Charleston (39 page)

Adah Samples took a colored-only car of the Northeastern Railroad up to Florence. Adah's mother, widowed in the summer, had gone to live with her brother on his farm. Adah was depressed to see so many people following the train on the road beside the right-of-way. On horseback and on foot, in buggies and wagons, they were fleeing the endangered coast for Columbia or Flat Rock or some other refuge.

Adah, in her late twenties, was handsomer than ever. She had a resolute eye and a ripe body men found desirable. It belonged to Folsey, though of late they'd hit a rough patch. Folsey was inattentive, short-tempered. Palmetto Traders had suffered a huge loss in October when the blockade runner
General Bee
broke apart in a coastal storm. The firm lost six hundred bales of cotton bound for Liverpool.

The blockade had all but closed Charleston Harbor. The one Atlantic port remaining open was Wilmington, North Carolina, a hazardous twenty miles up the Cape Fear River, past the Union guns at Fort Fisher. Lately Folsey spent all his time in Wilmington. He'd been there the past four weeks.

Adversity had a way of weakening and defeating some, but not Adah. Folsey's recent behavior only toughened her resolve to preserve the relationship. He wasn't the kindest of human beings, but he was a stallion in bed, and a richer man than she had a right to wish for. He might be pleased if she demonstrated her loyalty with a surprise visit.

After she left her mother at her uncle's farm, she went
to Florence and bought a ticket for the eighty-mile trip on the Wilmington & Manchester. The ticket agent asked for $12.75. Adah calculated quickly. “Fifteen cents a mile. That's outrageous.”

“Tell it to Jeff Davis. What's a nigger got to say about it anyway? There's one coach, be sure you sit in the last three rows.”

From the separate shanty reserved for Negroes she watched workmen piling fragrant sacks of coffee beans on a flatcar. Blockade bounty, surely. Her train arrived. Five miles up the line she asked the conductor why they were traveling so slowly.

“Can't go more'n fifteen miles an hour. Track's all run down. Can't be repaired, mills that made rails make armor plate now. South's falling apart. You be careful in Wilmington, missy. Meanest city in the Confederacy these days.” He squeezed her arm and bumped her breast with his knuckle. “I like that pretty yellow turban.”

They arrived after dark. The Wilmington waterfront was unattractive and noisy, the piers crowded with ships, and the streets full of refuse and wandering sailors. Downriver, along the east shore, low clouds glowed red. Saltworks, Folsey said; the kettles boiled day and night to evaporate seawater.

Groghouses filled the night with raucous voices and tinkly music. A poster advertised Sunday cockfights. Adah climbed steep and muddy Market Street to the boardinghouse where Palmetto Traders rented rooms. She carried her portmanteau up one flight, shivering with anticipation as she raised her yellow glove to knock. Telltale noises stayed her hand.

She wrenched the knob, threw the door open. Light from the hallway gas mantle revealed a naked woman prone on the bed, her hips elevated; Adah couldn't see much more than her enormous white hams. Folsey knelt behind her, jaybird naked except for his favorite tasseled Hessian boots.

“Told you to lock the damn door,” the woman said.

Folsey snatched his spectacles from the bedside table. Folsey was forty-seven, his soft good looks fading, his
blond hair thinning. He peered at Adah through large square bifocals with ugly cement lines where the lenses joined.

“What in Christ's name are you doing here?”

“I wanted to surprise you. Obviously I did.”

“There's an empty room two doors down. Wait for me there.”

She stamped her foot. “I will not. You said you loved me, Folsey Lark. In July you said we'd be married.”

“Well, I say a lot of things. I'm damn mad about this, Adah. You have a lot of brass, stalking me like some damn spy.” The woman covered herself while Folsey stamped across the room, his shrunken manhood dangling.

“I reckon it's time we called a halt. Go on home to Charleston. Haul your things out of the cottage. I get back and find you still there, I'll burn it down around you.”

More angry than frightened, Adah fairly spat at him. “Bastard. That's all you are, a no-good cheating fickle white bastard.”

The woman giggled; even Folsey was amused. “I do claim certain parts of that title, yes. Now get out of here before I hurt you.”

Adah stood fast. Folsey took a menacing step, raised his voice. “I said go.”

She ran down the stairs. On lower Market Street she rented a room at a seedy colored hotel, bolted the door, and threw herself on the bed. She cried awhile, then roused at the sound of tapping at her door. A rough voice whispered in some strange language. Sailors from all over the world gathered in Wilmington.

