Burton and Morgan had just a pistol and a sword between them. They stood inside the door to the car, and when a few brave mobsters climbed the steps, Burton showed his pistol and said, No.
If ten men had decided to board the car and do whatever their rage told them to do once inside, they could have stormed the door and succeeded, losing only two or three men. But no one wanted to go first. They backed off and shouted a few minutes more about killing Jeff Davis and the whole bunch of rich slave owners their friends and family had died for. Soon they lost interest and drifted away.
Burton went door-to-door through Charlotte looking for lodging at hotels and private homes, but everyone feared retribution, whether from their own angry people or from Sherman if he swept through killing and burning—the same people would have treated V like the queen of England twelve months before. Burton finally found a man named Weil who said he would be glad to offer shelter. The Trenholm girls and Morgan were moving on, the train set to take them as far down the line as it could toward their house in upstate South Carolina, the Charleston house being out of the question because of Sherman. One of the girls said, Come join us. We’ll have a house party till they burn us out. Drink all the best wine to keep the Yankees from getting it.
Burton escorted V and Ellen and the children through the angry streets of Charlotte to Mr. Weil’s house. In the following days they stayed hidden away, though Burton went out once gathering scraps of news and rumor—the fall of Richmond, the flight of the government, Lee handing his sword to Grant at Appomattox.
* * *
—I still have that little pistol, V says. I keep it in my jewelry box.
—I can’t imagine, whatever the danger, sending Julie away like that. If it was bad enough to give her a pistol to kill herself with, it would have been bad enough for me to walk away from everything else and try to take her someplace safe.
—Our situation was more complicated, V says. Jeff being president of a rebel country.
—Yes, but all that was over. How many days after we left Richmond did he go?
—I don’t know. Three or four?
—And he didn’t catch up with us for how long?
—Going on two months. And again, it’s a point of pride that we could probably have made it to Cuba if he hadn’t caught up with us.
James says, I told you last week about defending him against black children in South Carolina and white children in Massachusetts and both groups of them fighting me. But all I remember of him is a slim, older white man in a suit. He was much older than you, and I’ve been wondering how you came together.
—It was briers and hurricanes right from the start, V says.
Hurricane & Brierfield1842
SHE GREW UP OUTSIDE NATCHEZ IN AN OLD-FASHIONED house called The Briers. A house, not a plantation. No fields, no cotton. It sat on a few acres of high bluff overlooking the Mississippi. The ground sloped east to a dry bayou a hundred feet deep, its sides covered with pines and live oaks, and magnolia trees. To the west, deep yellow clay bluffs caved to the river below. The proportions of the house felt right—oversize windows and broad shady galleries across the front and back—but it was largely the river that made it beautiful.
Growing up, she witnessed every day all the dirty business of cotton and slaves, all the criminality and culture of the new country passing in miniature below her on the big brown river. Everything that floated—dugout canoes, and vast timber rafts, and every kind of johnboat, flatboat, keelboat, and barge, all the way to giant white paddle wheel steamboats—coasted down-current or struggled up.
Nights when she was young, looking down from the lawn of The Briers, steamboats passed below her lit up like Christmas. They trailed faint sounds of music and the distant grinding and churning of their great paddle wheels. She stood barefoot in the damp grass and watched their unreal passage below her, as if Venus had shifted its orbit and swooped by, a luminous world of its own, here and gone in minutes, leaving the blank space of wide river even quieter and darker than before.
AT LEAST ONCE A MONTH from twelve onward, dreams rode her nights. Prophetic, horrific, beautiful, mysterious. She never claimed they came true. Others did that, and during the Washington and Richmond years, she became famous for them. Most of them were no more important than anyone’s dreams, but her spooky dreams, the scary ones, sometimes reappeared in the real world in large and small ways.
Twenty years before it happened, she dreamed the balcony and the cobbles and the house where little Joe fell to his death. She dreamed the whole bloody war long before it erupted. It was an epic nightmare that lasted until dawn. She was in Washington at the time, the wife of a freshman congressman, still in her teens and childless, delighted to be invited to parties at the White House and happy that Jeff’s cotton plantation down
