By Bill Robinson
Senior News Writer
RICHMOND — Larry Hamilton was a high school history teacher in Piqua, Ohio, in 1975, when he took a a group of students to hear a talk by Alex Haley, author of the best-selling book “Roots.” The book recounts Haley search to find the ancestor who was abducted from Africa and sold as a slave in the American colonies of Great Britain. As he did whenever he spoke, Haley challenged his listeners to begin searching for their roots by talking to their oldest living relative. Haley’s presentation reminded Hamilton of the tales his grandmother would tell about her grandmother, Lucy Sams, a teenage slave on a plantation in Madison County, Ky. According to his grandmother, Lucy Sams, along with her sister and their mother, fled to Camp Nelson in Jessamine County, a Union Army post that gave refuge to runaway slaves and where a man with pale blue eyes named John G. Fee preached a gospel of love and equality and taught the uneducated to read the Bible. Fee taught and preached at Camp Nelson when he returned to Kentucky after he and his followers were expelled from Berea, where he had started an anti-slavery church and school, following John Brown’s raid on the Harper’s Ferry, Va., federal arsenal in an attempt to arm slaves for rebellion. After the war, Fee would return to Madison County, and his school became Berea College. Alex Haley served it as a trustee in the 1980s. Hamilton’s grandmother still was living when he heard Haley speak, so he visited her with a tape recorder and asked her to repeat the story she had told him as a child. The story takes a long pause at this point. Although he taught black history, along with world studies and current events, at Piqua High School, Hamilton inexplicably let the oral history interview with his grandmother sit in his desk for 33 years. That changed in February 2008 when a former student of Hamilton’s contacted him after learning he would be giving a Black History Month presentation on Camp Nelson at Edison Community College in Piqua. Inclement weather prevented Christina DeLaet from attending the event, but in a follow-up communication, she asked if Hamilton would meet her at her parents’ print shop so she could learn more about Camp Nelson. The high school class years before had stimulated in her a deep interest for 19th century literature and history, particularly of the slave experience. She also told her former teacher that she had taken to writing stories based in that era. Hamilton sensed that providence had provided him with the writer who could share his family’s story with the world. In a professorial manner, he gave her a story line about two young women attempting to bathe their elderly grandmother and asked her to fill out the scene with dialogue and action. Although he writes graceful expository prose, which is evident in his direct contributions to the book, Hamilton felt his skills were not adequate to the task of writing a novel that would bring his great-grandmother’s story to life. His suggestion to DeLaet was a veiled test to determine if she had the appropriate writing skills. Her response confirmed to Hamilton that providence had, indeed, given him DeLaet to write the first of a fact-based trilogy, “Lucy’s Story: Right Choices But Wrongs Still Left,” that would tell the saga of an American family, just as “Roots” did. What DeLaet wrote at Hamilton’s suggestion became the first book’s prologue. One of the two young women in the scene was Hamilton’s grandmother. As they gently, but firmly uncover their grandmother Lucy’s back, they are shocked to discover her reluctance to undress was not based solely on feminine modesty. Her light skin was marred with a lattice work of scars left by the slave master’s lash. The first chapter starts with Lucy as a young, attractive teenage, who knows little of the world beyond living in the dirt-floor cabins of the slave quarters and the toil of picking tobacco worms off of burley leaves, harvesting hemp and hoeing a vegetable garden. When her mother is “promoted” to cook at the big house, Lucy and her sister also go to live there. However, she misses scrunching her toes in the dirt and does not appreciate having to wear “brogans” as a house servant. Her good looks arouse the master’s carnal desires, and he employs the lash in an attempt to teach her submission. When the three women overhear a pro-slavery preacher and the master express their concerns about Camp Nelson and its harboring the human property of slave owners who profess loyalty to the Union, they catch a glimpse of possible freedom. They take flight one evening, and a series of natural occurrences they regard as divine intervention first helps them evade the blood hounds sent to find them and leads them to the Kentucky River and gets them across. There they encounter the “Moses Man,” Fee, who prevents the soldiers from keeping them out of Camp Nelson. The Union Army was more interested in former field hands who could help build roads and railroads, although they need cooks, maids and laundresses as well. The vivid dialogue that DeLaet creates seems to dance to the double-quick time that Camp Nelson soldiers go about their work. Hamilton used the resources of the Berea College Library Special Collections and Archives to verify the history behind his grandmother’s stories. There he was assisted by archivist Shannon Wilson and Dr. Richard, an English professor who published a history of Camp Nelson and Fee’s ministry there. Hamilton also has ancestral roots in Madison County through his father’s family tree. He visited Madison County late last year when he and a cousin from his father’s family, the Rev. Floyd Ballew, presented a copy of “Lucy” to the Madison County Public Library. The 196-page book is available for $18.87, plus $5 shipping and handing, from www.omaviasalipublishing.com. Bill Robinson can be reached at brobinson@ richmondregister.com or at 624-6622.
