“This is my home,” Alex said. Which wasn’t an answer. She didn’t have one.
Toward dawn on October 1 a volley of gunfire and a crash of glass brought Alex and Ham downstairs at a run. In the ground-floor office a jar stuffed with flaming rags had set fire to the oval rug. Choking on the smoke, brother and sister rolled up the rug and smothered the flames. Ham threw the carpet out the broken window and craned around to see the facade.
“They fired at least six rounds into the house.”
“A reprisal for defending the soldiers?”
“I would say yes, but Mitchell’s had no such trouble.”
“Then who would do such a thing?”
“I’ll write one name at the head of the list. Folsey Lark.”
“Because of the trial?”
“Perhaps, but I don’t think so. Something happened between our families long ago. I’m not sure what it was, but I’ve known for years that the Larks feel great enmity toward us. Folsey is dangerous because he’s duplicitous. At heart I think he’s cowardly—he never dirties his hands but hires others. He and Gibbes are alike in that respect, though I consider Folsey the more violent of the two. You might load one of those pistols.”
“Already done. It’s underneath my bed.”
They exchanged bleak looks. If they hadn’t been isolated before, they were now.
On the night of October 5 a fifty-foot steam-driven boat crept out of the harbor. Most of David’s hull was submerged. A torpedo bobbed at the end of a ten-foot boom on the bow.
David approached the Union ironclad New Ironsides and rammed her. The explosion sent up an immense geyser of fire and water. David was swamped but managed to steam away to safety. The disabled ironclad had to withdraw from the blockade. Charleston enjoyed a brief euphoria and contemplated an amazing new kind of warfare.
A week later Cassandra woke from an afternoon nap and said she’d like to see the garden. Alex helped her comb her hair and tie the ribbons of her robe. Cassandra was pale but cheerful as she clung to Alex and took the stairs one deliberate step at a time.
Rolfe was weeding in the garden. He snatched off his cap. “Afternoon, ma’am,” he said to each of the women. He’d listened to Alex playing her banjo twice more, asking politely each time. Music was mellowing him ever so little.
“What a glorious day,” Cassandra said. And it was: mild and dry, with light airs off the harbor to dispel insects. Sulphur butterflies sailed in and out of shafts of light falling through the branches of the live oak. Any child of the Low Country could tell from the sun’s altered position that winter would soon come calling.
Alex settled her mother on the garden bench. “If you’re not warm enough, I’ll fetch a blanket.”
Cassandra smiled. “Always worrying. I’m very comfortable.”
“Then I’ll work a bit. I’m planting four-o’clock. You don’t wait years for the blooms.”
“Mirabilis jalapa. In my time we called four-o’clock the Marvel of Peru because of so many colors from a single plant. I shall sit here next year at this time and enjoy the beautiful blooms.”
Alex was delighted by her mother’s good spirits. She pulled up her skirts and set to work with a trowel, looking up frequently to check on Cassandra. In half an hour she had all the seedlings planted where they would catch the sun. Cassandra had fallen into a doze, reclining against the iron bench with her mouth open. Time to take her upstairs. Alex brushed dirt from her skirt, stepped to the bench. “Mother?”
Her hand flew to her lips. She felt for a pulse. Cassandra’s heart had stopped.
58
The Good Seed
Snoo Bell sent a slave to deliver a maudlin letter of condolence, written on the back of wallpaper. From Ouida they heard nothing. Cassandra went to her rest beside Edgar in the shadow of St. Michael’s black steeple. Above the steeple clock, 150 feet in the air, lookouts with telescopes kept watch on Union activity around the harbor.
Few attended the burial: the Marburgs and their unruly sons; Cedric Buckles and his wife with an infant in her arms; the widow Letty Porcher-Jones; a handful of tradespeople and two elderly ladies Alex didn’t know. Of the sparsity of mourners Ham said, “She lived too long. Most of her friends have died.”
