On Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ Memorial To Colonel Robert Gould Shaw And The Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth Regiment (Volunteers) –Take Two  

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

…he had walked pass that blessed then muddied- unattended frieze across the street from the State House on Beacon Street in Boston it seemed like half his now graying life. Anytime he had cadged a hooky day from high school back in the early 1960s in order to head into downtown Boston and check out the day life on the Common, grab an off-beat movie at the many big house theaters on lower Washington Street to kill a couple of hours, or just hang out he would circle around Beacon Street after emerging from the Park Street subway station. Walked around just to get a “feel” for his city, the city of his birth, on humid summer days, leaves falling orange/red/yellow/autumn days, bleak snow-bound winter lights days, and rebirth green spring days. Walked head down right by the seemingly obscure defaced and unrepaired marble. Walked by thinking of his big world existential problems too intense to worry about faded pasts  

Later, mid-1960s later, when he went to school, a two-year school and then transferred to Suffolk University in that same downtown Boston and had to work trucks down toward Congress Street to make his daily meat he would pass the memorial on his way to school. Still later when he lived on the hill (Beacon Hill) with some rarified suburban girl from Long Island who foot the bill (or rather some New Jack City banker Daddy) in sullen splendor (until she in her turn married some junior up and coming stockbroker) his studied neglect continued.

Passed it, that subtle monument to past fights, like it was just another in a long line of historic ornaments in a town filled with memorials to its ancient arrival long continental history. You know bloody battle number one here, bloody battle number two there, a pigeon-bedecked statute of some fire-breathing Puritan divine casting out heathens here or some furious bearded abolitionist turning up the heat there, some battle-hardened general leaning Grant-like there, some corruption-filled over-fed civic leader in full three piece suit regalia here. Yes, the town was a breathing tribute to all that went down in the cold times American East when west, real west, was someplace around the Hudson River and white man European dreams were of making it along the Eastern seaboard and not having to trek inland luckless to face the unknown, natural or man-make.  

 

 

Had briskly passed blinkered that perfect pre-historic monument to some pretty important history going on right before his eyes down in bloody Birmingham/Selma/Greensboro/Philadelphia (MS that is)/Montgomery/Oxford (MS again) and one thousand other later to be   storied locales after the dust cleared (and the fight reined in). Yet with all that civil rights let-them-vote-sent-books-to Alabama-ride-the-freedom-bus bust he was clueless to that aspect of his history. Clueless (and no high school history class, at least the days he attended ever mentioned such things) to those places, Fort Wagner above all, where his people, his black proud Massachusetts 54^th (and later the 55^th) had made righteous stands for freedom, had filled the sable ranks, had arms in hand confirmed the worst planter’s John Brown-benighted nightmare, had bled rivers of blood and  inelegantly sweated buckets of sweat, had trooped down to their citadel, Charleston, singing marching songs, and had not waited, no, no more wait, on some benevolent white man to do the work of freedom…