Ascent by Balloon from the Yard of Walnut Street JailAuthor(s): John Edgar WidemanSource: Callaloo, Vol. 24, No. 2, The Best of Callalo Prose: A Special 25th Anniversary Issue(Spring, 2001), pp. 589-593Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3300536 .

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from Vol. 19, No. 1 (Winter 1996)

ASCENT BY BALLOON FROM THE YARD OF WALNUT STREET JAIL

by John Edgar Wideman

I am the first of my African race in space. For this achievement I received accolades and commendations galore. Numerous offers for the story of my life. I'm told several unauthorized broadsides, purporting to be the true facts of my case from my very own

lips, are being peddled about town already. A petition circulates entreating me to run for public office.

Clearly my tale is irresistible, the arc of my life emblematic of our fledgling nation's destiny, its promise for the poor and oppressed from all corners of the globe. Born of a despised race, wallowing in sin as a youth, then a prisoner in a cage, yet I rose, I rose. To unimaginable heights. Despite my humble origins, my unworthiness, my sordid

past, I rose. A Lazarus in this Brave New World. Even in a day of crude technology and maddeningly slow pace, I was an overnight

sensation. A mob of forty thousand, including the President himself, hero of Trenton and Valley Forge, the father of our country as some have construed him in the press, attended the event that launched me into the public eye.

The event-no doubt you've heard of it, unless you are, as I once was, one of those unfortunates who must wear a black hood and speak not, nor be spoken to-the event that transformed me from convict to celebrity received the following notice in the

Pennsylvania Gazette: "On January 19, 1793, Jean-Pierre Blanchard, French aeronaut, ascended in his

hydrogen balloon from the yard of Walnut Street Jail in Philadelphia to make the first aerial voyage in the United States. In the air forty-six minutes, the balloon landed near

Woodbury, New Jersey, and returned the same evening to the city in time for Citizen Blanchard to pay his respects to President Washington, who had witnessed the ascension in the morning."

Though I am not mentioned by name in the above, and its bland, affectless prose misses altogether the excitement of the moment, the notice does manage to convey something of the magnitude of the event. Imagine men flying like birds. The populace aghast, agawk, necks craned upward, every muscle tensed as if anticipating the

tightening of the hangman's knot, its sudden yank, the irresistible gravity of the flesh as a trap door drops open beneath their feet. Men free as eagles. Aloft and soaring over the countryside. And crow though I was, my shabby black wings lifting me high as the Frenchman.

I was on board the balloon because little was understood about the effect of great height upon the human heart. Would that vital organ pump faster as the air grew

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CALLALOO

thinner? Would the heart become engorged approaching the throne of its maker, or would it pale and shrink, the lusty blood fleeing, as once our naked parents, in shame from the Lord's awful gaze? Dr. Benjamin Rush, a man of science as well as a philanthropic soul, well known for championing the cause of a separate Negro church, had requested that a pulse glass be carried on the balloon, and thus, again, became a benefactor of the race, since who better than one of us, with our excitable blood and tropically lush hearts, to serve as guinea pig.

The honor fell on me. I was the Frenchman's crew. Aboard to keep the gondola neat and sanitary, a passenger so my body could register danger as we rose into those uncharted regions nearer my God to thee.

Jean-Pierre Blanchard was not my first Frenchman. Messrs. De Beauchamp and De

Tocqueville had visited my cell in the Walnut Street Jail on a humanitarian, fact- finding mission among the New World barbarians to determine whether this Quaker invention, "the penitentiary," reformed criminals and deterred crime. The French- men were quite taken with me. Surprised to discover I was literate. Enchanted when I read to them from the dim squalor of my cage the parable of the Good Shepherd, the words doubly touching, they assured me, coming from one who was born of a

degraded and outcast race, one who, they assumed, had experienced only indiffer- ence and harshness.

No. Beg pardon. I'm confusing one time with another. Events lose their shape, slide one into another when the time one is supposed to own becomes another's property. An excusable mistake, perhaps inevitable when one resides in a place whose function is to steal time, rob time of its possibilities, deaden time to one dull unending present, a present that is absolutely not a gift, but something taken away. Time drawn, quartered and eviscerated, a sharp pain hovering over the ghost of an amputated limb. Too much time, no time, time tormenting as memories of food and blankets when you lie awake all night, hungry, shivering in an icy cell. No clocks. Only unvarying, iron bars of routine, solitary confinement mark your passage, your extinction outside time.

