A SOLDIER GOES HOME FOR CHRISTMAS

From Linda Lee Greene, Author/Artist

Christmas Eve of 1941 in the mess hall of Ft. Knox, Kentucky Training Center was nothing like home for the young US Army recruits, but they decorated a tree and wolfed-down a traditional dinner of turkey, pie, cake, and all the trimmings. Early that morning, Buck Private Bob Gaffin had rummaged through the contents of the locker he had been assigned, trying to decide what to pack in anticipation of receiving a four-day pass. Jammed into the locker were bed clothes, overcoat, raincoat, two wool uniforms, two suntan shirts and tie, three wool suits, underwear, two pairs of shoes, one pair of overshoes, six pairs of socks, one combat suit, one pair of gloves, and toiletries, not to mention one tent, one first-aid kit, one shell belt, one mess kit, and more to come. This unsophisticated farm-boy, who owned far far fewer personal articles than this enormous cache, felt he had hit the jackpot. In a letter to his family he expressed a profound sense of stewardship for all the materiel issued to him by the military. I sure have to be careful with it, he wrote. In the end, he packed his haversack lightly—just enough to get him through a long weekend at his parent’s farm in tiny Peebles, Ohio. Stuffed inside were the clothes he had worn the day he was inducted into the Army at Ft. Thomas, Kentucky a month before. His mother and sisters would wash and iron them, brush his wool coat and hunting cap, wrap his scruffy old brogans in newspaper, and store them away for him in the locker at the foot of the bed at home he shared with his sixteen-year-old brother, Bussy. Bob was anxious to see his frail brother, ill with a serious bronchial condition he had developed at the age of ten.    

Although Bob told his family he had borrowed the money, in truth he had sold the stationery, the towel set, and other Christmas gifts he had received from his family and girlfriend. In that way he raised the money required of him by the Army to get a four-day pass. There was also enough to buy a bus ticket from Ft. Knox to Peebles and back, and he went home for Christmas, surprising his family.

                                                                         

            As his brother, Bussy’s new fighting rooster, Ranger, named after the Lone Ranger, Bussy’s favorite radio character, coaxed the sun to rising with his ringing five-note greeting, and the cows bawled in the field as if in welcome to him, the gravel on the road leading to his parent’s farm crunched beneath Bob’s boots. At that hour, only his mother would be up; his father and his many brothers and sisters would still be sleeping. He adjusted the haversack slung over the shoulder of his new wool overcoat and bent down to straighten the creases in the immaculate wool trousers of his spiffy new uniform.

His mother had been right in her latest letter to him: it was bleak in Southern Ohio. There was an eerie mist hovering over the land, a fuzzy band of fog like a shimmering boa hugging the neck of the earth. As far as the eye could reach, dense bare trees, their feet cloaked in the mist, seemed lonely and unsupported, their jagged and raw heads, unprotected, piercing the top of the mist. The silver conditions of the morning seemed to mirror a shift in Bob’s soul. It was an aloneness he was coming to know all too well, one in which clear colors and details formerly sharp and contrasting were fading to gray and merging, were transforming everything often to unrecognizable states. It was a wary feeling of exposure to a bizarre new life in which not only his surroundings but he was becoming unfamiliar to himself.

It had been difficult for him to articulate the issues that were needling him, and part of the problem was directly tied to the impossibility of finding that voice in the environment where he was being trained to be a killing machine. Although in the beginning he had spoken with such bravado about being ready to go to any lengths to protect his country and family, as well as Dot, the girl he loved, as the reality of the fighting approached, methods of killing and maiming and destroying that nobody on the outside of it could possibly anticipate or comprehend, his sense of purpose was becoming blurred, like that foggy landscape.