Alex was uncomfortable in a boned corset and layers of crinoline under a heavy dress of black bombazine. The crinolines were hooped from the knees down. The steel rings hit her legs at every other step. A Negro seamstress had sewn the mourning garb. The price amounted to banditry, but Alex couldn’t bury her mother wearing Mrs. Bloomer’s pantaloons. She was not that disrespectful of the traditions of death in Charleston.
Great Michael tolled as the gravediggers threw the first shovels of earth on the casket. The solemn moment was disturbed by a company of old men marching by, accompanied by a thumping bass drum. Gaudy letters painted on the drumhead identified the GEN. HAGOOD CITY GUARD. The decrepit volunteers sang, but not in unison. “Hurrah, hurrah, for Southern rights hurrah.”
Ham drew Alex aside when the mourners had gone. “You’re free now. There’s nothing to hold you here. I can manage by myself.”
“I admit I’ve been thinking about it.”
He put on his tall hat. Slender and stoop shouldered as he was, he resembled Lincoln. He slipped his arm around her waist. “I know you despise this place.”
It was true, yet in a small and contradictory corner of herself it wasn’t. Coming home had awakened good memories along with the bad. The suffering she saw around her, the suffering of ordinary people of both races, tore her heart.
They arrived at South Battery to find a funerary wreath of sweet grass, painted black, nailed to the door on the piazza. Ham touched the wreath.
“Paint’s still wet. This was not sent in sympathy.”
When he found Rolfe he said, “Burn it.”
It was sullen, uneducated Rolfe who planted the seed. It took root and grew in the teeming streets, where growing numbers of black refugees roamed alone or in ragged families. They huddled in alleys with their few possessions carried in sacks or wrapped in rags. They crowded rat-infested tenements near the Cooper River piers, sometimes ten or fifteen to a room, Alex heard. Were they freedmen or runaways? Did it matter? All their eyes had the same look of hunger, bewilderment, and fear.
One grizzled grandfather approached Alex with a child on his shoulder. The child sucked her thumb and hid her face. What Alex took to be rat bites marked the little girl’s arms. The old man showed Alex a cardboard square with an address scrawled on it.
“Ma’am, can y’all read this? We been walkin’ from Walterboro four days and Addie’s near to dyin’. They say food’s to be had at that place.”
Alex gave directions. The old man’s effusive thanks touched her. That night she opened her small trunk, lit a candle, and withdrew her late husband’s Bible. To justify the risks he took, he’d often quoted Christ’s words in the thirteenth chapter of Matthew: He that soweth the good seed is the Son of man.
She closed her eyes and prayed for guidance, as she hadn’t prayed in a long time.
Next evening she and Ham sat down to supper together. Candles were reflected on the surface of the table she’d cleaned and polished. The meal consisted of greens with a few precious bits of pork mixed in, and what Ham called secession bread, a stone-hard loaf baked with rice flour. She revealed her idea while they ate.
“I would teach a few Negroes privately. Teach them their letters, and rudimentary reading. If I could help only a handful, it would be a start.”
“A start down a very hazardous road. Why do you want to do such a thing?”
“Someone must. Can you imagine what it would be like to be free but unable to read a simple contract, or a circular offering jobs?”
“Dear sister. Your idealism will get you killed one of these days.”
“There are worse ways to leave this earth. William taught me that.”
“We know we have enemies in Charleston. Wouldn’t you rather go back to the North
?”
“Sometimes I would, but there’s no longer a need to preach abolition, the Union’s fighting a war for it and it will come. I could be useful here.”
“Where would you conduct such a school?”
“Why not Bell’s Bridge? It’s virtually shut down.”
“And dilapidated.”
“I’ll find money for repairs.”
“I can’t dip into the law firm’s cash box again.”
“Let me worry about it.”
“Can I possibly dissuade you from this?”
“No.”
“Then you might ask Marion to give you a loan. He didn’t send all his gold reserves to Bermuda. I do wonder whether you can find pupils. Wouldn’t Negroes be too frightened of punishment if you were discovered?”
“Surely some are braver than others.”
“You do have a stubborn streak,” he said, not unkindly. “I retire in defeat.”
