“Prophetic & Scary” — A Quaker Mystery from 1993 That “Foretold” the Course of U.S. History Til Today

I

In 1992, I spent much of my free time planning a murder.

I mapped it out it out to the last detail: victim, weapon, motive, opportunity, covering the tracks, the whole meticulous homicidal mess. In the end, it went almost exactly according to plan, and was a complete success.

Almost.

Fortunately for all concerned, the murder was fictional: the plot of a mystery novel,
Murder Among Friends, published in 1993. It sold out two printings; that was the successful part.

But I’m remembering it now for a different reason. One of its central plot elements, indeed the underlying theme — the reason I wrote it —was not the homicide, but the context: the murder was a portent, a forerunner of a larger real-life conflict, with a grim history and an ominous future. I could feel it coming then; two decades later, long after the novel ended with this part unresolved, it has moved from fiction to perilously close to fact.

Its history was our American Civil War (the first one): my tale was set in one of its most contested killing fields, the splendid and fertile Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, near Winchester. The Valley was fought over repeatedly, and changed hands between Blue and Grey dozens of times. Today its landscape is dotted with battlefield memorials and war cemeteries.

It seemed an apt locale for early warnings of a potential repeat catastrophe. Further, the Valley had the other feature I wanted for my story: a long and turbulent, but little-known Quaker presence.

So my mystery began with an old Quaker peace activist, named Lemuel Penn, on the verge of realizing a long-held dream, bringing an armistice — not to some tangled international conflict, but among an almost equally fractious group — Quakers.

To attract the more suspicious and separatist factions, Penn invites a fire-breathing evangelical radio-TV preacher, Rev. Dr. Ben Goode, who surprisingly agrees.


But once there, Goode clashes with a gay Quaker activist, Eddie Smith. But then (spoiler alert) Goode turns up murdered, Smith is the prime suspect, loudly protesting his innocence. Penn, along with Smith’s buddy Bill Leddra, set out to clear Smith by finding the actual killer.


Hardly an untypical mystery setup.


But all this whodunnit business is background for the book’s deeper conflict, embodied by Gus Murray, one of Goode’s sidekicks and strategists. For Murray, Goode’s rightwing revivalism was to be the opener to a larger, more ambitiously  theocratic crusade, and he’s determined to see it through.


Murray and Leddra have an encounter which sums up this approaching clash, and that scene has come to my mind often of late. One reader of Murder Among Friends called the book “prophetic and scary.” I’m not sure about the prophetic part — other writers also saw what was coming; but it was scary reading then, and it’s less and less fictional now.

At this point, I’m not planning to write a sequel.

But many of us may be about to live one.

Meantime, the book is still available, at this link. But here’s the passage, for the curious, and — not least — the insufficiently apprehensive:

From Murder Among Friends:

Setting the scene . . .

Major Hawks: The Yankees don’t seem willing to quit Winchester, General Stonewall Jackson: “Winchester is a very pleasant place to stay in, sir.”
–March 23, 1862, at the First Battle of Kernstown-Winchester, Virginia

CHAPTER ONE

“Sic Juvat Transcendere Montes.”  (Thus it is enjoyable to cross over the mountains.)
–Motto of Governor Alexander Spotswood’s 1716 expedition, claiming the Shenandoah Valley for George I.

Summer, 1991

“On a clear day in 1864,” I said, pointing to the northwest, “you could see all the way to Winchester from here, twenty-some miles.” 

My arm swept a few inches to the left. “And even farther from over there at Signal Knob. That air almost won the Civil War for the South.”

“It wouldn’t help them much today,” Eddie Smith said, squinting into the haze. “I can barely see the other side of Front Royal.”

We were standing at the Shendandoah Valley Overlook, the first one after the northern entrance to the Skyline Drive. To a reasonably tuned-in observer of Washington area biped fauna, we would have been as easily identifiable as a whitebreasted nuthatch to a practiced birder:

Eddie in shirtsleeves and Levi’s, mid-thirties, a short beard, close-cropped wavy black hair and glasses. Me, William  “Bill” Leddra, in a battered Baltimore Orioles cap, prescription shades and chinos, pushing the mid-forties and the 190s, my beard a little thicker and a lot grayer.

