Happy 4th?

     This is an excerpted version of the epilogue from my 2015 novel, GODS OF OUR FATHERS, which is finally, after countless setbacks, getting its own audiobook later this summer. It's narrated by Vesey Van Zant, the story's protagonist, a biracial former slave who'd arrived in Boston with his Black mother through the Underground Railroad. And, given his background, Vesey's thoughts on Independence Day are decidedly not in step with the white part of America. One of the more enjoyable aspects of writing GODS OF OUR FATHERS was in subtly juxtaposing what had actually happened in May of 1854 with what's still transpiring today. My book shows, in its own way, that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

What Independence Day means to a body devolves on the color of the skin wrapping it.

The Burns affair had officially ended not with the bang that ended the conspiracy but an anticlimax. The Morris, its fo'c's'le damaged in the successful attempt to free the anchor from its chain, was immediately docked in ordinary for repairs. Despite having already been slated to sail to the coast of Angola later this month, Constitution took over the duty of delivering Burns back to the Virginia plantation, from which his escape had inflamed our city.

The black bunting on the day of Burns’s ejection from Boston have long since been replaced with the red, white and blue variety in observance of our independence. Keeping my head down and ears open as I often do, I have yet to hear anyone remark on the irony of us celebrating our independence from a tyranny after having had our sovereignty stolen by President Pierce’s in the act of re-enslaving a black man who merely insisted on his dignity and liberty.

Cornets, trumpets, drums, tubas and all manner of instruments gaily fill the streets with a horrible and hardly self-conscious cacophony in celebration of a day that, to me, seems more hollow and meaningless than usual. We have just gotten our new silver badges supplanting the old brass ones and we are expected to turn in the old on receiving the new. I still possess both of mine because I have a decision to make.

Little boys set off firecrackers in the streets to the irritation of stodgy adults. In a way, it is a harmless recreation of the explosive that could’ve blown up much more than a ship or two. Firecrackers make for a harmless reprise of the bomb in the same way the burning of Guy Fawkes effigies is to the Gunpowder Plot.

 

Boston is a city of 150,000 souls. And among that number are perhaps millions of trials and tribulations, of which mine, Mama’s and Maizee’s were but drops in a vast ocean of love, tragedy, grief and ecstasy.

As I am but a policeman of some perspicacity and not a clairvoyant, I know not what will become of this “city on a hill.” It was optimistically dubbed as such in 1630 by our first Governor, John Winthrop, when it was but a quaint fishing village. In the last two centuries, it has expanded to become in all ways one of America’s three great cities. But each time greatness is achieved, it comes at a cost.

Naturally, I would prefer to believe my city will, in the decades and centuries to come, fulfill the promise of its destiny, to continue advancing toward that blessed day when we will no longer enslave one another or judge others by the hue of their skin. I hope our constabulary will continue to be a force for good and charity as well as an apparatus to enforce the law.

But as I said, I am a policeman and I would be silly to be so naïve as to think mere wishful thinking alone will keep evil at bay. My colleagues in other cities round up Negros and sell them into slavery as a matter of law enforcement. My brothers in arms in our own department had arrested Anthony Burns. And some are less tolerant of black people than others. We pass down these dubious values and our gods like odious heirlooms and it is up to the strong and independent-minded to break these destructive cycles.

I stand on the Warren Bridge where this tale began, my arms crossed on the railing. By God’s capricious grace have we become an iconic beacon of liberty for citizen and immigrant alike. I think back on that fateful day in Mississippi 20 years ago, when Master Van Zant, about to slit my throat, said, “The problem with God, Cornelius… is our children cannot survive ours… Sometimes I feel as if I cannot survive my father’s God… or perhaps it is mine that will do me in.”

Insane as he was at that moment, I cannot fault the man for his cynicism in a seemingly disinterested deity and his failure to survive the one handed down to him by his own father. At times I suspect we have created God in our image rather than vice versa. And, if that is the case, while we perpetuate this construct for the spiritual support of ourselves and others, it is up to us to make Him kinder and more disposed to unconditional charity. Maybe in the future He will prove to be more benevolent with each succeeding generation.

Because if a city ever needed a merciful God it is Boston, Massachusetts, a fragmented, fractious mess of a metropolis where black and white people, Protestants and Catholics and Democrats and Republicans tear at each other’s flesh. That goes for brother against brother and if anyone can testify to that, it is I.

Despite the somewhat satisfactory resolution of this first test of our unified department, I doubt my mettle and virtue for this job, especially in light of the letter I have lately received from a very unlikely source. I had broken as many laws if not more than John Brown himself. And the one law I had obeyed was the one to which I am most opposed with every fiber of my being. My assistance in getting Anthony Burns back to slavery, and saving countless lives in the process, was nevertheless an affirmation of the Fugitive Slave Act and I will perhaps never live down that stigma.

In my left hand is my old brass badge. In my right, the newly-issued silver one. I look at both, rear an arm back, and throw one of them into the river.