A Bronx Teacher's Travels

By George Colon

A Bronx teacher trots the globe, floating down many rivers, climbing many mountains from Europe to the Orient in a quest to understand humanity. Walking the Bible in Israel in the footsteps of Hebrew prophets and Jesus-from Bethlehem down to the Via Dolorosa to Golgotha, past the remains of Solomon's Temp

• Language: English
• Publisher: Prime Seven Media
• Release date: Dec 18, 2023
• ISBN: 9781963050332

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Copyright © 2023 by George Colon

Paperback: 978-1-963050-32-5

eBook: 978-1-963050-33-2

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023922463

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

This Book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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Prime Seven Media

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Tomah City, WI 54660

Printed in the United States of America

CHAPTER ONE

Saint Augustine of Hippo

In 1993 I got my very first car, a 1993 Toyota Corolla fresh off the lot, bought only after moving to a two-fare zone with no subway nearby. My driver’s license of thirty years I’d used for I.D. and I wasn’t mechanically inclined. All that time I rode Bronx buses, Els and subways from the time I paid .15 cents to ride the Number 5 and 2 trains from Longwood to Freeman Avenue to visit cousins.

With the car I broke out of those limits. Went all the way to Maine and Nova Scotia, stopping off in Boston, Plymouth Rock and Salem to visit the Puritan fathers. Then, on my next trips, went south to see all the places read about back in P.S.39 and after. So, I dropped in on America’s cradle in old Philadelphia, saw all the Washington D.C. sights. Edgar Allen Poe’s tomb, the inner harbor, and Fort McHenry awaited me in Baltimore before Annapolis. In Yorktown, Virginia I saw where Washington took the British surrender. Jamestown. Savannah. Charleston. Made it all the way to St. Augustine, first permanent settlement in the U.S.A. Then I saw Western Europe from London to St. Petersburg. Eastern Europe. Saw Egypt. Israel. Morocco. Got all the way to China.

My Bronx home I’s already explored from south to north and east to west on foot. Yes, the Bronx, my borough. Mi precioso El Bronx, a beautiful borough maligned by movies and the media. Fort Apache, the Bronx thrashes it. They high jack trains and kill people in The Taking of Pelham, 1,2,3. And of course Howard Cosell pointed out those tenements on fire during the 1977 World Series. Yes, he told the nation. The Bronx is burning. When the cameras panned away from the diamond during the life broadcast from Yankee Stadium, they branded a burnt spot on America’s psyche.

It’s come back, my borough, though not to the pristine shape that Jonas Bronck found when he landed here on his ship, the Fire of Troy (De Brand van Trogen), nearly 400 years ago after a journey of weeks. But new buildings now stand, and the fires are out. He bought it from the Dutch West Indian Company and made a token payment to the Indians. Bronck brought with him a bible and books on agriculture, navigation, the construction of windmills, law and history and a calendar. Fifty volumes in all, some say, though Lloyd Ultan, Bronx historian, says only eleven. Brought building material and skilled men to construct a settlement.

My family brought itself and very few possessions besides the clothes on our back. We arrived over 300 years later in 1953 from Puerto Rico, part of that great post World War II exodus from the sugar cane fields on propeller planes to Idlewild International Airport, later renamed for the dead President Kennedy. Our American Airline flight took eight hours to the American mainland. To El Bronx. Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens, and of course Staten Island, are on islands. We’re on the mainland. Of Puerto Rico before that April day, 1953, no remembrance remains. Memory begins with the eight-hour plane ride to New York with my grandmother and aunts. The weeklong voyages in hostile oceans of Jonas Bronck marvel me. I’ve been on sailboats, though never sailing far, and can only imagine the hardships.

I’ve been here in the Bronx since, except for college upstate, a short sojourn in the suburbs, and travels abroad. I’ve ridden every bus and train and have seen it all in the present. But its past now beckoned – and mine - and I explored it in my new car and the next car after that, swerving back and forth across time. By then, I’d put in my thirty years teaching English, Spanish, Science and history in Bronx high schools. With no more lessons to plan or essays to read, I had a pension and I had time.

