Chapter 50
June 15, 2017
CHRISTIAN RIVERS, A longtime professor at Monroe College in the Bronx, made his annual trek to the monument in Queens. According to stories handed down over the years, his great-grandfather Bodee had been a crew member on the Slocum and courageously rescued many during the aftermath of the fire. The professor spent years documenting his family history and could trace his roots all the way back to the Ashanti in Africa in the late 1700s. He was never able to document his ancestor’s employment on the ship, however, as all of the records of those working that day omitted his name. Still, the Rivers family made their regular excursion to the cemetery every June when he was a child and he chose to continue this tradition.
Young Christian Rivers found the tales of his
