Beyond the River
A Sermon by the Reverend Holly Horn
Delivered at The First Unitarian Church of Philadelphia
January 16, 2005
“The past keeps changing”, one of my archaeology professors used to say. And indeed it does, inevitably, as we attempt to understand our own times through meaningful negotiation with the past.
The past and the present converged sharply on a bright, sunny day last summer. My mother and father, Benjamin and I drove from my parent’s house in a suburb of Dayton, Ohio – south and east – to the small town of Ripley, which sits on the north bank of the Ohio River.
We drove through farmland sprinkled with small towns, countryside similar to that surrounding the suburbs of my childhood – yet also different. That familiar landscape flattened by glacial ice gave way to rolling hills. And beside the corn and soybeans, we passed by patches of a strange, broad-leafed plant, which my father identified as tobacco.
The trip should have taken a couple of hours, but we got lost. After a minor outbreak of whose fault it was, we stopped at a general store-type of place. A lively conversation at the checkout counter halted abruptly as I walked in. Getting directions turned out to be a greater challenge than I could have imagined. Only after I was back in the car did it dawn on me that “hee-ul” meant “hill” in this part of the world.
Our destination was the house of the abolitionists John and Jean Rankin, located at the summit of a ridge looking down past the town of Ripley, far below, and across the Ohio River to Kentucky. But, my mother’s plan was first to take the ferry over to the Kentucky side and eat lunch at an historic tavern by the river. Totally my kind of lunch: history with a view.
Despite a fair amount of whether this place would still be open for lunch, should we call, should we not call, was the ferry running, etc. we managed to find the landing. The ferryman motioned us to drive up onto the ferry, and we were gliding across the water before we could even ask the fee. It was only $5.00; did they think we would change our minds?
On the southern shore, we were greeted by a shiny red railroad car, which houses the visitor center for the tiny town of Augusta, Kentucky. The Beehive Tavern – constructed in the same year our church was founded, 1796 – is just across the street.
So – finally – we did eat lunch at the Beehive and picked up some tourist pamphlets, one for an Underground Railroad Walking Tour, titled “Walk the Escape Routes”.
It described, among other things, a slave jail just a few blocks away. So, we walked over there. And as we were walking, the bright sunny day gradually clouded over. A nearly imperceptible chill came into the air. It was as if we were approaching a precinct of permanent gloom, a pocket of cursed earth.
And we were.
The slave jail is a two-story, rectangular stone structure, with a steeply pitched roof and two chimneys. It looks as if it has just sat there since it went out of use.
There was no sign or marker of any kind to identify the site. But, it was unmistakable. Peering in through the iron bars, the cells are still there, cramped cages, and the dungeon – thick with despair, with the sickening memory of human suffering, just sucking the summer air out of you.
Yet, this pocket of cursed earth is in a municipal park. Just a few yards from the slave jail, there is a swimming pool, music is blaring, children are splashing and laughing. There’s a tennis court.
How can anyone play tennis here?
What does this unmarked grave of hope mean to the people of Augusta, Kentucky?
I decide to go to the perky, little Visitor Center to find out. The cheerful lady at the Visitor Center knows nothing, absolutely nothing about the slave jail. As far as she knows, nobody in town knows anything about it. But, they have plans to develop the waterfront.
At this point, I realize that I have, inadvertently, entered upon a pilgrimage which necessarily intersects, as most pilgrimages do, with tourism. The mysteries of knowing and not knowing, of remembering and forgetting, of presence and absence and how the past changes – coincide – with the opening the following week of the Underground Railroad Museum in Cincinnati, and Augusta, Kentucky seems eager to cash in.
What images will be engraved on their keychains and ashtrays? What does it feel like to live in a house built by slaves? How can anyone play tennis in that pocket of cursed earth?
No time to find out. Mom and Dad veto a detour to the Bracken County Historical Society. So, we’re driving down to the bridge which will take us across the river, back to Ohio. From the road, though, we can see very clearly the house of the Rankin family, high on the opposite shore. At night, the lantern on the front porch would have been a clear signal to the escaping slaves that the first station on Ohio’s underground railway was open for business.
Once again, it’s a beautiful summer day. The river shimmers and the wildflowers shake off the roadside dust.
This is the place where Eliza’s actual crossing happened, immortalized by Harriet Beecher Stowe in her novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. On such a beautiful summer day, it’s hard to imagine Eliza, in the dead of night, making her way across the breaking ice, falling into the frigid water and flinging her child onto the next floe, all the while pursued by a slave catcher.
We’re over the bridge in minutes.
The Rankin house commands a breathtaking view of the Ohio River valley. It’s maintained by the Ohio Historical Society and open to the public. And on this day, it was staffed by two women, at least one a highly knowledgeable docent.
It’s a small house, and after touring it, we set upon the docent with a barrage of questions. My mother and father and I had all read Ann Hagedorn’s book Beyond the River, a gripping account of the Rankins and others in Ripley and neighboring towns whose routine deeds of remarkable heroism inspired the later abolitionists, like William Lloyd Garrison. So, we had a lot of questions.
I saved for last my question about the slave jail in Augusta, Kentucky. Did she know anything about it?
Her face hardened; her eyes turned steely cold. “No,” she said.
I could tell I was on shaky ground here, but I ventured further, “It’s so near to here, I just thought maybe you might know something.” In a voice so controlled as if to withhold a flood-tide of emotion, she replied, “I’ve lived in Ripley for twenty years, and I’ve been across the river three times.”
Do Ohio historians hate Kentucky historians? Are they competing for tourist dollars? Have they made a pact not to know certain things? By saving that question for last, was I knowing something already? That it would put an unpleasant end to all the questions? Is the past not really past at all, but as nearly present as the unmarked slave jail by the swimming pool? As abundantly present as the safe house on Liberty Hill?
We concluded our visit to Ripley with a walk on the waterfront, lined with houses limned with stories of risk and courage. Looking across the river: two communities whose past is so deeply connected, so harshly contested, so thickly overgrown.
Deep veins of racism run like fault lines through our culture, quiescent at times, heaving and cracking at other times. We are all marked by it: in our knowing and not knowing, our remembering and forgetting, by saying and by silence, by presence and absences. It is the sum of all of these that infiltrates our institutions, as well, visibly or invisibly preserving a wrong past.
Martin Luther King Day is one national holiday that so far has resisted colonization by consuming. Neither food nor disciplines of shopping take center stage on this day. Rather, we are called to reflection and to service.
In reflecting on the past, we change it, and in doing so we ourselves are changed. AMEN.
Previous page: Sermons
Next page: Sermon Archive