Photo of the Day: Toni Morrison ‘Bench by the Road’ Project, Nyack, NY

Besides Carson McCullers, the Nyack area’s other major literary luminary was Toni Morrison. While walking in the village’s Memorial Park a couple of weekends ago, I came across and took a photo of this commemoration of African-American history that the Nobel Literature laureate (who resided a few miles away, in Grandview-on-Hudson) highlighted.

Ten years ago this past May, as part of the Toni Morrison Society’s “Bench on the Road” project, the novelist attended a public ceremony commemorating an individual who was part of the vast diaspora resulting from the forced “Middle Passage” from African freedom to American slavery.

The project took its name from Morrison’s 1989 observation about the lack of public places “to think about…to summon the presences of, or recollect the absences of slaves.”

This roadside monument honors Cynthia Hesdra, a former slave who became a successful businesswoman and property owner in Nyack. As a conductor on the Underground Railroad, she aided others from the South in achieving the liberty and opportunity she had come to enjoy.

The Underground Railroad involved the transfer of an estimated 30,000 to 100,000 people to freedom—a mass movement in which countless ordinary citizens performed extraordinary deeds. They changed America forever by defying legally sanctioned, government-sponsored, shameful racism.

Visitors passing through Nyack would do well to ponder how Cynthia Hesdra did her part, and how each of us could do ours now.