THE ASTOUNDING SPECTACLE COVERED THE WHOLE SKY, SO UNIMAGINABLY VAST YOU COULD PROBABLY SEE IT FROM ANYWHERE ON EARTH. I IMAGINED AUNTIE BEE AT THAT MOMENT, BACK IN OUR OLD CABIN. SHE WOULD BE LOOKING UP TO SEE THE SAME HEAVENLY EXTRAVAGANZA ROLLICKING BEFORE MY EYES.
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SUMMARY: THE STORY SO FAR…
Josiah, a young slave 12 years of age, lives in a cabin in the slave quarters of a Virginia tobacco plantation with Auntie Bee, Mose, the plantation handyman, two young children, Randall and Emily. He notices Mose leaving the cabin in the middle of the night and follows him to his secret workshop in the woods where Mose is building some sort of strange contraption. Mose tells him it is a machine that will fly him to freedom. Now that he knows Mose’s secret, he stays to help build the flier. After mishaps, false starts and setbacks—the flier tumbles down the mountain and is seriously damaged—they are attacked by snakes—mountain lions lurk all around them—they realize someone has been spying on them and they think their escape plan has been discovered. Finally, their time has come. Now they are in the air, riding on the wings of the wind.
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Then it began. Out of nowhere, the entire sky lit up like midday. Shooting stars beaming in every direction, fireballs big as moons, flaming showers of light and dust as white as snow—the heavens became an explosion of flashing light as far as we could see.
It was awesome—the most sublime, glorious, spectacular thing I’ve ever witnessed.
I remembered Auntie Bee reading to us from the Bible where it says: The stars shall fall from heaven and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken and then shall appear the sign of the Son of Man. And now, the stars were falling.
Randall, Emily and I watched in stunned silence. Was this the end of the world?
In all the fiery commotion, my eyes searched for the North Star. I could barely see the Big Dipper, nearly covered in a blizzard of white. There were the stars in the handle leading to the tail of the Little Dipper. What a relief to see the North Star shining brightly as ever, steady, unmoving, still guiding us.
Behind this shower of stars stood the same grand old constellations so familiar to me, all fixed and true in their places. So the heavens weren’t falling on us after all and the world wasn’t coming to an end.
I concluded that God was putting on a show for us. It was almost like he was saying—“You down there! Look to the heavens! Put aside all the troubles of this world and behold the Glory of My Divine Creation.”
It was God's hand that staid the stars. And it was God’s hand that moved them. In the amazing shower of light we witnessed, every bright descending star was a messenger from heaven. I knew that the Lord had great work for me to do and I must prepare to do it. He was assuring me that I would be a useful man in the world. That’s when I knew we would succeed in our journey to freedom.
The astounding spectacle covered the whole sky. It was so unimaginably vast you could probably see it from anywhere on earth. I imagined Auntie Bee at that very moment, back in our old home cabin. She always retired late. Sometimes she remained outside to clean up from dinner or to gather wood for the night fire. She might be picking flowers to bring
inside. Right about now she would be looking up to see the same Heavenly extravaganza rollicking before my eyes.
I could almost hear her startled gasp. Surely she would summon Mose and the others. “Come quick!” she would call out excitedly in her warm and lilting voice. “The stars are all shooting whichway.”
Years later, when I was a student at Moravian College taking a course in Astronomy, I told my professor about the shooting stars I witnessed that night. Of course, I didn’t tell him where I was or what I was doing at the time. But I described for him this amazing phenomenon I witnessed. I wanted to know if he could tell me what was going on.
He explained that it was a meteor shower, debris from a comet burning up as it enters the atmosphere of earth.
“When did you see it?” he asked.
I told him that I wasn’t sure of the exact date but most likely it was in the fall of 1857.
The professor looked it up in his book and found there was a spectacular meteor shower on the night of September 17, 1857. Reportedly, it was visible from Canada to Mexico.
I cannot tell you how excited I was to discover this fact. It allowed me to establish the date of our flight. The meteor shower took place on our second night in the air. Our flight began on the morning of September 16, 1857.
That was the last time I saw Auntie Bee.
Posted By: Richard Kigel
Friday, June 25th 2010 at 8:54AM
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