Thanks for telling the stories that were better, fiercer, truer and ultimately nobler than the ones we were otherwise being told about this country
I owe An American Book of the Dead - The Game Show to you. I had heard rumors of the Salted Wife, but your A People's History of the United States gave me the historical resources that proved it wasn't just a ghost story. It's just one of the tales I lifted.
Here's that section for you, Howard! You did well. May we live up to your example.
BARDO VOICE: Oh free and bravely born, having died and failed to grasp the clear light of reality, which is nothing but thine own nature most true, thou art entering now into the Bardo of the Salted wife.
Be not distracted. Be not afraid or attracted. Whatever strange terror might become thee here, repeat these words:
(As the Bardo Voice speaks the following, the words flash on a screen.)
BARDO VOICE & AUDIENCE: “Although the clear light of reality dawned upon me I was unable to grasp it, and so I must wander here. Whatever visions appear now, I must accept them as the reflections of mine own nature most true.”
BARDO VOICE: Behold, she stands before thee. Born in Bristol and bred there, she sails for the New World in Sixteen Hundred Ought Nine.
SALTED WIFE: All I ever wanted was to sail the Ocean Sea.
BARDO VOICE: Pitching and plunging over an angry Atlantic.
SALTED WIFE: All my brothers are sailors. All my girl's life, to ride the waves is my only wish, my only hope. I make no bones about this to the man who takes me as wife and takes me across. ‘Tis an even exchange. My body and the brood it will bear him buys this journey, not my soul. The English, so says he, can only claim this land with womanhood. New subjects to the crown do not flower from the mere mud. The female sex itself is the soil of this New World.
BARDO VOICE: Jamestown.
SALTED WIFE: The moment we land my only hope is for us to fail and sail away. Seems likely enough: squalid huts crouched inside ramshackle fort, savages culling us one by one when we stray too close to the forest which holds us forever in its suffocating shadow.
Oh, perhaps tomorrow we'll ship for some place else. Or better still perhaps we'll just keep sailing round and round and round this wonderful globe Columbus found.
BARDO VOICE: It was a hard winter, 1609.
SALTED WIFE: Hard.
BARDO VOICE: Bitter.
SALTED WIFE: Dark.
BARDO VOICE: Contagion.
SALTED WIFE: Starvation.
Who'd've thought that in such a terrible time I'd find my love for my husband.
BARDO VOICE: The livestock went quickly.
SALTED WIFE: Too quickly.
BARDO VOICE: So the pets became livestock.
SALTED WIFE: But they only lasted a day or two.
BARDO VOICE: Then it was the rats and mice and worms.
SALTED WIFE: But they weren't enough.
BARDO VOICE: Leather, bark, grass, feces.
SALTED WIFE: Become hungry enough, and suddenly the world surrounds you with food.
(A man appears out of the shadows and moves toward the Salted Wife.)
BARDO VOICE: A few settlers prayed perhaps God would forgive them if they secretly dug into a few of the fresh shallow graves.
And another... well another had yet a fresher meat in mind.
SALTED WIFE: Isn't that strange. I never loved him, not a jot, until one night it all changed, the moment he kissed me on the neck with his razor.
(The man reaches up and slits the woman's throat. The front of her dress runs dark with color.)
BARDO VOICE: Be not afraid. Be not attracted. Beings in the bardo often do not realize-- as thou dost, as thou must-- that they are dead.
SALTED WIFE: Now my love flows from me with such force that I doubt that I could staunch it if I tried.
BARDO VOICE: He took the rump first, the most obvious meat.
(The man starts to carve the woman into shadows.)
SALTED WIFE: He pays me so much more attention now.
BARDO VOICE: Then he worked his way down the legs: first the thighs, then the calves, then boiled the feet for a bouillon.
SALTED WIFE: He caresses me so tenderly.
BARDO VOICE: He made bacon of her back; rubbed her ribs with salt.
SALTED WIFE: And looks after me so carefully.
BARDO VOICE: Packing what was left of her in a hogshead cask.
SALTED WIFE: It’s strange. Something has certainly changed. But I can’t put my finger on it.
BARDO VOICE: Because she has no fingers. He’s gnawed them to the quick and crunched the bone open to suck the marrow.
By the time his fellow survivors grew suspicious of his queer vigor, all they found of the Salted Wife was her head.
(Tight pin spot on the woman’s head.)
They killed him of course. And thou canst hardly doubt they let him go to waste.
SALTED WIFE: With my husband’s love, I dream anything is possible. Now I am sure I could become the mother of a nation.
(The Salted Wife disappears.)
BARDO VOICE: Thou hast journeyed past the Salted wife. Go now. Leave this Bardo quickly. But know thou never canst forget her, for she is nothing but thee.
(Lights fade to black . . .
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