Blood (26 page)

The first documented case of blood libel involved the accusation that Jews in Norwich, England, had killed, by means of crucifixion, a twelve-year-old apprentice tanner named William. The accusations were never proven, but they grew and multiplied and led to additional accusations that Jews were preying on Christian boys to carry out ritualized murder. This led to the slaughter of many Jews in England, and to their eventual expulsion in 1290. (Many resettled in Spain, from which their descendants in turn were expelled, two centuries later.)

Muslims invaded the Iberian peninsula in the year 711, controlling diminishing portions of the region for some seven centuries, until the Catholics finally drove them out at the end of the Reconquista in 1492. In the years between, as the Catholic royalty, church, and followers fought to reclaim the land they believed to be theirs, Jews — who had been accepted to varying degrees for centuries by the Muslims — began to be vilified, restricted in their civil rights, attacked, and murdered. Priests and their followers began murdering Jews in Seville and elsewhere in 1391. Some Jews were enslaved, others fled, and still others converted to Christianity in a bid to escape persecution and death. These converted Jews became known as the
conversos.
There were more Jews in Spain than anywhere else in the world at the time, and it is estimated that more than one hundred thousand became
conversos
— many of them making sincere conversions that passed down through the generations. Being a
converso
gave a former Jew (or a person descended from former Jews) full rights of citizenship, and many of them thrived in business, government, church, moneylending, and other disciplines. They also married into Christian families, nobility included.

In 1449, however, Spanish citizens began to riot against
converso
tax collectors in Toledo. Authorities issued laws requiring the
conversos
to demonstrate the purity of their blood (
limpieza de sangre
, as it is known in Spanish). In the first step toward openly suggesting that Jews were biologically distinct from Christians, authorities issued a law requiring that the
conversos
demonstrate their own blood purity. As Erna Paris writes in
The End of Days: A Story of Tolerance, Tyranny, and the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain
, “Once
conversos
had been effectively reidentified as Jews by the statute of exclusion, all the ancient anti-Jewish accusations could be revived with impunity . . . ‘Purity of blood,' or
limpieza
(cleanliness), exploded into a national obsession.”

Within half a century, thousands of Jews and
conversos
were deprived of their rights, attacked, tortured, burned at the stake, and killed by other means. By 1490, some 2,000 conversos had been burned to death during or immediately after popular public events known as
autos-da-fé
(Portuguese for “acts of faith”). Finally, at the end of the Reconquista, in 1492, the Catholic monarchs — King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella — drove the Muslims and an estimated 150,000 to 200,000 Jews from Spain. Tens of thousands of Jews died trying to flee the country, according to the Jewish Virtual Library (
JVL
). Many of the most unlucky refugees ended up in Portugal, from which they were expelled again a few years later. Some of the more fortunate migrants ended up in Turkey. As for their fate, the
JVL
says: “Sultan Bajazet welcomed them warmly. ‘How can you call Ferdinand of Aragon a wise king,' he was fond of asking, ‘the same Ferdinand who impoverished his own land and enriched ours?'” 

The obsession with blood purity robbed the Iberian peninsula of many of its most talented, productive, educated citizens. The Inquisition, or persecution of heretics, plunged Spain into the Dark Ages and raged on for centuries. Erna Paris notes that after the Reconquista, pure blood became a condition for every post of merit: “By 1673, a ‘Jew' was being described as someone with as little as twenty-one degrees of blood relationship, or . . . (as) an Old Christian who had been suckled by a wet nurse of ‘infected blood.' The word Jew was stripped of all content; like ‘pure' and ‘impure,' it was a multipurpose, abstract trigger for class hatred, rejection and otherness.”

In Spain, to this day, the city of Santiago de Compostela — site of one of the most significant religious meccas in the world — is named after the Apostle James, whose remains are said to be buried under the cathedral in the old town. Catholic legend has it that Santiago rose from the dead to inspire Catholic warriors to victory over the Muslims in Clavijo in the year 844, when the Spaniards had embarked on their centuries-long Reconquista to recapture the Iberian peninsula. Henceforth, Santiago was much more than the simple name of an Apostle. It hollered out the notion of drawing blood from the infidel. Since the battle at Clavijo, the saint has been known throughout Spain and celebrated prominently in Spain's most famous cathedral as Santiago Matamoros, which means “Saint James the Moorslayer.”

