A few years ago, I was in Paris, taking a walking tour of the French Revolution, because that’s how I spend my vacations. I also took another walking tour on the Fourth of July about Thomas Jefferson’s Paris years, because I celebrate the Fourth of July—I do—but I take walking tours, I and the other retirees, because—I think I can bring myself to admit this—I am a history buff: I am one I-800 number away from ordering the Time-Life World War II series off the TV. I have set my alarm so I wouldn’t miss a C-Span morning live remote from the house of the Revolutionary War pamphleteer Thomas Paine. I celebrated my thirtieth birthday at Grant’s tomb. My airport reading material—a novelization of Gettysburg here, a Lyndon Johnson biography there—always receives an approving glance from whatever middle-aged man on my flight is perusing the new Stephen Ambrose book, because every domestic flight requires a middle-aged man with a Stephen Ambrose book in his carry-on luggage—it’s an FAA regulation.
When I was in Paris on the Thomas Jefferson walking tour, I learned that the core of the Library of Congress’s book collection was purchased from Jefferson after theirs got burned down by those British bastards. Though I could be wrong about that, since a car was passing and I couldn’t hear too well. Jefferson bought books every day in the bookstalls on the Seine, that I know, and, also, walked everywhere. Walked like a maniac apparently.
The French Revolution walking tour I took was mostly a drag, except for a gripping if questionable anecdote about Danton, whose lip was split when he was sucking milk from the teat of a cow and the bull came up and knocked him down and while he was lying there a bunch of pigs trampled his face. Nevertheless, according to the guide, an Englishwoman in a hat, the ladies adored Danton because he was “so vital.”
But there was this one part, this breathtaking metaphorical jackpot, in which the Englishwoman led us down a cobble-stone street, almost an alley, to the Rue St. Séverin. So we’re in the Rue St. Séverin, which she points out by waving at one of those blue street signs attached to the buildings there. Then she points past the blue modern street sign to the place where “RUE SéVERIN” had been carved into the masonry in the eighteenth century. In between the RUE and the SéVERIN is this rough indention. A hole. Englishwoman, who heretofore hasn’t been that dramatic, which is puzzling considering what’s more dramatic than the French Revolution, what with the guillotines and let-them-eat-cake (brioche, actually, I was informed). She flourishes at the scratchy hole thing and says that the word saint was gouged out during the revolution because the revolutionaries were running around destroying references to the church and the monarchy. It was a big rut in the stone where the Christianity used to be. Have you ever heard of anything so beautiful or perfect? A better picture of history itself, a kind of erasing and revamping with fresh new signs hanging below the telltale gaping holes, holes made with meaning and purpose and no small amount of glee? Well, right before some nice old priest got his head lopped off, but still.
The historical periods I like to learn about aren’t so much costume dramas as slasher flicks. The French Revolution is a favorite because it features the beloved plot of carnage in service of democracy, but I prefer American history. And if I had to pick my pet domestic bloodbaths, nothing beats Salem or Gettysburg. I’m a sucker for Puritan New England and the Civil War. Because those two subjects feature the central tension of American life, the conflict between freedom and community, between individual will and the public good. That is a fancy way of hinting that sometimes other people get on my nerves. I’m two parts loner and one part joiner, so I feel at home delving into the epic struggles for togetherness.
Plus, Puritanism and the War Between the States inspired some of the greatest American writing, scary sermons and Lincoln’s speeches, writing which asks, to me, the question: If you’re so gung ho on the fellowship of your countrymen, why have you had your phone off the hook for the last four days? I revere the idea of the Union, adore that phrase of Lincoln’s when he asked the country to carry on “with malice toward none.” And what of the prettiest Puritan sermon, the “city upon a hill” one John Winthrop delivered on a ship approaching Massachusetts in 1630? He aspired toward a covenant of community, decreeing, “We must delight in each other, make others’ conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, our community as members of the same body.” Are there any nobler words than that? And yet, did Winthrop ever live next door to a neighbor who was training a puppy? Would he have been so keen on us suffering together if he had just awoken to screams of “Naughty, naughty, no, no!”
The most bizarre episode in Puritan history is the Salem Witch Trials. Twenty innocent people were executed in Salem during the witchcraft hysteria of 1692. Which is horrifying, yet manages to make for a surprisingly nice weekend getaway. I went up one Saturday, ate dinner in sight of the Customs House where the Salem native Nathaniel Hawthorne began The Scarlet Letter, then got up for Sunday breakfast at the coffeehouse where the Sons of Liberty plotted the Revolution in 1776.
