The Pedagogy of Concealment
Closed Communities, Withheld Knowledge, and a Novel That Names the Pattern
On April 3, 2008, Texas state troopers and child protective services workers entered the Yearning for Zion Ranch in Schleicher County, a 1,691-acre Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints compound four miles northeast of Eldorado. By April 8 they had removed 533 women and children. Among them were girls in long prairie-style dresses who had been ordered to marry at twelve and thirteen and fourteen. Schleicher County Sheriff David Doran would later say his office had been told for years that two to three hundred people lived inside the walls. The ranch, when his deputies counted, held over four hundred children alone.
The temple at YFZ Ranch had a top level the deputies did not understand at first. There was a bed that folded out from a wall. Former members had to be brought in to explain what the bed was for.
Prairie Voice has spent years documenting the hidden architectures of rural American life. Data centers humming in converted grain elevators. Rendering plants processing what feedlots produce and grocery stores refuse to acknowledge. Four hundred Minuteman III nuclear missiles maintained by skeleton crews under the wheat fields of Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, Colorado, and Nebraska. The investigative tradition this publication serves treats rural America as a place where infrastructure and consequence are deliberately kept out of sight, by parties who benefit from the arrangement. Closed religious communities belong to that infrastructure as much as the silos do. YFZ is one example in a long American line.
That line is older than 2008. Macon County, Alabama, 1932 to 1972. The United States Public Health Service, working out of the Tuskegee Institute, enrolled 600 Black men in a study of untreated syphilis. Three hundred and ninety-nine of those men had the disease. Two hundred and one served as the control group. The men were sharecroppers, mostly poor, mostly illiterate, all chosen from a county the Public Health Service believed it could observe for forty years without interference. They were told they were being treated for “bad blood,” a local phrase that covered anemia, fatigue, and various other complaints. Penicillin became standard treatment for syphilis in 1947. The study leaders did not give the men penicillin. They did not tell the men penicillin existed. Twenty-five more years passed before the study ended. It ended in 1972 only because Peter Buxtun, a venereal disease investigator at the Public Health Service, gave the documents to Jean Heller of the Associated Press. Heller published on July 25 of that year. The Public Health Service shut the study down within four months.
Wasco County, Oregon, 1981 to 1985. Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and several thousand of his followers purchased the 64,000-acre Big Muddy Ranch, incorporated a city called Rajneeshpuram, and took political control of the nearby town of Antelope. In September 1984, intending to incapacitate voters in The Dalles ahead of a county election, Ma Anand Sheela and Ma Anand Puja cultured Salmonella enterica Typhimurium in a laboratory at the commune and contaminated the salad bars of ten restaurants in town. Seven hundred and fifty-one people fell sick. Forty-five required hospitalization. The Centers for Disease Control later confirmed the outbreak was the first and largest bioterror attack in United States history. The voters of The Dalles had not been told they were the test case for a new application of biological warfare. They were told they had eaten something that disagreed with them. The truth arrived a year later, when a federal task force found the open vial of Salmonella in a commune medical clinic.
Stanford University, August 1971. Twenty-four men were paid fifteen dollars a day to participate in a two-week study of imprisonment psychology. Twelve became guards. Twelve became prisoners. Prisoners who asked to leave were treated as parole-seekers rather than as research subjects exercising their right to withdraw. The men playing guards were given uniforms and authority but not a moral floor. Philip Zimbardo, the principal investigator, allowed the experiment to proceed for six days while guards forced prisoners into stress positions, simulated rape, and stripped the men of their names. Christina Maslach, a graduate student who had not been part of the design, walked into the basement on the sixth day and asked the only honest question in the building, which was, what are you doing to these people, and on whose authority. The experiment ended that night.
The four examples are not equivalent in scale, in century, in application, in harm done. What persists across all of them is the moral physics. A small group of educated or self-anointed adults looks at a larger group of human beings and decides, in private, what the larger group will be permitted to know. The educated group describes its decision as a kindness, a necessity, a research imperative, a religious requirement, an experimental protocol. The decision is the same in each case. We will administer the truth on a schedule of our choosing, in doses we will determine, and the people inside our protocol will not be consulted.
This is the territory of my new novel.
