Emails from Hell, Part five.

Here is another email I received from Our Man in Hell. I have not yet learned this soul’s identity, but these reports are too good for me to not pass on to you.

{Beginning of email}

            While I watched the two communists, Marx and Moses, walking away, I next saw a beast with ten horns and four heads and…no, wait, that was a hallucination that was written down in the Book of Revelation, also known as the Apocalypse. In that book, the beasts were truly frightening but they were all praising The Lamb on His Throne around the glassy sea. The writer was named John of Patmos, who may or may not have been the same John I met, as I described a couple of messages ago. John of Patmos. What was that guy smoking? He must’ve gotten some bad hash from Damascus. No, what I saw was strange, but not terrifying.

            I saw a Native American man dressed up in a Hollywood Indian costume. I approached him to ask him more about Hell.

            “I see by your outfit that you are an Indian,” I sang to the tune of Streets of Laredo.

            “You must be one smart fellah,” he said. “My name is Singing Snake Windbreaker. Well, that’s not my real name. That’s just what I tell people who ask. When I was alive on Earth, we didn’t dress up like this. We Native Americans were sort of ordinary people. What’s your name, fellah?”

            {Response omitted}

            Then I asked, “So, what are you down here for?”
            “And here I thought you must be one smart fellah,” he said. “Who were you just talking with?”

            “Marx and Moses…Wait, you’re not telling me you were a communist too?”

            “Seems so,” he said. “We were communists thousands of years before the word was invented. See, in our tribes and villages—and sometimes in our large cities: Cahokia, near the Mississippi River, was one of the largest cities in the world about your year 1100—we owned the land and the resources in common. We each built our own houses, and we owned those houses, but not the land. We owned our personal items, which were few and simple, but we did not pass them on to our children. There was no private real estate or inheritance of wealth. That made us communists, I guess. And communal land ownership continued long after we started adopting white technologies. I’m a Cherokee. Right, I know, Cherokees didn’t wear costumes like this, as I already said. But long after we were forcibly relocated by the United States Army from our Appalachian homeland to what is now Oklahoma, after we started building white-man houses, and raising white-man cattle, we still kept our communal ownership of land. We did so right up until the Dawes Treaty of 1887. By 1904 all Cherokees (except a few hiding in the hills) were enrolled on the list and our communal land was divided up into individual allotments. It was easier for white people to steal our land a little bit at a time than all at once, see. A white banker swindled me out of my land about 1922. So, you could say, we were communists right up until about 1904.

            “But that’s not the only reason I’m down here,” he said.

            “What other reason or reasons?” I asked.

            “I thought you were one smart fellah,” he said. “Well, look at me.”

            “Your face is all painted, like a Hollywood Indian…wait…your paint is all the colors of the rainbow. That’s odd. When I was alive, that was a symbol of the gay and lesbian community. You mean, you are gay?”

            “I am more properly referred to as Two Spirit,” he said. “Many Native American tribes recognized three genders.”

            “Three?”

            “Yes. Male, female, and two-spirit. The old French word for it was berdache. We two-spirits did not fit into either male or female category. We dressed like women, sometimes. We didn’t get a lot of respect, but the other people let us be what we were. But your American evangelists declared—and God was obligated to obey them—that anyone who wasn’t heterosexual had to go to Hell. Didn’t make much difference to me, I was already a communist. Seems to me that a smart fellah like you could figure that out.”

            “Well,” I said, “I didn’t, but I understand your explanation. Imagine, learning things in Hell!”

            “That’s more than you can say for Heaven,” he said, scratching underneath the pink paint. Then his face brightened. “There comes my friend Andrew.”

            A man in a Biblical robe walked up.

            “Is he two-spirit too?” I asked.

            “No. He was one of the Apostles who lived in the Upper Room in Jerusalem after Jesus was crucified. No, he was as straight as they come. But that doesn’t mean we can’t be friends. Say, Andrew!”

            “Hey, Joe,” said Andrew.

            “This man here wants you to explain how you were a communist.”

            “That’s easy enough,” said Andrew to me. “All of us apostles lived together—no, we weren’t gay, if that’s what you were thinking—in the Upper Room in Jerusalem, and, as recorded in Acts chapter two, we held all of our possessions in common. We were communists, I guess, though we didn’t know it. But that didn’t last long. It wasn’t long before a church hierarchy formed, and the church started attracting rich people, and pretty soon we were just like everyone else has been through all of history, except Joe and his folks and other tribal peoples. But, while it lasted, the Upper Room Commune was a brief shining moment of goodness. Time for lunch. Got some pemmican, Joe?”

            “I hate that stuff,” said Joe. “Let’s go get a nice salad.” And that’s what we did, not for the food value—we were spirits—but for the pleasure of being together.

{End of email}