Songs and Stories from the Falls

Henry James once said of the English novelist Anthony Trollope that "His great, his inestimable merit was a complete appreciation of the usual." 

That's the kind of fine line that makes you sit back and spin through it again. Whether James is right or not is a judgment I'm not qualified to make, but I can't help feeling what James might be talking about shows up in a passage Trollope penned about "the falls," the only ones that matter really, the Niagara Falls. 

Now, don't be mistaken--Niagara Falls is in no wise "usual." Its three separate falls span the border between Ontario, Canada, and New York state, and empty the Niagara River at a rate of almost six million cubic gallons of water every minute. Nothing about the Niagara Falls is "usual." Some claim that kind of immensity pounding into the Niagara Gorge can be heard as far as forty miles away. 

Here's what Trollope, this master of the usual, said about the Falls:

…To realize Niagara you must sit there till you see nothing else than that which you have come to see. You will hear nothing else and see nothing else. At length you will be at one with the tumbling river before you. You will find yourself among the waters as though you belong to them.

Then there's the water's sheer divinity:

The cool liquid green will run through your veins and the voice of the cataract will be the expression of your own heart. You will fall as the bright waters fall, rushing down into your new world with no hesitation and with no dismay: 

Oh, yes, and here's the spirit too:  "and you will rise again as the spray rises, bright, beautiful and pure. Then you will flow away in your course to the uncompassed, distant and eternal ocean…"

Phew. But then, I'm sure Niagara Falls (where the three are one) prompts every mortal soul who takes the time to sit and stare at its eternity of water, then rise into some timeless transcendence, not a particularly difficult thing to do, by the way.

A boat tour at the Falls uses an ancient myth to advertise, goes by the name of "The  Maid of the Mist."  The almost ageless story belonged originally to the Haudenosaunees, a local Native people who long claimed one of their own, a young woman suddenly widowed, depressed and lonely, took it upon herself to push her canoe into the Niagara River and willfully plunge over the falls to her death. 

Once she heard the roar of the falls, she prayed to her god to make her death easy, or so the story goes, and he did more than that: he saved her, even married her off to one of his handsome sons. Don't know if Trollope heard this one when he was at the Falls, although if he did, he may well have been even more ecstatic. 

One more chapter. The lovely maiden, now a wife, amid the pounding somehow hears the anguish of her people back up top the falls, then gets permission to visit them and warn them, which she does successfully, thereby becoming a savior of her people, "the Maiden of the Mist." 

But then, how about this one? Harriet Tubman, who almost single-handedly saved as many as seventy enslaved people, many of them by way of the Underground Railroad, used to bring the newly freed over the vast and newly built suspension bridge, right there at Niagara Falls. She delivered the suddenly freed, including her parents, to St. Catharine's or Chatham, to Canada, where finally their shackles fell blessedly away. 

Josiah Bailey must have heard that immense roar of the falls as the train he was taking came up on the old Suspension Bridge. But, Tubman said, he wouldn't look up, kept his head in his hands, or so she wrote in a memoir.

Finally, when Tubman knew they'd passed the halfway point on the bridge, she shook him, grabbed his shoulders, and told him they'd made it--he was out, he was free. This man Josiah Bailey stood right then and there in the train, and started singing on that suspension bridge. 

“Glory to God and Jesus too,
One more soul is safe;
Oh, go and carry de news,
One more soul got safe.”

And didn't stop singing that song till he got off the train, even drew a crowd of admirers while he sang, Tubman said.

Anthony Trollope first visited America in the early 1850s, and stayed only for a short time to visit his mother, who'd moved to America sometime earlier. So it's unlikely but not impossible that Trollope was here in 1856 when Harriet Tubman brought Josiah Bailey into freedom, which means you can't help but wonder what more Trollope might have said or how he would have said what he did, if he knew that right above him on that newly constructed suspension bridge, four slaves from Virginia were being brought into freedom. I wonder what this "master of the ordinary" might have added to what he had written had he heard Josiah Bailey's song amid the tumult and the roar, because it's amazing, isn't it?--how music stays in the soul?