2 - “As Lively Stones”: Abolitionist Culture in Johnson's Dresden

Summary

After the service to mark the one hundredth anniversary of Dresden's Anglican church in June of 1959, the visiting priest made an unusual notation in the Preacher's Book, the meticulous record of services dating back to the earliest days of the church in the 1860s: “Tonight this service was attended by Miss Jennie Johnson, aged 94, who is the daughter of Mr. Isaiah Johnson; a fugitive slave who escaped and who became associated with ‘Uncle Tom’; the Reverend Josiah Henson; and the Reverend Thomas Hughes, founder and first Rector of Christ Church. Miss Johnson spoke a few words at the service, and said her father was helping in the construction of the church and fell dead at the corner where the pulpit now stands. Miss Johnson still carries on Christian work at Flint, Michigan, USA, among colored people.” It was, the entry concludes, “an excellent service.”

The account of Isaiah Johnson's fatal fall from the beams of the church must have had a strange effect on the anniversary crowd. Both Johnson's summation and the priest's recounting of her association with church and community are held together by ellipsis and silence. In telling the story as she did—in the setting of the church itself, weaving her family's personal loss into the sense of place—Johnson drew the attention of those assembled to the church's complex antislavery beginnings and to the way those origins were intertwined with the intimate history of her family.