It was mid-October, and I was riding through the hot, flat farmland of California’s San Joaquin Valley, on a family outing. At the wheel of my car was April Gaede. April is in her late thirties and she has light brown hair. She grew up on a ranch and she looks a healthy, outdoorsy type of person. Sitting in the back were Lamb and Lynx, April’s twelve-year-old twins, pixie-faced little girls with blonde hair and blue eyes.
April was telling me about the twins’ debut CD, which they had finished recording a few months earlier.
“We’ve been making sure there are no National Socialist emblems on it so it can be sold in Germany,” April said. “It’s okay to have the word ‘Aryan,’ which is good because one of the song titles has ‘Aryan’ in it. ‘Aryan Man, Awake.’ But, like, we won’t have pictures of Grandpa’s cattle brand in there.”
Grandpa’s cattle brand, I knew, was a swastika.
“And then there’s a really cute picture of Lamb and Lynx saluting,” she went on. “We’ll take that out.”
“Sieg-Heiling?”
“Saluting. ‘Sieg Heil’ is what you say. Saluting. It’s a Roman salute.”
The name of the twins’ band is Prussian Blue. A folk band, but no ordinary folk band, Prussian Blue specialize in White Power music. They play a repertoire of cover versions of songs by skinhead groups, some traditional German songs, including the “Panzerlied” (the anthem of the German panzers), and a few original compositions by Lamb, “Aryan Man, Awake” being one of them, another called “Skinhead Boy.”
I’d spent several days filming April and the twins the previous year and been struck by the intensity of April’s beliefs and her readiness to recruit her daughters into the cause. In the months afterward, I’d stayed in touch with the family, curious how the girls were growing up, how fully they were absorbing their mother’s message, and how they were enjoying their growing status as White Power celebrities. I was also keen to meet the newest addition to the Gaede clan, little Dresden, named in honor of the city in Germany that was firebombed by the Allies during the Second World War.
Earlier in the day, on the way back from the restaurant where we’d had lunch, I’d asked about Dresden.
“It’s not like we named her Aryana or something,” April said. “To me that would be more extreme.”
“Yeah, but at least Aryana is a name,” I said.
“Well, Dresden’s a name. What about Paris? Paris Hilton?”
“If someone says, ‘Oh, that’s an interesting name,’ what do you say?”
“I say it’s a city in Germany. And then they’ll say, ‘Oh, okay. And you’ve been there?’ And I’ll say, ‘No, they make fine china and porcelain and stuff.’ And we’ll leave it at that. Unless I’m in a particularly ornery mood and then I’ll say, ‘It’s where the real holocaust happened.’”
Naming a baby Dresden was a little weird even to some other members of the white racist community. “It would be kind of the same thing if I had named one of my sons Adolf,” one concerned fellow racist had posted on a White Power discussion forum. “All young people—and especially girls—want nothing so much as to fit in and be accepted by their peers and friends . . . I worry that something like that could have the opposite effect and make her reject your beliefs, simply because they had been thrust without question upon her so completely in the form of her own name.”
“I don’t think it carries anywhere near the load that ‘Adolf’ does,” April had replied, “though I wouldn’t mind naming a son that either. My husband said no when I suggested it for a boy, and we settled on Wolfgang.”
My road back into their lives had not been easy. I’d called after I touched down in Vegas, months earlier. I’d called again in July, after I’d been to the Aryan Nations World Congress. But April had taken issue with aspects of the finished documentary. It had bothered her when I asked if she ever considered going into therapy to help overcome her powerful racial antipathies. “I had several emails from people in Britain saying they would kick your ass if they saw you because of that remark. They thought that was waaaay out of line.” She’d seen discussion on the Internet to the effect that social services should intervene and take the kids away from her. Not surprisingly, this had given her pause.
In September, I’d spent several days trying to negotiate my way into a “Pro-White” festival that April and the twins were attending, and where Prussian Blue was due to perform. It was called Folk the System. The website promised “a variety of folk-building and camaraderie-enhancing activities.” Sack races, ax-throwing, and caber-tossing were mentioned.
