’re wondering what happened to the Indians.
The simple answer is: they vanished. The Conestogas who inhabited my county clung to the hope of peaceful coexistence with their European neighbors for more than a hundred years and signed treaty after treaty, several in the brick courthouse on Lancaster’s main square. They met with William Penn, who pledged that the two groups “should always live as friends and brothers, and be as one body,” but his heirs betrayed Penn’s vision and continued to surge west,