I have an article in the current issue Humanities about Langston Hughes and a shawl he inherited that had purportedly been worn by one of John Brown’s men at Harpers Ferry. Although Hughes sincerely believed in the connection, it turns out that the story was not true. Nonetheless, objects such as Hughes’s shawl can tell us a lot about American history, and in this case the struggle through many generations against slavery and racism.
Here is a link to the article (coauthored with Rachel Maines), which began life as a post on this blog last February. The opening section is below:
“One of the most treasured objects” in the collection of the Ohio History Connection in Columbus is item H 6806, which, at first, seems to be a rather ordinary handwoven wool twill shawl. Measuring 142 cm x 315 cm (about 56” x 124”), it is large enough to cover a dining room table and has a plaid pattern in blue and yellow. The edges are frayed. The color is faded and the fabric bears numerous holes of different sizes. The shawl seems to date from the early nineteenth century, its age evident from both its badly worn condition and the nature of its yarn and weave.
The object is so modest it hardly seems museumworthy. But it came with a great story deeply rooted in American history and literature.
In 1943, the shawl was donated by Langston Hughes, the great African-American poet and playwright. In a handwritten note, Hughes explained that it had belonged to his grandmother’s first husband, Lewis Sheridan Leary, who had given his life in John Brown’s raid at Harpers Ferry in 1859.
Said Hughes,
Sheridan Leary wore this shawl when he went from Oberlin, Ohio, to join John Brown in order to help him create the slave revolt which they hoped might free the Negroes. At Harper’s Ferry Leary was killed and left to lie for a long while in a muddy ditch, but some good person took this shawl and sent it back to Oberlin to his widow, Mary Sampson Patterson Leary, who later became Mrs. Langston, my grandmother.
The museum’s website says that the shawl “had been handed down in the Leary family from Sheridan’s grandfather,” and adds that “we would be safe in dating the shawl at thirty to forty years preceding John Brown’s raid, certainly in the first quarter of the 1800’s.”
The shawl belonged first to the Leary family, then to the Langstons, and finally to the Hugheses. The poet also included a brief account of it in his autobiography, noting that Leary had left Oberlin without disclosing his destination, “except that he told [Mary] he was going on a trip. A few weeks later his shawl came back to her full of bullet holes.” Hughes’s biographer, Arnold Rampersad, wrote that “a friend brought [Leary’s] bloodstained, bullet-ridden shawl” back to Oberlin, and that it remained a symbol for Mary of his martyrdom. “She still wore it fifty years after his death, or used it to cover her young grandchild, Langston Hughes, while he slept at night.”
The Harpers Ferry raid and its aftermath are among the most evocative events in the long struggle to abolish slavery that led to the Civil War. To an African-American poet who wrote about the suffering of his people from the injustices of bondage and racial discrimination, the shawl had tremendous emblematic significance, not only of the quest for freedom but of his own ancestor’s sacrifice in the deeply unequal battle at Harpers Ferry. Hughes’s memories of being wrapped in it as a child lent even greater dramatic power to the story of the shawl, making it a part of his own origin story as well as a symbol of the family’s tradition of resistance to oppression and racism.
This shawl has the power to make the heart race and the imagination open wide to an incredible series of connections between a famous twentieth-century name and a significant nineteenth-century tragedy. And yet, in all likelihood, the story that this shawl was at the battle at Harpers Ferry is not true.
Comments