The Long Walk

I suppose the Tuscarawas isn’t much of a river after you’ve seen the Mississippi or the Ohio, but until my sixteenth year, it was the boundary of my world. I had never been more than ten miles from it before then, before the war. Like many young men, I joined the Union Army and the 51st Ohio Volunteer Infantry Regiment, out of sense of justice and, admittedly, a false hope for adventure and glory. But now, as I followed the course of the Tuscarawas River and left the county seat of New Philadelphia, I found myself wishing that the world around that river was still all that I knew. Many of the boys who had enlisted with me had fallen at places like Chickamauga and Stone’s River, and a lamentable number had drowned when the steamship Sultana exploded and sank while transporting Union troops down the Mississippi. Eight hundred troopers from Ohio regiments had been on board, and most did not survive.

The regiment arrived by rail at the B&O train station, and marched to New Philadelphia. From there I intended to walk home and re-familiarize with the sights and sounds I had missed for so long. I was still miles from home, but I was an infantryman, and my feet were used to long walks. I limped a little from a wound received that terrible day at Stone’s River; the doctors said I always would, but the welcomingly familiar surroundings made the walk painless. The return of the regiment had been announced in the local newspaper, the Ohio Democrat, and most of my friends had their families there to greet them at the station, but I had written my parents and asked them to wait for me at the family farm, because I wanted my homecoming to be a private thing between us. I had no way of knowing if they had received my message, or if excitement over my return would compel them to ignore my wishes. However, since they hadn’t been at the station to welcome me, I assumed that the letter had arrived. As home became closer, an odd trepidation came over me. I knew I had changed since I had left our farm nearly four years before, how would my family react when they saw the soldier that had replaced the boy who had gone to war?

Would my mother still see the boy who had retched the first time he saw his father butcher a chicken? Or would she see a man who, only months before, would casually kick the corpses of slain enemies off of the end of his bayonet? Would my father, himself a veteran of the war against Mexico, sit with me, smoke a pipe, and converse with me as an equal for the first time? Would it be as though I had never left, or would I be a stranger in my own home? My uneasiness increased when I thought about Caleb, and his father James. Caleb was my best friend throughout my childhood. His father, I knew, was a runaway slave that my father had hired as a farmhand before the war began.

Our house was small, so James and Caleb lived on our land in a somewhat rickety shack built from discarded lumber, but when the nights grew too cold, or too damp, we would make room for them in the house. They took their meals with us, and afterwards, my mother, Caleb, and I would practice reading at the kitchen table. Caleb was like a brother to me, and when the war came, the thought of what might happen to Caleb and his father should the south prevail compelled me to take up arms. For me, every enslaved black person reminded me of Caleb.

With that motivating me, I excelled at soldiery. I mastered the drills of the musket and bayonet; I knew well the sound cannons. I was wounded twice and the number of men I killed could not easily be counted, but by the time the guns at last fell silent, I came to see that the carnage and bloodshed I had born witness to and participated in had, in actuality, accomplished little. We had forced the Confederacy to discontinue the sin of slavery, but we had not eliminated the desire to commit that sin. The minds of our enemy had not been changed: their hearts remained untouched.

As I made the long journey North toward home after the war, I could see that while the chains of iron had been removed from the Negro, the chains of fear were still present. They still were reluctant to look a white man in the eye; they still toiled in silence. Fear, I came to realize, was the only chain that could truly bind the human spirit, but once in place, the chains of fear were the hardest to remove.
Home was now quite near, and the trepidation I was feeling was replaced by an almost manic excitement. Home had become an almost mythical place for me: a place to too perfect to actually exist. It only became real to me again when I saw the fence that marked the boundary to my family’s land. When the house came into view, I was overcome by excitement, and tried my best to run despite my unsound leg. Caleb, much taller now than when I had left, appeared in the doorway and came out to meet me. He leaped over the porch railing and shouted the news of my return as he ran. Mother was weeping well before I reached the house. She hugged me as though I were an apparition that might fade from existence at any moment. Father, freshly returned from the fields and still covered with dirt and dust, nearly crushed my hand as he shook it.

James seemed unsure of how to greet me. He looked at me for several seconds, shook my hand, then looked at me with the most sincere eyes I had ever seen, and said “Thank you.” Not ‘welcome home’, not ‘good to see you; ‘thank you’. It was as though, in his eyes, I had personally freed every slave in the south. I had never expected to be thanked. I had done what rightness and justice had demanded. The war had not given the slaves anything that had not already been theirs; it simply had returned what had been taken from them. James, however felt the need to express gratitude. I found no words to reply to him, and after holding his gaze for a few seconds, decided none were needed.

I had been home for a few days, when my father decided that the family should travel to New Philadelphia. His stated purpose was to purchase needed supplies, but I suspected he wanted to tell people of my return, and express a father’s pride in his son’s wartime exploits. The family, including James and Caleb, crowded into a wagon drawn, reluctantly I suspect, by the same horse we used for plowing, and arrived in town two hours after dawn.

Caleb and James seemed nervous. I restrained myself from asking why, because I feared that I knew the answer already, and did not want my suspicions confirmed. The family dispersed to find diversion and conduct their business, while my father took me in tow as he sought out his friends at The Gray House, one of New Philadelphia’s taverns. I had known most of these men before I left, but I was boy then, and that was how they had treated me. Now I was man among equals but, as we drank and talked, I could not help but notice that my father had not asked James or Caleb to join us. This made me somewhat uncomfortable, and I quietly excused myself from the gathering.

After walking Front Street for a time, and feeling strangely out of place, I saw Caleb surrounded by three young men I didn’t recognize. They were taunting him with various slurs about his color and I heard one of them tell him that: “Even if the slaves have been freed, you darkies still should know your place!” Had I a musket; I would have killed the miserable lout on the spot. But, lacking a musket, I pushed my way through the bullies and stood beside Caleb. “Leave before you get hurt.” I said, staring the largest of the three in the eye.

I had seen this type of spineless bully before. Having avoided fighting on either side in the war, where an opponent might offer resistance, they contented themselves on causing misery to those who could not resist. I was prepared to do battle on Caleb’s behalf, but took to no action to provoke the bullies. I had faced some of the bravest fighting-men in the world while fighting the Confederacy, and these three cowards did not impress me. I stood my ground and, as I knew they would, they lost what little heart they may have had and skulked away.

Caleb wouldn’t look at me. I don’t know weather it was out of shame because he hadn’t fought the bullies, or if he was simply overcome by fear, but he would not meet my gaze. It was at that moment when I felt a deep sense of hopelessness. The death and pain of the war seemed, at that moment, to have been for naught. Caleb, who was a free man, and who was like a brother to me, was still enslaved by fear. He wore no chains and he never had, but as he stood in front of me that day, I could see chains upon him. I knew then that no earthly force; no bayonet, no mini-ball, no cannon or saber had freed, or could free, anyone of any color from bondage. Freedom is a thing of the mind, heart, and soul. The war was an unfortunate but necessary first step, but I realized then that I, and people like myself, still had much work to do before no black person, white person or person of any race was chained by fear. The guns are silent, the dead buried, and blood washed away, but the struggle against fear would continue, perhaps for eternity.