I followed the foot seps of Jonas Bronk whom tradition makes a Dane from Copenhagen. But Lloyd Ultan, official Bronx historian, told me in a chat before a lecture December 5th, 2009 in City Island library that he was born in Sweden. I’d later go there after first doing Denmark and Norway. with its endless fjords and mountains.

A woman named Ann Hutchinson also came to the Bronx too hears God who inspires her to read the bible and preach. Dreary, intolerant New Englanders people burned women at the stake after the infamous witchcraft hysteria in Salem. In Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, they pin that scarlet A on the unmarried Hester Prynne after a trial where she refuses to name the father of her unborn child. They locked up Ann, too, and put her on trial. She defended herself.

"You have no power over my body, neither can you do me any harm, for I am in the hands of the eternal Jehovah, my Savior.

They spared Ann a burning at the stake, but expelled her from their promised land, driving her not east of Eden, but south of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. "So, it was on to New Netherlands, where the more tolerant Dutch gave her haven in Bronksland, north of Jonas Bronck’s Emmaus farm. Many times, I’ve driven on the highway named for her in our borough.

While assigned administrative duties in the office of the superintendent of Bronx High Schools at Lehman High School on Tremont Avenue, I sometimes ate at the White Castle on Westchester Square. Nearby is a plaque that I stopped to read one day. It commemorates the skirmish between the Westchester Militia and British troops there in 1776. These militia men stopped the British who’d marched across Tremont avenue and perhaps saved the American Revolution.

In 1976. I stumbled upon St. Ann’s Church during the great Bicentennial year. As the 200th anniversary of signing of the Declaration of Independence nation generated excitement. A Catholic, I’d attended Pentecostal services with my grandmother. I’d been unofficial Shahbaz goy at a local synagogue and once or twice dropped in to light the place for Jewish neighbors. Romancing a Buddhist woman, I flirted with Nirvana and chanted in front of a G, a sort of Altar. But up to then, I’d never entered Episcopalian Churches.

St. Ann sits on a knoll on E. 141st Street and St. Ann’s Avenue, now called La Lupe Way, after the late Cuban singer. But long before Puerto Ricans and Cubans got here, the church has stood since early in the 19th century. It’s patron, the Morris family had long resided in the Bronx, and like all people, eventually left it. Arriving from Wales to a plot allotted by the Stuart kings, they purchased additional parcels from Jonas’ Bronck’s original lands in what’s still called Morrisania. Bronze plaques around the iron picket fence protecting its the grassy grounds tell their story.

And in the vaults, that connect to the church lie their remains.

On day, I stopped one day to study the plaques.

Robert Livingston, first governor of New Jersey.

Lewis Morris signer of the Declaration of Independence and one of Washington as general.

And of course, the greatest Morris of them all, Gouverneur Morris, penman of the United States Constitutional convention and the author of its great Preamble.

Representing Pennsylvania at the Constitutional Convention, his great verbal skills helped to smooth differences that separated the delegates. And great writing skills gave shape to the framing of the constitutions wording. His style turned a rough draft into the resounding words We the people of the United States of America, to form a more perfect Union, do ordain this Constitution … He was an outspoken critic of slavery.

Yes, this Bronx boy did all that.

I often visited the home of another Bronx resident, Edgar Allen Poe, who came later in the 19th century.

But it was the Dutch that signed up the young Jonas Bronck.

The Dutch settled Manhattan, New York up to Albany, and the New Jersey coast. Not the Dutch government, but a corporation, the Dutch West Indian Company sent the Englishman, Henry Hudson to also look for a northwest passage to India. Finding sweet, not salty waters narrowed there, he concluded the river didn’t lead to open sea. His voyage lays the basis for the Dutch claim to the region first called New Netherlands. His crew became the first Europeans to set foot in the Bronx – in autumn.

In the American Natural History Museum, this future teacher saw Peter Minuet’s diorama where this early Dutch governor pays the Indians $24 dollars for Manhattan. Miss Ross, my first-grade teacher at P.S. 39, the Bronx, the class there. The future teacher still hears later Governor Peter Stuyvesant’s wooden leg on Wall Street’s cobblestones echoing through his earliest remembrances. I still