Add to that my veteran Toyota. It had decals for WETA Public TV and Amnesty International on the rear window, plus a Greenpeace “Love Your Mother” bumpersticker  Added up, these signs would leave no room for doubt what we were:  A couple of liberal Beltway policy wonks on vacation. . . .

[Fast forward]

. . . The cafeteria was noisy with the buzz of Quakers getting acquainted and reacquainted, as were we. And there was the hint of a smile on Rita Gillespie’s face as she talked, signaling the possibility of more pleasure in our conversation than her story deserved, something I was anxious to encourage. 

We had reminisced a bit about the salad days of the late Sixties, then caught up on work (she was now Associate Curator of Special Collections at Barnard College), and family (she left her husband three years ago; their son, now 12, was living with him in Queens). She had also given me her quick and dirty take on the leading Quaker evangelicals at the conference

“Horace Burks’s dream is to plant a thousand new churches through telemarketing,” she said.

“Telemarketing?” I gaped at her. “For churches?”

“Oh, yes,” she assured me. “He did a briefing on it last night. It’s the latest thing in evangelism. And Lyndon Coffin wants him to run a pilot program for them in Indiana. They’ve been losing members fast out there, and he thinks it could save their bacon. That is, as soon as every Quaker body gets out of the National Council of Churches.” 

“The National Council of Churches?” I asked. “Are we in that?”

Rita laughed, and it was a hearty, vigorous laugh. “I don’t know,” she said. “I think so.” 

I can’t say I cared much one way or another about the National Council of Churches.

But I liked the way this conversation was going. 

It was at this point that Augustus “Gus” Murray arrived with a buttinski question about Eddie’ Smith’s  blowup  over the fierce opposition his Queer-friendly display. Gus was,  Rita had also said, President of the Center for Public Renewal in Washington. And he sat his tray of roast beef and glutinous gravy down right next to her without even a by-your-leave.

I scowled and speared some more salad. So much for getting re-acquainted with Rita at this meal.

Murray was scholarly-looking, with thick glasses, nerdily slicked back hair and manners much too refined for the assembly line food we were eating. In fact, he was a misplaced mandarin in our whole deshabille Quaker ambiance: the suit was too well-tailored for a Friends pastor, but the liberal Quakes wouldn’t be caught dead in such getup either, especially away from the office. And even the pastors, some of them anyway, wouldn’t have called Smith “Mister.”  Avoidance of titles was one of the few classic Quaker traditions they remembered, at least at conferences like this one.

For Murray, though, it was part of the civility necessary for productive dialogue on issues, and he was big on civility. It was a key part of his Center’s image, at least as I had heard of it around town. They were continually putting on forums and conferences on topics like “The Social Issues As The Key to Realignment,”  “Recovering Authentic Values From the Wreckage of the Sixties,” or, “Golden Age or Dead End?  A Balanced First Look at the Reagan Years,” in which a few well-patronized liberals were surrounded and out-talked by a phalanx of rightists.

Ah, the fun you could have with right-wing foundation money.

So when he asked about Eddie, I was inclined to be guarded in response. I wasn’t ready to pick up on Eddie’s harangue; I wasn’t even sure I wanted to be associated with it. But doing intelligence work for Murray wasn’t my cup of tea either. I swallowed the mix of limp lettuce and sallow tomato slices, gagging slightly on an extra-crunchy white-toast crouton.

“We attend the same meeting,” I said noncommittally.

Murray sipped from his water glass. “Is he often that, uh, vehement?” he asked. One eyebrow was slightly raised, emphasizing the understatement.

That was easier. “No,” I answered. “In fact I don’t think I’ve ever seen him that upset.” 

This was a line of questioning I was anxious to deflect, with one of my own. “How did you come to be here with, uh, Dr. Goode?”

