On Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ Memorial To Colonel Robert Gould Shaw And The Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth Regiment (Volunteers) –Take Four   

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

…he had walked pass that blessed then defaced, muddied, unattended frieze across the street from the State House on Beacon Street in Boston it seemed like half his now graying life. Anytime he had cadged a hooky day from high school back in the early 1960s in order to head into downtown Boston and check out the day life on the Common, grab an off-beat movie at the many big house theaters on lower Washington Street to kill a couple of hours, or just hang out with the beats, beaten, and the bowed, would circle up around Beacon Street after emerging from the Park Street subway station (sometimes up Tremont then to Beacon). Walked around just to get a “feel” for his city, his mother’s birth city, the city of his birth, on humid summer days, leaves falling orange/red/yellow/autumn days, bleak snow-bound winter lights days, and rebirth green spring days. Walked head down right by the seemingly obscure defaced and unrepaired marble. Walked by thinking of his big world existential problems too intense to worry about faded pasts, or old time hokey glories.   

Later, mid-1960s later, when he went to school, a two-year school at first since that playing hooky to be one with the beaten brethren on the Common had caught up with him come graduation time and then transferred to Suffolk University in that same downtown Boston and had to work trucks down toward Congress Street to make his daily meat he would pass the memorial on his way to school and occasionally when he was second man on the trucks. Still later, after a stint in Uncle’s bloody, bloodied defeated Vietnam army at a time when he had developed a bad habit of expecting the world to owe him a living for his meager service and he lived on the hill (Beacon Hill) with some rarified suburban girl from Long Island who footed the bill (or rather some New Jack City banker Daddy) in sullen splendor (until she in her turn married some junior up and coming stockbroker) his studied neglect continued.

Yes he had passed it, that subtle stark monument to past fights, to fights worth fighting, like it was just another in a long line of historic ornaments in a town filled with memorials to its ancient arrival long continental history. You know bloody battle number one here against some heathen force, bloody battle number two there against the damn redcoats, a pigeon-bedecked statute of some fire-breathing Puritan divine casting out heathens here or some furious bearded abolitionist turning up the heat there, some battle-hardened general leaning Grant-like there, some corruption-filled over-fed civic leader in full three piece suit regalia here. Yes, the town was a breathing tribute to all that went down in the cold times American East when west, real west, was someplace around the Hudson River and white man European dreams were of making it along the Eastern seaboard and not having to trek inland luckless to face the unknown, natural or man-make.  

Had thoughtlessly briskly blinkered past that perfect pre-historic monument to some pretty important history going on right before his eyes down in bloody Birmingham/Selma/Greensboro/Philadelphia (MS that is)/Montgomery/Oxford (MS again) and one thousand other later to be  storied locales after the dust cleared (and the fight reined in). He had been attuned to all that although only touched the fringe of the crest when some army brothers, some Harlem brothers spoke of creating a new nation all shiny and black. Yet with all that civil rights let-them-vote-sent-books-to Alabama-ride-the-freedom-bus he was clueless to that aspect of his history. Clueless (and no high school history class, at least the days he attended, ever mentioned such things) to those places, Fort Wagner above all, where his people, his black proud Massachusetts 54^th (and later 55^th) had made righteous stands for freedom, had filled the sable ranks, had arms in hand confirmed the worst planter’s John Brown-benighted nightmare, had bled rivers of blood and  inelegantly sweated buckets of sweat, had trooped down to their citadel, Charleston, singing marching songs, and had not waited, no, no more wait, on some benevolent white man to do the work of freedom.

Then one cloudy day, not a 1960s day but much later after the image of the shiny black nation faded and long after he had gotten over the need to feel the world owed him a living for his meager service and for his skin, he happened to notice some work being done in the area around the monument while walking toward Park Street Station and a ride to the suburbs. That suburban ride came with its own psychic price but that is for another day as this day was a day for heroic remembrances not the stuff of benighted life. So he walked toward the site and asked about what was going on, why all the furious activity. Restoration they called it, bringing the dead back to life he thought.

Suddenly the sun glistened though a cloud and he noticed something on the then partly repaired frieze, a figure of a man. An old man trooper, an old pappy they called them back in the neighborhood back in the day, ancient bearded to almost be able to see the grey flecks sprinkled in that Jehovah nest, bed-rolled, knap-sacked, rifle-shouldered, marching in step just in front and to the left (from a front view of the scene) of a white officer on horse (whom he would find out later was the Colonel Shaw who was buried with his black brethren in  knighted dignity in some ashy pit in front of bloodied Fort Wagner). He stopped in his tracks as he realized that old soldier looked very much like his paternal grandfather, the father of his own rolling-stone father who had taken off for parts unknown and left him and his mother to the tender mercies when he was about seven. That bearded old man, grey-flecked, had (along with his grandmother) saved him from gathering a storm in the streets with the lure of the corner boy life. He had come north from sharecropper Mississippi, Mister James Crow’s Mississippi the worst kind), had taken up the shoemaker’s trade when that flourished in the town, had raised as best he could his five sons and two daughters (only his rolling-stone father a misstep) and raised hell when he could about the de facto segregation he faced every day. Had thus shouldered some serious if not heroic activities, had made up for some father sins.  

He was befuddled by the old greybeard at first since as a veteran of the Vietnam War he knew that no old pappy guys were filling the ranks of the American army in his time and so that old pappy figure perked his interest. Maybe he was kindred, but more importantly what drove the old-timer to put harm’s way between himself and his old long gone world. One day he went to the Boston Public Library over in Copley Square and found a book that dealt with the history of what he had found out that cloudy day was a memorial to the heroic Massachusetts 54^th Regiment, all volunteers, all black ranks, and all white officers raised right there in Boston. (Mostly all freedman too since old Johnny Reb was putting a summary death penalty on any former slave, anything black that he captured.)

His interest perked he sought to find out who was the model for that old pappy soldier. Had he a history, some story to tell. He never did find out if there was a real live model but he liked to think that old pappy had escaped from some desperate Tidewater plantation, maybe led others out of bondage, had followed the northern star, had made something of himself, learned a respectable trade, maybe a shoemaker like grandpa, and had prospered. Then when Frederick Douglass or one of those hot-tempered abolitionist orators raised the call to sable arms he had laid down his tools and joined up.  Joined up amid ancient memories of kin in Pharaoh’s thrall and had not waited, said no, no more wait, on some benevolent white man to do the work of bloody freedom...