In whichever case, alone or between them, my father and grandfather monogrammed the Niagara Frontier visually with the apocalyptic Morse-code S: an aerial photograph would have shown the two large craters and the central smaller one as three dots, or suspension points… And acoustically they shook the heavens with the initial echoed down to me 35 years later by the Ontarian telegrapher’s recollection: the big G, not for God Almighty (with whom no Cook or Burlingame, whatever his other illusions, has ever troubled his head), but for the man who was to my father what Tecumseh and Pontiac were to my remoter ancestors: well-named Tuscarora, boom boom bang, Great-uncle Gadfly!

We approach the end of the line, lengthy as our letters. The Tuscaroras were “originally” a North Carolinian tribe so preyed upon by the white settlers (who stole and enslaved their children) that after losing a war with them in 1711-13 the survivors fled north to Iroquois territory, and the Five Nations became Six. The Tuscarora War coincided with the great slave revolt of 1712 in New York, mentioned in Andrew Cook IV’s third letter and by him attributed to the instigation of Henry Burlingame III, the Bloodsworth Island conspirator. Many white colonials feared a general rising of confederated Indians and Negroes, who might at that juncture still have driven them back into the sea. This ancient dream or nightmare, which so haunts our Sot-Weed Factor, was my Great-uncle Gadfly Junior’s obsession (His Christian name was Gerald Bray; he was early given his father’s nickname after his agitations, in the remnants of Iroquois longhouse culture, for the cause of Indian nationalism generally and Iroquoian in particular; he later took the name officially and passed it on to his own son). A better student of history than my father, he argued for example that the Joseph Brant who signed away the ancient Mohawk territory in the Treaty of 1798 was either an impostor or a traitor, and that thus the treaty was as invalid as the one signed by Tecumseh’s rivals with William Henry Harrison at Vincennes, and countless others. The Mohawks should reclaim their valleys; the Oneidas, Cayugas, Onondagas, and Senecas their respective lands, from the Catskills and Adirondacks through the Finger Lakes to Erie and Ontario. Bridges, highways, and railroads should be obstructed. The moves in Congress to confer U.S. citizenship on reservation Indians should be resisted as co-option. Common cause should be made with W. E. B. Du Bois’s NAACP (conceived at Niagara Falls, Canada), with the Quebec separatists, with American anarchists, Bolsheviks, et cetera, to the end of establishing a sovereign free state for the oppressed and disaffected in white capitalist industrialist economic-royalist America.

My grandfather admired and distrusted him; thought him a bit cracked, I believe, but valued him all the same both as Kyuhaha’s brother and thus his own, and as rallier of the apathetic Indians: his relation to Gadfly Junior was like Pontiac’s to the Delaware Prophet, or Tecumseh’s to his brother Tenskwatawa. What made Andrew most uneasy was exactly what most impressed my father as a youth: Gadfly’s extreme, even mystical totemism, or animal fetishism. In 1910, for example — the same year that the NAACP and the Boy Scouts of America were incorporated — Gadfly claimed to have conceived a child upon a wild Appaloosa mare in Cattaraugas Indian territory around Lake Cassadaga, near your Chautauqua. The following year he brought to the Grand Island Reservation a strange piebald infant whom he called his son by that union (a disturbed, unearthly boy, more like a bird or bat or bumblebee than a centaur colt, this “Gadfly III” was the queer older companion of my early youth when, after his orphaning, my parents took him in. His own child — whom they also briefly raised — was queerer yet.)

My parents! With those fond, ineffectual, endearing intrigants I end this letter. My ancestors since the 17th Century have burdened their children with the confusion of alternate surnames from generation to generation: I was the first to be given two at once. Henry Cook Burlingame VI and Andrée Castine III, though utterly faithful and devoted to each other till the former’s death in July 1945, never got around to marriage: my father duly named me Andrew Burlingame Cook VI; my mother, as nonchalant about the famous Pattern as about other conventions, blithely christened me (in the French Catholic chapel at Castines Hundred) André Castine, and maintained that inasmuch as she was the sole surviving member of that branch of the family, I was the 5th baron of that name. I grew up bilingual as well as binomian, and peripatetic. Now we were in Germany, protesting with the Spartacus partisans the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht; now in Massachusetts demonstrating on behalf of Sacco and Vanzetti; now in England for the great general strike of May 1926; now in Maryland’s Blackwater Wildlife Refuge, “communizing” the CCC (the only pastoral interval in my youth: I was awakening to sex, literature, and history together, and to this day associate all three with marsh grass, wild geese, tidewater, the hum of mosquitoes); now hiding out back at Castines Hundred. They were not poor: the Cooks and Burlingames were never men of business, but the placid Barons Castine had invested prudently over the years in firms like Du Pont de Nemours; there was money for our traveling, for my educating — and for their organizing Communist party cells in the Canadian and U.S. heartland during the depression; for infiltrating the Civilian Conservation Corps and the WPA Writers Project; for supporting the Lincoln Brigade and other Loyalist organizations during the Spanish Civil War…

At least for ostensibly so organizing, infiltrating, supporting. For while it is clear that they played the Game of Governments, however ineffectively, to the top of their bent, it is less clear which side they were on. By the time I learned — at least decided, in 1953, after Mother’s death — that they had in fact been sly counterrevolutionaries all along, the revelation made no real difference to me, for I had also come to understand that the Second American Revolution was to be a matter, not of vulgar armed overthrow — by Minutemen, Sansculottes, Bolsheviki, or whatever — but of something quite different, more subtle, less melodramatic, more… revolutionary.

But that, of course, is for another letter, which I will happily indite once I have provided you, in weeks to come, with the bones of my Marylandiad: the further adventures of Andrew Cook IV in and after the War of 1812. Till when, I have, sir, the honor of regarding myself as

Your eager collaborator,

A. B. Cook VI

(dictated but not reread)

P.S.: As to the orthographical proximity of your Chautauqua and my Chautaugua: The Algonkin language was spoken in its sundry dialects by Indians from Nova Scotia to the Mississippi and as far south as Tennessee and Cape Hatteras, and like all the Indian languages it was very approximately spelled by our forefathers. The word in question is said to mean “bag (or pack) tied in the middle.” Chautauqua Lake was so named obviously from its division into upper and lower moieties at the narrows now traversed by the Bemus Point — Stow Ferry, which I hope it will be your good fortune never to see replaced by a bridge. Chautaugua Road, where this will be typed for immediate posting to you at Chautauqua Lake, is near the similar narrows of Chesapeake Bay (now regrettably spanned at the old ferry-crossing, as you know, and about to be second-spanned, alas), which divides this noble water into an Upper and a Lower Chesapeake. The scale is larger, but the geographical state of affairs is similar enough for the metaphor-loving Algonquins, wouldn’t you say?

ABC/mb: 4 encl

E: Jerome Bray to his parents and foster parents. His betrayal by Merope Bernstein. His revenge and despair.