Skipping the title here seemed like going along with a PR image of affability that I found distinctly distasteful.

“He’s working with us on the Crusade,” put in the Reverend Tommie Lee Brewer, who was settling at Murray’s right. Wiping his broad, perspiring face with a paper napkin, he smiled broadly, too easily for me.

“Yep, Gus and the Center are gonna be the real brains of the operation.”  Brewer was round and much more roughlyhewn than his partner. The effect of his expensive suit was spoiled by a tie which had “Jesus Is Lord” machine-embroidered on it in an italic, repeating pattern of silver and maroon. . . .

“Gus is gonna run the office and handle the communications end,” Brewer continued. “He’s getting some real pros in on it. It was his idea to kick it off here tomorrow.”

“Kick it off?” I asked, my throat feeling suddenly dry. “Kick what off?”  I shot a glance at Rita; she looked embarrassed and wouldn’t meet my gaze.

“The Crusade for Family Values,” put in Horace Burks, beaming across at Brewer from over a cup of coffee.

All at once I felt surrounded.

“It’s quite an honor for us, really,” Burks bubbled. “A chance to rededicate the Friends movement to genuine old-fashioned family values again. It’ll give us a real boost in our church-planting, I just know it.”

He turned toward Murray. “Do you think it will make the evening news shows?”

“We’re hoping,” Murray said modestly. “We could use a little publicity. This is a bit more activist than our usual program.” He reached into his jacket and handing me a brochure about the Center.

I glanced obliquely at it; the heading read, “To Shape America’s Future.”  I set it delicately down by my fork, and was not sorry when a drop of salad oil made a small dark spot on the textured paper.

Murray was droning on. “I’ve thought for some time we were perhaps getting too exclusively academic at the Center,” he said. “Policy debates in Washington are necessary, of course, but the pressure for real change ultimately comes from the grass roots. So this will add a somewhat different approach to our traditional agenda.”

He glanced at me. “I’m looking forward to it. A press conference would be fun.”

Fun? I thought. A press conference for Reverend Dr. Ben Goode at a Quaker gathering?  

[Fast Forward]

Murray was warming to the microphone, his tone more professorial, almost pedantic after Brewer’s fervor. “This fiasco shows only too well the ultimately disastrous consequences of the Enlightenment Project of unfettered individualism,” he intoned.

“What’s he talking about?” I whispered.

Lemuel Penn only shrugged.

“These homosexuals,” Murray went on, “are like other special interest groups of deviants today, demanding their so-called rights, regardless of the communal imperatives of two thousand years of Judeo-Christian morality and culture.”

His tone was sliding toward the oratorical. “And as we see here today, the common norms of civility that make the public square a safe place for authentically democratic, reasoned discourse are cast aside as soon as they fail to serve their agenda.”

He shook his head, and leaned back. .“The conflict between their obsession with rights and our determination to uphold traditional, objective values is irreducible, and as far as I can see, irreconcilable.”

“If I hadn’t earned a masters degree,” Penn whispered back drily, “I don’t think I’d understand a word he’s saying.”

“I gather it means he doesn’t like it that the Queer Commandos are coming,” I concluded.

“I don’t much like them either,” Penn said. “We don’t need a mass march of blatant homosexuals this weekend any more than we need a swarm of fundamentalists.” 

He shook his head. “What next?”

[Fast Forward]

Eddie turned to his bag again, talking rapidly to Russell. I stepped out of the room, heading to the bathroom, for a preroad leak. As I pushed through the door, steam was rising from the shower room, and Gus Murray was at the sink, wet hair slicked down, a towel around his middle, one side of his face lathered white. His glasses lay on the edge of the sink, beside the can of shaving cream.

“Not exactly a normal day,” he said mildly, raising a Bic to his white cheek.

“You got that right,” I said, heading for the urinal. “And more to come.”

  • “Ummm,” he responded, guiding the blade carefully around the point of his chin. The razor swished in the sink. “You gonna march with your friend on Saturday?”