Bob had innocently played with the idea that he had a kind of affinity with the ways and means of war, for as a backcountry boy he was familiar with the natural cycles of birth and death of the animals on the farm, surrounding forests, and countryside. He had euthanized sick animals, shot hogs in the head in preparation for slaughter, and he knew guns, the feel of them in his hands, their kick against his shoulder, the real damage they did to animate and inanimate objects alike. Guns had long been a hobby for him, actually. In his creative mind, he had even begun to design guns. As a matter of fact, in his spare time at the training camp in Ft. Knox, he had made rudimentary sketches of a canny little gun he planned to someday fashion out of a Zippo cigarette lighter. 

Hunting had been nearly a daily activity for him since his adolescence, and he was learning that his experience in that regard gave him a decided advantage over many of the other boys at Ft. Knox, town and city boys whose experience with guns extended no further than toy guns, or perhaps B. B. guns, boys who had never held real guns in their hands, or tracked down living prey in their sights, and once positioned in the crosshairs, squeezing the trigger and killing that prey. But that nagging voice inside of him was urging him to pay attention to the fact that killing an animal was a whole other matter than bringing a human being to its death. Despite the fact of his believing in the necessity of the war, for after all Japan had attacked the United States, and Germany had aggressed against his country as well, his being away from Ft. Knox for only a few hours now helped him to see that he was wrestling with that very moral dilemma, the first and most serious moral dilemma of his life.

            His was a tender society that believed in goodwill toward all people. He had been taught that “Thou Shalt Not Kill” his fellow man and it constituted a basic tenet of his very soul. How am I going to kill another human being? he worried as he sauntered in his usual loping fashion toward the farmhouse. He decided to find time to talk to his favorite preacher, Harley Ward about it before he returned to camp. Perhaps that man of God could help to lift the mantle of confusion weighing so heavily on Bob’s soul. 

            Barely glowing from a moisture-streaked window in the kitchen of the farmhouse was a sole low light. In the thick mist, a plume of white smoke billowed delicately, charging the air with the scent of wood smoke, a scent of home. Sparks in the smoke twinkled like stardust shooting from the chimney at the top of the peaked roof. As he neared the back of the farmhouse, he took note of its slick moisture-sodden clapboards. It was a house weeping from the melting icicles along its eves, weeping like those damp and lonely trees, weeping like the boggy fields, as if in an act of complicity, they collectively wept, as if the whole of nature and his home grieved an inapprehensible and ill-omened fortune lying in wait for him, his family, his girl, his country, lying in wait like the hidden land mines he would encounter on the beaches of Southern, Italy in the not too distant future. Shuddering like a threatened animal in the few minutes that passed, he worked at shaking off his paranoia as he entered the perpetually unlocked back door that opened to the kitchen. 

At the cook stove, her back to him, his mother stood in the arc of light from a kerosene lamp, her body noticeably weary as she bent to her duties of stoking her cook stove with her poker.  At the sound of his footfalls that she knew so well, but dared not believe were real, and visibly shaking with fear that they would prove to be products of her imagination, she turned to him. Her empty hand flew to her mouth to stifle her cry, and tears spilled from her eyes.

The changes in his mother in just a few weeks took Bob’s breath away. It was as if the changes in him were manifestly reflected in her, as if by some means of osmosis beyond the natural connection between parent and child, his experiences and fears and bewilderments also were hers, only exaggerated and accelerated. She seemed already to have endured what he was facing; she seemed to have already passed through, and had been permanently altered by, the ravages of war: the superhuman demands on one’s body and heart and mind and conscience; the depleted stores of psychological reserves—the lifetime of recurring night terrors. In her rote movements as she had bent to stoke her stove, in her turning to him, and in her covering of her quivering mouth, a rigid choking anxiety afflicted her.

