“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
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