I wondered what a “Pro-White” festival might look like. I couldn’t help admiring the quirky idealism of taking a creed linked in most people’s mind with hate and trying to make it the basis for lighthearted social intercourse.
But April had not been won over by my numerous pleas and phone calls. Folk the System had come and gone, and I’d more or less given up hope of seeing April and the twins again. My suggestion, via email, of an outing to a theme park had been a last throw of the dice. April said she would think about it, but I was not optimistic. I told myself that her unwillingness to expose the twins to further publicity was a good thing. I’d always felt the twins were too young to be held responsible for ideas their mother had imposed on them. Though I was keen to see how they were changing, it was more important that they should have their anonymity and be allowed to lead a normal life.
I settled into an apartment in Hollywood and began writing up my notes from the other re-encounters from the trip. And then, having resigned myself to not seeing them, I received a message from April saying she liked my idea of an outing. She had a place in mind. A Halloween theme park. I wasn’t clear on the details, but it took place every October, with a large cast of ghosts and ghouls. Whatever twinges of conscience I had suddenly evaporated in the heat of opportunity. I bought Lamb and Lynx a couple of small Halloween gifts and drove up from Los Angeles one Saturday morning.
I’d first met April at a skinhead music festival in Riverside County, in Southern California. The event was called the Gathering of the Gods and featured six or seven “hatecore” groups. Brutal Attack, Final War, and Extreme Hatred were all on the bill. There were maybe 300 skinheads in attendance, dressed mostly in white vests, with tattoos. I’d hoped I might be able to interview one or two of the skinheads, and I gamely tried to engage them in conversation. “Hi, are you media-friendly?” I would ask. The reaction was not favorable. “What’s the point?” asked one. “You’ll just kike it up.” I, my director Stuart (who is Jewish), and our two-man crew had consulted with a pair of “security experts” from Pinkerton’s earlier in the day. The experts had explained that the skinheads would probably be members of the Aryan Brotherhood, a prison gang that would think nothing of attacking a couple of supposed “Jew journalists.” Unfortunately, the experts from Pinkerton’s couldn’t come with us into the event—that would have meant giving up their weapons at the gate, which they refused to do. They remained in a van down the block from the festival. In the meantime, we were to stay alert at all times and make sure we had a clear route to the exit.
As a result, the whole time I was at the festival I was in a state of anxiety, afraid one of the skinheads might try to “Jew-bash” me, looking about, like a driving-test candidate checking his mirrors. At first I didn’t notice when Prussian Blue took the stage.
Dressed in tartan skirts and boots, the two girls played a version of “Road to Valhalla,” a ballad by the British skinhead Ian Stuart about white racists in the afterlife. They accompanied themselves on the guitar and the violin. The audience of skinheads, who until this point had been moshing and giving Nazi salutes, stood still and listened. One or two wiped tears from their eyes. The girls beamed, and Lynx did a little jig in excitement.
I approached April, not realizing she was the twins’ mother, merely because, with no tattoos, and in her late thirties, she seemed one of the less intimidating people there. She said she would be happy to be in a documentary, and mentioned she was the mother of the two girls. Several days later, I drove four or five hours north to the small city in central California where they lived.
I arrived on a beautiful, cloudless day. Most of the days are beautiful and cloudless in that part of California. The only evidence of anything unusual about their house was a row of three pairs of skinhead boots by the front door, two small, one big. Had I been more observant, I might have noticed the bumper stickers on the battered white pickup truck parked in front: “Stop Hating My Heritage,” “Member Of The Ladies Sewing Circle And Terrorist Society” and “My Boss Is An Austrian Painter.”
The house itself was part of a new development on the outskirts of the small city where they live. It was a singlestorey, stuccoed building, with a tidy little front lawn and shrubbery (April was working part-time at a garden center). April answered the door wearing jeans and a black T-shirt with “Resistance” on it, the name of the skinhead record label that would be putting out the Prussian Blue CD. She introduced me to Lamb and Lynx.
The house was sparsely decorated. It had pale beige carpets and off-white walls and IKEA furniture made with blonde wood (even in matters of home decor April favors Nordic looks).