He lowered his bag to the linoleum-clad floor while concurrently she dropped her poker with a crash. That emptying of their hands was the prelude to the opening of their arms. As she swayed weakly in his embrace, Bob’s dilemma was erased from his mind. In that moment, his conscience split into two expedient parts, and in a reversal of roles, he became her personal protector. He knew then that to keep his mother safe, he would kill their enemies, and without hesitation, if not with relish—he would kill with the automatic precision of the professional soldier he was learning to be, and as grievous as they might be, he would live with whatever consequences his choice quickened in him…©

 

The above is an excerpt from multi-award-winning and Amazon best-selling author, Linda Lee Greene’s novel of historical fiction titled, GUARDIANS AND OTHER ANGELS. An ambitious and thorough exploration of two families whose experiences are funneled through the pivotal early to middle decades of the twentieth century, this seamless blend of fiction and nonfiction renders an authentic slice of Americana at its most personal and profound. Based on actual events and oral history, and featuring transcriptions of dozens of authentic private letters written by the story’s principle characters, Greene delivers an insider’s view of the hearts and minds and day to day events of a singular group of people counted among history’s greatest generation. Powerful in its sweeping journalistic impact and at the same time tender in its novelistic prose, this highly rated book contributes greatly to the preservation efforts of the era it interprets.

 

The novel is available for purchase in eBook and paperback through Amazon.

Purchase Link of the book: http://goo.gl/imUwKO

Image: GAFFIN FARM IN WINTER, acrylic painting by Linda Lee Greene

#ChristmasEve, #Ft.KnoxKentucky, #ArmyTrainingCenter, #WorldWarII, #PeeblesOhio, #GuardiansAndOtherAngels, #LindaLeeGreene

A PLACE AT THE TABLE

 

From Linda Lee Greene, Author & Artist

 

It was a foregone conclusion that eighteen year old Lee Greene of Peebles, Adams County, Ohio would be drafted, but like so many young couples living everywhere under the specter of World War II, his sweetheart Roma Gaffin and he got married anyway. The date was September 29, 1942. By Christmas of that same year they were pregnant for me. A few weeks before my birth, my father was drafted into the US Navy, with the expectation that following his training he would be shipped to somewhere in the Pacific Theater of the war. My mother stayed on at my grandparent’s farm in Peebles, and it was in a bedroom there that I was born, assisted into the world by Old Doc Ellison. My father first laid eyes on me a few weeks later—on the occasion of his return home after receiving an honorable medical discharge from the Navy.

There was little separation in my mind between my parents and my grandparents when I was a kid. Despite the fact that by the time of my toddlerhood, my parents, little brother, and I had settled in Columbus, Ohio, the farm and its inhabitants play central roles in the script of my childhood. We spent every weekend and holiday there, and my brother and I stayed at the farm during every summer until I was an adolescent. One of my most vibrant memories is of Lena, my grandmother, thick around the middle by then, her chestnut hair peppered with white, utilitarian apron tied around her waist, standing before her cook stove. With fresh peaches plucked from trees in the farm’s orchard or stash of canned goods in the cellar, and butter churned from the milk of resident cows, in her wood-filled cook stove, lacking the modern convenience of temperature control, my grandmother whipped up peach cobbler to rival any big city bakery. Breads, muffins, cakes, cookies, pies, cobblers—all the baked goods consumed by her large family were the products of her masterful hands. An abundance of her baked goods was the highlight of her high-holiday dinners. Memories of them helped me through the lonely Thanksgiving of 2020, and will continue to sustain me in the trying weeks of Covid-19 ahead.

I didn’t inherit my grandmother’s prowess in the kitchen but once in a while, I catch a glimpse of myself in a mirror, and I see fleeting fragments of her in me. I did inherit her affinity for storytelling. I hear her colorful depictions of local gossip so clearly in my mind’s ear. She was also a prolific writer of delightful and informative letters, the greater number of them penned during the Great Depression and World II. Many of them are transcribed in, and form the spine of, GUARDIANS AND OTHER ANGELS, my novel of historical fiction, based on the true story of three generations of my family. And of course, my formidable grandmother is a key figure of it. One review of the novel states: “5 stars…Wonderfully Written! This was a thoroughly enjoyable book. I loved the Americana. [It] reached out and touched my heart, mind and soul. [It] provided tremendous insight into what many American families endured during the first half of the 20th century. It captures you and draws you in. This is most certainly a five-star novel.”

