Widow of Gettysburg (30 page)
Read Widow of Gettysburg Online
Authors: Jocelyn Green
Now, most likely, more prisoners from Gettysburg were rolling in en route to the prison at Fort Delaware. Or, they could be prisoners from the recent Union victory in Vicksburg, Mississippi, after the forty-seven day siege. The fact that the Rebels had surrendered on Independence Day, the same day that Lee began his withdrawal back across the Potomac, had made the story even grander.
But that was not the story he had fallen asleep thinking about.
Harrison yawned and rubbed his eyes. With a trainload of troops about to invade, there was no use in going to bed. But he could go back to work.
Light flared as he struck a match, removed the glass chimney from the oil lamp, lit the wick, then replaced the smoky chimney. Taking a bite of the dried-out gingerbread, he picked up Fanny Kemble’s journal, flipping through it to find the last place he remembered reading. About halfway through, he stopped when he saw a list of names, a partial log of the slave women who had visited Fanny on a particular day. Along with the women’s names, Kemble recorded their family details and complaints. He read carefully for clues.
Fanny
has had six children, all dead but one. She came to beg to have her work in the field lightened.Nanny
has had three children, two of them are dead; she came to implore that the rule of sending mothers into the field three weeks after their confinement might be altered.Leah
, Caesar’s wife, has had six children, three are dead.Sophy
, Lewis’s wife, came to beg for some old linen; she is suffering fearfully, has had ten children, five of them are dead. The principal favour she asked was a piece of meat, which I gave her.Sally
, Scipio’s wife, has had two miscarriages and three children born, one of whom is dead. She came complaining of incessant pain and weakness in her back. This woman was a mulatto daughter of a slave called Sophy, by a white man of the name of Walker, who visited the plantation.Charlotte
, Renty’s wife, had had two miscarriages, and was with child again. She was almost crippled with rheumatism, and showed me a pair of swollen knees that made my heart ache. I have promised her a pair of flannel trowsers, which I must forthwith set about making. Nearly all the women beg for flannel, and my bolt of red and cream pinstripe is almost gone.
Harrison turned the page to find more names, more miscarriages, dead children, and ailments recorded.
Sarah, Stephen’s wife. Sukey, Bush’s wife. Molly, Quambo’s wife.
Daphne and Bella, twin sisters.
He stopped. Hunching over the book, he pinned the print with his finger, as if afraid it would flutter off the page. Slowly, he read, committing each line to memory. His bare toes curled into the rug in delight as all the pieces fell into place in his mind.
This was better than he had dared to hope. At last, he had the missing link. Bella Jamison was telling the truth when she said she wasn’t at the Weeping Time. It was her twin sister, Daphne, that he had seen. But Bella had most certainly grown up on the Butler plantation, too. The
main difference between the sisters, according to Fanny Kemble, was that one of them wanted to learn to read and write, even though it was illegal both for her to learn and for Fanny to teach her.
It didn’t stop them.
And it didn’t stop there. But the greater part of the story was not printed for public consumption.
Liberty Holloway’s face surged in his mind.
The very likeness of Roswell King Jr.
, Lt. Pierce Butler Holmes had said. Liberty had no idea who she was.
But Harrison did. At least, he had a hunch, and if he was right, it wouldn’t take long to find evidence. If he could just find Holmes again, and question him.
The story just got better.
Holloway Farm
Thursday, July 9, 1863
“Good morning, Silas.”
Silas Ford jolted at the sound of his name. His real name.
Dr. Owen O’Leary sat on a squat, three-legged stool beside him and handed him the folded up letter he had written to Liberty before the battle in the wheat field.
“I thought Liberty had this.”
“I’m quite sure no one has seen it. Except for me. I burned your trousers soon after your operation, but this must have fallen out on the way to the bonfire. Plucked it out of the mud this morning.”
But Liberty said she’d read his letter. That she knew everything.
If this wasn’t the letter, then what did she read?
“Does she know?”
“Does she know,
what?
” Liberty entered the barn, her face dark with anger, and stood above Silas. “Chances are, I don’t. I don’t know a thing about you. I don’t even know your real name. Do I?” A piece of
paper was tucked in her folded arms.
“I will come back another time to change your dressing, Silas.” Dr. O’Leary slipped out, taking his stool with him.
“Silas,” she hissed. Somehow he had dreamed his name would sound sweeter on her lips. She made it sound like it was poison. Maybe he was. “What happened to Johnny? ‘Just call me Johnny,’ you said. Remember?”
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Fitz raise a hand in the air. “I’m a Johnny!”
Liberty threw back her head and groaned. “How could I have been so stupid? I can’t believe I didn’t see it! I saw what I wanted to see, that was all. Stupid! Foolish girl!”
For the first time since she had entered, Silas opened his mouth. “What did you want to see?”
