Behind the Scenes of: "Echoes of a Lincoln Song"
Another peek inside the messy mess of an author's thoughts.
The short story Echoes of a Lincoln Song is my offer to America’s 250th birthday. I was twelve during the bicentennial and lived in the cradle of American democracy and the early battles of the American Revolution happened around my childhood home in Metro-Boston. I wrote this story for the bicentennial of my little home town and it was published in a book called Lincoln by Lincoln over 20 years ago. Lovely lyrical writing… and somehow I relate a thought to a virus (in a good way).
I wrote this story in 2003 for my mother. Like so many of our “shared” projects, I got lost in her efforts at improving it. This happened to us. On my living room wall is a gray photo of a Massachusetts beach in winter. One of us snapped the picture, the other found where to crop it. Even with arguments and solid memories, neither of us know the truth. That photo now hangs in the living room next to original art by both of her brothers and her father. The dining room celebrates her paintings. One of her metal sculpture in the foyer has been turned backwards protecting the shins of all. Odd figures, one of an Eeyore-like pig, human torso, and hundreds of fossils and pretty stones dot every flat surface in the living room and foyer. If you were in my dining room, I would point to a painting of a Boston road saying, “That was painted by my mother’s father.” Then I’d direct your eyes to a large format oil painting of a Native American. I’d then say, “That was painted by my father’s mother.”
The collaborations between my mother and me resolved into kinetic, energetic, and emotional fusses.
I was twelve during the American Bicentennial, a memorable event for a Boston kid. The nation’s eyes turned towards my home. I had been raised in a town touching both Lexington and Concord. The Minutemen from my town where the first (after Concord) to the Concord Bridge. In the spring of 1976, we recalled the major events from 201 years prior during April and May of 1775. The walk from my childhood home to the Concord Bridge takes me past Walden Pond where H.D. Thoreau did his thing. As you’ll have found in my story Echoes of a Lincoln Song, Thoreau’s first choice was a lot closer to my home. Some are happy he got pushed to Walden. Other’s less so given Thoreau’s activities overshadows a story of community of formerly enslaved who lived on the shores of Walden Pond, a story told in Black Walden by Elise Lemire.
This twelve-year-old felt cradled by our history. And of course, I was. I did not know then that Paul Revere was played by the mother of a classmate. Year after year, she was captured by British troops on the battle road then questioned. For the convenience of school children and visitors, the ceremonial capture had been moved to daylight hours (Revere rode at night and was captured/detained at night). The land around me served as the backdrop to colonial America. The people around me carried their own history in story. At dinner, folks told stories of exodus. For the astrophysicist at the table, Wallace Tucker, the story starts in Choctaw lands of eastern Tennessee and northern Georgia, a story that has his ancestors walking the Trail of Tears to Oklahoma. The oil on tribal lands paid for his education. For my surrogate grandfather, an engineer and artist, his story is that of a young Brooklyn Jewish kid stuffed in the tail of American bomber over Nazi Germany. My father’s own stories of his family forced from tribal lands of Scotland.
The stories are here at our tables and in our land. I wish we all listened and remembered better. We think our stories remain distinct from our neighbors story. They do not.
The original name and the inspiration for this story came not from my mother, but from My Lost Youth, a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The poem echoes battles fought near Chastain, Maine, a coastal town. The last stanza of that poem reads:
And Deering's Woods are fresh and fair, And with joy that is almost pain My heart goes back to wander there, And among the dreams of the days that were, I find my lost youth again. And the strange and beautiful song, The groves are repeating it still: “A boy’s will is the wind's will, And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.”
My version of Deering’s Woods can be found 18 miles west of Boston. I remember reading this poem in High School. Many would look at the work as archaic work of a long dead white guy. I lived on the same road as a full-scale replica of his house. We knew the original house in Cambridge. I learned to drive in Mount Auburn Cemetery where Longfellow’s gave can be found. His words, like those of living in Concord, can be heard daily from the mouths of the living—at least in my lost youth.
When I wrote this story for my mother and a publication she worked on, neither of us knew my mother’s deep history to Massachusetts and New England. My mother’s version had her telling of an ancestor stepping off “the boat” in North Sydney Harbor, Nova Scotia. A story correct only in the most limited sense. My mother, then living illegally in Italy as a marble sculptor, wanted an Irish/E.U. passport and undertook her own genealogy efforts. She died not knowing the truth.
The gent stepping from a ship in North Sydney Harbor did so in November of 1783. As a student of the American Revolution, I recognized that date. It rang like a bell. That Revolutionary War ended in November of 1783. Therefore, one of her ancestors came not from Ireland “fresh off the boat”, but sailed on a ship he likely owned transporting troops and British Loyalists from Manhattan. My mother is thus entitled to the Canadian designation of “United Empire Loyalists” as the descendant of an American loyalist who then fled to Canada. Another of her ancestors was a captain in the Continental Army aiming his cannon from Dorchester Heights during the siege of Boston in 1776. Meaning, my mother was also eligible for membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution.
My mother so wanted to be related to an Irish pirate or a part of famous Native American tribe. My mother, a human ever ready to hop a plane to anywhere, anytime with little notice had roots in Massachusetts spanning four hundred years. This got proven after time at research facilities in Boston where I traced her family back to Peregrine White, a babe born on the Mayflower in Massachusetts Bay. White, made orphan shortly after that horrible first winter of 1620-1621, lived for 84 years and spent most of that time as a warrior. He sometimes battled along side local Native folks and sometimes battled against local Native folks, in the confusing way history works. Never a Pilgrim, never a Puritan, he wielded weapons before “finding god” in the weeks (or days) before his death. This made my mother a Mayflower descendant as well.
In everyone of us, history lives. And my mother, who died in 2007, never came to learn about her connections to early Boston. She preferred the outsider’s view and would never have shared this. Her family’s history includes nearly a century of urban poverty. Her granduncle’s son died of Noma (Cancrum Oris)— a disease of malnutrition that results in gangrenous infections on the face. Her own grandmother scrub Harvard’s floors on diabetic feet that eventually got removed.
Yes, for many of us, history was either never recorded or written history has been destroyed. The records of my father’s family were torched in the early 1900s in a New York City fire. Even when written stories remain incomplete never complete, on their own. They come alive with the telling and sharing.
I wrote this short story about thoughts, collective memory, and specific American history of the 19th of April, 1775. I did not know when writing this story, that I too would head off to war at the ripe age of 40.
Twenty years ago, I was in Iraq. In 2021, I wrote the novel Captain Henry based on my Iraq journals and genealogical research on my father’s ancestor. The story interleaves the narrative from my time in Iraq and my ancestor’s time battling the KKK and others during the Reconstruction period (1871-1872). While in Iraq, we kept encountering real threats from Iranian funded stuff. My journals echo my fears of going to war with Iraq. My ancestor’s stories revolve around trying to protect the rights of formerly enslaved people who were being forced back into chains by local governments. In an off-the-cuff comment, I wrote this yesterday:
If this book is history repeats itself, we’ll go to war with Iran and use laws to restrict the rights of human beings. Book drafted 2021 based on 1871 & 2006.
If nobody reads this then we’ll do it all again, real soon. Book due out Sept 2026.
Go off and enjoy a happy little story during your 4th of July commemorations.