The Bend in the Ohio

Hello, this is Amorella. Nearly fifty miles east of this bend in the Ohio slaves crossed the river to escape slavery by continuing to follow the Underground Railroad from Kentucky up to the Rankin House at Ripley on the Ohio side. Richard shook hands with a neighbor of his grandparents, a Mr. Press Reynolds, who also lived on West Walnut Street in Westerville, Ohio. The story is that when Mr. Reynolds was a boy on the plantation he operated a tobacco press, thus he took Press for his first name. Supposedly it was a Reynolds’ plantation so he took Reynolds as his last name. Richard remembers Mr. Reynolds as a kindly old fellow with a workingman’s hands. What does it mean to have shaken hands with a man who had been born and early raised as a slave orndorff?

It was an important event in my life at the time. I was five, if I remember correctly. Too be honest, I don’t remember my thoughts at the meeting other than my grandfather and I were standing on an old side porch and Mr. Reynolds was standing on the porch with the screen door open. The house paint of the small one story house was blue I think. Almost directly across from the house stood, and still stands, the war memorial in the Otterbein College cemetery. Mr. Reynolds was like one of those granite stones that lined north to south across that cemetery. As I grew up I learned more about slavery as a matter of course. I mainly remember the event because I thought that here was a man who had witnessed the Civil War. That the war had not been that long a time before, since I could shake his hand in the present, which would have been 1947.

I had shaken hands with history. At five I had not thought much about that before, but I had an early understanding of it, because of the cemetery where as a child I toyed with my imagination while walking, running, or sitting among those stones. I understood the last names of some of those people on the stones because I had already met some of their living children or grandchildren. The concept of generations was something inherently important to me, and still is. The human generations is something I want to remember when I am dead and partially buried in that same cemetery. That is, if one consciously survives death. I think it is entirely possible because the human spirit and mind are very powerful and if anything can survive death they just might. If there is nothing after death, that’s all right too. Whatever is the natural inclination of the spirit and mind has something to do with it. Perhaps we inwardly fear death enough that we just survive it. That would be funny. If G---D exists, I feel SheanHe has a sense of humor and it would be funny to wake up dead. The universe is full of little jokes.

Strangely enough, I awoke in the middle of the night with a flash of memory of old Mr. Reynolds’ round face. He had brightness within his tired eyes, short gray curly hair, and a warm, kind smile for a little one like me.