Charles Rammelkamp
Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore. His poetry collection, A Magician Among the Spirits, poems about Harry Houdini, is a 2022 Blue Light Press Poetry winner. A collection of poems and flash called See What I Mean? was recently published by Kelsay Books, and another collection of persona poems and dramatic monologues involving burlesque stars, The Trapeze of Your Flesh, will be published by BlazeVOX Books in April.
The Power of Sarcasm
I owed my freedom to Tom Smallwood.
I came to his shoemaker’s shop in Washington,
not far from the Capitol,
running from the tobacco farm over in Virginia
where I’d get routinely beaten if I didn’t work hard enough.
Mr. Smallwood snuck me up to Albany in a hay wagon,
where his abolitionist friend Charles Torrey,
who edited a paper called Tocsin of Liberty,
helped me move on to Toronto.
Smallwood and Torrey had a little joke
about an “underground railroad”
they mocked the slaveholders with,
a secret means of travel nobody knew nothing about,
as if whisked away by spirits,
except of course the slaves and abolitionists.
Mister Smallwood got it from a Baltimore constable,
John Zell, who got a bounty for returning runaways.
Zell fumed that there must be some “underground rail-road” because
the “rascals” disappeared without a trace.
Thomas Smallwood’s sarcasm burned like acid.
In his Tocsin of Liberty articles he’d taunt the slave owners
to apply to “the office of the underground railroad”
in Washington for “information about their lost property,”
appointed himself “general agent of all the branches
of the National Underground Railroad,” teasing
the slavers for their loss and their impotence.
Later, Mister Smallwood, who’d bought his own freedom
back in the 1830s, moved to Toronto himself,
with his wife and four children,
started a business manufacturing saws.
“The American government will never voluntarily
grant the African race among them freedom,”
he wrote in his memoir. Amen.
But at least the phrase he coined in satire caught fire.
Isaac Smith Remembers His Mother
Grandpap was white, his wife mixed African and European,
but Mama married a Black barber in Gettysburg,
who beat her up, which is why she left him,
took me and my brother William with her to Lancaster,
where she became Thaddeus Stevens’ housekeeper.
Mr. Stevens raised us like his own kids.
Senator Stevens, who got the 13th, 14th and 15th
Constitutional Amendments through Congress,
might have been more than Mama’s employer;
both of them active in the Underground Railroad.
She sure helped him when he got sick,
nursed him enough to give him six or eight more years.
He left her with an annuity when he died in 1868,
her at his bedside, holding his hand.
After my brother Will shot himself in 1861,
a horrible accident which Mama witnessed,
I enlisted two years later in the 6th
United States Colored Infantry Regiment.
Up until then, I’d been a banjo player
and a barber, like my daddy.
After joining the army at Camp William Penn,
we went down to Virginia, served at Fort Monroe,
until we joined Sherman’s Carolina Campaign
the last year of the war.
I lost touch with Mama and all that went before,
but when I learned she died in 1884,
I visited her grave at the Catholic Church up in Lancaster,
proud to learn how respected she was
by all the Whites and Blacks in Washington.
