The Lyman Family’s Holy Siege of America
At the south end of Boston lies the Roxbury black ghetto, a dirty oasis of trees, homes and small stores that suddenly emerges from blocks of old factories and railroad yards. Like many of our nation’s famous darktowns, Roxbury includes hundreds of decaying apartment buildings housing too many people on not enough land, ruthlessly noisy elevated trains, and a sprawling, brand new, all concrete police district station.
Yet there’s something different here. It can be seen from all over Boston — a tower, an ancient brick watchtower that rises needlelike from a secluded hill — Fort Hill — in the center of Roxbury. A relic from the original American Revolution, the structure stands some 70 feet above an abandoned city park. The stone tablet commemorating it is itself nearly 100 years old and starting to crumble around these words:
“On this eminence stood Roxbury High Fort, a strong earthwork planned by Henry Knox and Josiah Waters and erected by the American Army June 1775 — crowning the famous Roxbury lines of investment at The Siege of Boston.”
Five years ago a small community of young white intellectuals and artists from the Boston-Cambridge area moved onto the hill and “took over” several empty apartment houses bordering the park. Relations with the black neighborhood immediately deteriorated, and soon guards, members of the new Fort Hill Community, could be seen patrolling the fort for the first time in almost 200 years.
* * *
Since then peace has returned, relations have improved, and there is some question on a recent summer evening why guards are still needed at Fort Hill. Or who, exactly, is being watched. It’s dark, about 9:30 p.m., as one of them approaches holding a flashlight. He appears troubled, glancing nervously up and down a long row of houses now owned by the community. Inside the first house some 60 Fort Hill members are eating dinner, methodically cleaning their plates after a 12-hour workday. Suddenly the guard turns and walks briskly to an area at the rear of the houses where garbage is dumped. He shuts off his flashlight and from a large green plastic garbage bag secretly retrieves a suitcase packed the night before. Then, without looking back, he runs as fast as he can, as fast as he’s ever run, past the garages, past the basketball court, past the tool sheds, down the long dirt driveway at the rear, through the winding paved streets of the ghetto and the straight paved streets of the first factories, past the nearest subway station, where they’d be sure to check, to a second station, blocks and blocks away, more difficult to find.
As the sentry boards a subway train, safe for the moment, the interior lights reveal his panting, boyish face. He is Paul Williams, a rock author and first editor of Crawdaddy Magazine, who several months ago gave up his writing career to join the Fort Hill Community.
“I was very frightened, sure.” he admitted later at his New York hideaway. “I said I was leaving the day before and they said I wouldn’t be allowed to. They said they’d be watching me 24 hours a day. So I was super paranoid, super cautious. But that doesn’t bother me. I mean, they owed it to me, in a sense, to keep me on the hill.
“If I grow enough, someday I may come back. I care about Mel Lyman more than anyone outside of myself; someday I may be able to care about him more than me.”
Part I
What Ever Happened to Jim Kweskin?
The career of artist Bruce Conner is as unpredictable as his pioneer assemblages and films. For 15 years he has dabbled among the great and weird, the straight and near-straight around the country. He has produced light shows, played the harmonica and run for supervisor of San Francisco. Lately he has earned his living in that city as a minor box office attraction, collecting $2 a film buff at the Interplayers Theater near Aquatic Park. Thin and scholarly in a gray business suit, Conner sorted out change during a Von Stroheim twin-bill not long ago and recalled the man who taught him to play the harp.
“I met him about 1963, ’64, in Massachusetts,” said Conner, handing some of his change to the popcorn lady. “I was staying at Leary’s Newton Center, and Mel was one of those people who just came in and out. He was living with a bunch near Brandeis, all students and dopers. This guy in Anthropological Review had just written about morning glory seeds and how they got you stoned, and Mel was there three or four nights a week at the coffee grinder, grinding up seeds from this 500-pound bag we had in the kitchen.
“And everybody was getting fucked up. Mel just had them swallow the seeds, not soak them and everything the way it said in Anthropological Review, and all these people were falling down on their faces and hemorrhaging and falling down in the bathroom and talking about how great it was afterwards.” Conner snickered over a neatly trimmed goatee.
“I remember once, Mel called up and said, ‘I got 12 people, I want to bring ’em over, we’ve all taken the seeds.’ I said no, but he came anyway. All these people showed up and he said, ‘I want to see your movies.’ And I ran A Movie. And in the middle of it, somebody just exploded over the place, threw up all over the place. And Mel thought that was great. ‘It was so much for him he just had to throw it all out,’ was the way he saw it.” The recollection of it reduced Conner to giggles. “Of course, the ladies upstairs saw it as a bunch of vomit all over the floor.”
The box office phone momentarily returned Conner to the present. “Interplayers. Right. Fury is running right now. It’s on again at 10:30. Greed starts at 9:00. OK?” He hung up and continued.
“We’d talk about things. One time Mel was talking about morning glory seeds and how they put people to sleep sometimes, and I thought that was a real drag, you know, that must not really be enlightenment. And the conversation went into talk about rituals and exercises; and all of a sudden it started hinging around what is God, what is Cosmic Consciousness and everything.
“And I told Mel one of my private theories. I said that mostly what people do when they talk about God is a projection of what they think God is, and it always comes down to a projection from a person. So the best way to find out what God is is to say you’re God yourself. And maybe the first way to do this was if somebody was on the phone and they said, ‘Oh my God!’ and then you say, ‘Yes? What is it?’ And you could just go on from there.”
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