The book is called Ischia is Burning. It is set in the autumn of 1986 in a basin on the western flank of the Italian island of Ischia, in a place called Mezzavia. Inside the basin are four adults and sixteen children. Their ages range from six to seventeen. By training, the adults are an anthropologist, a physician, a pilot, and a linguist. They have spent eighteen years building a closed Iron Age village around the children, complete with hand-woven clothing, a small iron mill the children themselves operate, a constructed Germanic dialect rooted in Old Norse and Old High German, an invented cosmology with four gods and eight constellations, and a sky with no airplanes in it. The children believe they are living in the Iron Age. They believe this because the four adults have withheld twenty-four years of European history from them. There are no radios in the basin. No printed page betrays the year. The antibiotic that would tell a child the world contains chemistry beyond the herbal poultice does not exist there. A funding agency in Naples has been told that the project is a long-term anthropological study of early Germanic linguistic evolution. Most maps do not show the basin. The Italian government has been encouraged to misplace the file.
In September 1986, a cesium-137 contamination event begins to appear in the basin’s groundwater. The four adults face the question they have spent eighteen years not asking, which is, what do you do when the constructed world you have built around children begins to poison them, and the only treatment you can offer comes from a century the children are not allowed to know exists.
The novel is fiction. Four scientists, sixteen children, the basin itself, the Iron Age village: all of these are inventions. What does exist, in the documented record this publication has spent its years tracking, is the temptation that built the basin. The temptation appears in Macon County in 1932 in the form of an untreated control group. It appears in The Dalles in 1984 in the form of contaminated salad bars and an election. Schleicher County in 2008 supplies the form of girls in long prairie dresses who have been ordered to marry at twelve. Stanford in 1971 supplies the form of a guard who has been issued a uniform but not a moral floor. Cover and vocabulary keep changing across these examples while the temptation itself stays the same.
What documentary work cannot do, fiction can. Reportage has the obligation to stay outside the head of the perpetrator, because reportage cannot ethically invent what was thought. The novel has the opposite obligation. It is permitted, even required, to walk into the room of self-justification and stay there long enough to understand the architecture. Those four adults in the basin on Mezzavia can defend every individual decision they made. They are educated, careful, well-spoken. The novel is interested in how educated, careful, well-spoken people arrive at a project that, taken in aggregate, looks like the thing they would never have built if they had been able to see the whole shape of it from the outside. The novel does not let them off the hook for what they built. It refuses, at the same time, the easy out of calling them monsters. Calling them monsters would close the question of how their colleagues, students, and followers found them defensible while the work was being done.
Every American example I have cited above was operated by people who were not monsters. Public Health Service doctors. A doctor of psychology with a faculty appointment. A guru with several thousand followers. The president of a fundamentalist church whose temple foundation had been dedicated on January 1, 2005. They were, in their own accounts, doing work they understood to be necessary. The work, taken in aggregate, was not what they would have built if the larger group of people had been allowed to see it.
I wrote the first version of Ischia is Burning as a screenplay in 1990, in the second year of an MFA program at Columbia University’s School of the Arts. The first draft told me there were four scientists and sixteen children and a basin and a fire. What finding out would cost the children was beyond me at twenty-five. So was what finding out would cost the adults who had spent eighteen years not telling. The notebook in which I wrote down my screenplay teacher’s adjustments was lost in a move sometime in the late 1990s. The screenplay went into a steel filing cabinet. It stayed there for thirty-six years. I am sixty-one now. Sitting down with the pages in May, I found the staples rusted and half the dialogue wincing. I wrote the novel between then and now. The original 1990 screenplay is reproduced unaltered as Addendum I at the back of the book, with its small infelicities of a twenty-five-year-old preserved as they were committed.
What I have built in fiction is not Macon County, Schleicher County, or Wasco County. The fictional sixteen children of Mezzavia are not the four hundred children removed from YFZ in April 2008, nor the men of Macon County, nor the seven hundred and fifty-one people of The Dalles. What the novel does is hold up the mechanism that all of those documented places had in common, and ask the question the documented record can describe but cannot directly inhabit: how does a small group of educated people, deciding in private, walk eighteen years into a project that the people inside the project never agreed to be inside?
The book is Ischia is Burning. Paperback and Kindle edition are available at Amazon. A free web reading edition lives at BolesBooks.com, where the full bibliography is also indexed. The novel runs around 130,000 words across thirty-three chapters and a closing addendum. The dedication is one sentence long. It reads, For the children who were never told.
David Boles is the editor and founder of Prairie Voice, the publisher of David Boles Books, and the host of the Human Meme podcast. His Institutional Autopsy trilogy, examining how American institutions divided the human organism, the prison’s logic, and the public broadcasting experiment, is available at BolesBooks.com.