The Testaments

The Thirteenth Symposium

HISTORICAL NOTES

Being a partial transcript of the proceedings of the Thirteenth Symposium on Gileadean Studies, International Historical Association Convention, Passamaquoddy, Maine, June 29–30, 2197.

CHAIR: Professor Maryanne Crescent Moon, President, Anishinaabe University, Cobalt, Ontario.

KEYNOTE SPEAKER: Professor James Darcy Pieixoto, Director, Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Archives, Cambridge University, England.

CRESCENT MOON: First, I would like to acknowledge that this event is taking place on the traditional territory of the Penobscot Nation, and I thank the elders and ancestors for permitting our presence here today. I would also like to point out that our location—Passamaquoddy, formerly Bangor—was not only a crucial jumping-off point for refugees fleeing Gilead but was also a key hub of the Underground Railroad in antebellum times, now more than three hundred years ago. As they say, history does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.

What a pleasure to welcome you all here to the Thirteenth Symposium on Gileadean Studies! How our organization has grown, and with such good reason. We must continue to remind ourselves of the wrong turnings taken in the past so we do not repeat them.

A little housekeeping: for those who would like some Penobscot River fishing, there are two excursions planned; please remember your sunscreen and insect repellent. Details of these expeditions, and of the Gilead Period town architectural tour, are in your symposium files. We have added a Recreational Gilead Period Hymn Sing at the Church of Saint Jude, in company with three of the town’s school choirs. Tomorrow is Period Costume Re-enactment Day, for those who have come equipped. I do ask you not to get carried away, as happened at the Tenth Symposium.

Now please welcome a speaker familiar to us all, both from his written publications and from his recent fascinating television series, Inside Gilead: Daily Life in a Puritan Theocracy. His presentation of objects from museum collections around the world—especially the handcrafted textile items—has been truly spellbinding. I give you: Professor Pieixoto.

PIEIXOTO: Thank you, Professor Crescent Moon, or should I say Madam President? We all congratulate you on your promotion, a thing that would never have happened in Gilead. (Applause.) Now that women are usurping leadership positions to such a terrifying extent, I hope you will not be too severe on me. I did take to heart your comments about my little jokes at the Twelfth Symposium—I admit some of them were not in the best of taste—and I will attempt not to reoffend. (Modified applause.)

It is gratifying to see such a large turnout. Who would have thought that Gilead Studies—neglected for so many decades—would suddenly have gained so greatly in popularity? Those of us who have laboured in the dim and obscure corners of academe for so long are not used to the bewildering glare of the limelight. (Laughter.)

You will all remember the excitement of a few years ago, when a footlocker containing the collection of tapes attributed to the Gilead Handmaid known as “Offred” was discovered. That find was made right here in Passamaquoddy, behind a false wall. Our investigations and our tentative conclusions were presented at our last symposium, and have already given rise to an impressive number of peer-reviewed papers.

To those who have questioned this material and its dating, I can now say with assurance that half a dozen independent studies have verified our first assumptions, though I must qualify that somewhat. The Digital Black Hole of the twenty-first century that caused so much information to vanish due to the rapid decay rate of stored data—coupled with the sabotage of a large number of server farms and libraries by agents from Gilead bent on destroying any records that might conflict with their own, as well as the populist revolts against repressive digital surveillance in many countries—means that it has not been possible to date many Gileadean materials precisely. A margin of error of between ten and thirty years must be assumed. Within that range, however, we are as confident as any historian can usually be. (Laughter.)

Since the discovery of those momentous tapes, there have been two other spectacular finds, which, if authentic, will add substantially to our understanding of this long-gone period in our collective history.

First, the manuscript known as The Ardua Hall Holograph. This series of handwritten pages was discovered inside a nineteenth-century edition of Cardinal Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua. The book was purchased at a general auction by J. Grimsby Dodge, lately of Cambridge, Massachusetts. His nephew inherited the collection and sold it to a dealer in antiques who recognized its potential; thus it was brought to our attention.

Here is a slide of the first page. The handwriting is legible to those trained in archaic cursive; the pages have been trimmed to fit within the excavation in the Cardinal Newman text. The carbon dating of the paper does not exclude the Late Gilead period, and the ink used in the first pages is a standard drawing ink of the period, black in colour, though after a certain number of pages blue is employed. Writing was forbidden for women and girls, with the exception of the Aunts, but drawing was taught at schools to the daughters of elite families; so a supply of such inks was available.