We agreed we might as well start with a recital, and so in the front room, Lamb and Lynx sang an a cappella version of a song by the British skinhead group Skrewdriver:
I wanna tell you’bout South Africa And the so-called fight for freedom The much-praised black resistance And the communists who lead them . . . Strikeforce! White survival!
Strikeforce! Yeah!
Strikeforce! Gonna kill our rivals!
Strikeforce! Into the Devil’s lair!
Each time they said “strikeforce” the girls gave a Nazi salute. When the song ended, I clapped, a little uncertainly.
“They don’t seem old enough to really know what that’s about,” I said.
“Well, I’ve explained it to them,” April said. “What’s the ANC?”
“It’s, um, African . . .” Lamb began, “National . . . ”
“Congress,” April said. “And what’s happening in South Africa?”
“The blacks are killing whites,” Lamb said.
“And in Zimbabwe?”
“And in . . . Bim-zah-bwe,” Lamb said, and looked out of the window.
“They seem a little young to get into politics and racial issues,” I said, adding “maybe” when I noticed April glowering at me.
“Yeah, but they’ve got to start sometime,” she said.
They had given their first performance at age eight, singing a White Power song called “Ocean of Warriors” at a “Eurofest” organized by the National Alliance, the neo-Nazi organization that April and her fiancé both belonged to.
In April’s version of the story, Lamb and Lynx had wanted to go onstage and sing a White Power song, having seen a woman perform “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” and figuring they could do just as well. The National Alliance leaders had been so impressed with the vision of the two little blonde girls singing racially charged songs, they’d offered to pay for the recording of a CD. How two little eight-year-old girls had happened to know all the words to a White Power song was another question. “I think they learned ‘Ocean of Warriors’ because I’d given my brother a copy and he just loved it,” April said, “and they wanted to sing it for him.”
Lynx gave a marginally different account: “My uncle liked it and Mom suggested learning it and we were okay with it. So she wrote out the lyrics, and when we were driving somewhere we’d have a little singing session.”
Either way, the band was born. The name Prussian Blue came a couple of years later. The girls read the name of the color in a magazine, April said—“and since their eyes are blue and my dad’s side of the family are Prussian Germans they thought it would be a good name for the group. Prussian Blue is also a compound that should be present in the residue left over from Zyklon-B and which is not present—get this—not present at the so-called ‘gas chambers’ in Auschwitz. It’s kind of tongue-in-cheek.”
They would promote racial pride among young white teenagers, an alternative to mainstream pop music, which April views as propaganda for the Jewish-dominated Establishment. “They’re going to show how being proud of your race is something that would be very appealing to young teenage girls,” she said, as Lamb flopped over the back of the sofa and Lynx giggled. “Especially as they get a little bit older. I mean what red-blooded American boy isn’t going to find two blonde twins, sixteen years old, singing about pride in your race . . . very few of them are not going to find that very appealing.”
The girls did not go to school. April educated them herself at home, according to a syllabus of her own devising. She used text books from the fifties. In her study, April showed me an ABC book she was working on for toddlers, entitled A is for Aryan. “Every letter has a word that is important to the white race or represents the white race,” she said. “So B is for blood, C is for creativity, D is for Dixie, E is for eugenic . . .” The artwork was being drawn by white prisoners, some of them incarcerated for hate crimes against nonwhite victims.
Lynx and Lamb were in the same room playing on the computer. I asked Lynx what she thought of April’s ABC book.
“It’s cool,” she said and smiled politely.
I spent two days with April and her daughters on that first visit. In those two days, she barely stopped talking about race. She inhabited a world in which every action was assessed according to how it would either help or hurt the cause of white nationalism.
A handful of times, I found a topic that might divert her for fifteen minutes or so into a race-neutral zone: the Beatles and Monty Python, Thomas Hardy (The Mayor of Casterbridge and The Return of the Native are her favorite books). The rest of the time, April was a one-woman White Power radio station, finding a racist dimension in the most innocent topics: The Lord of the Rings (“For me, it was totally racial”), Young Frankenstein (“by Mel what’s-his-name— that Jew”), the Harry Potter films (“When the goblins in the bank came on, Lamb turned to me and said, ‘They look just like Jews!’”). It struck me that she is not only a racist, she is also a racial fundamentalist—someone for whom loyalty to race was the guiding compass of her life.
