Everything for everyone, p.12
Everything for Everyone, page 12
O’Brien: You sound very thoughtful in thinking through these kids’ experiences.
Addams: I used to live here myself. I moved here when I was eighteen. That was—that was ten years ago this month. I was … still kind of a kid in some ways, like I hadn’t really been able to fully grow up yet. So, the crèche was a bit in between being independent and being able to still be really lost, which was what I needed. I see that with some of the teenagers now, that in-between space that can be really confusing.
O’Brien: Did you grow up in a commune? You described that scene of your mother holding you. It sounds like you felt loved.
Addams: [Pause.] I had a lot of siblings. Nine of them … My mother ran the house. It was a big job. Constant cooking, tons of cleaning, taking care of guests, managing the education of my sisters and me. She was working all the time. There were always people around. I was never alone growing up. It was like the commune in that way.
O’Brien: Like the commune? I think I am missing some context. What sort of living arrangement was this?
Addams: I grew up in the compound of the Church Fathers. The—what did you call us?—“that cult.” My father was on the elder council … You don’t know what to ask.
O’Brien: You were describing your household? Saying it was quite busy?
Addams: It wasn’t just us kids. My mother would host all these formal dinners for the Church Fathers. She eventually had a staff to help with the cooking and cleaning, but I kind of felt like we were on our own when I was little. My older sisters ended up taking care of us. We all worked a lot. We spent a lot of time together. A lot of my memories growing up were relating to my father as this far-off person that I was in awe of, that I was afraid of, that I loved. But my actual life was generally spending all my time working with my sisters. My brothers started going to church school, but the girls never left the house.
O’Brien: What year were you born? To give us some context.
Addams: I was born in 2040.
O’Brien: And your gender? How do you identify now? How did it fit into that dynamic then?
Addams: They treated me as one of the girls. Now I don’t have a gender. I didn’t then either, but I guess that was a secret.
O’Brien: Did you have a lot of secrets?
Addams: So many. Our compound was filled with them. Tucked into every nook, in every apron pocket. We all had secrets. I don’t think I would have survived without them. [Long pause.] I try to tell people about what the Church Fathers were like. I mean, some things everyone knows. The mass sterilization of nonbelievers. Locking people up in those cages along the ferry platforms, starving them to death, displaying them like trophies, or zoo animals. These people governed through hate and fear. But for those of us in the heart of all of it, there was a whole other life inside the main compound. I know it’s hard for people to actually imagine. We had zero contact with the outside world. They would designate three young people, mostly boys, to act as secretaries. They would handle our social media presence, and the correspondence the Church Fathers kept up with other sects elsewhere. But if you weren’t a secretary, you were cut off. I never saw a computer screen until I was twelve. Never touched a phone. Another group would handle the warehouse, the shipping out of books and Christian supplies. They had to use computers at work to communicate with customers or to print out shipping labels, but outside of work—no contact. Do you know the history of the Fathers?
O’Brien: Not in great detail. Would you tell us?
Addams: Well, they took over Staten Island for real in 2053, but the Church Fathers were a thing for two decades before that. Buying property, building out this business selling Christian merchandise internationally. They became the biggest landlord on Staten Island. The church was founded as a breakaway faction from a Pentecostal sect. The big focus was on gender. The world had been consumed by satanic gender ideology, they said. It had destroyed the family, destroyed the nation. The only way back, first to civilization and then to God’s Kingdom, was through reimposing the rightful order.
O’Brien: They sound terrifying.
Addams: Yeah. Okay … So, their power grew all through the forties. Staten Island has always been the most conservative borough. The borough president was a sympathizer, a lot of the local cops had joined. I think society was falling apart all across the board, and the Church Fathers offered this vision of stability. With the disease, and hunger, and everything, they very publicly said they could hold things together and they were more or less telling the truth. So, before the takeover they had become the most powerful force in the borough. A lot of the borough’s bigger landlords ended up joining, and more and more they had a lockdown on the rental market. They started refusing housing to same-sex couples, or to people on this list of aborters, or to trans people. Landowners and business owners that lived in Staten Island, and some from around the region too, more and more got behind the Fathers as a way of trying to navigate the many crises going down. I didn’t know any of these class dynamics at the time, but I tried to study them later. Capitalists took a lot of different strategies in the chaos. Many fled the city or went up in orbitals. Others got behind what was happening here in Staten Island, like to make a fort against the onslaught and chaos of it all.
