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We spend our lives learning about heroes through books and school when the real heroes are among those with whom we live and have lived. The purpose of this book is to shine a light on four heroes. These stories are of four men not known to history but of considerable importance in helping me be the man I am today.
The story below called The Day I Met Moses is the fourth book in a book entitled Life Lessons and Hopes - A Boy Grows Up in Baltimore. They are listed here for your information.
This book, a collection of four short stories, is available either as a Kindlebook or in print through Amazon Book through the following link.
The Day After My Father Died is a story of my father whose influence on many and me was not appreciated until the day after he died.
The story Howardis the story of a brother-in-law through whom the virtues of generations of good people from the early days of Germany became my guide. I learned about that which inspires.
The Story of Samuel is the story of a poor family living in America teaching the American Dream. Through this family, not a family of unlimited means, the American Dream is appreciated.
And in The Day I Met Moses, the story of a child beginning life picking cotton rising to wealth teaches this American Dream possesses no boundaries.
The Day I Met Moses
Thousands of years ago lived a people in what today is called Siberia farming the land living in villages. Their communities thrived presenting opportunities for a good life. A world of contentment they knew that is until the land turned barren from approaching coldness forcing them to leave for lands in search of food and warm shelter.
It is doubtful they wanted to move leaving behind a land home for centuries, but they required the three basic needs of man: clothing, shelter, and food, and these had become threatened by the changing climate. No longer were they able to thrive in this land they once called home. They needed to move in search of food and shelter. Thus began the slow migration of these people into the western part of Siberia.
In time these people of Western Siberia crossed over into what is now called Alaska discovering salmon and other foods to eat with furry animals for clothing and food. In time they migrated southward into what is known today as North, Central and South America, lands of abundant food and an inviting climate.
They became the Indians of North America, the Incas of Peru, the Mayas and Aztecs of Mexico. The descendants of these people became those whom Christopher Columbus met upon his arrival in 1492 in what the Europeans called the new world.
Many of European descent living in the United States are here because their ancestors found their way to this country to worship as they pleased. They had been victimized for their beliefs in their homelands because their form of worship differed from the conventional, the favored. In America, the hope of no persecution gave them the vitality to leave their homes.
From England came those who initially sought refuge on the continent to worship. The persecution experienced in England followed them onto this continent, where persecution for their form of worship continued but at the hands of a different people. Upon stepping onto the cold shores of North America they became known as the Pilgrims.
Many came to America to avoid being drafted into an army to fight for an impersonal king or emperor. The risking of life and loss of many years away from family in wars to protect the king’s way of life, not their way of life, lacked appeal to many Germans, French and others on the continent. Many Germans fled their homeland for America to avoid being drafted into the army of Bismarck.
Others came fleeing the walls of the jail or the hang man’s rope. Many sought a new life because of the economic, political, and religious chaos from which they fled. Those of Irish descent arrived in the harbors of America for these reasons with the same being true for Italians, Poles and Jews.
Many came in pursuit of gold and riches. Others came to America because they were bored with their lives seeking adventure. Some came just to come.
Most of those who left the continent of Europe for America did so for the same reasons the people of Siberia moved west into Alaska and the Americas. They did not migrate out of a desire to leave the homes of their youth and the history of their people. But when faced with a life of extinction, regardless of the cause, the lure of the new world held promise.
Those who traveled across Siberia to Alaska came not out of desire but to avoid starvation. They came looking for food. For most of those from Europe, the forces of economic and political disruption with the losses of religious and personal liberties caused them to leave their homes for the new world. What laid behind them was as important a reason, perhaps more important, as what lay in front of them.
For the Europeans, within this appearance of involuntariness hid an element of voluntariness. There existed the element of a conscious decision. These people planned for the day of moving. When leaving their homes, a consciousness of where they were going existed.
The person fleeing the authorities in Ireland did not want, desire, or wish to come to America but he chose this decision because this way he could live another day. The young man fleeing wars would have rather stayed home but he came across the ocean to live another day.
Common to these people coming to America, from the man avoiding religious persecution to the man avoiding the hangman’s rope, was on the day they departed from their home for America they awoke knowing where they will be at the end of the day. They awoke in the morning, ate their breakfasts, packed their things, and said goodbye to their families, loved ones and friends. Perhaps even a hope lived deep in their souls that one day they will see their families again.
Doubt, uncertainty, and fear accompanied them on their long and dangerous journey, but hope accompanied them as well. That is hope of a better day containing the idea of freedom to live as they desired.