April said she had been racist all her life. Her parents had raised her that way—though she allowed that she’d passed through a “brainwashed lemming” phase in her late teens and early twenties. She studied journalism in college, but dropped out and worked as a horse trainer. She only got serious about White Power politics around 2000, when her second marriage was breaking down. (Her first, the one that produced the twins, ended after her husband, a musician, got hooked on crack and crystal meth; now clean, he was totally supportive of her beliefs, she said.) In 2001, having shopped around and compared a few different racist groups, including a visit to the Aryan Nations in Idaho, April joined the National Alliance. Since then, she had been a tireless and dedicated white activist, leafleting local schools, writing letters, recruiting any white people she thought might be sympathetic.
We spent our second morning driving up to see April’s father, Bill, a cattle rancher who lives a few hours north. Bill grazes 500 head of cattle, every one of them branded with the official registered ranch brand—a swastika. I had been struggling to understand how April had become the way she is, and I was hoping Bill might provide some context.
Bill was seventy years old. He was wearing thick dark glasses, a cowboy hat and a torn Wrangler shirt. “Right now, all the people are so politically correct that they wouldn’t say shit if they had a mouth full of it,” he said, standing by his truck, which had a big black swastika on the side of it. I told him I was a multiculturalist. “Are you? When you get married, are you going to marry a white person or a nigger?”
This took me by surprise and all I said was, “Ugh.”
“What do you usually date? Do you usually date white women?” April asked.
I paused, and sighed, and said in a small voice: “Do Jewish women count as white?”
“No,” Bill and April said together.
“Not in our books,” Bill said.
“I think we should hope he marries some Jewess,” April said. “Won’t that be funny? A Jewish princess. She’s gonna have you right there.”
“Twisted right down,” Bill said. Then adopting a strange high voice he said: “Louis! I want a new ring, Louis! Flush the toilet for me, Louis! I can’t push the handle down!”
Bill went some way toward explaining April. But still, for singlemindedness, she was way beyond him. “My whole family agrees with all my beliefs,” April said, “but whereas they’re just believers, I’m an activist. They’re racialists. They’re nationalists. But they haven’t taken it to the next level.”
I wondered what it must be like for Lamb and Lynx, being exposed to April’s beliefs every day. To be fair, they seemed, much of the time, charming and well adjusted. But their mother’s skewed worldview would occasionally peep out. “Did you know Martin Luther King was a plagiarist and he liked to sleep with white prostitutes?” Lamb remarked on our first morning together.
Over lunch one day, Lynx told me how, though forbidden to have a Game Boy, she was allowed to play Ethnic Cleansing, a shoot-’em-up computer game put out by the National Alliance in which a skinhead goes through a ghetto shooting blacks and Mexicans. “They hide in bushes and they’re perched on basketball hoops and they make gorilla sounds,” Lynx said. “Ooh! Ooh! Ooh!”
Once or twice, I heard them using racial slurs—muttering “jungle bunnies” as we passed some black people in the car. Introduced to a man from New Mexico, Lynx said, “You don’t look like a spic.”
But I also sensed a wistfulness in the twins, a desire to be like other girls—to be normal.
In August 2004, a month before the conversation about Folk the System and the sack races, and despairing of ever seeing April or the twins for my “follow-up,” I made arrangements to visit the headquarters of the National Alliance in West Virginia.
Antiracism watchdog groups say the National Alliance is now the largest neo-Nazi group in America. They put its dues-paying membership at between 800 and 1,500. Unlike the Aryan Nations, the National Alliance is secular. It doesn’t field candidates for elections, it considers its function to “educate the public.” Its website speaks about its goal of achieving “White Living Space.” “We will not be deterred by the difficulty or temporary unpleasantness involved,” it says, going on to describe the racial utopia it envisions, a place where young women will waltz, reel, and jig but never “undulate or jerk to negroid jazz or rock rhythms.” Marc Chagall is singled out for special opprobrium as a Jewish artist, along with Barry Manilow—the surreality of this pairing rather serving to undermine the supposed value of racial categories.
