October 20, 2005

Allen Schwartz performing during a program on the Underground Railroad at Mills Lawn School last Tuesday. Schwartz and author Ann Hagedorn spent the day at the school performing for students, followed by a public performance in the evening.

By Lauren Heaton

It’s a story she spent three years researching, a year and a half writing and almost two years presenting around the Midwest and the East Coast, but when writer Ann Hagedorn told the story of the Underground Railroad to an audience at Mills Lawn School last week, she wept from the power of her own words.

“That part gets to me every time,” she said.

The true stories of the “heroes and great Americans” who stood against slavery are what lured Hagedorn from New York City to Ripley, Ohio, six years ago, she said.

At that time she began work on Beyond the River: The Untold Story of the Heroes of the Underground Railroad, a work of literary nonfiction about early abolitionists along the Ohio River. Stories about the conflicts between the slave state of Kentucky and the free state of Ohio drew her friend Allen Schwartz to Ripley to amplify this part of history through music and visual art, Hagedorn said. The power of those stories then propelled Hagedorn and Schwartz to tour the country, making a stop in Yellow Springs to pass on the story of the Underground Railroad.

“It started out as a promotional, and then I realized that it was no longer about promoting the book. It was about promoting the story, which inspired me to write the book and inspired Allen to write the songs,” Hagedorn said. “It’s the story that keeps us going.”

Last Tuesday Hagedorn and Schwartz performed once for the community and four times for the Mills Lawn and Antioch School students in grades three through six. As Hagedorn read about abolitionist John Rankin, who lived at the top of the hill in Ripley, Schwartz strummed on his guitar a tune about the “war before the war” and a “town with a double life.” Hagedorn introduced historical figures such as slave catcher Chauncey Shaw, who waited for runaways “desperate enough to cross” a frozen river and found himself in a moral quandary when one turned up with a baby in her arms.

Then, as the music picked up speed, the story shifted to the Granville Riots at an antislavery convention in 1836 and Parker’s Ferry, events that helped the slaves to freedom. Following the vignettes, Schwartz led a discussion using the pastels and acrylics he painted of the boat crossing the river to freedom and other images.

The third-grade students listened and swayed with the school’s first historians-in-residence, and afterward generated some profound questions based on what they had heard. Why did slavery exist? Why didn’t they just use whites as slaves? Who ended slavery? Does slavery exist today?

Hagedorn said she was pleased that the discussion led into a reflection of today’s world, where, she said, she hopes her story’s lessons of democracy can be applied.

“We need models as citizens of a democracy to show us that if we want to achieve something, we have the right to and we can achieve it,” she said. “The Underground Railroad is really about democracy and the people who believed that the ideas of the republic applied to all people, no matter the color of their skin.”

As a former journalist for the Wall Street Journal, where she covered the “crime, grime and slime” of the court beat, Hagedorn said she needed a break to spend time with courageous people who risked everything for what they felt was right and “devoted their lives for something larger than themselves.”

She used her skills as a journalist to prove the existence of the Underground Railroad, which up until then seemed like “quaint history” based on folklore, and focused on physical spaces rather than the actual people involved in the fight to free slaves, she said. From a house on the river, Hagedorn said, she delved deep into the history of the town and found diaries, letters, court records, memories, newspaper clippings and other primary sources that described a grassroots movement that took place before the antislavery movement gained popularity.

When Schwartz came to Ripley, he said, he was moved by the story of Adam Lowery Rankin, who, seeing a white slave sold at the auction block, began to question his country’s institution of enslaving blacks because of their race. Lowery’s moment of awakening, captured by his statement, “I’d rather be a man who struggles than a man who never says what he means,” convinced Schwartz that if he could be so touched by these stories, others would be too, he said.

In 2003, Hagedorn and Schwartz transformed the book into an educational vehicle and took their show on the road. They have performed over 100 times in libraries, churches, schools and universities such as Vasser, Berea and Dennison, and they continue to try to reach as broad an audience as possible. In 2004, the duo was awarded an Ohio Humanities Council grant to do a seven-city tour, including Columbus, where Yellow Springs Historical Society members Mary and Ross Morgan first heard them perform. Mesmerized by the stories, Mary Morgan said she and her husband followed the couple and saw them four times before asking them to come to Yellow Springs.

The artists’ visit was sponsored by the Historical Society, the Yellow Springs Community Foundation and the Yellow Springs Endowment for Education. Hagedorn, who is working on her fourth book, teaches journalism at Columbia and Northwestern Universities. Schwartz teaches at Wilmington College, where he is also the program director for the Quaker Heritage Center.

Hagedorn and Schwartz, now partners, will continue to present their pieces wherever there is interest in learning about the Americans who sacrificed so much to gain “trust, freedom and the principles of a democracy for the people and by the people,” Hagedorn said.

The National Afro-American Museum and Cultural Center will sponsor a day trip to Ripley on Saturday, Oct. 22, to visit the sites mentioned in Hagedorn’s book. The cost of $30 per person includes transportation, lunch and museum and reenactment fees. For more information, call Valena Randolf at the museum at 376-4944, ext. 115.

Contact: lheaton@ysnews.com