O’Brien: Can you tell us about the takeover?
Addams: The Church Fathers were on pretty good terms with the NYPD, which through the forties was pretty much the only force that mattered around here. For a century, Staten Island was where a lot of cops chose to live, because it’s more suburban than the rest of New York City. The Fathers always had this vision of theocratic rule and had all these fantasies about taking over Albany or Washington. That didn’t really pan out. As things unraveled, they decided they could make do with Staten Island. A lot of the cops were up fighting in the Bronx, but the Fathers had some loyalists in command positions down here. I mean, when they put up that giant cross at the ferry terminal and no one took it down, that was a sign to a lot of people that something had changed. Soon they shut down the bridges and the ferry and later they cut off the Internet. That was around the time the NYPD also went after the Internet, I think. It didn’t really work anywhere else, but here on the Island it was all dead. Then the Fathers had this mad creepy recorded message calling every cell phone on the Island, telling people they were now subject to “God’s law.” They had this paramilitary force run by ex-cops, going house to house. They called it the Brave Sons. Mostly they rounded up gender nonconforming people and same-sex couples. They never told me exactly what happened to them. This stuff ended up in the news, you must have seen it.
O’Brien: Sounds like a tough scene to be assigned female.
Addams: You could put it that way.… Some pretty horrific things happened to women. Especially young women. I don’t feel comfortable talking about details.… But the whole thing was built around child sexual abuse.
O’Brien: You definitely don’t have to share anything you don’t want to.
Addams: I’ve had so much trauma therapy, you wouldn’t believe.… It was part of Church Father doctrine, the authority of the Patriarch was absolute. I don’t like to get graphic. It doesn’t help anyone at this point. But there was so much violence.… I’ve gotten to share exactly what happened to me where I needed to. But I’ll tell you that I grew up a tight bundle of rage.… While it was happening, while the Fathers were in power, the trauma started—I don’t know how to say it—it started taking over our bodies.
O’Brien: What do you mean?
Addams: Young women in the Church had really unraveled. Before the takeover, there were just a few secrets here or there, you know. Whispers. But there were … medical problems. The girls in the Church, a lot of us, dealt with these physical symptoms that couldn’t be explained. Girls who experienced paralysis, like me. Girls who stopped talking for months, or years. Like our bodies objected, but we were all still true believers. Like something in us refused, even as we were still loyal.
O’Brien: Do you know why?
Addams: Why the paralysis or why the loyalty? The paralysis was trauma, I’ve come to realize. It used to be called hysteria. An intense inner conflict that sometimes takes over the body—the loyalty is harder to make sense of. People saw that things were getting bad everywhere else, and remembered what the pandemic had been like. And like I said, everyone was taken care of in a way. And the sexual violence, the public mutilations of aborters, and the murders I think broke something inside of the young women.…
O’Brien: Why did most people go along with it?
Addams: The Church worked because everything else was collapsing. And they managed to keep people alive when others couldn’t. It was a cross-class operation, I guess I’d say. From a bare staying-alive standpoint, many people’s lives got better under the Fathers’ rule. If you weren’t targeted, the Fathers ran better government than what had come before. Their core leadership, including my father, were all major landowners of the NYC area. They ran all these businesses around Staten Island, and a few in Lower Manhattan, that the men would work at. When no one else on the outside had jobs, every man in the Church had work. Every member of the Church had a home. Every member of the Church was cared for. They made sure the residents of Staten Island got enough food and basic medical care. When the famines were so bad everywhere else, we always ate together. In a weird way it was kind of a protocommune. You know, we’d eat together and pray together. So, I guess that’s why so many people stayed, both in the Church and others continuing to live in the borough. By the time the torture and stuff really got out of control everyone already felt locked in and with nowhere else to go.
