There Must Be Two Sides To Every Story

That’s the opening line of a song by the same name written by Willie Nelson and Dyan Cannon. It’s a song about love and sadness. It’s a lovely song. Sad. Beautiful lyrics. Beautiful music. Beautiful voices, and beautiful harmony.

American history, maybe all history, always has two sides; the narrative we want the world to hear and believe, and the actual history. The other side.

I wasn’t always a fan of country music. In 1970 I found myself in Vietnam behind a U.S. Marine Corps CH-46 helicopter-mounted machine gun with bullets a half inch wide that could pierce the engine block of a vehicle, fighting for… well… I never was too sure about what we were fighting for or even who we were fighting for that matter. Later in that same year I found myself in the Texas Tavern in Sidney, Australia. The government figured - correctly – that we could use a break once a year, so they sent us to either Sidney, Hong Kong, or China Beach - our choice – for Rest and Relaxation. R and R. China Beach was an “In country” resort on the South China sea. I have zero idea why anyone would stay in Vietnam when you could go to Hong Kong or Sidney.

Anyway, it wasn’t random that I landed at the Texas Tavern. The place had four bars. Four! They all played country music and to my great surprise I kinda fell in love with it. Maybe because I spent a crap ton of time in the four bars of the Texas Tavern. Back in the states, as a Black Marine, I wasn’t supposed to like country music. That caused several altercations. But that’s a story for another time. Today’s story, on the anniversary of Paul Revere’s famous ride, is about Paul, Mark Codman, and that ride. And… well, ok… the actual anniversary was two days ago, but you probably would not have known that if I had not fessed up.

A bit of this story came to me from Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters From An American. The rest from a book by Bill McKibben, The Flag, The Cross, and the Station Wagon. It’s a great read and I recommend it highly. It’s the reflections of a man in his 60’s on how we got to where we are today. I was introduced to Bill through a mutual friend about three years ago and I’m proud and happy that we have become good friends since. Bill is arguably the most prominent environmental advocate in the country today and unarguably the most prominent climate advocate. If you’re over 60, you can join him (and me) in fighting for the climate, our democracy and for racial justice at the Third Act organization.

Revere rode from Boston to Lexington, eleven miles in just under two hours, to warn the colonist that the British were coming – by sea - to put down an armed rebellion. The war to gain American freedom had begun. But of course, not freedom for everyone.

Some 23 years later, Revere wrote about his ride: “I set off upon a very good horse. It was then about 11 o’clock and very pleasant. After I had passed Charlestown Neck and got nearly opposite where Mark was hung in chains, I saw two men on horseback under a tree.”

Wait…Mark? Who the heck was this Mark person, so casually mentioned by Revere?

From Bill’s book: “The part of the story that struck me was that phrase, ‘nearly opposite where Mark was hung in chains’. Clearly, it was a well-known local landmark, since Revere just mentions it casually in passing, but signifying what? Signifying, it turns out, altogether too much. Mark Codman had been enslaved; Mark and his sister Phillis, had been owned by a sea captain named John Codman, who was, by all accounts, a brutal master. Brother and sister had suffered long enough that, in 1755, they resolved to kill their owner – not to escape slavery, but in order to, ‘get another master’. Mark was afraid of sinning, he read his Bible and concluded that if he could kill his tormentor without actually shedding blood, he would have avoided the letter of the holy law. He obtained arsenic from a doctor on the pretense he would use it to kill pigs; instead he and his sister poisoned the tea and porridge of John Codman till he died

He and Phyllis were tried and convicted, not just of murder, but of petit treason, the first time such a charge had been laid in Massachusetts. Her punishment: She was burned alive. His sentence was almost as grim. After being hanged, and then tarred, his body was gibbeted. Gibbeted means being locked in a human shaped iron cage, and then hung in a public place as a warning – sometimes alive - there to die of starvation, and sometimes, as with Codman, after execution. Gibbeting was fading away in England, and largely unknown in Massachusetts. But the crime of a Black man murdering his owner was evidently so unsettling that Mark was not only stuck in a cage on a pole – he was left there for decades.

Courtesy of the Cambridge Day

By the time Revere rode by him in 1775, Mark had been there 20 years. Revere recounted his ride in 1798, when 40 years had passed - yet he could still assume that absolutely everyone would know just what he was talking about.”

Now you know the other side of the story of Revere’s famous ride.