I would meet De Tocqueville and De Beauchamp years after the flight with Jean- Pierre Blanchard. By then I'd been transferred from Walnut Street Jail to the new prison at Cherry Hill. There, too, I would have the distinction of being the first of my race. Prisoner Number One. Charles Williams:farmer; light black; black eyes; curly black hair; 5' 71/2 ";foot, 11 ";flat nose, scar on bridge of nose, broad mouth, scarfrom dirk on thigh; can read.

First prisoner of any race admitted to Cherry Hill. Warden Samuel Wood greeted me with no acknowledgment nor ceremony for this particular historic achievement. Later that day, when I complained of dampness in my cell, he reminded me that the prison being new, on its shakedown cruise so to speak, one could expect certain unanticipated inconveniences. The good Warden Wood allowed me a berth in the infirmary until my cell dried out (it never did), but unfortunately the infirmary was also dank and chilly, due to lack of sunlight and ventilation, the cold miasma from marshy soil sweating up through the prison's foundation stones. So I began my residence with a hacking cough, the subterranean air at Cherry Hill as thick and pestilential as the air had been wholesome and bracing in the balloon.

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I'm complaining too much. All lives are a combination of good times and bad, aren't they. We all suffer a death sentence. Today I wish to celebrate the good, that special time rising above the earth. So up, up, and away then.

A cloudless morning. In minutes we drift to a height that turns Philadelphia into a map spread upon a table. The proud steeple of Christ Church a pen protruding from an ink well. After the lazy, curved snake of river, the grid of streets laid straight as plumb lines. I pick out the State House, Independence Hall, the Court House, Carpenters Hall, the market on High Street. And there, the yard of the Walnut Street Jail, there at 1, 2, 3, ... count them ... 4, 5, Sixth Street, the Jail and its adjacent yard from which we'd risen.

People are ants. Carriages inch along like slugs. Huge silence beats about my ears. A wind, clear and safe as those rare dreams that enfold me, slip me under their skirts and whisk me far from my cell.

But I must not lose myself in the splendor of the day until I execute the task that's earned me a ride. Once done, I can, we can, return to contemplating a world never seen by human eyes till just this unraveling, modern instant.

I place the glass on my flesh, count the pulse beats 1, 2, 3,... as I practiced counting rungs on the ladder of streets rising, no, sliced one after another, beginning at Water Street along the Delaware's edge.

Near the end of that momentous year, 1793, a plague of yellow fever will break out in the warren of hovels, shanties and caves along the river and nearly destroy Philadelphia. My Negro brethren, who inhabit that Quarter in large numbers, will

perform admirably with enormous courage, skill and compassion during the emer- gency. Nursing the afflicted, burying the dead. One measure of the city's desperation in that calamitous year, a petition that circulates (unsuccessfully) suggesting we, the inmates of the jail, be allowed to serve and, thereby risking our lives, purchase freedom. This is the year that famous prisoner, the French King, is executed and my brethren will build their separate church, the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas at Fifth and Walnut, a location empty at the moment, though cleared and ready. See it, a mere thumb print opposite the jail from this elevation.

The Quakers, with their concern for the state of my soul, their insistence I have boundless opportunity to contemplate my sins, to repent and do penance, arrange matters in the Jail so I have ample time to consider things consequential and not. I've often pondered late at night when I cannot sleep, the symmetry between two events of that busy year, 1793: the separation of black from white in God's House, the plague that took so many citizens' lives. One act, man's, an assertion there is not enough room in the house of worship; the second act, God's, making more room.

During the terrible months when the city teetered on the brink of extinction, when President Washington together with all Federal and City officials decamped to more salubrious locations, various treatments, all futile, were prescribed for the deadly fever. Among the treatments, phlebotomy, the opening of a vein to draw blood from a victim, was quite popular until its opponents proved it killed more often than it cured.

My brethren, trained and guided by the ubiquitous Dr. Rush, applied his contro- versial cure: an explosive purge of mercury and calomel, followed by frequent,

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copious bleedings. Negro nurses became experts, dispensing pharmaceutical pow- ders and slitting veins with equal dexterity. Out with the bad air. In with the good. I couldn't resist a smile when I pictured my brethren moving through white peoples' houses during broad daylight as freely as I once glided through the same dwellings after dark. Emptying purses, wallets, pockets, desk drawers, I, too, relieved my patients of excess.