“Whoever you are, you'd better leave me alone. I have a gun.” Evidently her English communicated; he went away.

Adah sat up, rubbed her eyes. This would pass. Folsey had clipped her tail feathers but not forever. She'd survive, without charity from her uncle and her mother. The yellow bird would fly again, see if she didn't.

 

“Oh, there's a nigger watching the house,” Ouida cried. She stood by a window of the sitting room at Sword
Gate. Gibbes had sent a trustworthy slave to bring Ouida to town for Christmas Eve. She hadn't visited Charleston since meeting Alex. Gibbes had convinced her that going to Mr. Calhoun's grave was unsafe; Union shelling of the city had resumed.

Snoo rushed to Ouida's side. “Please be careful with the candle, dear.” Ouida held it too near the draperies, and her hand shook. At least she was wearing her glasses.

Snoo lifted the drapery for a clear view of Legare Street, where weeds grew and broken glass lay like scattered diamonds. Ouida whispered, “It's Virtue, I know it. His left ear's missing.” She lived with the memory of Lydia's body crushing her to the heart-pine floor, the warm blood bathing both of them. Ouida still washed her hands and face several times a day.

Snoo gently pried the candle from Ouida's fingers, blew it out. “Look again, dear. It's just a boy, with both his ears.” And already gone into the night.

With a vague, helpless gesture Ouida said, “But I was sure. I dream of him all the time, you know.” Twice, she thought she spied her grandmother's slayer lurking on the grounds of Prosperity Hall. Each time she sent slaves to catch the man, and each time they came back to hesitantly say they'd found no one. Not even footprints. Ouida reacted by calling them liars and locking herself in her room.

Snoo settled Ouida in a chair by the Christmas tree, a volunteer cedar cut from the sandy soil of Malvern. Snoo had decorated the fluffy branches with ribbons, popcorn strings, white mistletoe berries, and an engraving of Robert E. Lee in place of a star. She offered Ouida a plate. “Have some of my special fruitcake, dear.” The wartime cake was made with dried cherries, dark-blue whortleberries, and watermelon rind. Ouida hated it.

Gibbes came in with a bag of striped candy sticks, surely from one of his ships; there was no candy in the South. He presented each woman with a set of silver-chased Parisian hairbrushes, then showed his small gift to himself, a box of imported fishhooks and sinkers. “The niggers can go down to the harbor and catch us a char or
a porgy for dinner.” Few people fished in metal-starved Charleston anymore; hooks and sinkers couldn't be found.

A houseman served snifters of brandy. It was French, not the vile ersatz made with sweet potatoes. Sipping it calmed Ouida. They saw her up to bed at half past nine, then sat on a love seat glumly discussing her mental state. They agreed that the only remedy for it was a continuing supply of spirits and opiate tonics.

Shortly before 1:00
A.M.
violent explosions shook the house. Gibbes flung himself out of bed. “The damned villains are firing at us on Christmas.” Under the door a ruddy light shimmered. He pulled on his fine London dressing gown of orange silk. “Snoo, wake up, there's a fire.”

He ran with the gown flapping around his bare ankles. He discovered Ouida in the lower hall, an old woman's lace-trimmed cap pulled down low on her forehead. She had another candle, and no glasses. The Christmas tree was ablaze.

“It was an accident, Gibbes. I heard a noise. I stumbled.”

A burly houseman ran from the pantry where he slept. “Luke, fetch a bucket of water,” Gibbes ordered. “Then go into the street and sound the alarm.”

Snoo came down in a robe of vanilla-colored brocade. Gibbes threw the bucket on the fire. Not nearly enough. In Legare Street, Luke hallooed and shouted while Gibbes pulled furniture away from the fire. Smoke thickened. One wall had already caught, devouring a Watteau reproduction Snoo prized. Gibbes, Luke, and another houseman kept a bucket brigade going until the fire company arrived. By then the ceiling was burning, and two walls and part of the floor.

Gibbes, Snoo, and Ouida retreated to a safe spot while the firemen dragged their hose through the front door and pumped water. All the volunteers except the man in charge were colored, replacements for whites gone off to fight. At least the Charleston Negroes were performing a useful service instead of taking advantage of the wartime confusion. Half the slaves at Prosperity Hall had run away.
At Malvern every last one was gone, making it necessary to close the house.

The water brought the fire under control, then put it out. In the dining room Snoo wept over the smoke and water damage. Ouida wandered aimlessly, getting in the way but never apologizing. Gibbes caught the arm of the white fireman.

