Friday, June 23, 2023

The Mangrove Roots

 “The Magic Kingdom” by Russell Banks, 2022

This is the last book by the great writer Russell Banks, who died in January this year.  Banks wrote stories about the working-class in New England and Florida – books like Affliction, The Sweet Hereafter, Trailer Park and Continental Drift.  In this book, Banks allegedly shows the historical roots of the land upon which Disney World sits – though by my geography that land is not quite the same as this. Clues in the book about Tampa being ‘north’ of this area are curious, as Tampa is west or southwest.  Constant references to the land being in “south central Florida” when it’s more like central Florida also belie the factuality. I’m assuming he did research into land records prior to their purchase by Disney and perhaps made up a connection – or not.

At any rate, the ‘magic kingdom’ in question is not the fake land of cartoons and nostalgia.  It is a real, religious Shaker farming community named ‘New Bethany’ covering 7,000 acres in central Florida, situated in the watery land of that area near what is now Narcoossee, just southeast of Orlando. The Shakers are a split-off from the Quakers. The colony is joined by a ‘communistic’ family leaving a utopian socialist commune in Georgia run by the Ruskinites, who move because the husband has died and the commune is failing.  On the way they spend time in an almost literal ‘slave’ plantation as the only white people, trapped in excruciating labor until they are rescued by a Shaker elder, Brother John.  That plantation’s labor was mostly supplied by convict leasing, per Jim Crow.  It's just after 1900.

The Memoir

This is a memoir of a teenager and then an old man, a real-estate speculator, Harley Mann, who lived on the Shaker commune for many years… and thinks he destroyed it.  Each chapter is based on his dictation into a reel to reel tape machine, tapes supposedly found in the ‘basement’ of the local library.  Florida buildings have no basements because of the water table, so that is a tipoff that the story might not be wholly true. Harley’s the one who supposedly got ahold of the Shaker land after the commune failed and sold it to Walt Disney.  This guilt suffuses the book - about this lost world in the mangroves and cypress swamps, about his first love, about Elder John who was the architect of the successful farms, the sad fate of the colony, estrangement from his own mother, sister and brothers, about his lost youth and lost reality. 

It is the early 1900s.  At New Bethany, teenaged Harley doesn’t buy the Shakers’ religious hokum but he attempts to be a celibate like the Shakers (they cannot have sex so they have to recruit to survive); hard working, community-oriented and ignorant of the outside world. He becomes a bee keeper for the colony, learning from an older worker.  He gets no pay, just his room and board, along with his family. His romantic and sexual crush on a frail tubercular woman who visits and eventually settles in New Bethany does this world in. Wild animals, fires, sinkholes, storms and jealousy and hypocrisy eventually ruin the massive farm, which was the most successful and efficient in the area. Even outsiders approved of its presence.  The community had drained the land and grew vegetables and fruit, milled grains, raised animals, sold eggs and honey, made furniture – almost everything a farm could do.  And what they did, they did well.  Elder John later becomes a successful businessman and politician in Tampa after the collapse – leaving his Shaker ways of not pursuing a profit.

Shaker colony near St. Cloud, Florida

Utopianism

To a socialist, there is more here than just a stock story of the frailty of human beings.  Utopian experiments surrounded by a sea of capitalism are fraught and many have not survived.  Marx himself argued against them as the method of overthrowing capital – though workers’ cooperatives have survived for years in some locations.  Banks was not a socialist, so instead he shows the huge benefits of collective labor and the pitfalls of personalist, religious collectivism … called sinkholes in the Florida context.  You might remember the Ruskinite community was also failing, so there is a pattern.

The ‘magic kingdom’ of the title is a functioning human community, not constructed of a plastic ‘Main Street’ but of cooperation.  Religious utopianism can be twisted, as is seen in many religious cults using free labor, enriching the leaderships of Scientology, the Branch Davidians, Rajneeshees or fundamentalist FLDS Mormonism.  But in this case of Shaker communalism no strata of brutal or totalitarian leaders emerged.  Just small, sad lusts and the involvement of the outside legal system, which led the elderly leadership to close the colony. 

Shakerism, still waiting for the Second Coming, was bound to fail, given their complete and typical religious antagonism to sexuality. Only 2-3 elderly Shakers are left, per Wiki, in one small town. Previously they had recruited from the many people left adrift by society, from poverty and jail, desperate, homeless, lonely or sick.  Now people have other avenues in which to survive, but in the 17, 18 and 1900s, Sharkerism might have been a logical social option in England and the U.S., a refuge of sorts for the dispossessed.

Russell Banks, like Cormac McCarthy, will be missed, as every one of his books has something valuable to say. Read on!   

Prior blog reviews on this topic, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms:  “Affliction” and “Rule of the Bone,” (both by Banks); “Slavery by Another Name,” “Cults and Cultists,” “The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx,” “Sick Puppy” and “Native Tongue” (both by Hiassen); “Florida Will Sink.”

And I got the book at the Minneapolis Library!

Red Frog

June 23, 2023

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