OBSESSIONS WITH BLOOD —
as demonstrated by the persecution and murder of Jews in medieval Europe — have spilled into countless acts of ethnic or racial hatred over the centuries. I have examined the Spanish Inquisition not because it is the only major example of human monstrosity — we all know that it isn't — but because the same blood-based obsessions found in medieval Spain spread into other countries and continents as new forms of genocide took root in the world.

Perpetrators of genocide — who massacred indigenous peoples in the Americas, the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire (now Turkey), the Jews during the Holocaust, ethnic minorities in Cambodia, the Tutsi in Rwanda, the people of Darfur, the people of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and so many others — all demonized their victims by alluding, directly or indirectly, to the impurity of their blood. In the case of the Rwandan genocide, which took the lives of an estimated eight hundred thousand Tutsis and moderate Hutus in 1994, radio broadcasts and newspaper reports repeatedly referred to the Tutsis as “cockroaches” and urged listeners to kill them. Years earlier, the Belgian colonizers of Rwanda had helped drive a wedge between the two peoples by issuing identity cards to each group, and by artificially attributing to the Tutsis a role of economic and social privilege. Over the decades, it became possible for one group to demonize the other, and for the perpetrators of the genocide to successfully categorize the Tutsis as members of an inferior and threatening race, who deserved to be exterminated. Even the genocide in Rwanda rode on a racist wave, and was kept afloat by the implicit assertion that the Tutsis had tainted blood.

It has become common to hear genocidal massacres depicted as “ethnic cleansing,” but I find the term repugnant. However unintentional, the language we use to describe abhorrent behaviour tends to reinforce the behaviour itself. How can there be such a thing as “ethnic cleansing”? How does murder, or genocidal massacre, relate to cleansing? The term is worse than a euphemism because it makes it sound as if it is actually possible to “clean” a society by ridding it of people of a certain ethnicity. I am aware that “ethnic cleansing” became a quick, shorthand, widely recognizable way for people to refer, for example, to the horrors of the civil war in the former Yugoslavia. I don't think that users of the term mean any harm by it. But the language that we use does affect the way we think about things and frame them. “Cleansing” sounds like a positive act. For me, there can be no cleansing in the context of deliberate bloodshed. There can only be murder.

The term
genocide
was coined in 1944 by the Polish-American lawyer Raphael Lemkin, who based it on the root words
genos
(Greek for “family” or “race”) and
cide
(Latin for “killing”). Its catalysts are well known, although they still mystify us. The plague in medieval times led to pogroms against Jews, who were blamed for causing mass death by poisoning the wells of Christians. Genocide — the mass murder or extermination of targeted groups of people — has been taking place for as long as humans have existed. In his book
Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur
, Ben Kiernan notes that only recently have we come to roundly condemn genocidal practices. He notes archeological evidence of mass murder carried out against men, women, and children as many as seven thousand years ago in present-day Germany, and two thousand years ago in present-day France.

Kiernan reminds us that the Old Testament is replete with examples of genocidal enmity. Deuteronomy 20:17, for example, says: “But thou shalt utterly destroy them — the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites — as the Lord has commanded you.” The Qur'an enjoins believers to “slay the idolaters wherever you find them.” Christians, Hindus, and others have perpetrated every manner of genocide.

No one group holds a monopoly on this form of ultimate evil, and few groups have completely avoided capitulating to it. But we abase ourselves each time we stand by passively and allow one group of humans to target another for destruction.

One of the most barbaric and effective ways to undermine an entire group of people has been to attack its women sexually, leaving them either dead or else “tainted” and socially isolated in the wake of the assaults. Rape has been a constant companion to genocide — during the Holocaust, over the course of the transatlantic slave trade, and in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and the Congo, to name a few places. When it does not lead to their immediate death, it has been used to kill women slowly by means of infecting them with sexually transmitted infections and diseases such as
HIV
/
AIDS
. Failing literal death, it can bring about women's cultural death. Abandoned by husbands, shunned by those who consider the rape victims to be polluted, people who have been raped have often been marginalized in the very societies to which they belong.

Pointing solely to atrocities in other communities allows a person to have a false sense of moral superiority, so we must not flinch from acknowledging, opposing, and righting injustice in our own backyard. The Beothuk people were wiped out from Newfoundland. As a form of cultural genocide, thousands of First Nations children in Canada were forcibly removed from their families and shipped to residential schools, where they were abused and punished for showing any trace of their language or culture. Indigenous peoples were also slaughtered in the United States. In one lesser-known case of North American genocide, for a quarter-century ending in 1873 — with the sanction of law authorities and the cheering of newspapers — individuals, groups, and militiamen chased down and murdered nearly all of the Yana peoples of California. Atrocities have been carried out in most corners of the world, by many peoples of the world, and that they continue to this day. We must be ever vigilant. In our own backyards, and elsewhere.