“I know you.”

“Yessir, Mr. Bell. Corporal Plato Hix.”

“The Peninsula,” Gibbes said with a sudden pained look, quickly gone.

“That's right, sir.” Plato Hix was a stout chap with a round, bland face and large dark eyes. He seemed nervous. He showed his right hand, stubs of scar tissue instead of a thumb and index finger. “Took a ball at Seven Pines and couldn't rightly fire a musket afterward. They sent me home.” He touched his forehead and turned away.

A few minutes later he returned to Gibbes and said, “Fire's out. Believe it's all right we go now.”

“Our people will clean up in the morning.” He saw no point in thanking the colored volunteers for doing what they were supposed to do.

Hix said, “They fired on St. Philip's tonight. Scored a hit, I seen it when we ran over here.”

“Damn Yankees have no respect for the house of God. No respect for anything, including holy days.”

“Yessir, seems so, don't it?” Plato slipped out the door, his boots splashing in the water escaping over the sill.

 

Trudging beside the pumper, Plato Hix thanked his blessed Lord that he'd managed to keep his composure with Mr. Gibbes Bell. He knew a secret about that gentleman, a secret so dire, he'd shared it with no one, not even his wife, Mary. If Mr. Gibbes Bell only knew how he'd trembled when the fire company was called to Sword Gate.

From the Peninsula he'd traveled all the way home to Charleston, a long, arduous journey on foot, because Mary and their two little ones waited there. Mary was a free mu
latto woman of good character, though poverty and the difficulties of marriage to a white man had worn her down and blurred her good looks.

A comet's tail of sparks streaked overhead. The shell crashed into a wall of St. Michael's and exploded; they had another fire to chase. A hell of a Christmas, sure enough. Old Charleston couldn't stand many more like it.

“Can you cut one of these from a piece of wood?” Alex showed her pencil sketch.

Rolfe jutted his lower lip. “Looks like a paddle to beat on somebody.”

“Nonsense, it isn't nearly big enough. This is drawn to size.”

“Then what is it?”

“A hornbook, a very old way of learning your letters. They're pasted here.” She touched the large vertical rectangle with a narrower handle at its lower edge. “Usually there's a thin piece of deer or elk horn to protect the letters, but we'll have to do without that.”

Reversal of Rolfe's sullen air was immediate. “Know just where there's a scrap of cypress. Have it done for you late today.”

On a precious square of writing paper wheedled out of her brother, Alex inked the alphabet, three or four letters in each row. She separated a wafer of sealing wax from a letter of Drew's, one of many she'd saved. She thought he'd be pleased to see it used this way.

Rolfe brought her the cypress paddle as the January sun was going down. She melted the wafer and dripped wax
on the corners and the center of the wooden rectangle. She pressed the paper in place and held it. You couldn't buy glue, not even for postage stamps, which had all but disappeared.

Rolfe studied at the homemade hornbook. “I seen all those letters in Miss Letty's newspapers, but I don't know what they are or how you 'sposed say 'em.”

“You know more than you think. Pull up that footstool.” Seated beside her, he watched as she pointed. “This is the letter
a.
” She sounded it. “Say it.” He did. “This is the letter
b.
Like the bee that stings. Say it.” He did. Her work had begun.

 

In the attic she found a boyhood slate of Ham's and a little muslin sack of crumbly chalk. Among the offerings in the dining room at Marion Marburg's house she discovered a worn copy of
McGuffey's Eclectic Primer
. Reverend McGuffey taught at Miami College in Oxford, Ohio. A Cincinnati firm printed his series of instructional readers, literally by the thousands; parents, teachers, and the clergy approved of their moralistic approach. Children learned to read with uplifting poems and stories that inspired proper behavior. She asked Marion's sister Helena to watch for a
First Eclectic Reader
as well as a
New England Primer,
an older but no less popular beginner's text.

Little cargo had come through Bell's Bridge in the last two years, and none since the preceding autumn. Planks spongy with rot sank under her feet when she went to inspect. The old storage sheds for rice and indigo were too large for her purpose. So was the scale house. The small kitchen building was ideal. She opened the rusty padlock and immediately stepped back, fanning the air to clear the fetid smell. Squirrels had gnawed through the eaves to make nests of twigs and Spanish moss. Her own Augean stable.