Oddly enough, given its stand on “rock rhythms,” the National Alliance raises most of its money selling Nazi skinhead music on its label, Resistance. It also puts out a quarterly skinhead music magazine of the same name. But in its broader character, the National Alliance is at the intellectual, elitist end of the White Power spectrum. It is the Gray Poupon of hate groups. It publishes a bimonthly current affairs magazine, National Vanguard, and a monthly newsletter, Free Speech. Both contain articles on supposed Jewish world domination that are largely free of racial slurs but no less hateful for it. In a recent issue of Free Speech, a review of a book called Blood Ritual contained the line: “Naturally, the Jews aren’t the only group who have practiced (and might still practice) ritual murder,” going on to mention the Carthaginians and the Aztecs. This combination of a seemingly reasonable tone with a flat-out bizarre racial message, tossed in casually in parentheses, is typical of the National Alliance.
I drove up from Mississippi, where I’d been chasing gangsta rappers, through Tennessee, into West Virginia. The poorest state in the Union, poorer even than Mississippi, West Virginia is shaped like a stain on the map. Landlocked, bounded by rivers and mountains, it felt a little like the land that time forgot. I passed rickety old barns; elegant white shuttered houses with porches; a general store that stocked “lye soap” and “Amish cheese.” The countryside reminded me of England. Rolling hills and leafy trees looked down on fields and white wooden fences.
The headquarters themselves were a few miles outside the tiny town of Hillsboro, in the foothills of the Allegheny Mountains, which run like a spine up the border between Virginia and West Virginia and flow into the Appalachians. I drove up a rutted dirt road, past farm buildings and a mobile home, into the woods. There was a sign saying “No Hunting or Trespassing—Keep Out” and a small “life rune,” the logo of the NA, which looked like a capital Y with three forks. But no swastikas, no signs saying “Whites Only” as there were at Aryan Nations.
I was met by Shaun Walker. An ex-Marine and ex-skinhead and now the chief operating officer of the National Alliance, Shaun was a beefy man. He looked to be in his mid-thirties, and had a punctilious military manner—his hair was clipped at the sides and he was wearing a white button-down shirt and a tie with a tie clip. He also had the endearing habit of mispronouncing certain words. President Putin was “Pootnin.” He said “amalgation” for “amalgamation” and coined the word “sheerly,” a synonym of “purely.” Shaun took me on a tour of the headquarters, crunching up a gravel road to a Quonset hut—a hangar-like auditorium with 200 or more seats where they hold their biannual “leadership conferences.” The road was overhung with trees and crowded with bushes. Shaun cut an incongruous figure, deep in the wilderness, in his shirt and tie, as insects chirped loudly. He looked like some minister of a government in exile, biding his time, dreaming of the downfall of the occupying power.
“We want a white, sovereign homeland,” he said. “We’d like to use the existing borders. If we can expand the borders, that would be okay. If it’s a portion of the existing United States, that would be okay. There would be no permanent residence of nonwhites. You’d have to keep interracial mating away. If they want to come as tourists, okay, that’s not a problem. There’s only a problem if they want to move permanently or mix racially.”
When the National Alliance founder, William Pierce, bought the acreage in West Virginia in 1984, he’d envisioned it as a kind of proto-homeland, a first step on the road to an American Reich. “There was a prevalent idea of buying an area and selling parcels and starting a little whites-only community,” Shaun said. “That was the original intent. But communes don’t work. They never have.” By 1990, they had abandoned that idea.
We crunched up another gravel road to the warehouse for Resistance Records. Its shelves were stacked with boxes of racist CDs. Angry Aryans. Celtic Warrior. Blue-Eyed Devils.
“1993 is when the first American White Power CD was pressed,” Shaun said. “And eleven years later, we have around seven hundred, eight hundred, so the whole thing is geometrically expanding . . . We believe we’re the largest distributor.”