The Ardua Hall Holograph claims to have been composed by a certain “Aunt Lydia,” who features somewhat unflatteringly in the series of tapes discovered in the footlocker. Internal evidence suggests that she may also have been the “Aunt Lydia” identified by archaeologists as the main subject of a large and clumsily executed statue discovered in an abandoned chicken battery farm seventy years after the fall of Gilead. The nose of the central figure had been broken off, and one of the other figures was headless, suggesting vandalism. Here is a slide of it; I apologize for the lighting. I took this picture myself, and I am not the world’s best photographer. Budgetary constraints precluded my hiring a professional. (Laughter.)

The “Lydia” personage is referenced in several debriefings of deep-cover Mayday agents as having been both ruthless and cunning. We have been unable to find her in the scant amount of televised material surviving from the period, though a framed photograph with “Aunt Lydia” handwritten on the back was unearthed from the rubble of a girls’ school bombed during the collapse of Gilead.

Much points to the same “Aunt Lydia” as our holograph author. But as always we must be cautious. Suppose the manuscript is a forgery; not a clumsy attempt made in our own times to defraud—the paper and ink would quickly expose such a deception—but a forgery from within Gilead itself; indeed, from within Ardua Hall.

What if our manuscript were devised as a trap, meant to frame its object, like the Casket Letters used to bring about the death of Mary, Queen of Scots? Could it be that one of “Aunt Lydia’s” suspected enemies, as detailed in the holograph itself—Aunt Elizabeth, for instance, or Aunt Vidala—resentful of Lydia’s power, craving her position, and familiar with both her handwriting and her verbal style, set out to compose this incriminating document, hoping to have it discovered by the Eyes?

It is remotely possible. But, on the whole, I incline to the view that our holograph is authentic. Certainly it is a fact that someone within Ardua Hall supplied the crucial microdot to the two half-sister fugitives from Gilead whose journey we will examine next. They themselves claim that this personage was Aunt Lydia: why not take them at their word?

Unless, of course, the girls’ story of “Aunt Lydia” is itself a misdirection, intended to protect the identity of the real Mayday double agent in the case of any treachery stemming from within Mayday. There is always that option. In our profession, one mysterious box, when opened, so often conceals another.

This leads us to a pair of documents that are almost certainly authentic. These are labelled as transcriptions of witness testimonies from two young women who, from their own accounts, discovered through the Bloodlines Genealogical Archives kept by the Aunts that they were half-sisters. The speaker who identifies herself as “Agnes Jemima” purports to have grown up inside Gilead. The one styling herself as “Nicole” appears to have been some eight or nine years younger. In her testimony she describes how she learned from two Mayday agents that she was smuggled out of Gilead as an infant.

“Nicole” might seem too young, in years but also in experience, to have been assigned to the hazardous mission the two of them appear to have carried out so successfully, but she was no younger than many involved in resistance operations and spywork over the course of the centuries. Some historians have even argued that persons of that age are especially suitable for such escapades, as the young are idealistic, have an underdeveloped sense of their own mortality, and are afflicted with an exaggerated thirst for justice.

The mission described is thought to have been instrumental in initiating the final collapse of Gilead, since the material smuggled out by the younger sister—a microdot embedded in a scarified tattoo, which I must say is a novel method of information delivery (laughter)—revealed a great many discreditable personal secrets pertaining to various high-level officials. Especially noteworthy is a handful of plots devised by Commanders to eliminate other Commanders.

The release of this information touched off the so-called Ba’al Purge that thinned the ranks of the elite class, weakened the regime, and instigated a military putsch as well as a popular revolt. The civil strife and chaos that resulted enabled a campaign of sabotage coordinated by the Mayday Resistance and a series of successful attacks from within certain parts of the former United States, such as the Missouri hill country, the areas in and around Chicago and Detroit, Utah—resentful of the massacre of Mormons that had taken place there—the Republic of Texas, Alaska, and most parts of the West Coast. But that is another story—one that is still being pieced together by military historians.

My focus will be on the witness testimonies themselves, recorded and transcribed most likely for the use of the Mayday Resistance movement. These documents were located in the library of the Innu University in Sheshatshiu, Labrador. No one had discovered them earlier—possibly because the file was not labelled clearly, being entitled “Annals of the Nellie J. Banks: Two Adventurers.” Anyone glancing at that group of signifiers would have thought this was an account of ancient liquor smuggling, the Nellie J. Banks having been a famous rum-running schooner of the early twentieth century.

It was not until Mia Smith, one of our graduate students in search of a thesis topic, opened the file that the true nature of its contents became apparent. When she passed the material along to me for evaluation, I was very excited by it, since first-hand narratives from Gilead are vanishingly rare—especially any concerning the lives of girls and women. It is hard for those deprived of literacy to leave such records.

But we historians have learned to interrogate our own first assumptions. Was this double-bladed narrative a clever fake? A team of our graduate students set out to follow the route described by the supposed witnesses—first plotting their probable course on maps both terrestrial and marine, then travelling this route themselves in hopes of uncovering any extant clues. Maddeningly, the texts themselves are not dated. I trust that if you yourselves are ever involved in an escapade such as this, you will be more helpful to future historians and will include the month and year. (Laughter.)

