Ascent by Balloon from the Yard of Walnut Street Jail

Abstract

Ascent by Balloon from the Yard of Walnut Street Jail John Edgar Wideman (bio) 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 [End Page 1] 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 Frenchmen 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...