“An honest man, John—Silas. Oh …! I can’t believe your name is not Jonathan Welch!”
Fitz called out again. “Who’s he?”
Silas glared at him, then looked back at Liberty. “Well?”
“Oh, no. I’m not going to say one more word until you tell me exactly who you are and why you’re here. Start talking. Go. Right now, Johnny Reb.”
“Stop!” Silas raised his hands. “Stop talking and I will. Just give me a minute.” He sighed as she twisted her apron in nervous agitation. Her eyes looked larger in her face than before, her collarbones sharper against the thin fabric of her dress. “Would you do me an enormous favor and sit down for this? I’ll sprain my neck if I have to talk up to you the whole time.”
She thumped herself down on the floor at his feet, her skirt forming a perimeter around her. “Are you Union or Confederacy?”
“It’s not that simple.”
“Of course it is.”
“That mean he a Johnny!” Fitz laughed with glee.
“Is it true?”
Silas rubbed the back of his neck. “I am for the Union.”
“A spy?”
“Let me finish! Or I’ll never get it out!”
“Do you—did you fight for the Union?”
He narrowed his eyes. “I don’t fight at all. I am—I was—a scout. For the Rebels.” He patted his stump. “But I’ll never be that again, thanks to this.”
“A Rebel scout?”
“He mean he tell the Johnnys where the Billys are at. If that’s not fightin’ too, I don’t know what is.”
“I’ve never killed anyone … in the war.”
Liberty’s eyes glittered. “Who did you kill before the war, Silas?” She jumped up again. “You’re a murderer?”
“Wal!” Fitz slapped his knee. “Ain’t you a nasty feller!”
“I’m the son of a slaveholder—”
“What?” Liberty rounded on Silas. “I thought …”
“Whatever you thought was wrong, and whatever you think now is guaranteed to be wrong too because you’re not letting me talk! This is impossible. I wrote it all out in the right order. I thought you read this!” He held up his letter.
“No Silas, I read this!” She speared a letter of her own into the air. “What was I supposed to think? It was pinned to the inside of a Union jacket you were wearing. Should I have assumed you had stolen it, knowing I would find the letter—proof that we’d known each other longer than
just two weeks
?”
Ironically, they had. But she still hadn’t put the pieces together.
“I thought you were someone else.” Liberty looked away.
Right now, he wished he were. “All right. But I didn’t steal the jacket with you in mind. The only thing in my mind at that moment was getting out of that wheat field alive. I had used my shirt as a tourniquet for another soldier, and I took the jacket off of someone else so Union guns wouldn’t aim for me.”
“Why wouldn’ ya just shoot ’em first?”
“I told you, I don’t fight. I don’t have a weapon. Yes, I used deception
to stay alive. But I never lied to you, Liberty.”
“‘Just call me Johnny’? Truth in a riddle is not the truth!”
Muffled footsteps on the hay breezed down the row. “Fitz, come with me, let’s get you some air.” It was Dr. O’Leary.
“No thanks, Doc, this is gettin’ real good in here.”
“Fitz.” The doctor’s voice hardened. “Now. Or I’ll put you on burial detail.”
“I ain’t got but the one arm!”
“Then it would take you twice as long.”
Fitz muttered out of the barn, followed by Dr. O’Leary.
“I was going to tell you.” Silas lowered his voice, as if that would lower his heart rate. “I wanted you to know the truth.”
She put her hand to her head. His own was spinning, aching. Finally, she spoke again. “Then tell me.”
His letter was gritty in his hand from the granite-flecked soil. He held it out. “My story. From the beginning.”
She dropped her arms to her sides. Stepped forward, breaching an invisible chasm between them, and took the letter. “The truth?”
He nodded.
Most of it. Enough of it.
Liberty lowered herself to the floor and pressed a hand to her heart before opening the grimy paper.
Dear Liberty,
I grew up on a tobacco plantation in central Tennessee, and yes, my father owned slaves. One summer when I was twelve, I became so ill with malaria that my parents sent me to live with my aunt and uncle in the North for the cooler temperatures. The doctor said my constitution was entirely broken down, and for years, every summer I spent with them in Boston. There I dropped my Southern accent and attended abolitionist meetings with my uncle. I heard Frederick Douglass speak, as well as former slaves and free blacks, and it filled me with hatred for both slavery and my father, and for
myself, for this was my heritage. Finally, painfully, I realized why there were so many mulatto children running around our plantation. They were my father’s children, my half-siblings, born out of his violence and lust for our female Negroes. And Mother did not say a word in protest, at least not in front of me.I felt God’s call on my life to be different, so I decided to become a pastor and preach truth. Maybe that was partly to atone for the sins of my father, I don’t know. I do know I wanted to be God’s instrument. So I enrolled at Lutheran Theological Seminary. Yes, in Gettysburg.
