Hella Nation - Evan Wright [58]
HANNAH, a stout twenty-year-old Aryan mother of two, with a pudgy face and a pug nose, stands in the bright sunlight outside the Aryan Church hall, testifying about the miracle of her conversion to Christian Identity. “When I was sixteen, I was trying to kill myself. I overdosed on Prozac. I should have died, but Yahweh [the Christian Identity name for God, taken from the Hebrew] gave me a miracle. He gave me a child. I started studying Identity when he was in my belly.” She adds, “My little one came out saluting Yahweh just like this when he was born.” She demonstrates by giving a Hitler salute.
Hannah is married to Bill, a wiry twenty-six-year-old who wears his hair in a small ponytail that makes his odd SS uniform even odder. In the Pennsylvania town where Bill and Hannah live, Bill is a leading Christian Identity “teacher of Yahweh.” He learned about Christian Identity from a friend in prison.
“We’re persecuted for our beliefs,” Bill explains. “I used to get hate mail stuffed in the mailbox. One of the worst was a drawing of a white man on his knees praying while a nigger urinated on his face. The cops wouldn’t do anything, so finally, my buddy and I made a KKK snowman in the front yard. We did it right around Martin Luther King’s birthday, so it got a lot of newspaper coverage. People have left us alone after that.”
A sense of oppression—fear of the world and of nonwhite people—weighs heavily on Bill. “We’re in bondage until Yahweh’s hand comes across the land. People say I’m paranoid, and I am. I have a lot of anxiety. If I go to the store, man, and I get around two big, black boys, my heart friggin’ thumps. It’s Yahweh telling me, Get the fuck out!”
“I feel very spiritual because of Yahweh,” Hannah cuts in, as her four-year-old wanders past. “Yahweh protects me from every bad thing that can happen, because I am of Aryan race. I—not the Jews—am God’s chosen. My whole life, I knew that I was special inside. Finding Yahweh explained to me why I’d felt that way.”
Hannah picks up her son and kisses him on his cheek, gooey with a banana he’s eaten. “I’ve taught my son to shout ‘shibbia’ whenever he sees a nigger on TV. In Hebrew, our language, ‘shibbia’ is the term for a biped beast. I was at the supermarket and the lady doing the checkout was black, and he pointed at her, freaking out, going, ‘Mommy, Mommy, beastie, shibbia, beastie!’”
“But the worst threat to our race,” Bill says, “is not the nigger and the muds. It’s the wiggers, white traitors, who betray their own people.”
Hannah adds, “A white guy once told me that I’m going to hell for hating the Jews. Sometimes, all I can do is laugh at how confused white people are in our own homeland.”
Before leaving, Hannah demonstrates an innovation she claims to have contributed to the Aryan Nations. She lowers herself into a curtsy, then looks up smiling as she gives the Nazi salute. “This is my Nazi curtsy for you.” She smiles. “I invented this.”
DURING HIS CAREER as a soldier in the United States Army, James A. Dillavou washed out of helicopter pilot school because of color blindness, was kicked out of MP training because of a prior criminal record and flunked airborne assault school because of bad knees. In four years in the Army, he never achieved a rank higher than private. In the Aryan Nations, he is Major James A. Dillavou, commander of the North Central Territory.
Like others interviewed at the Congress, Dillavou, twenty-five, comes from a broken home and a hardscrabble childhood.
“You know the banana seat on a Schwinn?” Dillavou asks, squinting nearsightedly beneath the visor of his black Aryan Nations cap. “My grandfather invented that, and Schwinn stole it from him. My family lost all its money.”
Dillavou grew up in Southern California’s San Gabriel Valley. His mother—dispossessed heiress to the banana seat fortune—went through a succession of marriages and supported the family by working as a waitress.
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