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

 

 

 

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 he would circle around Beacon Street after emerging from the Park Street subway station. Walked around just to get a “feel” for his 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  

Later, mid-1960s later, when he went to school, a two-year school 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. Still later when 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 monument to past fights, 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, bloody battle number two there, 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 briskly blinkered pass 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). 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, 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. Walked toward the site and asked about what was going on. 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 frieze, a figure of a man, an old man trooper, bearded, 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 old man had (along with his grandmother) saved him from gathering a storm in the streets with the lure of the corner boy life.

He was befuddled 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. 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 was a memorial to the heroic Massachusetts 54^th Regiment, all volunteers, all black ranks, and all white officers raised right there in Boston. His interest further perked he sought to find 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, had followed the northern star, had made something of himself, learned a respectable trade and had prospered. Then when Frederick Douglass or one of those hot-tempered abolitionist orators raised the call 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 freedom...