Salem boasts everything you would want from a trip down American memory lane, from information to anxious giggles. At the Witch Dungeon Museum, a place about as dignified as it sounds, there is the fun kind of bad actress in a period costume emoting through a reenactment of Elizabeth Proctor’s witch trial, “I am not a witch! I am innocent!” There’s a colorful old guy walking-tour guide named Bob who must not be a member of the chamber of commerce because he says things like “They hung dogs for being witches, that’s how stupid these people were.” There are freaky talking mannequins in the Salem Witch Museum that recite the Lord’s Prayer and while they do resemble shrunken apples they nevertheless help the visitor understand how hard it must have been for the condemned to say the line about forgiving those who trespass against us. There’s an old cemetery so archetypal it looks as though a child has drawn it as a decoration for Halloween. There is the seventeenth-century House of the Seven Gables that Hawthorne wrote about, where I decide to stop reading The New York Times “House & Home” section because, during the tour, the slave quarters strike me as really pretty. And there are a few yellowing historical documents to look at in the Peabody Essex Museum so that I don’t feel like a total cheeseball, even though I just bought a whiskey glass emblazoned with a little yellow highway sign with a silhouette of a hag on a broomstick that says, “Witch XING.”
On July 19, 1692, a woman named Sarah Good stood on the gallows and answered the minister making a last-ditch effort to get her to confess to witchcraft. She famously proclaimed, to the reverend and, I’m guessing, the town, “You are a liar; I am no more a witch than you are a wizard, and if you take away my life, God will give you blood to drink.” Could she have any idea then that, three centuries later, bloodthirsty tourists would sip her life story from a souvenir shot glass? What would she think of the local ice cream parlor going by the name Dairy Witch? Or that the high school football team is called the Salem Witches? Or that a cartoonish witch logo adorns the town’s police cars and newspaper? Or that the town that put her to death based on the harebrained testimony of a few teenage girls would remake itself as a vacation spot nicknamed Witch City?
As Bob the tour guide said of Salem’s witchcraft hysteria, “We’re not ashamed of it.” On the one hand, why not? It’s a shameful episode. On the other hand, there are few creepier moments in cultural tourism than when a site tries to rewrite its past. Once, I took a boat tour up the Hudson and visited a seventeenth-century Dutch farm. At the farm there was a different tour guide at each station—the bridge, the mill, the manor—and to a man (they were all women actually) they described the farm’s slaves not as slaves but as “enslaved Africans.” As in “The mill was worked by enslaved Africans.” Or “Over there were the cabins of the enslaved Africans.” Or “That was the job of the enslaved Africans.” After a while I couldn’t stand it anymore and cornered one of these shawl-wearing tour guides and asked point-blank why on earth nobody used the word slave. And in that singsong dialect of teenage girls, in which every sentence ends in a question mark, she replied, “Because ‘enslaved African’ describes slavery as something that was done to them? Instead of what they were? Enslavement was not their whole identity?”
“Um,” I asked, “isn’t the whole point about being a slave that you don’t have a choice to be anything else?” Prettying up the word slave with that adjective-noun construction makes “enslaved African” sound nonchalant. As in “Those were the cabins of the jolly leprechauns.”
This isn’t anything to be proud of. Those cringing, galling moments are, for me, one of the big draws of visiting historic sites in the first place. I’ll admit, one of my happiest moments in Salem was in a gift shop in which one of my fellow tourists asked the cashier if she was selling any “witchcraft trivets.” To which the cashier replied, “You mean a trivet with a witch on it?”
On one level I understand that it is a disrespectful affront to the twenty people who lost their lives—including Giles Corey who was pressed to death—to such a grave injustice that this tourist wants to remember his visit to their hometown by purchasing an object to protect his dining room table from a boiling saucepan. At the time, that didn’t stop me from enjoying a good chuckle at his expense. But once I returned home, I felt guilty.
I called my friend Kate, asking her if she could figure out why I do the things I do. Kate is a psychologist who counsels people with actual historical problems, like Kosovar refugees, at the Bellevue-NYU Program for Survivors of Torture. (If you really want to dampen your excitement about seeing the new Tom Hanks movie, just call Kate at her office to pick a show time and hear the receptionist answer the phone, “Program for Survivors of Torture.”) Kate asked what was wrong, and I told her that I’d just gotten back from Salem and I had a really good time.
“Is that normal?” I wondered. “How come I never go to the Caribbean or Martha’s Vineyard or someplace that’s a travel magazine’s idea of fun?” I told her how much I enjoyed the Rebecca Nurse Homestead near Salem. “Why should I want to spend my Saturday seeing the farm where a nice old lady who was hanged three hundred years ago used to live? I’m a pretty happy person. Why am I drawn to these gruesome places?”
“Well, its not denial,” Kate responds. “It’s the opposite of denial. Something is playing out in your unconscious. Maybe you feel guilty about your happy life.”
“But it’s not like I’m going to Gettysburg or Salem just to earnestly mourn. I go there and joke around. When I had breakfast in Salem, I ordered bacon, the food of joy.”
“So,” she says, “you enact your ambivalence. You feel two ways about American history. Your life turned out great, but you’re disgusted by the creepiness. So you take your own happy self to sites of disaster in order to deconstruct your ambivalence.”