After a number of dead ends and a rat-plagued night spent in a derelict lobster canning factory in New Hampshire, the team interviewed an elderly woman residing here in Passamaquoddy. She said her great-grandfather told a story about transporting people to Canada—mostly women—on a fishing boat. He’d even kept a map of the area that the great-granddaughter gifted to us, saying she was about to throw out that old junk so no one would have to tidy it up after she was dead.

I’ll just bring up a slide of this map.

Using the laser pointer, I will now trace the most likely route taken by our two young refugees: by car to here, by bus to here, by pickup truck to here, by motorboat to here, and then on the Nellie J. Banks to this beach near Harbourville, Nova Scotia. From there they appear to have been airlifted to a refugee processing and medical centre on Campobello Island, New Brunswick.

Our team of students next visited Campobello Island, and on it the summer home built by the family of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the nineteenth century within which the refugee centre was temporarily located. Gilead wished to sever any ties with this edifice, and blew up the causeway from the Gilead mainland to prevent any land-based escapes by those hankering after more democratic ways. The house went through some rough times in those days but has since been restored and is run as a museum; regrettably, much of the original furniture has vanished.

Our two young women may have spent at least a week in this house, as by their own accounts both were in need of treatment for hypothermia and exposure, and, in the case of the younger sister, for sepsis due to an infection. While searching the building, our enterprising young team discovered some intriguing incisions in the woodwork of a second-storey windowsill.

Here they are on this slide—painted over but still visible.

This is an N, for “Nicole” perhaps—you can trace the upstroke, here—and an A, and a G: could these refer to “Ada” and “Garth”? Or does the A point to “Agnes”? There is a V—for “Victoria”?—slightly below it, here. Over here, the letters AL, referring possibly to the “Aunt Lydia” of their testimonies.

Who was the mother of these two half-sisters? We know there was a fugitive Handmaid who was an active field agent with Mayday for some years. After surviving at least two assassination attempts, she worked for some years under triple protection at their intelligence unit near Barrie, Ontario, which posed as an organic hemp products farm. We have not definitively excluded this individual as the author of the “Handmaid’s Tale” tapes found in the footlocker; and, according to that narrative, this individual had at least two children. But jumping to conclusions can lead us astray, so I depend on future scholars to examine the matter more closely, if possible.

For the use of interested parties—at the moment, an opportunity available only to symposium attendees, though, depending on funding, we hope to extend it for the benefit of a broader readership—my colleague Professor Knotly Wade and I have prepared a facsimile edition of these three batches of materials, which we have interleaved in an order that made approximate narrative sense to us. You can take the historian out of the storyteller, but you can’t take the storyteller out of the historian! (Laughter, applause.) We have numbered the sections to aid in searches and references: needless to say, no such numbers appear on the originals. Copies of the facsimile may be requested at the registration desk; no more than one each, please, as supplies are limited.

Travel well on your journey into the past; and while you are there, ponder the meaning of the cryptic windowsill markings. I will confine myself to suggesting that the correspondence of the initial letters to several key names in our transcripts is highly evocative, to say the least.

I will conclude with one more fascinating piece of the puzzle.

The group of slides I am about to show you portrays a statue located at present on the Boston Common. Its provenance suggests it is not from the Gilead period: the name of the sculptor corresponds to that of an artist who was active in Montreal some decades after the collapse of Gilead, and the statue must have been transferred to its present position some years after the post-Gilead chaos and subsequent Restoration of the United States of America.

The inscription would appear to name the principal actors cited in our materials. If this is so, our two young messengers must indeed have lived not only to tell their tale but also to be reunited with their mother and their respective fathers, and to have children and grandchildren of their own.

I myself take this inscription to be a convincing testament to the authenticity of our two witness transcripts. The collective memory is notoriously faulty, and much of the past sinks into the ocean of time to be drowned forever; but once in a while the waters part, allowing us to glimpse a flash of hidden treasure, if only for a moment. Although history is rife with nuance, and we historians can never hope for unanimous agreement, I trust you will be able to concur with me, at least in this instance.

As you can see, the statue depicts a young woman wearing the costume of the Pearl Girls: note the definitive cap, the strand of pearls, and the backpack. She is carrying a bouquet of small flowers identified by our ethno-botanist consultant as forget-me-nots; on her right shoulder there are two birds, belonging, it would seem, to the pigeon or dove family.

Here is the inscription. The lettering is weathered and difficult to read on the slide, so I took the liberty of transcribing it on the following slide, here. And on this last note I will close.