when time permits, but he’s catching double-duty now that my studies are piling up. Let’s stash your bags and I’ll show you around.”
She gave us a private mini-tour in a low voice as we walked into the shadows under the wall. “This is the sally port. For you laymen, that means the passage in and out. The name comes from the military term
“In case the enemy attacks us tonight,” Erin said.
“Exactly,” she said, deadpan. “It wouldn’t do if I yelled, ‘Reinforcements to the left flank!’ and all of you fell into the harbor looking for it.”
Erin laughed. “I can see we’re going to get along fine.”
“Speaking of supper,” Libby said. “I hope you’re not finicky eaters. The menu here is not our strong point.”
We stared at each other, somewhat shamefaced. None of us had given food a thought.
“Don’t worry about it. All I’m hoping is that you’re not too put off by TV dinners.”
“We can eat anything,” I said. “Right, Koko?”
“Absolutely,” said Koko. “I’m ready to tear into a raw shark.”
“Can’t help you there,” Libby said. “Maybe I can scare up some canned squid.”
She made a
“Imagine this whole structure two and three levels high. Above us was another tier of casemates—gun rooms—and the enlisted men’s barracks were three stories high on both flanks, with guns on top of each wall.”
We skirted the left face. “This was a formidable fort then,” she said. “That’s all gone, pounded to smithereens in the Union siege. After they shelled that little band of Yankees out, the Confederates held this rock for almost four years, living in rubble much of that time. For two years they were battered by gunboats and by big guns from Morris Island, which we’ll see in a minute. Historians say seven million pounds of iron were fired in here. The Yanks thought they could take anything if they shelled the bejesus out of it long enough. But this old baby was tough, and the more they reduced it, the tougher it became. In the end there was nothing here but piles of bricks and whatever was buried under them—these walls you see and those ruins over there, the remains of a proud old fort. By then the Confederates had replaced their artillery forces with infantry, and the Union still couldn’t take it.”
She gestured at the guns as we walked past. “Some of these cannons were used against the fort by Union forces on Morris Island— moved over here years later.”
We went up to her little apartment in the battery. “Just throw your stuff down anywhere,” she said, and we went out again. She led us along the right flank and we stood facing the sea. “So anyway,” she said, “this is what I call home.”
Koko asked how long they had been here.
“A year. They’ll rotate us; they say it keeps us from going stir crazy, but I’m going to miss this terribly when I leave. I think about it even now, how quickly we move past things, sometimes without ever seeing them. There’s so much here that’s of the past, and soon it will all be part of my own past. Maybe Luke and I will come back years from now as tourists and I’ll think of these days. But I’ll never again be part of it, so I make the most of every day I do have.”
She pointed to a long, sandy beach across the channel, facing the sea to our right. “That’s Morris Island. Fort Wagner sat near the end, just where it hooks in toward the city. Union forces tried their best to take it in the summer of 1863. Get Wagner, get Sumter—that’s how they figured it; get Sumter, get Charleston. Get Charleston and they could close down the whole Southern seaboard. But they never did any of that, not till the Confederates pulled out and left it to them in 1865.”
We stood on the point, the right gorge angle she called it, and looked where she looked. “That narrow beach on Morris Island is where the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Colored Infantry was butchered trying to dislodge the Confederates. Not to take anything away from those black warriors, you’ve got to admire the Southern fighting man. You don’t have to like his cause to know he and his pals were a tough, valiant bunch.”
We stood there for a while. The day was almost perfect, the sun warm, the harbor full of sailboats. Closer in, smaller, power-driven craft skimmed across the water. Libby walked to the right gorge and shaded her eyes, peering out toward the long, flat island. “Lots of ghosts out there,” she said. “Over here too. I just felt a breath tickling my cheek.”
“My gosh, I felt it too,” Koko said. “That wasn’t the breeze I felt.”
Libby put a hand on her arm. “Don’t worry, they won’t bother you. They are ghosts of a time when women were put on pedestals and cherished. You must be sensitive to spirits.”
“I’ve always thought so.”
“That doesn’t happen to everybody but I feel it all the time. I’ll be out here on the wall and suddenly I’ll get a feeling someone’s here with me…as if he’s just touched me or tried to whisper some mysterious thing in my ear.
