Plain Secrets: An Outsider among the Amish

245 Pages·2008·2.24 MB·English

by  Joe Mackall

Plain Secrets

Plain Secrets
An Outsider among the Amish
(cid:1) (cid:2)
Joe Mackall
Beacon Press, Boston
Beacon Press
Beacon Street
Boston, Massachusetts -
www.beacon.org
Beacon Press books
are published under the auspices of
the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations.
© by Joe Mackall
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
 
This book is printed on acid-free paper that meets the uncoated paper
ANSI/NISO specifications for permanence as revised in .
Text design and composition by Susan E. Kelly
at Wilsted & Taylor PublishingServices
Library of Congress Control Number: 2007924329
For Dandi,
now and forever,
and in memory of Sarah

Nothing, I think, is more peculiarly characteristic...of American
society...than its inability to see the Amish for what they are.
Oh, it seesthem, all right. It sees them as quaint, picturesque, old-
ff
fashioned, backward, unprogressive, strange, extreme, di erent,
perhaps slightly subversive. And that “sight” is perfect blindness.
Wendell Berry
The Unsettling of America

contents
Author’s Note xi
Introduction xiii
one Pop Cans and Doomed Pigs 1
two The Leaving 19
three Remembering Sarah 39
four “You be careful out among them English.” 57
five The Midnight Table 69
six Underground Railroad 91
seven The Lot Falls 107
eight The Amish FBI 129
nine Time and Space 147
ten Deadly Sacred 167
eleven Another Leaving 187
twelve The World Inside, and Out 195
Epilogue 201
Acknowledgments 203
Notes 205