“Isn’t that immoral?”
“No, that’s how we try to make sense of the worst horrors. We use humor to manage anxiety.”
Which got me thinking. I’ve been “managing” my “anxiety” pretty well lately. In fact, the last year has probably been the happiest of my life. So what does it mean that in the last twelve months I’ve taken trips to the sites of so many historical tragedies? Besides Gettysburg and Salem, I’ve dropped by Little Bighorn Battlefield (more ominous than Gettysburg in that a bunch of headstones mark the spot where soldiers in Custer’s 7th Cavalry fell down and died); the North Dakota ranch where Theodore Roosevelt escaped when his wife and mother died on the same day; Dealey Plaza in Dallas; and the George W. Bush inauguration.
If I had to nail down the objective of my historical tourism, it’s probably to collect evidence in support of my motto. And my motto in any situation is “It Could Be Worse.” It could be worse is how I meet every setback. Though nothing all that bad has ever happened to me, every time I’ve had my heart broken or gotten fired or watched an audience member at one of my readings have a seizure as I stand at the podium trying not to cry, I remind myself that it could be worse. In my self-help universe, when things go wrong I whisper mantras to myself, mantras like “Andersonville” or “Texas School Book Depository.” “Andersonville” is a code word for “You could be one of the prisoners of war dying of disease and malnutrition in the worst Confederate prison, so just calm down about the movie you wanted to go to being sold out.” “Texas School Book Depository” means that having the delivery guy forget the guacamole isn’t nearly as bad as being assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald as the blood from your head stains your wife’s pink suit. Though, ever since I went to Salem, I’m keen on “Gallows Hill.” As in, Being stuck in the Boise airport for ten hours while getting hit on by a divorced man with “major financial problems” on his way to his twentieth high school reunion is irksome, but not as dire as swinging by the neck on Salem’s Gallows Hill.
So if I have gleaned anything useful from reading and day-tripping through the tribulations of the long dead, it’s to count my blessings, to try and quit bellyaching, buck up. Can’t you just hear the children’s song:
Gallows Hill and Andersonville
It could be, could be worse
Another reason I’m intrigued with the hanged of Salem, especially the women, is that a number of them aroused suspicion in the first place because they were financially independent, or sharp-tongued, or kept to themselves. In other words, they were killed off for living the same sort of life I live right now but with longer skirts and fewer cable channels.
On the first day of school when I was a kid, the guy teaching history—and it was almost always a guy, wearing a lot of brown—would cough up the pompous same old same old about how if we kids failed to learn the lessons of history then we would be doomed to repeat them. Which is true if you’re one of the people who grow up to run things, but not as practical if your destiny is a nice small life. For example, thanks to my tenth-grade world history textbook’s chapter on the Napoleonic Wars, I know not to invade Russia in the wintertime. This information would have been good for an I-told-you-so toast at Hitler’s New Year’s party in 1943, but for me, knowing not to trudge my troops through the snow to Moscow is not so handy day-to-day.
The other sort of useful thing the history teacher in the brown jacket never really said, probably because he would have been laughed out of the room, was this: knowing what happened when and where is fun. The next time I go to Paris, before I get my first croissant, I’m heading straight to that street and look for that hole. That hole was the best part of my trip. It’s even more enjoyable to learn hole-like factoids about where you live, because you can see them all the time. Picking up my dry cleaning in my neighborhood, Chelsea, seems more festive since I found out that this is where Clement Clarke Moore wrote “’Twas the Night Before Christmas.” (Well, until some historian proved that Moore lied and stole the poem from someone else, but, hey, the plot thickens.)
The more history I learn, the more the world fills up with stories. Just the other day, I was in my neighborhood Starbucks, waiting for the post office to open. I was enjoying a chocolatey caffé mocha when it occurred to me that to drink a mocha is to gulp down the entire history of the New World. From the Spanish exportation of Aztec cacao, and the Dutch invention of the chemical process for making cocoa, on down to the capitalist empire of Hershey, PA, and the lifestyle marketing of Seattle’s Starbucks, the modern mocha is a bitter-sweet concoction of imperialism, genocide, invention, and consumerism served with whipped cream on top. No wonder it costs so much. And, thanks to Sophie and Michael Coe’s book The True History of Chocolate, I remembered that cacao beans were used as currency at the moment of European contact. When Christopher Columbus’s son Ferdinand captured a Mayan canoe in 1503, he noticed that whenever one of the natives dropped a cacao bean, “they all stooped to pick it up, as if an eye had fallen.” When you know such trivia, an act as mundane as having an overpriced breakfast drink becomes imbued with meaning, even poetry. Plus, I read a women’s magazine article called “5 Fabulous Morning Rituals,” and it said that after you “bask in bed” and “walk in nature” you’re supposed to “ponder the sins of the conquistadors.”