The Visionist: A Novel

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Prologue

The City of Hope
1902

IT IS NOT
uncommon, when one is young, to think that life is simple. In my case, I reasoned, it would require little besides discipline and effort. If I labored well, worshipped, confessed, and shunned all carnal desire, my soul would find sure and brilliant its path to Zion. And if I held faith as the brightest star in my firmament—and thus the easiest by which to chart my course—the universe would fall into order. Order, after all, means everything to a Shaker, and a Shaker is what I am.

But if we are to be sincere, then we know that we are not made for perfection. However we may try to fit the pattern, it pulls and bunches like a poorly sewn waistcoat and we exhaust ourselves with the fruitless smoothing of seams. I know something of this struggle, and now that I am old, I realize that my youthful presumptions about the way forward were based on a fundamental misunderstanding: I thought life was simple because I thought I was simple. On both counts, I was mistaken.

What I could not know was that, even in societies as steady as my own, life-changing tumult can be born of a single happening. And though, when first I heard of it, the event may have felt as unconnected to my daily existence as a sigh breathed in a distant land, it transpired that nothing would be the same after the day in August of 1837 when six young sisters received signs from the world beyond.

The communication took place in a settlement far from my own, after the resident schoolteacher had died of a sudden ague. My caretaker, Elder Sister Agnes, who had once lived and taught in the enclave, was summoned north while community elders searched for a permanent replacement. She was gone several months, and as she had been the one who raised me from birth, I missed her. I was barely ten years old at the time, and Elder Sister Agnes was the closest thing to a mother I had ever known.

A child will despise anything that deprives her of her beloved’s attention, and I viewed the miracle of divine contact—for that is what it was—as an interloper and a thief. Once I had won my eldress back, I was determined to banish from my thoughts the cause of her absence. Perhaps that is why the import of what she had witnessed was lost on me until later. Certainly, I understand now how foolish the passions of a child truly are, how such willful blindness cannot last.

Yet, however little I allowed the remarkable day to mean to me at the time, the story threaded through and bound us all as believers, passing from community to community until there was no one who did not know of it. My eldress told me the account herself as though it were a parable from the Bible whose lessons she had yet to discover. She glowed as she recalled even the smallest details of the wondrous day. How faint breezes blew the smell of tomato vines through the open windows and carried songs sung by the brethren as they brought in the last of the summer hay. How the girls in the schoolhouse—young as ten, old as fourteen—struggled with penmanship that day. How their ears rang with my eldress’s exhortations to keep their letters evenly spaced, cleanly drawn, pure and unadorned as the beliefs we are taught to hold dear. I knew how the studious sisters must have felt, listless and hypnotized by the droning of flies in the late-afternoon heat, for I, too, was a schoolgirl.

From this most ordinary of scenes erupted an episode the likes of which had never before been experienced. For all of a sudden, as my eldress described it, the girls’ fidgeting ceased—a moment of calm before the room rang with the sound of furniture scraping the wooden floor, a crash, the crack of a desk toppling, and then, once more, silence. Virgie Thompson, one day shy of her eleventh year, jumped to her feet and began to sway. What Virgie saw my eldress could not say, but her blue eyes were fixed hard on a point in the distance directly in front of her. She made no sound at first, yet her lips moved ceaselessly, forming strange syllables that seemed to stream from her mouth. Her hands fluttered and twitched by her side as her head cocked from shoulder to shoulder, quickening until her hair had loosed itself into a tangle and it seemed her thin neck might snap.

“Virgie?” my eldress asked. “Are you all right, child?” The others were afraid to look, eyes glued to their careful writing.
Do All Your Work,
the lines read,
As Though It Were To Last 1,000 Years And You Were To Die Tomorrow.
I knew the saying well—indeed, I had copied it countless times myself. It was one of many left to us by our Beloved Mother Ann Lee—founder of all that we believe, equal in Heaven to the Lord Jesus Christ, sufferer at the savage hands of the World’s people. Dead more than half a century at the time, Mother was yet as powerful from the beyond as she was when she walked this Earth, and my eldress had asked that the girls scratch her words over and over onto the pages before them, in the same blue-black ink with the same tidy hand.

The rattle of wood on wood, louder and louder as Virgie’s feet trembled against the leg of her tumbled chair, filled the room. Her narrow hips began to jerk while her arms shook and went limp, sounds now issuing forth from her mouth full and loud. They began deep in her throat and recalled no utterance made by human voice, but rather a deep growling that rose to a moan and then to the high-pitched keening of an eagle, her eyes wild, expressions of bliss and terror, woe and relief passing across her features, my eldress said, like the flicker of shadows in candlelight.

“Virgie, come back, dear,” Elder Sister Agnes implored, kneeling before her, trying to stay her movements by enveloping the child in her arms. To regard a young believer so lost to the Spirit disturbed her. She had seen grown men lament their sins, weeping and rolling in the mud outside the meetinghouse. She had watched Brother Eleazer Howell get down on his hands and knees in mortification to lick the floor clean where he’d stood. She had heard Sister Thankful Brice confess, wail over wail, to the carnality of her previous life. Such gifts occurred during Meeting, and such passions were commonly made manifest only in the adults of the society. Yet there before her, little Virgie would not, could not, be still.

