MODERN FAMILY

   “I’m the darnedest fool of a great big family. Mixed all up like a plate of hash. Listen for a minute with your kind attention. I’ll tell you all about it, I will by gosh.”- Maude S. Miller, (my grandmother) unpublished diary 1913

    So here I go to battle with a head upon my stick, a squinty little scowling face holding up his dick. A hammer made of good cast steel and real fine work at that, you couldn’t find a better tool for cracking a white man’s back. Old Lady was the first to fall and then I paused to pray, over by the picket fence, just sawing on my way.

   Now, the anonymous family unit comes front and center—suspended in time and space—waiting for history to wash over them. My grandmother’s little ditty reveals a mindset I heard repeatedly as I was growing up. “We’re mutts.” my mother would say, if I asked “what are we?” The dismissive response wasn’t even close to the truth.The tangle of blood lines, though long and twisted, were relatively pure, nativist and almost all originating in western Europe. Taking into account a few Indian marriages and the African American branch of both Jennings and Osterhouts (which emerged out of slavery) my ancestors were almost all exclusively WHITE. Fact, not guilt.

    When John F. Kennedy was assassinated Malcolm X remarked that “the chickens have come home to roost.” When the twin towers came down, many pointed to generations of western European colonialist imperialism and global genocide that put fourteen out of nineteen Saudi hijackers on those planes. On that quiet spring evening in 1846, in upstate New York, a similar “cause and effect” blowback phenomenon was about to unfold. The Van Nest family were our sacrificial lambs. They would pay dearly for the white man’s generational sins.          

Thursday March 12,1846, Fleming, NY— 6:35 pm 

     Although snow still covered the ground in large patches, the Van Nest family was enjoying an early spring thaw and the last rays of sunlight of that unseasonably warm March evening streamed in the windows. The Van Nests had a house guest, so the time passed quickly and before they knew it, it was time for the children to go to bed. “I’m right behind you.” Sarah Van Nest said tucking the baby George in first, kissing his forehead. He was only two years old, but growing fast. It was a quiet evening; the first peepers of spring not yet making their voices heard. There was absolutely nothing unusual or foreboding about the domestic scene. The fading twilight gave way to a moonlit night as the Van Nest children drifted off to sleep. 

    Peter Van Nest had an unassuming, yet beautiful two story house out by the lake in Fleming; a short horseback ride from Auburn. The Van Nests were a normal family in a quiet, sparsely populated, residential neighborhood by the lake. There was nothing extraordinary about them. Wife Sarah, her mother Phoebe, Peter and George the sons, and a daughter Julia made up the household. The wood frame, clapboard house was not ostentatious, but large enough to accommodate live-in help. A young white woman, Helen Holmes, lived in the back, seeing to the baby George and helping Sarah Van Nest with the household chores; now that Mrs. Van Nest was expecting another child. 

     Their guest, Mr. Van Arsdale, having drank a little too much, had decided to stay over in the guest room and leave the next morning. He’d gone off to bed, while Peter Van Nest remained the sitting room, enjoying one last pipe bowl, with the baby George sleeping soundly in the corner crib. It had been a pleasant evening and the house was quickly growing dark. Helen Holmes lit two candles and an oil lamp for Peter Van Nest to read by, before she headed off to her room, to read as well. Sarah Van Nest was in the backyard closing up the hen house, singing softly to herself…… when she thought she saw something moving along the fence line. 

    

    From this point on, the particulars vary widely as to exactly what, when and where things took place— in the house, outside in the garden, upstairs in the hall, or downstairs in the parlor. There’s a rough official chronology and a basic perimeter of the crime scene. What everyone could agree upon as they came upon the aftermath was, it was the bloodiest, most horrific scene anyone had ever witnessed, since John Sullivan, John Clinton, and John L. Hardenbergh drove the Haudenosaunee out of Cayuga County in 1779. Only now, instead of beheaded soldiers and skinned Indians (for boot leggings) all the victims were white.