myth. Mason went on: “What was laid to the Indians charge was that they held a private correspondence with the Enemy Indians; but this could never be proved against the men, and the women and children (some in their Mothers wombs that never saw light) could not be guilty.”
Mason seems to have spent just a day in Lancaster, and it’s unclear whether his fellow surveyor, Jeremiah Dixon, went with him. Thomas Pynchon speculates that he did, and that at the murder site Dixon felt like a “nun before a Shrine.” Both Dixon and Mason had witnessed barbarity before—public executions, whippings, torture—but the Lancaster jail was somehow different, maybe because it signified a fundamental betrayal of the idea of America. “Is it something in this Wilderness, something ancient, that waited for them, and infected their Souls when they came?” Pynchon has Dixon ask.
Pynchon imagines the streets and corners around the jail brimming with activity during Mason’s visit: guides hawking tours; tourists with sketchbooks, easels, and specimen bags eager to document the crime scene, all drawn by “the same queer Magnetism.” By this account, the Lancaster workhouse was already on its way to becoming theater.
Mason jotted down his notes and went on his way plotting the line that would separate Pennsylvania from Maryland and eventually cleave a nation into North and South. Weeks after he visited Lancaster, five Cherokee were murdered as they slept in a barn in Virginia. Mason may have heard about these and subsequent killings in Detroit, Fort Pitt, New York, and Ohio. By the time he and Dixon finished charting their line in 1767, dozens of natives had been murdered and countless more were fleeing west. The two surveyors may have wondered what their boundary defined.
No one from the Paxton gang was ever punished for the murders of the Conestogas. John Elder retained his job as a Presbyterian minister until his death in 1792 and is today lionized on websites as the “fighting pastor of Paxton,” whose battle-ready parishioners killed the Conestogas “against his advice.” The pretty limestone church where he preached with a rifle beside him in the pulpit holds services every Sunday.
The Conestoga Indians themselves, as I have said, vanished. Even their bones disappeared—unearthed, reburied, and ultimately lost in Lancaster’s efforts to construct a downtown railroad line in the late nineteenth century. A few years ago, when I visited the State Museum in Harrisburg to see some of the artifacts excavated at Betty Witmer’s farm in Conestoga, a curator told me that while members of other Indian tribes often called about objects in the museum’s holdings (the day I was there a Delaware phoned), she had never received a call from anyone claiming to be either a Susquehannock or a Conestoga. It’s as if they’d never existed.
Some of the petroglyphs in the Susquehanna River were altered in the 1930s by the construction of a hydroelectric dam just upstream. Officials removed several dozen sections of inscribed rock before the dam went up, but other parts of the site were submerged. Seven boulders remain visible. Paul Nevin, the de facto curator of the petroglyphs, makes an offering of tobacco every time he visits the site. “Native Americans referred to rocks as grandfathers, because rocks contain the stories of Mother Earth,” he told me one evening as I watched him scatter copper-colored leaves onto the surface of one of the big stones. It was late October, and we had sailed out in Paul’s battered aluminum dingy. Hawks coasted overhead. At my feet I could make out dozens of shapes: thunderbirds, crosses, circles, footprints, both animal and human.
Inside the Fulton basement, actors lounge in the greenroom, trading jokes and cough drops as they wait to go onstage. They’re half-dressed—bathrobes and T-shirts over crinolines and tuxedo pants. You could be forgiven for thinking James Webb’s prison walls still house “loose and idle persons.”
If you look closely, you can see how Webb worked: tall blocks of limestone alternate with stacks of short blocks to create long rows he then plumbed with lines and bobs. He must have been proud of his craftsmanship, the thousands of stones laid end to end, edges squared, thin bands of mortar laboriously applied with a trowel. Two of his walls extend all the way up to the stage, where they’ve been painted black.
It’s a few minutes before eight. From her podium behind the proscenium, the stage manager calls places. Actors drift onto the set. They stretch and pirouette. Some check props. A soprano, warming up, utters kittenish yelps. “Standby lights one,” the stage manager whispers into her headset. For an instant everything is suspended—actors, orchestra, audience, the redheaded boy, still as a statue, whose gloved hands grip the rope that controls the curtain that shelters this make-believe world. I watch his face. Very possibly he’s the same age James Webb was when he went to work on the building whose walls gave rise to this theater. The boy listens for his cue. He’s dressed in a flannel shirt and jeans, work boots, the kind of practical attire I imagine Webb wore. This young man too is about to unleash a story. In another moment he’ll swing into action, the Fulton’s red curtain will lift toward the heavens (or more accurately, toward a wood grid reinforced with steel), and Webb’s walls will slip into shadow, or at least it will seem that way for a while.
I made my stage debut when I was four, as an angel in a Christmas pageant in my grandparents’ church. I wore a white taffeta sheath with a pair of sheer white wings edged in tinsel. My mother fussed with them right up to my entrance, but they flopped anyhow. I had no lines. My parents tell me I clung to the altar rail and bobbed up and down.
My next role was Mrs. Claus in a second-grade skit, followed by a small singing part in an operetta about flowers. By age eleven I was stagestruck. That year our music teacher informed my sixth-grade class that she and her colleagues were casting a Nativity tableau and needed a Mary who could sit very, very still for long periods of time. We girls shut up for days, but in the end the role went to an eighth-grade brunette who looked the part. I was crushed. Two years later I was cast as Lady Macbeth, a role for which I seemed better suited. “Out, damned spot,” I intoned, thrilled by my profanity. At sixteen I joined an evangelical Christian theater troupe, and we traveled the country giving overwrought performances of A Man Called Peter in sanctuaries and social halls. In one church we used an empty baptism tank as the entrance for a maid.
I’m not sure what I believed back then. Faith was a way of doing theater, so I accepted Christ and memorized John 3:16. I even handed out tracts in Brooklyn one weekend. At a revival meeting I watched a pair of missionaries set a matchbook on fire and hold it under the fingers of someone they hoped to convert. “This is what hell feels like,” they murmured. “Do you want to burn?” I was bewildered by their histrionics, so different from the tame Episcopal rites I’d grown up with.
I joined a Christian choir and learned dozens of gospel tunes (“Love is surrender / Love is surrender to His will!”). One night we gave a concert at the Fulton Opera House (as it was then known), my first appearance on that stage. We wore floor-length skirts of fuchsia and royal blue with big sashes and bright blouses. I stood off to one corner and swayed, much as I’d done when I was four. Henry Harrison, a singer from Harlem known as “Amen Henry,” stole the show with his rendition of “Amazing Grace.” There were drums and a synthesizer, swirling light effects, and a crowd of mostly family members who clapped in time to the music. Offstage we talked, as we almost always did in those days, about sex. The choir director’s wife confessed that she and her husband had done it at least five times on their wedding night—she’d been too sore to remember. My friend Margaret and I swore to each other that we would not die virgins, even if we were diagnosed with a terminal disease the next day.
When I turned seventeen, my Christian theater troupe produced The Diary of Anne Frank, and I played Anne. We opened it in my high school auditorium, took it briefly on the road, and then rented the Fulton for a week and ran it there with my name on the marquee. The production