 

Purchase link to GUARDIANS AND OTHER ANGELS: http://goo.gl/imUwKO

                                                                               

 

~LENA’S PEACH COBBLER~

Add 5 peeled, cored, and sliced peaches, 1 cup sugar and ¼ tsp salt to a saucepan and stir to combine. Cook on medium heat for just a few minutes—until the sugar is dissolved and juices are drawn from the peaches. Remove from heat and set aside. 

*(If using canned or glass jar peaches in an amount of about 1 quart, skip the above step) 

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Slice 6 tbs butter into pieces and add to a 9x13 inch baking dish. Place the pan in the oven while it preheats, to allow the butter to melt. Once melted, remove the pan from the oven.

1.      To make the batter, mix together 1 cup flour, 1 cup sugar, 2 tsp baking powder, and ¼ tsp salt. Stir in ¾ cup milk, just until combined. Pour the mixture into the pan, over the melted butter and smooth to an even layer. 

2.      Spoon the peaches and juice (or canned/glass jar peaches, if using) over the batter. Sprinkle ground cinnamon generously over the top.

3.      Bake for about 38-40 minutes. Serve warm topped with a scoop of ice cream, if desired.©

                                                            

#PeeblesOhio, #AdamsCountyOhio, #farm, #WorldWarII, #WWII, #USNavy, #GuardiansAndOtherAngels, #LindaLeeGreene

A WORLD WAR II SOLDIER’S CHRISTMAS

By Linda Lee Greene, Author & Artist

Christmas Eve of 1941 in the mess hall of Ft. Knox, Kentucky Training Center was nothing like home for the young US Army recruits, but they decorated a tree and wolfed-down a traditional dinner of turkey, pie, cake, and all the trimmings. Early that morning, Buck Private Bob Gaffin had rummaged through the contents of the locker he had been assigned, trying to decide what to pack in anticipation of receiving a four-day pass. Jammed into the locker were bed clothes, overcoat, raincoat, two wool uniforms, two suntan shirts and tie, three wool suits, underwear, two pairs of shoes, one pair of overshoes, six pairs of socks, one combat suit, one pair of gloves, and toiletries, not to mention one tent, one first-aid kit, one shell belt, one mess kit, and more to come. This unsophisticated farm-boy, who owned far far fewer personal articles than this enormous cache, felt he had hit the jackpot. In a letter to his family he expressed a profound sense of stewardship for all the materiel issued to him by the military. I sure have to be careful with it, he wrote. In the end, he packed his haversack lightly—just enough to get him through a long weekend at his parent’s farm in tiny Peebles, Ohio. Stuffed inside were the clothes he had worn the day he was inducted into the Army at Ft. Thomas, Kentucky a month before. His mother and sisters would wash and iron them, brush his wool coat and hunting cap, wrap his scruffy old brogans in newspaper, and store them away for him in the locker at the foot of the bed at home he shared with his sixteen-year-old brother, Bussy. Bob was anxious to see his frail brother, ill with a serious bronchial condition he had developed at the age of ten.    

Although Bob told his family he had borrowed the money, in truth he had sold the stationery, the towel set, and other Christmas gifts he had received from his family and girlfriend. In that way he raised the money required of him by the Army to get a four-day pass. There was also enough to buy a bus ticket from Ft. Knox to Peebles and back, and he went home for Christmas, surprising his family.