Liberty looked up at Silas. “Here? You studied here?” She squinted at his face. Silas. Silas. The name was vaguely familiar. Hadn’t Levi told her about a former student named Silas?
“Please, just keep reading. Don’t stop yet.”
She obliged.
One day I heard a woman needed some help around her farm, making repairs, working with wood, that sort of thing. I took the job to earn some extra money. My plan was to buy the freedom of my father’s slaves. That woman was your aunt. When I was 22, and you were 14, we met for the first time.
Her breath hitched as she looked up at him. “That was you,” she whispered. Aunt Helen had called him simply The Hand, as she had called Liberty The Child, and Bella The Help. My, how he had changed! Strands of silver threaded the dark blond hair above his ears, and faint lines framed his smile and eyes. His face and body were chiseled by army life.
She kept reading.
My first year at the seminary was also my last. When I went home for a break in the summer of ’58, we awoke one morning to
find that my father’s strongest slave, Brutus, escaped in the night. My father interrogated the rest of the slaves for details, and when none came forward, he ordered his overseer to lash a young slave woman, about my age.I couldn’t stand it. My instinct to protect the helpless would not allow me to stay silent. I shouted at him to stop, and in reply, my father told me someone had to pay. That it could be me. He ripped the whip from the overseer’s hand, tied me up by my wrists, and flogged me, his own son, in full view of our two dozen slaves. I can still feel the metal beads on the end of those leather braids, raking through my flesh.
It was a week before I could get out of bed, and in that week, I fanned the flame of my loathing for him until it raged as an inferno. God tells us to love our neighbors, but I hated my father, and even my seminary training could not quench that scorching heat. The next time I saw him, he said I had given him no choice but to lash me to a pulp, because I had defied his authority in front of the slaves. He was making a lesson of me, he said. In a torrent of words, I unleashed all my bitterness and anger and frustration upon him. I told him he disgusted me with his abuse of the slave women, in particular, and how that must have hurt my mother. I called him a monster, a tyrant, and worse. He called me a coward, a fool, a disgrace. Rage burned in my veins, curled my hands into trembling fists. “You have tarnished my honor with your words,” he said, voice as calm as a lake at sunrise. “Fight like a gentleman.” He challenged me to a duel.
Fool that I was, I accepted. Refusing may have been pointless, but I did not resist at all. I jumped at the opportunity to point a loaded gun at my father, and my conscience still torments me for this fact. We were given our walnut-handled pistols, we each took our twenty paces. The next thing I knew, I had fired, but my father had lowered his gun. Did he drop his weapon before I pulled the trigger? Or only after my bullet hit him square in the chest? I will
never know. But I see his face, twisted in agony, almost every night in my dreams. “You shot me! You killed your own father!”How could I live with myself after that?
Somehow I buried my father, with my weeping mother beside me. I also buried my dream of becoming a pastor. How could I be a man of God after what I had done?
My mother banished me from her home, and in truth, I would not have wanted to stay. I bought some land in the eastern part of Tennessee, where slavery was much less prevalent because the land was not suitable for farming. I became a carpenter. For three years, I sent letters to my mother, and never received a reply.
Then war broke out. Tennessee was the last state to join the Confederacy. But the eastern part of the state wanted to secede from the rest of the state and join the Union. That didn’t happen of course, but many Tennessee men did sign up for the Union. Suspicions flared over loyalties. I wanted no part of the Confederacy, so decided to start over somewhere else, in the North. But first, I had to say goodbye to my mother.
She turned me away on the doorstep. Heartbroken, and blaming myself for the disintegration of my family, I went to the local saloon and drank more moonshine than I could even look at, until I was right where I wanted to be. Passed out, in sweet oblivion to the miserable reality I created. But when I woke up in a puddle of drool, someone shoved a paper under my nose, pointed to my name and claimed I had enlisted in the Confederate army. It wasn’t my signature, Liberty. I couldn’t even hold a pen in that state. But they knew me, and they drafted me to fill their ranks. Next thing I knew, they threw some lice-infested uniform and a revolver at me.
I wouldn’t touch it. They picked it up by the barrel and struck me with the handle. Still I refused. I would never, I will never, handle a weapon again. This angered the men who signed me up not a little. They reminded me that if I tried to escape my duty, I’d be a deserter, and would be summarily shot.
What was I to do? They could force me to walk with them, but they could not force me to fight. They considered me a waste of space until an officer arranged for me to be a scout for them. Instead of fighting, I could look ahead of them, gather information and report it.
That’s what I was doing on June 26. Would to God I had a better story to bring you, but you deserve to know it. I want nothing more in this world than to get beyond this battle, let alone the entire war. I rue my part in it.
I pray God keeps you safe, and gives you peace and happiness. You deserve more than the trials that have come to you.
