August 4, 2018 Travel notes

I drove along the Ohio River day before yesterday, along Hwy 52, a two lane, nearly empty road that ribbons up and down the swells caused by frequent, chocolate-colored creeks (from recent rain) that spill into the Ohio. It’s a rain forest. Each side of the highway is either thick with maple forests or lawns and hardly used marinas. It’s a scenic route. But it’s also a journey through some dramatic history. Grant’s birthplace, which I visited, and whose memoirs I partially read a couple years ago, written with a touching and powerful voice as I recall, and Rev John Rankin’s house, leader of local Abolitionists, in the town of Ripley, being main examples. Ripley was the first destination of slaves trying to make their way to Canada and freedom—the first point on the Underground Railroad. The name comes from bounty hunters, chasing a runaway slave, asking a local who was sympathetic to escaping slaves, “Where’d he go?” “Must’ve dropped onto a underground road,” was the unhelpful reply. The word “rail” added later as trains became a reality.

Looking at a map of the safe houses and towns that linked that railroad you can see it’s as busy as a network of veins. There are many examples of brave people in our history that should be recalled. Fighting to free others is part of the fight to free yourself. One predicts the other, a fact that resolves the apparent conflict between working on one’s own problems and those of society. Without the help of selfless white people sympathetic to the slaves’ struggle for freedom the escaping blacks would have been doomed. Abolitionist efforts created a womb out of which emerged all the music, art, athleticism and thought the black culture has given to our country and the world. It was a joint birthing still going on today and something we can be proud to be part of as we struggle to free ourselves from discouraging habits and internalized doubts we may have about our potency. Art is an unselfish gesture that culminates in connection just as light culminates in our blood.   

This area was a hotbed of Abolitionist activity since the revolutionary war. After that war those Virginia slave owners who felt the compunction to live up the Declaration of Independence and free their slaves did so in this area. It was a wilderness then, and they could do so without earning retaliation from other slave owners. Two small towns of ex-slaves developed here but didn’t work out too well. I haven’t researched why, as yet. But Ripley became a thriving, ship-building town rivaling Cincinnati by 1845, opposed to the sleepy, rather sad lure for tourists it is today. Another current fact is that it is full of heroin addicts, a comment on our government’s economic neglect and on the giant pharmaceutical companies marketing of Oxycontin and other opioids. But for twenty years, up through the end of the Civil War in 1865, this was the center of Abolitionist activity. Slaves were hidden in safe houses, protected by Abolitionist guns, in an atmosphere that divided fathers from sons and brother from brother. Constables, bounty hunters and slave owners prowled the shoreline and forests looking for runaway slaves, trying to force themselves into homes that hid them. Hounds on both sides of the river sniffed for runaways. It sounds like being Jewish in the Nazi era. Specific stories are of narrow escapes, tragic captures that pulled husbands from wives, parents from children. On the verge of freedom, the other side of the Ohio river in sight, people were caught and sent to the deep south and resold into slavery for life. But many made it. 

Abolitionist minded citizens of Ripley walked the streets armed, at all times. People such as John Rankin risked poverty helping ex-slaves escape because of laws allowing the government to confiscate everything you had if you aided people seeking their freedom. But they kept on despite the sacrifices and risks. At the same time he helped run-away slaves, Rankin raised thirteen children, established and maintained his church and congregation (having been driven out of Kentucky by the slave-owners and in trouble with the Presbytery there, but followed by his congregation of farmers nevertheless), wrote anti-slavery and philosophical tracts, built his house, cleared his land for his farm and, from his house high on a hill overlooking the Ohio river, kept a whale oil lamp burning in the second story window to guide runaway slaves to the safety of his home. He took them in day or night and defended them against bounty hunters and slave masters at rifle point, along with his six sons. Many threats and attempts on his life were made.

And Grant himself, although not a declared Abolitionist, was Abolitionist-minded, as was his father and family and their friends. Ultimately, Frederick Douglass remarked that the black man owed his enfranchisement primarily to the efforts of one man: President Grant. It was a back and forth struggle for freedom that goes on in various forms today. Perhaps we should be glad to have Trump, since he shows the base part of human nature so blatantly he forces us to define ourselves against it. Only now we must stand up not only against inhumane practices toward others but for the earth, water and air. All our struggles to achieve art and beauty are an essential part of this. To confront any self-doubt to create art in the face of this materialistic society is to stand against the dark inertia threatening everything. It is a call for communion of the human heart with the soft drum inside every living creature.

By the way, Cardinals are not only a pretty bird but sing with a startling clear song that trickles through the ears quick as a mountain stream!—Gene