She and Rolfe labored for a week, sweeping and scrubbing, then applying a watery whitewash to interior walls. At one point Rolfe looked like a white-face minstrel. When Alex held up a scrap of mirror, he laughed with
great glee. He'd done well with his instruction in a short time. He knew his alphabet and could sound out simple sentences from McGuffey's primer.
It is so
.
On we go
.
I am he
.

As soon as the kitchen building was furnished with an assortment of rickety chairs and wooden boxes, and Ham's slate and chalk, she went prospecting for other students. Marion Marburg's elderly cook had twin nephews, fat little boys named Washington and Jackson. The cook's husband won their mother's consent and dragged the reluctant nine-year-olds to Bell's Bridge one evening. He sat in a corner during the first hour-long lesson. He thwacked heads when either twin showed inattention or disrespect. The following week the boys came back without the older man.

At the end of every lesson Alex sang and played the banjo. The boys liked the music as much as Rolfe did, especially “The Camptown Races.” The instruction took hold gradually. One evening Jackson, the quicker of the twins, surprised her by running in and exclaiming, “I know where they sell beer.
B-e-e-r
. I read the word on a sign, what do you think of that?”

Alex flung her arms around him. “I think it's wonderful.” How remarkable and thrilling—almost forty-nine, and she finally had children to teach.

 

All this went on against the continuing drumbeat of war. Fear and privation stalked Charleston. Empty bellies growled louder; resentments grew, directed chiefly at the government. A letter in the
Mercury
called for President Davis's impeachment. A dozen people wrote letters seconding the idea.

The area below Broad Street was a wasteland of mostly abandoned houses and lightless streets unsafe after dark. Beauregard's artillery, his “circle of fire” defending the harbor, did nothing to forestall Union bombardment, which occurred at all hours. Alex seldom slept a night without interruption. While the guns boomed, she lay with her hands tightly clasped on her breast, wondering if they should have moved out long before.

In February the iron attack boat
Hunley
sank the Union's screw steamer
Housatonic
offshore, only to sink itself, all hands lost. The Confederacy's submersible warfare program ended on the bottom of Charleston Harbor.

Late in the month a screaming shell dug a crater directly in front of the house. Two artillerymen in the White Point battery died. Alex and Ham agreed they should go. Marion Marburg helped them find and rent a small house on Chapel, a block west of the Northeastern Depot. Alex, Ham, and Rolfe moved essential furniture north of Calhoun Street in a borrowed wagon, then returned to nail the shutters closed and block the downstairs doors with Xs of foraged lumber. The well-loved house, so full of memories, looked sad and disfigured as they drove away.

 

In the West, Lincoln found a commander who could win. He named U. S. Grant general-in-chief. A constitutional amendment abolishing slavery passed the Senate. Beauregard left Charleston, called to duty in Virginia as fighting there intensified. He gladly fled what had become, in his own harsh phrase, the Department of Exile.

Grant fought at the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, heedless of the number of men lost. Ham said Grant used regiments and battalions the way a smoker used matches. Marion Marburg observed that the North had many more match factories than the South, and Grant knew it.

In May gallant Jeb Stuart fell at Yellow Tavern. William Tecumseh Sherman thrust out of Chattanooga to hammer Joe Johnston in Georgia with a hundred thousand effectives. Off Cherbourg, France, the Union sank the South's legendary commerce raider
Alabama
. The newly organized National Union party nominated Lincoln for president and an unknown Tennessee tailor, Andrew Johnson, as his running mate. The South's faint hope lay with the Democrats, who called Gen. George McClellan out of retirement to run on a so-called peace platform.

The scorned treasury secretary, Memminger, resigned. Too late, cynical gentlemen said, and lit their cigars with
Memminger's currency. The exotic Confederate spy Rose Greenhow returned from England via Halifax and drowned trying to row ashore at Wilmington. In the heat of September, John Bell Hood evacuated Atlanta and Sherman marched in. Lincoln won reelection on November 8. A week later, Sherman's great war machine lurched into central Georgia.

Horrific tales of plantations set afire, valuables plundered, wives and sweethearts raped, reached Charleston's trembling elite. A rabble of white and black men followed Sherman's army. When this horde passed by, they left weeping women and terrified children and, where great houses had once stood, only brick chimneys. People called them “Sherman's sentinels.”

On December 21 Gen. William Hardee ordered his troops to evacuate Savannah and retreat north across the Savannah River. Hardee had replaced Gen. Robert Ransom as commander of the military district of Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina. Ransom had replaced Gen. Sam Jones, who had replaced Beauregard. Every man was a West Point graduate.