NATURAL DISASTERS AND ECONOMIC
anxieties bring out the worst in human beings. When we are insecure, when we feel that the outside world or the elements of nature threaten us, we look for a scapegoat. Often, that scapegoat has been a “privileged minority” that is seen to be usurping the rights and the dominant role of the majority. To find a scapegoat, the easiest path is to isolate a group of people — often along lines of their blood, or race. We fear that we will be displaced by these people, so we demonize them — right down to the level of judging the purity of their blood — and then we wipe them out. To protect ourselves. Xenophobia seems to be one of the most deeply entrenched human fears, and — aided by antiquated, nonsensical notions of blood — we humans have allowed it to bring out the very worst in us.

To recognize the fundamental equality of all human beings means that we cannot create hierarchies along lines of gender, race, religion, age, sexual orientation, or ability. To identify and shed subconscious beliefs that should be relegated to the Dark Ages, we must agree that blood is no determinant of human difference. In our bodies, and in the red stuff that courses through our veins and arteries, we are one and the same.

Blood has the ability to bring us together, when we share it to save each other's lives, or draw upon it metaphorically to allude to the most noble elements of the human heart and soul. But, sadly, our fixations on blood have all too often driven human beings apart; given us the most facile, unexamined, and absurd excuses to demonize each other; and fuelled the most atrocious behaviour known to mankind.

Blood. How about if we take it or leave it? Let us take it, when it is offered in the way of help — medical or metaphysical. And let us leave it right where it belongs — circulating in our veins and arteries, nothing more and nothing less — when it comes to dealing with our most base human instincts.

FIVE

OF PRESIDENTIAL MISTRESSES, HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS, AND LONG-LOST ANCESTORS:
SECRETS IN OUR BLOOD

MANY FAMILIES HAVE SECRETS
of the blood. Mine certainly does. My paternal grandparents, May Edwards Hill and Daniel Hill, had to elope to get married in 1918, shortly before he went overseas as an American army officer during World War I.

May came from a well-to-do Catholic black family, and there was nothing satisfactory about the Baltimore-raised young man with whom she had fallen in love. May's mother, Marie Coakley, who could pass for white but was married to a black dentist and was living as a member of the so-called “black bourgeoisie” in Washington, D.C., led the charge against my grandfather. What was so bad about him? In the opinion of my great-grandmother, Daniel Hill had three strikes against him. He was not Catholic. (He was soon to become a lifetime minister of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and therefore close to being a heathen. Indeed, when May wrote love letters to her husband while he fought in the trenches of France, she began some of them with “My dear pagan buzzard.”) He was not from money. And he was a dark-skinned African-American — exactly the opposite of what Marie Coakley wanted for her daughter. How would their children slide into white society, or hang on the edges of it, or benefit by means of association, with May married to a visibly black man? I heard many stories about Marie Coakley trying to break up my grandparents. I even dramatized and exaggerated the situation in my novel
Any Known Blood
. But here, I will stick to the family legend as I have heard it. According to the stories that have been passed down to me, Marie offered to pay for May's tuition at Radcliffe College only if she would leave
that man
. Daniel eventually moved his family to Missouri (where my father was born, in 1923), then to Colorado, and then to Oregon, partly to escape the clutches of his mother-in-law.

However, in 1919, before May and Dan moved out west, Jeanne — the first of their four children — was born. The war had just ended. At the time, May and Dan were living in Philadelphia. After giving birth to Jeanne, May was kept for a long time in the hospital. With May still confined to her hospital bed, Marie Coakley made arrangements for Jeanne to be baptized in a Catholic church (with a white congregation, and a white priest) in Philadelphia. The priest, the story goes, did not recognize that Marie Coakley was black, and Marie did not tell him. Not long after May was released from the hospital, she, her mother, her husband, and baby Jeanne travelled to the church on the day of the baptism. When the priest saw that they were black, he refused to baptize Jeanne. “They thought they were showing up for a baptism, and they were all completely insulted,” Doris Cochran, my aunt (and the only surviving member of the family), recalled in a telephone interview in June 2013. “The priest refused because Jeanne was a child of colour.”

Jeanne, who died in 2005, told me (in 2000, when I was researching
Black Berry, Sweet Juice
) that she ended up being baptized in a black Catholic church in Philadelphia, but that the incident left her mother disenchanted with Catholicism. May eventually left the Catholic Church entirely. According to Jeanne, the Protestant churches in the early 1900s were just as racist. Nonetheless, Jeanne attended the Catholic Church until 1985, when she finally moved over to the African Methodist Episcopal Church.