The abrupt coolness of the query put me on guard. I shook off the drips and zipped my fly. “Haven’t thought that far ahead,” I answered, honestly. “You’ll be at the stadium, I suppose?”

He nodded slightly, squinting at the mirror to maneuver the razor without his glasses. “I won’t be on the podium,” he said after the stroke. “I’ll be doing media arrangements. There’ll be hordes of ‘em. Probably one for every deviant marcher.” 

Civil War cemetery, Winchester VA.

He smirked. “They’ll be invading quiet Winchester like Sheridan’s army.”

“And you’re going to be Jubal Early?” I said, edging into sarcasm. Jubal Early was a wily Confederate tactician.

Murray stayed cool. “No,” he parried, “just think of me as Captain Jed Hotchkiss, the mapmaker who showed Early where to  counterattack.”

U.S. General Phil Sheridan, at work.

“So Brewer gets to be the General?” I said.

“Yep. Except,” Murray’s expression had become arch, “Doctor Brewer won’t be Early. Early was brave, but in the end he was a loser.”

“Of course,” I was simpering myself. “I should have guessed. He gets to be Stonewall Jackson.”

“That’s it. The brilliant Valley Campaign of 1862 will rise again.”

I was about to ask if he was going to suck lemons, too, as Stonewall Jackson reportedly did. But suddenly I felt tired of the conceit; something about it was nagging at me. “Do you really believe all this Center stuff about a new civil war?”

“What do you think?” Murray retorted. “In our culture we’ve now got two incompatible worldviews, with contradictory definitions of humanity, fundamentally opposed understandings of morality and community. And like your hero and mine honest Abe said, ‘A house divided against itself cannot stand.’”

The Bic made one last long stroke. “I’m all for civil debate and democratic processes,” he went on. “But there are some struggles you can’t escape, or compromise. For Abe, ultimately it was slavery. Now it’s abortion, marriage and the family”

he rubbed a white towel across his chin. “In such a context, liberal talk of tolerance and pluralism is just an obtuse way of saying ‘be reasonable, do it our way, and let the gays and the abortionists take over.’”

He sighed. “I’ve been in denial about it like everyone else. But I see now that last night was as inevitable as

The Battle of Cedar Creek, near Winchester: Sheridan vs. Early, October 1864

Harper’s Ferry in 1859. Oh, it didn’t have to happen here. It didn’t have to be Dr. Goode. But it was coming.” 

He picked up his glasses and rinsed them under the faucet. “One side’s gonna win the right and the duty to shape America, and through it much of the world, and the other side will lose.”

He put on the glasses. “Bottom line. Like it or not, it’s a zero sum game.”

I didn’t buy it. “Does it really have to be either/or?” I objected. “Seems to me there are a lot more than two sides to most important questions, and a lot more than two groups in society. Why can’t we just muddle through, to some ambiguous and untidy set of compromises we can’t imagine yet?”

Murray wrapped the towel around his forearm. “It’s a nice thought,” he said. “What I’d expect of a Quaker and I mean that as a compliment, at least in an ultimate, theological sense.” Now he was glaring at me sidelong in the half-fogged mirror over the sink. “Where’s the compromise position for the preborn child when its mother goes into an abortion clinic?  How is that baby supposed to tolerate what’s about to happen?”

He noticed a spot near the base of his right nostril that had escaped the blade. But when he applied the razor, it slipped a bit.

“Damn,” he swore, as a bright crimson line trickled down to his full upper lip. He swiped at it with the towel, but the red kept coming, and he stood there with the towel pressed to his nose. The cut made him more implacable.

“Same with the family,” he said. “It’s the best-no, the only way to reliably produce healthy, law-abiding children, and then responsible adults. It’s not one option among others, like one boutique among dozens in the grand lifestyle shopping mall. Civilization depends on it.”

“Bottom line again, I suppose,” I said.

He lifted the towel gingerly, and the bleeding had stopped. “You live in DC, don’t you?” he said, pulling out the clincher. “You should see the proof of that every day.”