            As his brother, Bussy’s new fighting rooster, Ranger, named after the Lone Ranger, Bussy’s favorite radio character, coaxed the sun to rising with his ringing five-note greeting, and the cows bawled in the field as if in welcome to him, the gravel on the road leading to his parent’s farm crunched beneath Bob’s boots. At that hour, only his mother would be up; his father and his many brothers and sisters would still be sleeping. He adjusted the haversack slung over the shoulder of his new wool overcoat and bent down to straighten the creases in the immaculate wool trousers of his spiffy new uniform.

His mother had been right in her latest letter to him: it was bleak in Southern Ohio. There was an eerie mist hovering over the land, a fuzzy band of fog like a shimmering boa hugging the neck of the earth. As far as the eye could reach, dense bare trees, their feet cloaked in the mist, seemed lonely and unsupported, their jagged and raw heads, unprotected, piercing the top of the mist. The silver conditions of the morning seemed to mirror a shift in Bob’s soul. It was an aloneness he was coming to know all too well, one in which clear colors and details formerly sharp and contrasting were fading to gray and merging, were transforming everything often to unrecognizable states. It was a wary feeling of exposure to a bizarre new life in which not only his surroundings but he was becoming unfamiliar to himself.

It had been difficult for him to articulate the issues that were needling him, and part of the problem was directly tied to the impossibility of finding that voice in the environment where he was being trained to be a killing machine. Although in the beginning he had spoken with such bravado about being ready to go to any lengths to protect his country and family, as well as Dot, the girl he loved, as the reality of the fighting approached, methods of killing and maiming and destroying that nobody on the outside of it could possibly anticipate or comprehend, his sense of purpose was becoming blurred, like that foggy landscape.

Bob had innocently played with the idea that he had a kind of affinity with the ways and means of war, for as a backcountry boy he was familiar with the natural cycles of birth and death of the animals on the farm, surrounding forests, and countryside. He had euthanized sick animals, shot hogs in the head in preparation for slaughter, and he knew guns, the feel of them in his hands, their kick against his shoulder, the real damage they did to animate and inanimate objects alike. Guns had long been a hobby for him, actually. In his creative mind, he had even begun to design guns. As a matter of fact, in his spare time at the training camp in Ft. Knox, he had made rudimentary sketches of a canny little gun he planned to someday fashion out of a Zippo cigarette lighter. 

Hunting had been nearly a daily activity for him since his adolescence, and he was learning that his experience in that regard gave him a decided advantage over many of the other boys at Ft. Knox, town and city boys whose experience with guns extended no further than toy guns, or perhaps B. B. guns, boys who had never held real guns in their hands, or tracked down living prey in their sights, and once positioned in the crosshairs, squeezing the trigger and killing that prey. But that nagging voice inside of him was urging him to pay attention to the fact that killing an animal was a whole other matter than bringing a human being to its death. Despite the fact of his believing in the necessity of the war, for after all Japan had attacked the United States, and Germany had aggressed against his country as well, his being away from Ft. Knox for only a few hours now helped him to see that he was wrestling with that very moral dilemma, the first and most serious moral dilemma of his life.

            His was a tender society that believed in goodwill toward all people. He had been taught that “Thou Shalt Not Kill” his fellow man and it constituted a basic tenet of his very soul. How am I going to kill another human being? he worried as he sauntered in his usual loping fashion toward the farmhouse. He decided to find time to talk to his favorite preacher, Harley Ward about it before he returned to camp. Perhaps that man of God could help to lift the mantle of confusion weighing so heavily on Bob’s soul. 

            Barely glowing from a moisture-streaked window in the kitchen of the farmhouse was a sole low light. In the thick mist, a plume of white smoke billowed delicately, charging the air with the scent of wood smoke, a scent of home. Sparks in the smoke twinkled like stardust shooting from the chimney at the top of the peaked roof. As he neared the back of the farmhouse, he took note of its slick moisture-sodden clapboards. It was a house weeping from the melting icicles along its eves, weeping like those damp and lonely trees, weeping like the boggy fields, as if in an act of complicity, they collectively wept, as if the whole of nature and his home grieved an inapprehensible and ill-omened fortune lying in wait for him, his family, his girl, his country, lying in wait like the hidden land mines he would encounter on the beaches of Southern, Italy in the not too distant future. Shuddering like a threatened animal in the few minutes that passed, he worked at shaking off his paranoia as he entered the perpetually unlocked back door that opened to the kitchen. 