In a strip-lit back office was a store of other merchandise. Stickers saying “Earth’s Most Endangered Species—The White Race—Help Preserve It”; copies of The Jews and Their Lies by Martin Luther and White Power by George Lincoln Rockwell (the late American Nazi Party leader) alongside editions of Dickens, the Hornblower series by C. S. Forester and Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf. Two or three young men were stuffing envelopes, answering phones, and filling orders. Shaun said they have eight full-time staff at the headquarters and another eight around the country.
“When are you going to put Lamb and Lynx on the cover of the magazine?” I asked.
“This month!” Shaun said. “We’re actually making their CD right now. Oh, the little kids love it. In fact, there are little kids around the country that write’em letters and stuff.”
Shaun handed me the latest issue of Resistance, which showed a severe-looking Lamb and Lynx, in short tartan skirts and white shirts, leaning against a brick wall, hugging their instruments. Indeed, Lamb’s skirt looked hiked up—most of her thigh was exposed— and she was almost scowling. It was hard to judge, but the overall effect was somehow a little off-key. But it was a delicate point and I wasn’t sure how to broach it.
“Why aren’t they smiling?”
“I don’t know. April showed the twins a bunch of photos they had taken and that’s the one they picked!”
“Because they’re being, ah, how do you read that?”
“Uh, I read that as that’s the picture April sent us! Ha ha!”
“Hmmm.”
On the way out of the warehouse, walking back toward the main office, Shaun shared his opinion of the Aryan Nations. Butler, then still alive, was a good person, he said. “But the organization is just slap full of crackpots. And it has been infiltrated by the federal government since time”—as Shaun put it—“immortal.”
“They did seem like they were marching, uh, goose-stepping to the beat of a different drum,” I said.
“When you go and you meet people, and their media spokespeople that come to you, and if they strike you as weird or oddballs, that’s bad. People aren’t supposed to be oddballs.”
I felt Shaun and I were getting on quite well at this point, so I lowered my voice and confided: “But being a Nazi is pretty weird.” “Well, maybe. George Lincoln Rockwell was quite charming!”
“I’m speaking as someone who likes weird people,” I said, backpedaling.
“Adolf Hitler had so much personality and charisma.”
“I’m talking about nowadays. To be a Nazi sympathizer in this day and age. It’s odd, because it goes against what so many people feel, and what I feel, which is just that we should get along with people.”
“Yeah, but the problem is, Mother Nature says otherwise. Why does ‘white flight’ exist? Why in America has 50 percent of the white population moved in the last forty years? Why do areas like Detroit and Camden, New Jersey, exist? Why did all the white people leave? Biology is the reason! You can’t change it! They could buy a house for 10 percent of what they paid in the white area.”
“That’s what I did.”
“But most whites will not. You, I guess, get along better with them.”
Later, back at my motel, I read the interview with Lamb and Lynx in the new issue of Resistance. Maybe because they were speaking to a white racist publication the tone was different to the one they’d taken with me:
The use of a racial epithet surprised me. Likewise, the description of the nonwhite doll as ugly. There’s a kind of decorum practiced among certain white racists that dictates they don’t put down other races. Their beliefs, they maintain, have to do with pride in one’s own race. Hence, they style themselves “white separatists” rather than “white supremacists.” This was how they talked when their guard was down. And was Final War really Lamb’s favorite kind of music?
The photo of Lamb and Lynx in short skirts on the cover of Resistance spawned a lively discussion on White Power message forums on the Internet.
“Breaking News: National Alliance using kiddie porn now,” ran one post, with a copy of the cover pasted into the message.
“Who is running Resistance?” asked another. “Aryans? Or filthy kike pimps in Tel Aviv?”
“Do you think Hitler would have allowed his little girl out dressed like that?” asked a third.
Using her online name SheWolfoftheNA, April responded: “I would like you to understand exactly the aim of the cover of Resistance magazine this time. We are hoping to get the attention of young girls who are being bombarded with images like Britney Spears and the like. We are competing against the Hilary Duff/Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen phenomenon, and girls dressed like Little House on the Prairie won’t cut it. We need to be able to attract young women to our way of thinking in a way that will be timely as well as maintain our cultural and racial identification. The one thing that we lack more than anything are women in our white nationalist community. I believe that we need to attract them as young as possible and to do it in any way that works.”
