High Spirits
Dianne Salerni
Reviewed by Mary
Lydon Simonsen
High Spirits is the story of Maggie and
Kate Fox from Hydesville, New York, early members of the Spiritualist movement.
Their first foray into the realm of
Spiritualism was accidental—a prank played upon an annoying relation. However, the contrivance was so successful
“that
they extended the prank to include parents and their neighbors until
deception
became their way of life.” The two young
sisters, barely in their teens and managed by their business-savvy
older
sister, Leah, and assisted by a boarder, Calvin, a willing participant
in the
charade because of his love for Leah, succeeded in convincing people
that they
were able to communicate with spirits who had passed to the other side
by
rapping noises created by the cracking sounds of their knees, ankles,
and
toes. In the next few years, the sisters
moved to Rochester seeking greater fame and fortune and on to New York City
where the editor of the New
York Tribune, Horace
Greeley, of “Go West, Young
Man” fame, attended their sessions.
The Spiritualist
movement grew in the fertile ground of Upstate New York which was known
as the
“burned-over district” because so many revivals had been held there in
the
1820s. This area was also home to Mormon
Joseph Smith, William Miller of the Seventh Day Adventists, and the
Utopian
Oneida community. Those seeking the
services of the Fox sisters ranged from parents wishing to know that
their
child was safely in the arms of God to those seeking forgiveness for
some wrong
to a family member or friend. The girls,
especially Kate, came to see their séances as a way of providing
comfort to
grieving relatives by reassuring them that their loved ones were at
peace in
the afterlife, and they also spoke out on behalf of the anti-slavery
movement.
The story focuses on
the middle sister, Maggie, who falls in love with the explorer, Elisha
Kent
Kane, of Philadelphia, who is aware that the Fox sisters’ claim to
communicate with the dead is a hoax. Before
leaving on a rescue mission to the
Arctic, Kane extracts a pledge from Maggie that she must give up her
rapping,
dangling the promise of a wedding before her.
She agrees and keeps her eyes on the horizon waiting for her
explorer to
return.
Dianne Salerni is
masterful in recreating the environment that allowed Spiritualism to
flourish. Her detailed portraits of the
Fox sisters allow modern readers to understand how these young women
were able
to pull the wool over the eyes of so many, including author James
Fenimore
Cooper, the suffragists Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and
the
tragic wife of President Franklin Pierce who had seen her only
surviving child
crushed in a train accident. Her
understanding of the time in which the Fox sisters lived as well as
in-depth
knowledge of this slice of American history enables her to write this
engrossing and compelling story. Beautifully
written, with each chapter pulling you in to the lives of the Fox
sisters, High
Spirits reveals much, not only about mid-19th
Century
America, but our own century and the importance religion plays in
today’s
political debate.