At the cook stove, her back to him, his mother stood in the arc of light from a kerosene lamp, her body noticeably weary as she bent to her duties of stoking her cook stove with her poker.  At the sound of his footfalls that she knew so well, but dared not believe were real, and visibly shaking with fear that they would prove to be products of her imagination, she turned to him. Her empty hand flew to her mouth to stifle her cry, and tears spilled from her eyes.

The changes in his mother in just a few weeks took Bob’s breath away. It was as if the changes in him were manifestly reflected in her, as if by some means of osmosis beyond the natural connection between parent and child, his experiences and fears and bewilderments also were hers, only exaggerated and accelerated. She seemed already to have endured what he was facing; she seemed to have already passed through, and had been permanently altered by, the ravages of war: the superhuman demands on one’s body and heart and mind and conscience; the depleted stores of psychological reserves—the lifetime of recurring night terrors. In her rote movements as she had bent to stoke her stove, in her turning to him, and in her covering of her quivering mouth, a rigid choking anxiety afflicted her.

He lowered his bag to the linoleum-clad floor while concurrently she dropped her poker with a crash. That emptying of their hands was the prelude to the opening of their arms. As she swayed weakly in his embrace, Bob’s dilemma was erased from his mind. In that moment, his conscience split into two expedient parts, and in a reversal of roles, he became her personal protector. He knew then that to keep his mother safe, he would kill their enemies, and without hesitation, if not with relish—he would kill with the automatic precision of the professional soldier he was learning to be, and as grievous as they might be, he would live with whatever consequences his choice quickened in him…©

The above is an excerpt from multi-award-winning and Amazon best-selling author, Linda Lee Greene’s novel of historical fiction titled, GUARDIANS AND OTHER ANGELS. The novel is available for purchase in eBook and paperback through Amazon.

Image: GAFFIN FARM IN WINTER, acrylic painting by Linda Lee Greene

©A STEP AT A TIME…THE RIVER OF FREEDOM

©A STEP AT A TIME…THE RIVER OF FREEDOM

By Linda Lee Greene, Author & Artist

©A STEP AT A TIME…THE RIVER OF FREEDOM

By Linda Lee Greene, Author & Artist

Three-quarters of an hour southwest of Peebles, in Adams County, Ohio, which is the place of my birth, the great Ohio River flows briefly northward and narrows to little more than one thousand feet wide. In times of summer drought a nearly dry footpath, and of winter freezes a solid bridge of ice, this taper in the waterway hosted animal and human traffic trekking shore to shore since antiquity, in pre-colonial times including but not limited to the river’s northern-based Miami and Shawnee Indians slinking across it, looting their southern neighbors, and hightailing it home with their angry victims in close pursuit. Once back on the north side of the river, it was easy to take cover in the great and dense “Imperial Forest,” as dubbed by frontiersmen. Caves, hollows, and thickets of bushes and of grapevines that wove impenetrable screens among the giant trees, some of them sycamores so large in circumference that two horsemen riding side by side could pass through their tunneled trunks, provided strategic hideaways. Over time, as the red faces changed to white, the river was a primary transportation route during the westward expansion of the United States of America, and the magnificent trees shading its waters began to be put to man’s ax to build their residential and commercial enterprises.  