I just grunted, refusing to rise to the bait. Families are fine; but Washington’s many pathologies looked to me like better proof of a society reaping the whirlwind sown of its own racism and militarism. But it takes me half an hour just to get warmed up on an that.

Hell, I thought, for that matter, DC locks up people, mainly young black men, at a faster rate than most other American cities, and it hasn’t helped do anything except train more older black male criminals. Then there’s the haunting, multiracial legion of homeless people wandering its streets, prattling, pissing and panhandling—they’ve been one of its few growth industries in the Reagan-Bush years. I take every one of them as a prophetic sign of judgment on that blighted decade, and those who have fattened on it.

But this tirade was internal; I had no energy to get into it here. There was something desolating about the vision Murray was laying out. Especially with the evidence of Goode’s death on his side.

Yet as it sank in, my sense of historical parallels felt scrambled. He might be comparing Goode’s murder to Harper’s Ferry, and that made some sense. Yet he was the one who sounded like John Brown to me.

I took another, oblique track. “Do you think Goode can really serve as the symbolic martyr in this apocalyptic struggle?” I asked. “Isn’t there something archetypally self-destructive about these bigtime evangelists?  You know, Bakker and Swaggart, and Oral Roberts?  It seems like only a matter of time before some bimbo, or even a bimbo boy, turns up in their beds. Or the bank account comes up mysteriously empty. Or both.”

Murray’s face showed distaste; he clearly didn’t appreciate the comparisons. “Goode is no Swaggart,” he said vehemently.

Was no Swaggart,” he corrected more quietly. “But I suppose you’re going to help those Queer Commandos try to wreck his good name.”

“I’m not interested in wrecking anybody’s good name,” I said. “But I do want to help my friend, who may be innocent.”

“I doubt that.”  Murray was rubbing some aftershave on his cheek. He grimaced when it reached the cut. The odor was acrid and alcoholic.

“As for Goode, look all you want. Sure, he was human, but you won’t find any bimbos, male or female. He was no Jim Bakker.”

He adjusted his glasses, and regarded himself in the mirror. “Of course,” he said thoughtfully, “there was that business with the radio tower….”

“The what?” I asked quickly.

The door banged open and Eddie looked in. “Hey, come on!” he called. “What’s the matter?  You constipated or something?”

Then he noticed Gus.

Murray’s face had gone rigid. “Get out of here,” he hissed at the mirror. I wasn’t sure whether he meant just Eddie, or both of us. But Eddie quickly retreated, and I turned toward the door.

“They never found anything on Stonewall Jackson either,” Murray called after me. “He lived clean, he fought clean, died clean. But even if you do find something, it won’t make any difference. It’s too late for that.”

Four years ago

The bathroom door banged behind me, and I had the cold feeling he was right. . . .

It is well that war is so terrible, or else we should grow too fond of it.

–Robert E. Lee, to Stephen Longstreet, at Fredericksburg, December 13, 1862

 

3 thoughts on ““Prophetic & Scary” — A Quaker Mystery from 1993 That “Foretold” the Course of U.S. History Til Today”

  1. Set in my old stomping grounds. I attended Mary Baldwin College in Staunton (“the Baldwin Nunnery”). Danced at the Jefferson Society Ball at UVA in white gown and long gloves. Guess which of your factions i’d be cast in? LOL

    1. Great to hear from thee, Julia, and it’s good to hear some of the atmosphere feels familiar. Has thee yet written your own story? It should be kept for future readers.

  2. Should I call it “Confessions of a Birthright Quaker Debutante”? I was presented at the Terpsicorean Society’s Ball by the Governor of North Carolina in Raleigh, with a side trip to Sunnymeade, my mother’s family’s plantation, to visit our cousin James Speed who was a state legislator. (She became a Quaker officially when she married my dad, but remained a Southern belle at heart, daughter of a rock-ribbed Southern Baptist and Methodist deacon.) Yes, same family as Joshua Speed, friend of Abe Lincoln. We are also related to the wives of Abe Lincoln and Robert E Lee. My mother was big into genealogy.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.