It was true, I reflected, that teen idols on the Disney Channel dressed in a grown-up way and wore make-up; but as a rule, they also smiled in their photographs. The girls hadn’t smiled, I think probably because they wanted to look tough. But the combined effect of the short skirts and the not smiling gave them a kind of come-hither look that on twelve-year-old girls was, to say the least, disquieting.
When I saw them again the following year, on the way to the Halloween theme park, I asked April about the Resistance cover. I put it to April that she’d dressed the twins provocatively on purpose.
“But there’s no flesh showing!” she said. “I mean, they’re wearing leotards . . . At the very most, you could have said okay, maybe their skirts were a little short. But for them to claim it was kiddie porn? Did you see that? Isn’t that bizarre?”
“Well, I think they were trying to make a point by exaggerating.”
“Well, yeah, but that’s stupid. That’s like what the Jews do. That’s what we accuse the Jews of doing all the time, exaggerating figures and stuff to make a point.” “They said you were acting like a Jew,” I pointed out.
The Halloween theme park, when we got there, turned out to be a kind of epic version of the haunted houses they have at funfairs. There were walks through dark woods, a large spooky house, and a “hayride,” all of them staffed with people dressed up as ghouls and ghosts, looming out of the shadows, cackling, howling, and hooting.
I’m unusually sensitive to sudden loud noises, and I found the only way I could make it through the haunted zones without completely jangling my nerves was if I put my fingers in my ears and squinted. The idea of the outing, of course, had been to give me a chance to chat to Lamb and Lynx about the changes in their lives and about their beliefs. We’d done a little of that in the car. Lynx talked about the need for “real” diversity. What if lions and tigers interbred until there were none left, just a mixed-up species of half-and-halfs? Listening back to the tape of my conversation with the girls, I was surprised to hear myself say to Lynx, “Good answer.” Then I mentioned that “lygers” were real animals but that they, apparently, suffer from weight problems, as I’d learned on a TV documentary. I said this in the spirit of making a concession to her argument.
The truth was I felt odd soliciting incendiary remarks from Lamb and Lynx. Their comments about White Power had a rehearsed quality—they didn’t seem quite real. I had a feeling they would rather be listening to their Sony Discmans.
I was looking out for changes in them. They had both grown a couple of inches while I was away. They were a little more ladylike, wearing tiny amounts of make-up. Lamb had earrings. They had braces on their teeth.
“We have tickets to go to a Green Day concert on November 20,” Lynx said. “We know they’re not racial. They’re probably a communist band. But it doesn’t matter because it’s still good music and stuff. And it’s kind of upbeat and they’re talented musicians.” April’s mother had been waiting for us at the park. Her name was Dianne. She wore glasses and had short white hair. She grew up in England and came to America when she was fourteen. She babysat Dresden while we explored the park. After we’d done the walks and the hayride, we sat round in the concourse eating hot dogs while a rock band played and people dressed as zombies and ghouls mingled with the paying public.
“Are there still gaps where the buildings were bombed out in the Blitz?” Dianne asked.
“Not really,” I said.
“I was in Bristol. It was bad. So many derelict buildings. You’d see a bathtub two storeys up, just sticking out of the wall. They bombed Bristol pretty badly.”
“April likes him,” I said, meaning Hitler. It seemed rather an important point—destruction of Europe by April’s dear leader—but Dianne didn’t hear. “What do you think of April’s views?”
“I think the races should be separate. I’m not a fighter the way my husband is. You don’t want a khaki nation do you? I had a friend over in England. He said everyone was khaki!” She squeezed Lamb’s cheeks. “Look at that face. Isn’t it beautiful? Blonde hair. Peachy complexion. Why would you want to go and ruin it?