In the prison also, we must drive out bad blood. Though all of us are infected by the fever of lawlessness, some prisoners are incurably afflicted. One such wretch, Matthew Maccumsey, Number 102. His crime: speech. Too much talk and at the

wrong times and often in an obstreperous, disruptive, disrespectful manner, threat-

ening the peace and economy of the entire system of absolute silence. Ice water ducking, bagging with black hood, flogging, the normal and natural

deterrents all applied and found wanting in lasting effect, the iron gag was pre- scribed. Number 102 remanded for examination and treatment to Dr. Bache, the

nephew, I've heard, of the famous Dr. Franklin, the kite-flyer. A committee, convened a decade later to investigate continuing complaints of

questionable practices at the prison, described the gag in these words: a rough iron instrument resembling the bit of a blind bridle, having an iron palet in the center about an inch square and chains at each end to pass around the neck and fasten behind. This instrument was placed in the prisoner's mouth, the iron palet over the tongue, the bit forced back as far as possible, the chains brought round the jaws to the back of the neck; the end of one chain was passed through the ring in the end of the other chain drawn tight to the "fourth link" and fastened with a lock.

Rousted out of sleep before first light, groggy, frightened, I knew by the hour, the

hulking stillness of the figures gathered into the narrow corridor outside my cell, I was being summoned for a punishment party. Seeing the faces of other prisoners of color in the glaring torchlight, I rejoiced inwardly. This night at least I was to be a

punisher, not the punished. The guards always enlisted blacks to punish whites and whites to punish blacks, by this unsubtle stratagem, perpetuating enmity and divi- sion.

We forced No. 102's hands into leather gloves provided with rings, crossed his arms behind his back and after attaching the rings to the ends of the gag chain drew his arms upwards so their suspended weight pulled the gag chains taut, causing the chains to exert pressure on jaws and jugular, trapping blood in the averted head, producing excruciating pain, the degree of which I could gauge only by observing the

prisoner's eyes, since the gag at last had effectively silenced him.

Niggified, ain't he, a guard exclaimed, half in jest, half in disgust as 102's lifeless, once pale face, blackened by congealed blood, was freed of the gag.

Again, I'm muddling time. The pacifying of 102 came later at Cherry Hill. My job on the balloon was to record the reaction of my own African pulse to heavenly ascent.

Higher and higher it rose. The striped French balloon. The stiff, boat-shaped basket beneath it, garlanded with fresh flowers, red, white and blue bunting. Inside the

gondola the flags of two great republican nations. We intended to plant them wherever we landed, claim for our countrymen joint interest in the rich, undiscovered lands far flung across the globe.

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Watching the toy town shrink smaller and smaller beneath me, all its buildings and inhabitants now fittable on the end of a pin, for some unfathomable reason as I rose

irresistibly to a heretofore undreamed-of height for any person of my race, as I realized the momentousness of the occasion, all the planning, sacrifice and dumb luck that had conspired to place me here, so high, at just that fantastic, unprecedented, joyous moment, as I began to perceive how far I'd risen and how much further, the sky literally the limit, still to rise, a single tear welled out from God-knows-where.

From my swaying perch high above everyone I watch our shadow eclipse a corner of the yard, then scuttle spider-like up the far wall of the Walnut Street Jail.

Observed from the height of the balloon I'd be just another ant. Not even my black hood pierced with crude eyeholes would distinguish me as I emerged from the night of my cell, blinking back the sudden onslaught of crisp January sunlight.

My eyes adjusted to the glare and there it was, finally, the balloon hovering motionless, waiting for someone it seemed, a giant, untethered fist thrust triumphant- ly at the sky.

From the moment it appears, I am sure no mere coincidence has caused the balloon to rise exactly during the minute and a half outdoors I'm allotted daily to cross the

prison yard, grab tools, supplies and return to my cell. If Citizen Blanchard's historic

flight had commenced a few seconds sooner or later that morning, I would have missed it. Imagine. I could have lived a different life. Instead of being outdoors

glancing up at the heavens, I could have been in my cell pounding on the intractable leather they apportion me for cobbling my ten pairs of shoes a week. In that solitary darkness tap-tap tapping, I wouldn't have seen the striped, floating sphere come to fetch me and carry me home.

How carefully I set the pulse glass above a vein. Register the measured ebb and flow, each flicker the heart's smile and amen.

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