O’Brien: Were you a believer?
Addams: Oh, definitely. One hundred percent. Even with my secrets. I really believed I was exercising God’s divine will to save the world from the consuming demonic fires of communism and feminism. Like that’s literally how I would have said it. It made the rage do all sorts of weird fec. Like, I lost motor control over my legs for a year when I was eight and no one knew what caused it. I think it was all my rage, but also wanting to stay a believer. Those two wishes battled it out in my body and I was the casualty. Later I became a secretary, and I was charged with arguing with nonbelievers on Ours.
O’Brien: Could you say what Ours was?
Addams: Oh, Ours was a big social media platform, just a mainstream commercial thing that grew out of a few prior social media companies merging. We used to proselytize on it. So, I directed all my rage against Church enemies in these trollslam campaigns I would help coordinate … I had a limp from when my legs were paralyzed. It stayed with me up until I was eighteen or so.
O’Brien: Church enemies?
Addams: Trans people, mostly.
O’Brien: Ah.
Addams: Yeah, talk about a mindfuck.
O’Brien: How did you end up a secretary?
Addams: I don’t know. I was really smart. They wouldn’t teach the girls anything. I taught myself to read. It wasn’t banned so long as we were only reading Church materials. But I asked so many questions and I pieced stuff together really fast. I made my brothers explain to me the theological training they got. I soaked up anything I could get a hold of. Another mother in the compound, her name was Eleanor, had previously been a high school teacher. Like, a public school teacher. Whenever I finished my work, I’d try to go find her and make her tell me stuff.
O’Brien: What kind of stuff?
Addams: Reading and writing. Typing, but, like, on a typewriter. American history. She was a believer, but she at least knew about slavery and colonization.
O’Brien: What were the race politics of the Church Fathers?
Addams: They mostly … ignored it? Like there were several Latino families and one Black family. We had a lot of connections with similar evangelical communities across Latin America. Their thing was mostly about gender.
O’Brien: Are you saying they weren’t white supremacists? Like, do you know what the experience of the Black family was like?
Addams: Yeah, it was—I guess it was complicated. We railed against what we called racialist and antiwhite versions of American history, so I would never have learned about slavery and such if it wasn’t for Eleanor. But also, the Church Fathers spent a lot of time developing pamphlets, vids, and online messaging to circulate in Black Southern evangelical churches and trying to recruit racial minorities. I worked on that as a secretary and was told how important it was to “build inroads” with the minorities. That’s the term the Fathers used. But, I think when people showed up—people who weren’t white—their actual experiences were not great. I didn’t totally understand it when I was growing up. But I think everyone who joined had to remake themselves in the image of the Fathers, and the core of that—at the core of that—it was definitely whiteness, like the values and way of being that the Fathers saw as normal and proper. Even if they never said so. My wife pushed me on this later, we argued about it for a while and she kind of convinced me it was different than I had imagined.…
One part of the racial dynamics of the Fathers I actually did think about at the time, because it ended up having a big impact on my work assignments. As the Fathers were coming to power, white liberals, white queers, white feminists, they all got out. They all fled Staten Island. Black people with more resources got out too. But a lot of the people remaining either shared the general perspective of the Church Fathers, or they were working-class Black people. So, when the violence started against queers and such, a lot of the people in their videos, they were Black people, Black queer people, Black trans people, Black women. I think that kind of stalled out the recruitment efforts I was assigned to. Black evangelicals were kind of turned off by the images we were putting out, so I couldn’t really do my job making inroads. So, they reassigned me to trollslam trans people on Ours.
O’Brien: How did you come to doubt it all?
Addams: Arguing on Ours. I’ve learned since that there was a whole campaign to target me. I had no clue at the time. I found myself in frequent arguments with this girl who kept changing profiles so we couldn’t trollslam her. But when we’d start arguing I’d recognize her right away. She was smart, and she had some help. I don’t know what she saw in me. But we argued it out, argued about everything. She was a Christian, but a really different kind. Like liberation theology stuff. She knew her stuff, knew the Bible, inside and out. I was appointed to be a secretary in 2055. I was fifteen, I think. I was in the role until the end. So, for those three years I was arguing with her all the time. It was a slow process, but I think she de-indoctrinated me. She certainly helped break open my thinking.
