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The Preacher’s Corner
By Rev. Dr. Milton Winter Wonderful childhood memories of the Fourth of July The
Fourth of July is forever fixed in my memory according to celebrations
I enjoyed at my aunt and uncle’s home in Charleston, Illinois.
Summertime always found us up there, and I really have no childhood
memories of a Mississippi Fourth. This lacuna may arise from the fact
that it just gets so hot down here by July 4 that we just sort of shut
down, or because of memories by some in that bygone day of the fall of
Vicksburg on Independence Day 1863 — a fact that prejudiced some
against celebrating the birthday of the United States. Whatever
the reason may have been, we had wonderful times in Charleston on that
holiday. There would always be a parade that circled the town square,
with the high school band and perhaps a band or two from neighboring
towns. There would be floats from various civic organizations, antique
cars carrying public officials brightened with the sight of a pretty
girl waving atop the rumble seat, and the colorful squadrons of
soldiers with flags and always horses, beautiful prancing horses,
fascinating above all else to little boys. Fourth
of July evenings were the best of all. There would be a great display
of fireworks, and the whole town would gather with lawn chairs and
blankets to spread on the ground at the athletic fields of Eastern
Illinois University, where my uncle taught, and there would be an
hour-long show. For a small boy from Mississippi it was a great
spectacle indeed. Every Illinois town would mount
as great a fireworks performance as it could muster. Years later when I
lived in Chicago, I heard on the evening news about the misfortune of
the community of Kankakee where, several nights before the exhibition,
a carelessly thrown match ignited the entire stash of fireworks,
causing some bystanders to dive into the nearby river for protection,
so that the town did not have a Fourth of July fireworks festival that
year. Back in Charleston, on Independence Day
afternoon, we would usually take a picnic to the little Lincoln Log
Cabin State Historic Site, near the adjacent community of Lerna,
Illinois, that preserves the site of the 1840s farm of Thomas and Sarah
Bush Lincoln, father and stepmother of our 16th president. Abraham
Lincoln was a lawyer living in Springfield by the time his parents
moved here in 1837, but he visited them periodically. Nearby, at the
little Shiloh Presbyterian Church cemetery, we would visit the graves
of the president’s father and stepmother. Trips
out to the Lincoln sites were part of every summer visit, whether
Fourth of July or not. Often we would take a picnic. In one particular
year, when my cousin was along for the visit, my aunt had made a huge
pot of Italian spaghetti for a church picnic. That
year it rained on the Fourth and the picnic had to be cancelled. Not
one to waste anything, my aunt insisted that we consume this spaghetti,
and it became a family joke, the way the spaghetti kept turning up on
the plates, meal after meal. It was, I must say, a very good recipe. My
uncle was a great admirer of Abraham Lincoln, and was particularly
interested in the questions surrounding Lincoln’s religious beliefs —
which were not entirely conventional, and which have been exploited
with claims and counterclaims by fundamentalists and free-thinkers
alike. Through my uncle, I have inherited the interest and have
recently found Ronald White’s book, “A. Lincoln: A Biography,” recently
published to mark the bicentennial of Lincoln’s birth, to be a source
of solid scholarship and great reading pleasure. I
marked a particular passage. On July 7, 1863, upon receiving word of
the end of battle at Vicksburg, Lincoln asked a question of a group who
gathered at the White House to hear a word from him, “How long ago is
it? — eighty odd years — since on the Fourth of July for the first time
in the history of the world a nation by its representatives, assembled
and declared as a self-evident truth that ‘all men are created equal?’”
It is worth pondering for our own day, what those words mean in our
time.
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