On the day of our interview in her home in Brooklyn, Jeanne was full of stories of family secrets. She had reached the age of eighty-one and seemed to have lost any sense of urgency about keeping the secrets locked away. She said that her grandmother Marie Coakley was born after Jeanne's great-grandmother Maria Coakley was raped while working as a maid in the White House in 1875, during the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant. With a grin on her face, Jeanne said, “There was involuntary mixing in the White House.” Jeanne said that Maria Coakley neither named nor accused her rapist. Maria gave birth to Marie on February 21, 1876, and the baby Marie was raised as one of the children of her grandparents, Jenny and Gabriel Coakley. Jeanne recalled that Marie's “siblings” and “parents” were considerably darker than she was.

My Aunt Jeanne said she did not hear of this story until she was twenty-one years old and happened to be visiting with her grandmother Marie and with her great-aunt Gertrude. Marie happened to insult Gertrude. Gertrude shot back that Marie was a bastard, and taunted her about being conceived as a result of rape in the White House.

I have no way of verifying the story. I will never know, for sure, if my great-great-grandmother was raped in the White House. I have no way of knowing if one of my ancestors on my father's side was a White House employee or a visitor, and white to boot. I asked my Aunt Jeanne for her opinion on this family story, which is a secret no more. “It is probably true,” Jeanne said. “Things like that happened all the time.” I know a few secrets about my family, but I do not know them all.

Our blood contains many secrets. These secrets may have to do with an identity — racial, religious, or other — that we have chosen to shed, hide, or alter. They may have to do with crimes we have committed. Children we have fathered, or mothered. People to whom we are related, or not. Blood also has the potential to yield up secrets — and even resolve disputes — about our most distant ancestry. Blood can be the most intimate reflection of our being, and it can offer details that are either abhorred or welcomed. Since blood and race have come to be so intimately acquainted, I will spend a good part of this chapter assessing that relationship. However, I also want to touch down on blood and crime, blood and forensic investigation, and how the science of genetics may be altering or challenging long-held assumptions about the meaning of our blood and the nature of our identities.

IT SO HAPPENS THAT
BLOOD
is one of the hardest stains to remove. Apparently, this is because hemoglobin binds with fibres, rather than just sitting on top of them (as, say, mud might do). You don't necessarily want your house guests to know that you have spilled blood on bedsheets or towels. Blood, in these cases, is something you want to keep secret.

For years, skilled laundresses have had all sorts of household tricks to remove bloodstains from fabrics. The first lesson is to avoid the use of hot water. No need for a washing machine, either, although time is of the essence. If you have spilled blood, you don't sit back and contemplate your fate. You act right away, sopping it up with something absorbent and using cold water. On the Web, you can find endless suggestions about how to deal with the problem. In fact, the website
Mrs. Clean
offers specific tips: cold water, soap, and hydrogen peroxide. Failing that, you may also use your own saliva or reach for toothpaste, meat tenderizer, or ammonia.

The strange thing about blood on sheets is how exposed it makes us feel if others see it. Saliva on a pillowcase, semen on a bedsheet, blueberry stains on a blanket — none of these things bring about quite the self-consciousness one feels about leaving blood on the sheets in the house of an old friend who has just given you dinner and put you up for the night. In most cases, we take steps to clean up after ourselves so nobody will see the signs of blood in our beds. But there is one situation in which the very opposite approach is required.

In chapter one, I mentioned that men don't have to think about monthly bleeding. Another thing that men don't have to worry about is proving their virginity by producing a bloodstained bedsheet after the wedding night — a ritual so ancient that it's difficult to trace its exact origins. The blood on the sheet is intended to come from the breaking of the hymen, a thin membrane that covers the opening of the vagina until it is broken during intercourse. Therefore, the thinking and the tradition go, blood on the wedding sheets proves the virginity and thus the purity of the bride, and should be hung out the following day to prove to the family and community that the groom got a good deal. Blood, in this case, is meant to put to rest any suspicions that the newly married woman has a secret sexual past.

There are several problems with this way of thinking. First of all, not all women are born with a hymen. Then there is the fact that the hymen can be broken by tampon use and physical activity. And there is the larger problem of judging chastity as such an essential asset for a woman that the absence of its proof can threaten the legality of the marriage and possibly put her in mortal danger.