            In the spring of 1804, one year almost to the day following Ohio’s designation as the 17^th state of the Union, at the bend of the river where it meets Red Oak Creek on its northern shore, Colonel James Poage, a Virginian, along with his wife and ten children and their possessions, as well as his twenty slaves, disembarked two enormous flatboats on a wild and pristine thousand-acre plot, land granted to him for his twenty years of service to the government as a surveyor. Poage was attracted to the location not only because of its abundant natural resources, which he foresaw lining his pockets with riches, but also because it was a slave-free region. While a member of the Continental Army in the Revolutionary War, the practice of enslaving human beings exercised his conscience, and he wanted out of it. Shortly after his arrival at his new home, he freed all of his slaves, dismantled his flatboats, and with the recycled lumber and trees from the forest, built a settlement. Soon a town took root that through a few evolutions finally was named Ripley. The riches never materialized for Poage, but his reputation for his “robust and cheerful piety” and as a welcoming and gracious host to new arrivals and guests in his Ripley, Ohio home grew far and wide.

            Weary black slaves on plantations in America’s Deep South lulled their children to sleep at night with stories of the great river up north with its narrow place that would someday be their pathway to freedom. They called it the “River Jordan” after Jesus’ baptismal waterway in the Bible. “And on the other side of the river, in a place called Ohio, people don’t keep other people as slaves. All people are free, even people with black skins like you and me,” slave mothers told their wide-eyed children. “That river is the line between being a slave and being free.”           

In the years leading to the American Civil War, slaves bolting to freedom on dangerous journeys across the north-south frontier via the Underground Railroad found more escape routes for the largest number of themselves on the Ohio River than anywhere else in the country. According to Ohio State University history professor Wilbur Siebert, Ohio’s Underground Railroad network comprised an estimated 3,000 miles of routes featuring more than twenty points of entry on the Ohio River, and as many as ten exit points by ferry across Lake Erie into Canada. The Ohio River is the generally accepted line to this day in the United States that separates the Midwestern Great Lakes states from the Southern border-states. Remnants of martyrs to the cause of freeing slaves, black and white and all shades in between, pepper the shores of the river. If you silence your mind and put your heart to the task, you might hear their anguished cries above the angry shouts, the snarls of the dogs, the blasts of the guns of their trackers.                                                                                                                                   

Perched atop the high embankment of the narrow bend in the Ohio River, the townspeople of Ripley were major witnesses to and actors in the firestorm of comings and goings of runaway slaves and their pursuers across the river. Among the population at that point were prominent as well as less-known abolitionists drawn to the area by a burning desire to devote themselves to the illegal act of freeing slaves. They set up housekeeping, established secret safe houses, cut backwoods paths, and worked diligently at helping slaves to escape bondage, at risk to their own and their family’s lives. Owing to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 that granted slave-owners the right to regain their “property” even within the borders of free-states, slave-hunters, both owners and bounty-hunters, prowled the shores of the river, breached its northern shore, and chased down their human prey in free territory with impunity. It is doubtful that the Underground Railroad would have succeeded as it did absent the presence and support of free people of color fighting against such forces. They were people who had made it to freedom and had deliberately settled along stations of the Underground Railroad in Ohio beginning at the river, and stretching north to Columbus and on to Toledo and Cleveland and other towns around Lake Erie. Their express purpose was aiding runaways seeking safe harbor. During my growing-up years of the 1940s and 1950s in Columbus, I was unaware of the vital role my city, and even my state, played in fighting against one of the most oppressive human rights violations ever to occur. I was proud to learn in my research for this essay that Columbus alone has 22 documented Underground Railroad sites. 

Much is owed in the effort to end slavery in America to the more than 3,200 individuals known to have worked on the Underground Railroad. Many others will remain forever anonymous. But as I submit earlier in my dissertation, listening hearts might hear them.

          

**Author’s Note…I read a fabulous novel on the subject of a fleeing slave recently titled “The Day I Saw the Hummingbird,” by American author Paulette Mahurin. It is available in soft cover and eBook on Amazon.com.

Books by Linda Lee Greene are available on Amazon.com.

Image…Ripley, Ohio from the southern shore of the Ohio River…1847 Woodcut