At a recent book club discussion involving my Long Island-based
novel, Don’t Ya Know, a question came
up about the historical accuracy of the term “Keyclose Clan.” In the novel, this is an
association to which the dunce-meat duo of Josiah Remie and Hector
Wesley have sworn allegiance while acting out their miscreant deeds in the
early 1900s.
“Keyclose” is an aberration of the Greek word “kyklos,”
meaning circle. Kyklos is a philospophy dating back to Plato’s Republic.
It defines a political cycle that continually rotates
from anarchy through to democracy and around again. An American aberration of the word became “Ku Klux,” the Klan founded in 1865 as a secret society. The KKK flourished on and off, mostly in
the South, before being declared unconstitutional in the 1880s and fading away,
only to rear its head again in Plato's ongoing cycle. *
A revival of the hate-mongering group occurred in the northeast at the turn of the 20th century in the wake of rising
immigration numbers. One particular hotspot was Worcester, Massachusetts which
had become a fully industrialized city by then, attracting scores of immigrants
to work in textiles, shoes, and clothing factories.
 |
| Worcester, 1900s c. |
The first wave of Irish,
French and Swedes was quickly followed by an influx of Lithuanian, Polish,
Italian, Greek, Turkish, and Armenian people. The crowded living conditions overflowed
into all sorts of rivalries. In particular, Catholics and Jews became targets
of “kyklos” which formed their owned “codes” within the ghetto population. **
In Don’t Ya Know,
it is Josiah Remie who first mentions the “Keyclose Clan.” Josiah, whose
entire education is based on hearsay, transcribes the word in his brain phonetically
and comes up with "Keyclose." Josiah tells his buddy, Hector Wesley, about it:
“Yeah, so this Woo-ster man comes with this whole
group and they stays at the [Believers’] camp for two weeks. I never did have a group
stay that long, but they comes from the mainland over to here because they been
to the Believers’ place up around there on that Cape and hears about us…So this
guy tells about a group called the Keyclose Clan. They go around and scare
people in Woo-ster who don’t abide by the code, don’t ya know. Like the…uh..well..the
guy said…the code…uh…”
Hector Wesley
replies with a plan to attack a statue at a nearby Catholic convent. The two go
on to destroy a local Jew's Sukkoth and don’t hesitate to demolish an
integrated cemetery.
Neither
Hector nor Josiah knows “the code” specifically, but inherently they know about
hate and how it comes in cycles. In Don’t
Ya Know, an island community triumphs over a clash of cultures by working “all-a-wanna.”
It is an Indian word meaning, “altogether,
for the good of each other and for the
best in each other.”
Since we appear to be in another of those cycles in our real world, Don't Ya Know is a reminder of how to prevail over the Josiahs and Hectors among us.
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*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyklos
**https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worcester,_Massachusetts
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