Common to all, they consciously embarked upon a journey undesirable and feared. This was true of the people from Siberia to the Irish man escaping the rope of the British, the famine of Ireland, to the people of Europe fleeing oppression, starvation, and war.
Others, in a land far away, started their days working and caring for loved ones, hunting for food in the forest to feed their families, collecting firewood or water from the stream for breakfast and ended up in America. A way of life, a good way of life, having been for centuries, ended in one day.
They joyfully started their day thinking of being home that night with their families not knowing it will end with them being chained to the belly of a slave ship heading for an unknown world painfully and fearfully doubting of seeing ever home and family. Being chained with hundreds of men and women, they did not understand the future of the auction block in the harbor of Annapolis in America.
Many of this far away land left their way of life sensing they will not see their loved ones again. They did not have the chance to say goodbye. Those left behind seeing them gone did not understand the leaving.
One morning there walked a father, a mother, a sister, a brother, a grandparent, but come evening the walk was no more. Unlike those from Siberia, Ireland, Poland and elsewhere, these people of the far away land did not possess the need, the desire, to leave in search of a place in which to live, a place to worship as they pleased, to survive to another day. They had their homes, the homes of their ancestors.
For the Irishman, as with many from the continent, they chose to flee the cruelty of his homeland. For the slave, he had no choice.
For those who started their day collecting firewood, ending the day chained to the belly of the slave ship, on the auction block in a land unknown, no element of voluntariness, not remotely, lived in their lives.
The families and loved ones of those leaving Europe had the knowledge of knowing where their loved ones had gone, what happened and why. As to the people chained to the belly of the slave ship, there were no final goodbyes, no final kisses, no hope of there ever being another day when they could see their families. No understanding existed in any degree of knowing the location of the father, the son, the daughter, the mother, suddenly gone, or even if they lived. Those left behind in the land far away looked up to the moon wondering if the one they loved looked up to the same moon.
For the immigrants of Europe, traveling across the Atlantic Ocean, fear did accompany them. But for these European immigrants at least they heard of this place called America with an idea of what laid ahead of them.
To the men and women chained to the bellies of the slave ships such knowledge even in its most rudimentary form did not exist. For them fear did not come along as a companion. Fear became their being, a fear internalized; a fear with no hope. For the Europeans, their fear possessed this thing called hope making it a fear unlike the fear of the man chained to the belly of the slave ship. For the immigrant from Europe, fear remained part of his life. For the slave it was his life.
Each, be slave or European, traveled the same ocean in vessels moved by the wind. This much they possessed in common.
Some of the Europeans came as first-class travelers enjoying the best existing at the time. Charles Dickens with his wife and children traveled from England to America in the year 1823 and wrote of his trip. Dickens described the trip with words describing misery. They slept in small rooms, consumed food, not fresh, living each day in boredom.
For Europeans who came to the ports of the American East coast to avoid the rope of the hangman, or to worship their God as they pleased, the trip did not measure up to the description of the first-class traveler described by Dickens. Many died. Many became sick after eating rotten and poisonous food. Most experienced harsh conditions. For many, certainty in the future did not exist.
To the slave in the belly of the ship the ocean presented as the same with its vastness, winds, and storms. Like their European brothers they prayed to their God. But the similarities ended there.
For the slave a view of the sea, the beauty of the rising and setting sun, the moon once admired with family and that special person, and the feel of the wind in his hair no longer did he possess. Worse still, hope of someday possessing these did not exist.
For the slave, the trip became long and rough with little food and what food there was became rotten and filled with worms. He laid in human waste and dirt with no fresh water if any water at all. The days in the belly of the slave ship became days where the only goal was to survive the day.
One thought, that is to live another day, consumed their thinking becoming the motivation in all they did. Many did not survive the trip and thrown over the side to be eaten by the fish. For many, the day started with the gathering of wood to cook the morning breakfast ended being fed to the fish of the ocean.
Upon arrival, the European faced uncertainty of where he may work or sleep that first night. To the man chained to the belly of the slave ship, upon his arrival in a land unknown to him, he stood on a block, often naked, in Annapolis to be sold to a well-dressed Christian man to do that of which he had no idea.
This story is not about one of those who made and survived this journey in the belly of the slave ship. It is of a future grandchild of one of those who went out in the morning to gather berries and collect wood for the breakfast fire to end on the auction block in the City of Annapolis. Sold to the white man to pick tobacco or cotton in Virginia, Carolina, or even worse sugar deep in the South.
His name was George.
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