A Year in the South (40 page)

Armed with a letter of recommendation and some newly printed business cards, both courtesy of Dr. Douglas, Lou hung out his shingle and soon gained a reputation in Milwaukee as an excellent private-duty nurse. He pursued this calling for more than two decades. During those years he had the opportunity to travel with many of his patients, going to places as far away as Florida and California.
30

In 1897, “in compliance with the suggestion of friends,” Lou published a memoir of his life as a slave. He probably could not have afforded to do this on his own, and the book is written in a polished style that is clearly not his. It is likely that one of his wealthy patients, captivated by Lou's bedside stories of his years in bondage and his harrowing escape, paid to have those stories transcribed, edited, and published.
31

To the end of his life, Lou remained bitter about slavery. His memoir is a defiant reply to the romantic legend of plantation life in the Old South that had captured the popular mind of America by the late nineteenth century. In it, he graphically recounts the horrors he witnessed and speaks of “the scars which I still bear upon my person, and … the wounds of spirit which will never wholly heal.” Nor had he any patience with the popular image of the Confederate States of America as a noble Lost Cause. Fighting to preserve an inhuman institution, he insisted, was hardly noble. Readers of his memoir are reminded that if the Confederacy had won its war for independence, Lou and his loved ones, along with millions of other men and women, would have spent the rest of their lives in harsh servitude.
32

Though he traveled to the South on a number of occasions in his later years, he apparently never revisited any of the places where he had lived as a slave. Nor did he make any effort to learn what became of those who had held him in bondage. He resided in Milwaukee for the remainder of his days, moving in with one of his daughters and her husband after Matilda's death in 1907. By then he was a well-known figure in Milwaukee, thanks to his extensive business contacts and his published memoir. When he died in 1913, at the age of eighty, every newspaper in the city featured an article about him. He was laid to rest in Forest Home Cemetery next to Matilda.
33

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

NOTES

PROLOGUE

WINTER: LOUIS HUGHES