O’Brien: She sounds remarkable. Are you in touch?
Addams: Um. Yeah. We got married.
O’Brien: Was she from Staten Island?
Addams: Yeah, it turns out she was. She got out during the takeover and didn’t come back until the Fathers fell. She went to Newark.
O’Brien: That sounds very romantic.
Addams: [Pause.] It’s very hard. I am not very good at relationships. Not very good at being emotionally open.… Not very good at having a body.… I am glad I have her, but I wish I was better at it all.
O’Brien: It sounds like you love her.
Addams: I don’t know. I don’t—I’m not very good at saying that sort of thing.
O’Brien: I notice you don’t use her name. Can you tell us something you like about her?
Addams: We live here together, share a room. I always wake up before her. I watch the sunlight come in the windows, and when it hits her face, it is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. She opens her eyes, and looks at me, and every morning I totally melt inside, and everything feels possible. The sludge worm I always feel in my chest dissolves and I feel sane and have hope for a moment. I feel a bit of that every time she looks at me.
O’Brien: That is beautiful.
Addams: [Pause.] Could we talk about something else?
O’Brien: Sure. I am trying to make sense of the position of women in the Church Fathers. You talked about there being a lot of violence, a lot of fear. But I hear something else too, like, in how you talk about your sisters. Like, there was a care there you kind of miss?
Addams: Yeah, there was another side to it. Women cared for each other. Like, between siblings and aunties and mothers, there was a lot of love. There was terror and control, definitely, but also a lot of love. For many hours of every day, it was just women in the homes, and people formed very deep and very strong relationships. I think that was a huge part of what got us through. That didn't extend to any sort of solidarity with anyone outside, but it held us together for those of us who were on the inside.
O’Brien: Do you have an example of that kind of solidarity?
Addams: Like, … my father would go away for days at a time; he was a liaison with our lobby in DC. Sometimes he would take my older brothers with him, as part of their training. When he would, it would just be my sisters, and my mom, and my aunt, and a couple of younger boys, and it was so lovely. We would clean the house and pray in the morning, then all afternoon we would play these imagination games together, the sisters, but my mother would even join in sometimes. Like, we would pretend to be people on epic quests and roll dice and describe what happened.
O’Brien: Like Dungeons & Dragons?
Addams: That is Satan worship.
O’Brien: Oh—Are you joking?
Addams: Kind of … I mean, I have played that particular game since—the preteens here love it, especially now that they all have augs—but I can’t quite get over the sense that it is wrong.
O’Brien: Okay.
Addams: Yes, it was like Dungeons & Dragons. Only in biblical or medieval settings. Often set during the crusades. My sib—they were my sister back then—my sib Ezekiel would run the adventures, and all of us would play characters. On the crusades adventures, I would play this Knight Templar. Zeke is such a magnificent storyteller. Back then, he could make the whole room come alive. Or there were other ways we took care of each other. If Father was angry, all the girls would warn each other, and we would all know to be very quiet. Or, if one of the children was punished, Mother held them after so tight, and cared for them, and made sure they recovered, and wouldn’t leave their side all night. Or there was just a lot of laughing, like working in the garden together, or washing clothes in the laundry room, or preparing food in the kitchen with my sisters, and we would sing and laugh together. I remember my sister Mary had the most beautiful voice and sung all these old gospel songs that could bring me to tears. There was a lot of beauty, and a lot of love. What everyone remembers are those graphic, horrific images of the torture and cages that the Church Fathers posted on the Internet after the takeover, so it is hard to imagine that behind that there were moments of real love and joy. That love for each other—I think that’s part of what made this one incident such a big deal. At the time, I didn’t quite get how my sisters and other young women in the compound couldn’t identify with all the women in the cages, but really saw themselves in this one girl. Do you know this story?