The following morning, dandling baby Dresden on her lap, April played me a song from the new CD that Lamb and April had written together called “Sacrifice,” about martyrs to the cause of white nationalism. “Sacrifice, they gave their lives, all those ones who died.” It mentioned Rudolf Hess and William Pierce, the founder of the National Alliance. There was also another cover of a song by Ian Stuart, called “The Snow Fell.”
“I can’t wait to do the video on this,” April said.
“You’re doing a video?”
“Yeah! And a DVD!”
There were microphone stands in the front room. The girls sang “Green Fields of France,” a song about the First World War, which had also been covered by Ian Stuart. It had been drizzling, and when they finished Lynx went to the window and said, “I like the smell after it rains.”
“Do you think you might be a stage mom?” I said to April.
“Do you think I’m a stage mom?” April said, with sudden intensity. “What is a stage mom? Is a stage mom someone who buys their kids musical instruments and hauls them off to lessons every goddamn week when she has laundry and a thousand other things to do? And gets them to an open mike night so they can perform and books them into a recording studio? Isn’t it someone that’s overwhelmingly controlling and overbearing? I don’t think you could accuse me of that.”
Lamb, who had been strumming chords on her guitar, announced that she had just written two new songs. With some deliberation, looking down at her fingers, she played a set of chord changes, and then said: “That’s the second one.”
“We could get some lyrics that someone sent us,” April said.
“Who sends you lyrics?” I asked.
“Racial people,” April said. “People in the movement. Prisoners.” “No, Mom. I want this song mainstream,” Lamb said. Then her tone softened: “So we can have some mainstream songs for shows.”
“Would you like Prussian Blue to be a mainstream band?” I asked Lamb.
“Somewhat, yeah. Um, we could also make a mainstream band, and that would be completely different.”
“What would you sing about in your mainstream band?”
Lamb was sitting on the sofa with her knees up inside her baggy T-shirt, like a tent. “Well, I’m writing a song about how you don’t have to do stuff just because other people say it’s cool. Like smoking and drinking. It’s called ‘You Don’t Have To.’”
There was one other big change in the twins’ life. They would be going to school the following year. April had found one that she was happy with. It was 70 percent white. She seemed excited at the prospect of sending Lamb and Lynx to school full of white racial propaganda. She had an idea that the diary of Anne Frank, which is part of the curriculum in California, had been written in ballpoint pen, which wasn’t widely available until after the war, and that therefore it was probably a forgery. “I’m certainly going to support them if they want to challenge their teachers, and if they want to write a paper about the Anne Frank diary being questionable or Martin Luther King being a degenerate,” April said. “I’ll go speak to their teachers and if they get downgraded for including stuff that’s factually accurate, I’ll go in and call’em on it.”
“What if they don’t want to do that?”
“How do you mean?”
“What if they don’t want to challenge their teachers. Would you support them then?”
“Yeah! Whatever they want to do.”
My own sense was that they’d probably want to make friends with classmates and get good grades rather than offer a National Socialist–influenced critique of the school curriculum, but I was no longer surprised that April might think otherwise. It reminded me a little of a fantasy I sometimes used to have myself of going back to school as a grown-up and knowing more than everyone else, putting the teachers in their place, except hers was a White Power version and she was living it through her kids.
I wondered how the baby would grow up. Lamb and Lynx were already eight years old when their mom became a “racial activist.” But Dresden would never know anything else. From her very conception, she was a kind of breeding experiment. A test case of racist child-rearing.
The twins were watching Green Day, whose videos they had on TiVo. April was holding Dresden in her lap and moving her like a puppet in time to the music. “Yeah!” she said in a baby voice. “Hopefoowy, she will get some musical tawent fwom somewhere!” Dresden danced around, seeming to enjoy it. Her hair was wispy, strawberry blonde. Her arms and legs were like marshmallow. She poked her tongue out and gurgled.
Lamb and Lynx said they were hungry. “What are we going to eat?”
“We could always stick a Jew in the oven!” April said. “Ha ha ha!” But she was still thinking about Dresden and her musical future. “You know what would be fun? You could have a bluescreen and make her dance and make her play all the different instruments and make it look like she was doing it all on her own.”