Mark was too angry to speak; he left the house and never returned. This was my first but not my last encounter with what seems to me a rigid, joyless way of viewing religion, a view I have never shared.
I found other, more congenial workers. The most memorable was Harvey, an African American brickmason from nearby Princeton. He tenderly fondled one of the old firebricks I had collected. “These are from a slow-fire, wood-burning kiln, Miss Jane. I like them. I’ll take the job. If you let me sleep here at night, I can finish the whole wall and the chimney in a week.”
Harvey was provided with a cot in the unfurnished house, and I brought his meals to him. He pretty much kept to himself because, in those days, blacks had to be inconspicuous in the all-white community of a small southern Indiana town. I spent my mornings admiring the artistry of his masonry; when he inserted an occasional black brick among the pinkish red and coral ones, the gesture seemed symbolic, reminding me that racial prejudice could infect northern communities as easily as those in the South. The town had disregarded Robert Owen’s belief that the role of rational religion in society was “in promoting, to the utmost in our power, the well being and happiness of every man, woman, and child, without regard to their class, sect, sex, party, country, or colour.”1
I found other employment for my child-labor gang: they followed me with my seven-inch disc sander to my next operation, at the house of George and Annie Rawlings, who had arrived from Ontario by 1950 (14 on town map). The boys helped me clean old bricks for the foundation of a modern greenhouse that George was supervising (16 on town map). We gathered the bricks from the town dump, where they and other objects worth salvaging had long ago been heedlessly discarded. The discovery of a limestone plinth was significant.
Students of our architectural history believe the plinth was once part of the Harmonist brick cruciform church. In the future, the plinth would reside at the center of the St. Benedict Cloister Garden near the New Harmony Inn (17 on town map). From the former site of the dump, Richard Meier’s glistening white Atheneum would rise in the mid-1970s as an orientation and education center for visitors (18 on town map). Fellow preservationists, don’t overlook the middens of your historic districts, and take with you eager scavengers like the boys who enlivened my excursions.
The hearth of No. V photographed by my friend Sibylle de l’Épine when she visited in 1950.
Blaffer-Owen family photograph.
After loading our discoveries on my golf cart, the boys would wave, like heroes in a ticker-tape parade, to pedestrians we zoomed past. They were proud passengers on the only golf cart in town, and they had a mission. Donnie Hatch’s wide grin shone through the brick dust on his face as he called out to passersby, “Hey, you guys, New Harmony is going to have a greenhouse!”
I shared his enthusiasm, but for a different reason. On the site where the Lab now stands, Father Rapp’s followers had built a marvelous greenhouse on rollers (to facilitate adjustment to weather changes) to house his orange trees. No records exist indicating that David Dale removed it to make way for his laboratory. Whatever the cause of its demise, I decided that a new greenhouse, albeit one without wheels, would serve a Harmonist tradition and protect potted plants in winter.
Donnie Hatch’s excitement, I think, came from an expectation of future amenities too long absent from New Harmony. A few years later he watched and welcomed the bittersweet advent of the first swimming pool in town, added behind No. V. It would be essential for Janie to exercise her polio-affected legs in water, but her primary thoughts were for others: “Oh good, Mother! We can teach everybody to swim!” It was equally important that New Harmony children have swimming lessons. Recent gravel digging in the Wabash had created dangerous eddies. The river where Kenneth’s generation had learned to swim was no longer safe, and too many local boys had drowned. My friend Don Blair, an engineer, agreed wholeheartedly with me that swimming classes were necessary; he supervised and recruited teachers to give lessons to all the children who wanted to learn. That first summer, Flossie Tanner, an Owen descendant and beloved civic leader, inspired by Janie’s outreach, initiated professional classes and taught for almost a decade. Other dedicated instructors followed Flossie and have for more than fifty years kept New Harmony boys and girls from drowning in the Wabash.2
Donnie rejoiced in learning to swim. But his hopes for a new school far from the heavy traffic of Highway 66 and with room for an athletic field, though legitimate, were premature.
Nevertheless, there were some instant gratifications for those of us who were learning that removal was as necessary as preservation. Between two Harmonist houses on Granary Street stood a decrepit barn, no longer a storage house for grain but a community center for rats. The low brick columns that supported the barn were high enough for people to throw garbage underneath. Providence alone spared New Harmony a bubonic plague. I finally managed to buy the barn and, with the deed fresh in my pocket, called my young friends to watch a tractor demolish the dismal eyesore. Their loud hurrahs buoyed my spirits. In fact, they still do. Whether clown white from falling plaster or dirt brown from planting squares of zoysia grass on the lawn of No. V, whether silent or cheering, my child laborers bolstered my sometimes insufficient faith. As much as the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins does, they taught me to believe that within each battered Harmonist house and “deep down” in each weed-filled vacant lot or ill-used parcel of land lay the “dearest freshness” and wellsprings of new life waiting to be tapped.
Why did I call my first Harmonist house No. V? There are several reasons for the numbered name of the house that strained my muscles but brought me freedom. Richard Smoley, in his excellent book Inner Christianity, reminds us that the human body is based on a five-fold pattern or pentagon. Leonardo da Vinci confirmed this geometric fact in his drawing of a man measured in ratios of five. Can we, then, with Smoley’s friend Aleister Crowley, dare to believe that not only the famous but also all human beings are stars? Not every child who learns to swim in No. V’s pool or learns the names of flowers in its garden will shine like a planet, but there is reason to hope that each of them may offer pinpricks of light in a darkening world.
And I devoutly hoped that the boys who attended our swimming classes, as they grew into their teens, would remember other lessons from No. V, in particular the difference between clenched and unclenched hands. It may seem necessary sometimes to tighten a fist to punch an adversary; but certainly not in New Harmony, or any town, should fists be permanently clenched. Released and splayed outward, the five fingers of either hand can wave hello to friends or strangers alike. Esther de Waal once told me, “If you want to keep your head, use your hands.” More recently, the Rev. Martha Honaker’s image of stewardship for her parishioners at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in New Harmony strengthened my case for relaxed and open hands: “When our fingers are tightly closed around something, they are unable to receive anything else.”
May all young graduates from our high school never forget that beyond New Harmony’s soup kitchen, which feeds hungry families of Posey County, too many empty and open hands, each with five fingers, reach out for food to sustain life. If No. V, the victorious firstborn of my New Harmony houses, has a message for the youth of the world, it is: “Watch your hands!”
The pool at No. V is ready for swim lessons offered through the Robert Lee Blaffer Foundation,