From another corner of the room came the sound of singing. A strange, warbling tune unlike any my eldress knew. Divinity Brown, meek and dark-haired, had assumed a pose of beatific serenity as song swelled forth in great balloons of melody. Some of the words were familiar. She spoke of Heaven, of honey and a golden light. She called again and again to Mother in choruses that sounded as though a full choir was singing, so richly and tunefully did her voice weave the verses.

But then Divinity tumbled into other noises, eerie yowls that made no earthly sense. She chanted with the deliberateness of a three-year-old,
O sari anti va me, o sari anti va me, vum vum vo, vum vum vo!
Twirling, stamping her feet, she danced faster and faster until her skirts whipped into a great bell-shaped billow from which her thin, youthful figure emerged like the knob on a child’s top, spinning without cease. The incantations, repeated then varied, seemed to swallow her body as she quickened the rhythms, and her broad smile made it appear as though her face were being twisted from inside as her nonsensical Latin verse continued to drum forth.
I co lo lo san ti rum, I co lo lo san ti rum. Vive vive vum vum vum. Vive vive vum vum vum!

Elder Sister Agnes rose from her place at Virgie’s side and did her best to stand calmly by, then walked to the front of the room with her head raised and her eyes focused upon the black-painted canvas chalkboard in an effort, she told me, to hide her face from view. Why had Mother chosen to bestow such gifts inside the orderly confines of her schoolroom? How wild the Spirit World! The young sisters were lost to it, and my eldress feared for where they might have gone. Compared with the languidness of the summer day, the din was indescribable, and by the time she had wiped her countenance clear of confusion, she heard yet another strange sound as a body thudded to the floor—ten-year-old Hannah Whithers writhing at her feet, the child’s fingers clenched as though pleading. Holly Dearborn then erupted into a fit of the jerks, flopping about the room with her arms and legs as loose as a scarecrow’s. Severe and solitary at fourteen, Adelaide Hatch fell to her knees, praying in feverish foreign tones. And finally, Bridey White, the lone girl to remain seated at her desk, commenced howling like a dog.

My eldress sat down and drew her hands into prayer, lowering her head. The room resounded with the clamor of an asylum, but she resolved to wait and pray until the moment passed.

On their way back from the workhouses and barns, the settlement’s sisters and brethren could hear the commotion inside the school. Later, my eldress said, they assembled around the stepping-stone in front of the gray-green door, sisters to one side, brethren to the other. The elders began to sing and pray as they listened until well after sunset to the noise from inside, and though it was said that the older believers spoke quietly of the event as a miracle, those who were newer to our kind wondered in hushed tones if something had gone terribly wrong.

As the moon rose and the night became heavy with the scent of sage from the drying racks inside the herb house, the girls began to quiet themselves. Elder Sister Agnes gathered them together, and one by one, her pupils emerged pale with exhaustion, shuffling along the stone path that led to the yellow clapboard dwelling house. No one spoke as they passed—indeed, all pulled back in awe. The sight of the students in such a stunned, blank state after so many hours of commotion gave the impression that they had traveled far, that while it was unto their souls alone that communications from the Spirit World had been bestowed, an important sign had fallen before all of the believers.

Word of the goings-on spread quickly, and it was said that Mother’s hand had begun guiding other young sisters into similar states in settlements to the north and south. My eldress’s charges may have been the first instruments chosen to carry news of the Second Awakening, but it was said that ministers traveling between the Eastern villages in the months following that day recorded many related stories in their journals. Not all of the happenings involved such dramatic display. A young sister in Hancock drew luminous trees on paper and inscribed in perfect hand their brightly colored leaves with poems of peace and love. Visionists—for that was the name given to Mother Ann’s chosen instruments—were allowed to make things that were not simply functional but beautiful, for they had created them under divine inspiration. The rest of us worshipped as we always have, through the songs and dances we performed in Meeting, through our industry, and through our belief that—save for the Visionists—no one blade of grass stood taller than any other in the verdant fields of our faith. We knew that order was dependent on union, even in the face of heavenly chaos.

Elder Sister Agnes felt that the day she described marked the beginning of an extraordinary time, a time of great wonder. Why else would there have followed talk of renaming the settlements? Not Hancock, nor Tyringham, nor Watervliet any longer, but
The City of Peace, The City of Love, Wisdom’s Valley.
Why else would the sacred rites have begun, each on designated hilltops near the Church Family buildings? Why else would the elders in the largest of the villages have begun to forbid the attendance of Sunday visitors from the World to Sabbath Meetings, the better that our ecstasy might be expressed in private and seen only by those who could understand its meaning?

My eldress never forgot the miracle she watched unfolding in the souls of girls who, just hours before, were naught but little chatterers, a flock of tittering sparrows—just as common and without care. Still, it was several years before a Visionist came to The City of Hope. She appeared on a day that dawned as bleak and searingly cold as a metal blade left in the snow. And in such humble form. How could I have fathomed that her presence in our small, remote sanctuary—as unforeseen to her as to anyone—would change everything? At least, for me.