Sherman telegraphed Abraham Lincoln to present him the city of Savannah as a Christmas gift. It was evident to all but the blind that the South's defeat loomed.

 

Christmas. At Prosperity Hall a meager fire of fatwood and pinecones burned in the cavernous hearth of the great room. Tall windows framed a gray-green world: palmettos, oaks, and pines lashed by heavy rain; wet Spanish moss fallen on the lawns like so many clipped gray beards. A northwest wind whipped up foam on the Ashley. Ouida peered at the rushing river, disconsolate. “Where is my boy? What have they done with him?”

“You'll find out soon enough,” Gibbes said from the divan, where he sprawled with a cigar. Palmetto Traders no longer generated income. In November the partners had overridden minority shareholders and sold the company's last ship. Gibbes continued to spend as though nothing had changed. He was sliding toward poverty with
the desperate fatalism that was now epidemic in the Low Country.

“How will I find out?” Ouida wanted to know.

“Sherman's in Savannah. The end's coming. Then it will all sort itself out.”

Ouida's eyes enlarged behind her spectacles. “Will Sherman come this way?”

“Only time can answer that,” said Folsey as he strolled in with a bottle of port and wineglasses. Folsey's face had grown even more pale and puffy from indulgence. He'd installed a new white mistress in the Charleston cottage, but he never brought her around. He traveled everywhere with an adolescent waif named Kaspar Helios, whom he'd picked up from the streets. He called Kaspar “my little Greek boy.” Ouida thought there was something sinister to that but didn't care to imagine sordid details.

“Dinner yet?” Gibbes inquired of his partner.

“Soon. Your wife's tending to it with Kaspar's help. Care for port, Ouida?”

“Oh, heavens yes, I'm freezing in here.”

Ouida took the glass with a trembling hand; wine spilled on her satin skirt. She drank like a parched traveler in the desert. Her spectacles reflected the popping fire. “They say Sherman did terrible things to women.”

Gibbes said, “Actually, I understand he issued orders prohibiting such. But of course he has all those bummers, those damned camp followers he can't control. They do the damage.”

Ouida held out her glass for more. “They want to destroy Charleston, don't they? God knows what will become of us.”

“We're certainly in for a bad patch if Sherman marches up the coast,” Folsey agreed. “However, there's always the possibility that he'll spare us. He served at Moultrie twenty years ago, when he was a mere lieutenant. Painted watercolors, they say. Read some law. Got along famously with people, and loved the city.”

Gibbes snorted. “A more likely influence on General Sherman's decision will be the present condition of
Charleston. Why waste men and matériel attacking wreckage?”

Ouida shuddered. “Whatever he does, the niggers are sure to rise up. The Yankees will encourage it. We'll be Africanized.”

“Now, there's a pretty term I haven't heard before,” Gibbes said. Seeing Ouida's agitation, he hurried to her side and hugged her. “Don't worry so. We'll protect you.”

From his perch on the harpsichord bench Folsey said, “Frankly, I'll be glad to see peace restored. I don't mind doing business with Yankees if there's profit in it.”

Gibbes shot him a look. “We've been friends a long time, Folsey, but I take extreme exception to that remark.”

“Why? We made a pile of money with the help of certain gentlemen from New York and Boston.”

“Not with my knowledge or consent.”

“But you didn't mind using the money to buy fine clothes and set a decent table.” When Gibbes turned red, Folsey raised a placating hand. “Let it pass.”

“I will not. Ouida's right, the Yankees want to Africanize the South. They've already destroyed our economy and butchered our finest young men. I may have to bow my head before them, but do business with them? Swear loyalty to their government? Never.”

Folsey saluted with his wineglass. “Spoken like a hero.” Gibbes thought he detected sarcasm.

Ouida's hands clenched. “I'd kill every last one if I could.”

“By God, I believe you're serious, sister. You should have been a soldier.”

“I still may be. There are ways.”

At that moment Snoo sailed into the great room trilling, “We are ready.”

She pulled up short, wondering what she'd interrupted. They all looked so grave. The fire snapped in the chilly silence, then subsided, leaving the forlorn sound of the rain.

 

They dined on deer meat. One of the housemen too old to run away had shot and dressed the buck. Snoo person
ally prepared rabbit from a German recipe. Dinner concluded, they played whist. Gibbes saw his partner cheating but said nothing; he was used to it.