Some of the mysterious aspects of our town can be explained by inquiry. For example, there is no reason to be bashful in the presence of a song that is playing all day long in the Leung How Kitchen, the Chinese takeout restaurant next to TJ Maxx on South Oyster Bay Road. The recording is a piano playing a lovely song over and over. Asked what the song is, the restaurant manager said, “I don’t know … Asian music.” But, in fact, humming it can make you realize it is the American standard “You Belong to Me,” a favorite of 1952.
This song has a comical tragic quality for its words and melody evoke a world traveler who remains a hick at heart. Played constantly in a Hicksville takeout restaurant, it suggests to local visitors that they will remain ‘hick’ despite any ambitions they may harbor to escape to exotic shores and faroff worlds. The hick can never truly comprehend the implications of cosmopolitan and international reality.
Perhaps, understanding the man who invented Hicksville will reveal the basis for the constant play of this song at Leung How’s. For the tale of founder Elias Hicks is just as mysterious. It, too, is a manifestation of incongruous, dynamic, internal forces. Hicks was a fierce abolitionist. His soaring eloquence impressed a 10 year old Walt Whitman when Hicks displayed it in an oration in 1830 in the grand Morrison’s Hotel, in Brooklyn Heights, at New York Harbor. On the other hand, Hicks founded the Hicksite branch of the Quaker religion. And what, you may ask if unafraid, is the Hicksite branch of Quakerism? It is the branch devoted to contemplation, resistance to involvement with society, and in tranquility pondering the nature of the God.
Here, then, is a mystery. For abolitionism, a political radical ideology largely responsible for social unrest over slavery and, eventually, for the Civil War, was extolled by Hicks. This ideology stood for absolute rejection of slavery and insistence on immediate freedom for all slaves without regard for the economic harm that for some sections of the country it could create. So, here was one and the same person seeking to break up the antebellum social order in the South with his rabble-rousing oratory and, at the same time, creating a religious sect peculiarly devoted to tranquil contemplation of the divine.
Hicks said that Jesus “observed that the people were looking outward; and assured them that the kingdom of God cometh not with outward observation; and for this reason that it was only to be known in man”, within each one of us. He believed that the Inward Light was a more important source of truth than revealed truth but in turning to this light he—what?—found that a particular social reality was evil? One would have to empiricially study slavery as it was practiced in the country and compare it to the real alternatives to come to a fair judgment of it.
The hardly reconcilable differences between contemplated truths and the requirements of factual evidence make the effectiveness of Hicks mysterious. But do not such ironies flourish still within in our town to this day?
You can visit the Hicks house. It provided free board and lodging to strangers rather than requiring them to stay at roadside inns. The house is located at 1740 Old Jericho Turnpike, off Route 106, just north of Jericho Turnpike, in Jericho. Hicks was born in 1748 and he passed on in 1832. Part of the house now serves as offices for a charitable organization.
So, the song “You Belong to Me” sings to residents of a town named for backwater types: ‘You may see the pyramids along the Nile, You may see the sun rise on a tropic isle’ but all the while you’ll belong to Hicksville.
—David Forrest Weinstein
