5/11/1861: Letter to the Editor concerning “Dixie” as national anthem—I make no objections to the tune—it is bold and even pleasing. But the words, what are they? Mere doggerel stuff, from the brain of some natural poet, away down in Dixie—“that undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns,” because no one as yet has ever reached it.
7/5/1861: FOUND—A little Negro child, between 3 and 4 years old, calling herself BETSEY, yesterday evening at the new Fair Grounds. The mother or owner can get her by paying for this advertisement. Apply to GEO. WATT & CO., Plow makers, Franklin Street.
8/30/1861: Five Negroes, free and slaves, were apprehended Wednesday night by the watch while having a social gathering in the Lancastrian School House with dancing and other pleasing diversions. Being brought before the Mayor yesterday, they were ordered to be whipped.
10/25/1861: EXTRAORDINARY FREAK—Considerable excitement was occasioned on 12th Street, below Main, yesterday afternoon, by the appearance of a man dressed in a woman’s clothing. He soon made himself scarce, and the police did not succeed in tracing him to his hiding place.
11/13/1861: The Spotswood Hotel will begin selling genuine Clicquot and G.H. Mumm’s by the case. Also this day: free Negro ordered whipped for smoking a cigar in the street.
So this was Richmond—a veneer of refinement over a deep core of brutality. And yet the women from the best families calling her too western, too frontier, too crude.
Burnt Plantation1865
SOMETIMES THE VIEW FROM THE AMBULANCE INCLUDED as high as a half-dozen black house fire circles with stubs of singed rock chimneys rising like great mildewed gravestones. Empty gray split-log corncribs and slat-ribbed lost dogs. Dark bloody smears in the dirt from the Union’s hog and cattle butchering. Hardly any chickens to be seen, and those few gone wild and lank, little more meat to them than a hungry squirrel. Empty unplowed spring fields grew nothing but swaths of ragweed. Sometimes as the fugitives passed refugee camps, people raised their eyes, dim as if they were dead already, proof positive of Sherman’s notion that unarmed farmers and their families were a great deal easier to conquer than armies. Mostly the colors of that land stuck to shades of red dirt and black cinders with a few dashes of sickly green. And yet look up, and the sun burned yellow and the sky rolled blue and deep like a strong argument that the world had not gone wrong at all.
CROSSING THE WIDE PATH of Sherman’s army, flux ruled every moment even four months later. In that scoured territory, people divided into three categories—raiders, refugees, and fugitives.
The raiders moved fast, at a gallop, going from one easy target to the next, saddlebags heavy with plunder bouncing and flapping against their horses’ rumps.
Refugees trudged the roads day and night, ravaged by history. People dragging their last spotted pig by a hemp rope around its neck, a precious black Dominican chicken riding bright-eyed under an arm. Packs of children, faces blank as empty pages, took turns pushing wheelbarrows heaped with quilts and cookware and canvas for pitching lean-tos. Hardly a horse or mule to be seen, since Sherman and the raiders took the ones they could use and killed the old and weak for target practice.
V’s fugitives traveled slowly, stuck to the back roads, tried not to call attention their way.
ON THE ROAD, the refugees all coughed. Sometimes V could hear the deep rattle in their lungs—their hawking and spitting—before she could see them. Sometimes refugees traveled mixed together, black and white, unclear what rules applied when elemental concepts like slave and free suddenly became uncertain.
Former slaves, whole plantations of them, followed after the Northern army, hoping to be fed and cared for. And then mostly they had their few possessions stripped from them before being told to move along. Some, lacking a better idea, returned to the plantations they came from. But V met others still wandering the roads looking for something hard to articulate beyond the vague but essential word Freedom. Bands of people as high as twenty-five or thirty members roamed with no money and no real sense of how money worked. For most of them, their only knowledge of the world was what little had been afforded them within the tight boundaries of a plantation.
One lone man—barefoot, wearing half-leg pants and a collarless linen shirt—carried four rifles by their leather slings and three pistols in overlapping holsters around his waist. He said now that he was free he aimed to be an American, and he knew you needed guns for that.
A black girl, maybe eight or nine, led an old white man, half blind and mostly deaf and holding a rusty ear trumpet. She carried what had been a smoked hog leg by its foot. They’d shaved the meat away to a few maroon petals clinging to the bone.
HEART OF THE WASTELAND. The day pressed deeply humid, air laden so heavy with moisture and pollen that the color of the sky was a matter open to argument. The edges of things—tree leaves, tree bark, the features of a loved one’s face—from fifty feet away looked soft and blurred, barely identifiable.
They stopped in the remains of an empty one-street town. Houses and a few stores scattered on either side of the main road. Two of the buildings were painted white and the rest varied in color depending on how long the bare wood siding and shingles had faced the weather.
They walked into a half-burned hotel. A dark-headed girl played a dreamy nocturne at the lobby piano, notes spaced at careful intervals.
—Are rooms available for the night?
The girl looked around confused, her face the color of cake flour and her eyes dark. She said, Nobody’s here. The piano still plays, so I thought I’d play it.
—Is there someone we could ask about rooms?
—Everybody’s gone and nobody cares. Look on the second floor. Go left at the top of