Though the tradition of the wedding sheet is ancient, the value placed on virginity, and the presence of an intact hymen, persists today. And it has modern solutions. Hymen reconstruction surgery, in which a broken hymen is sutured or a piece of the vagina is used to create a new hymen, is available in many parts of the world. Some patients opt to create the illusion of chastity by having a capsule of coloured gelatin inserted into the vagina, so that it will break on the wedding night and create the desired “blood” stain.

This age-old blood revelation is meant to prove a woman's worthiness. It is a hideous way to evaluate a woman, exposing her to the judgement and condemnation of family and of the wider community. It is just one of the many ways in which society has used blood to expose our secrets, and it has led to fatal consequences for those who failed to satisfy their examiners.

LITERAL BLOODSTAINS HAVE SOME
prominence in the mind, but the blood of the imagination can be far more powerful — it prevents us from hiding from ourselves the secrets of our crimes. Consider the emotional torture of Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth. In one of the most memorable meditations on blood in Western literature, Macbeth muses that an entire ocean couldn't rinse clean his bloody hands after he and Lady Macbeth conspired to murder King Duncan. And later, as Lady Macbeth wanders her castle, half mad, a doctor and a gentlewoman wonder why she has been rubbing and washing her hands incessantly. As they eavesdrop on her wild musings, Lady Macbeth incriminates herself with her own haunting memories of the murder. Referring to the victim, she says: “Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?” She is completely unable to rid her mind of the blood she has spilled. “Out, damn'd spot!” she cries. “Out, I say!” And a few lines later: “What, will these hands ne'er be clean?” She even fixates on the scent of her victim's blood, as evidence that refuses to go away: “Here's the smell of blood still: all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.”

Lady Macbeth cannot turn her mind away from blood, because more than anything else, it symbolizes the life she has just stolen from Duncan. She has blood on her hands, and she can never forget it.

Another powerful image of blood spilled on literary pages comes from Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel
Crime and Punishment
, in which the impoverished young man Raskolnikov murders a pawnbroker and her stepsister and then, in a state of mind similar to that of Lady Macbeth, virtually drives himself crazy with the memory of what he has done.

Let me share a few lines about Raskolnikov right after he commits the double murder:

His hands were sticky with blood. He dropped the axe with the blade in the water, snatched a piece of soap that lay in a broken saucer on the window, and began washing his hands in the bucket. When they were clean, he took out the axe, washed the blade and spent a long time, about three minutes, washing the wood where there were spots of blood, rubbing them with soap. Then he wiped it all with some linen that was hanging to dry on a line in the kitchen and then he was a long while attentively examining the axe at the window. There was no trace left on it, only the wood was still damp. He carefully hung the axe in the noose under his coat. Then as far as was possible, in the dim light in the kitchen, he looked over his overcoat, his trousers and his boots. At the first glance there seemed to be nothing but stains on the boots. He wetted the rag and rubbed the boots. But he knew he was not looking thoroughly, that there might be something quite noticeable that he was overlooking.

Like Lady Macbeth, Raskolnikov is never quite able to get past the sensation that the blood on his hands has, metaphorically, not washed away; hence his grisly act will haunt him ceaselessly.
Macbeth
and
Crime and Punishment
have endured in the collective imagination for their eerie portrayal of those who have carried out violent crime. We imagine the characters will never be able to wash from their minds the memory of blood spilled — on the floor, on bodies, on their own hands.

Blood is so red, and it stains with such unrelenting diligence — as liquid manifestation, and as enduring metaphor — that when we spill it criminally, we are forever stained. Maybe our blood knows this. Maybe we are filled with red blood for a reason. Maybe the nature, colour, and undeniability of our blood serve to help preserve mankind.

WHILE LADY MACBETH AND
RASKOLNIKOV
were unable to shake their minds free of the crimes they'd committed, today's criminals not only have to contend with their conscience (we imagine) but they must also deal with the new science of forensic examination. Blood spatter analysis can reconstruct the details of a crime to a forensic investigator. Did the blood drip slowly after a crime took place? Did it travel from the victim at medium velocity as the result of a blunt blow from, say, a bat or a fist? Did it leave the victim's body at high velocity, as the result of a bullet? If a bullet passed through a body, spatter analysis can reveal the blood that left the entry point and the blood that left the exit point. Investigating detectives will also look for voids in (or sudden absences of) bloodstains at a crime scene. Perhaps, when the blood sprayed, the assailant got some blood on himself (or herself). Perhaps the absence of blood in a certain spot suggests that a witness or an accomplice was at the scene of a crime.