“Thank you. Charleston will fall one of these days, and the Confederacy. We’ll have to put this country back together.”
He didn’t argue with that.
To lure Rolfe she sat in the garden picking out a slow version of “All Quiet Along the Potomac Tonight,” a Union song; a lot of Southerners liked it too. Presently Rolfe appeared in the twilight shadows, almost without a sound. He’d been repairing the mare’s stall in the small stable building. “All right if I sit a while and listen, ma’am?”
“Yes, if you first allow me to tell you about an idea I have.”
Cautious but curious, he sat down on the piazza steps.
“It’s a school. I want to teach a few of your people to read, to prepare them for the jubilee.”
Rolfe chewed his lip. “We talked ’bout this before. Nigger could get punished bad for trying to read.”
“That’s true. We’d keep the school secret from everyone, even owners like your Miss Letty.”
“Cost money, this school?”
“No.” Her callused fingertips brushed the strings, the notes softly ringing in the air. A whippoorwill vanished into shrubbery to nest for the night. “Would you come to the school, Rolfe?”
After a silence: “Guess I would if you let me.”
She jumped off the bench and ran to him. “You’ll be my first pupil.” She pulled him into a hug.
Perplexed and alarmed, he quickly separated himself. He didn’t know what to make of a white lady touching him. Alex ran back to the bench to give him another song. He asked for “Lorena.” Soldiers and families on both sides liked the sweet, sad ballad. She played and sang it for him as the evening darkened.
59
Conversations at a Grave
At that same hour the President of the Confederacy was far from Richmond, touring the war front. He’d gone first to Tennessee, to settle differences between two of his generals, Bragg and Longstreet. From there he traveled on to north Georgia, Alabama, and his home state of Mississippi. In early November his private train brought him to Savannah, then South Carolina.
Jefferson Davis hadn’t visited Charleston since attending Calhoun’s funeral, nor had his popularity increased there. If anything, the opposite was true; a substantial and vocal anti-Davis faction existed in every state of the Confederacy. Beauregard’s disaffection was well known, and the animus of Robert Barnwell Rhett, publisher of the Mercury, was constantly on view in the columns of his newspaper. Rhett had never gotten over his rejection for a cabinet post. He characterized Davis as “perverse and incompetent,” not to say “vindictive, arrogant, and egotistical.” Because of Davis’s West Point credentials and military experience in Mexico, Rhett said he thought himself a better strategist than his generals, including Lee.
Artillery on the Neck fired salvos to salute the presidential train when it was still a good way off. A friendly depot crowd, largely white, waved handkerchiefs and placards with messages of welcome. The November air was cool, ripe with autumn smoke and the eternal stink of the mudflats.
When the President stepped down from his car, General Beauregard greeted him with formal politeness. He joined Davis in an open carriage, the first of four in a procession guarded by cavalry and followed by a German band blaring “Dixie’s Land.” Few remembered that the South’s anthem was written as a Northern minstrel tune, or that Lincoln Republicans had marched to it in the campaign of 1860.
The carriages traveled slowly south along Meeting. Large crowds shouted and clapped. Bunting and flags decorated buildings even in the burnt district. The carriages arrived at Broad and Meeting. At least a thousand people waited under garlands of laurel strung above the intersection. Alex was in the crowd with her brother and Marion Marburg. She drew hostile looks from a few who recognized her.
Alex had only seen pictures of Jefferson Davis. In person she found him unimpressive. He was a pale, cadaverous man with a tuft of chin whiskers, a high forehead, and fair hair going gray. His black suit was ordinary and looked cheap. She’d read that he was a veritable museum of maladies: neuralgia, malaria, an ulcerated cornea, and heaven knew what else. When the President turned his head to acknowledge one section of the crowd, sunshine striking his left eye made it glisten like a milky marble.
Davis spoke from the courthouse steps. Beauregard stood stiff and resplendent behind him; the double row of buttons on his cadet-gray tunic shone. He stared at the back of Davis’s head as the President began his address.
Davis commended Charleston’s military defenders, and its citizens, for resisting the enemy onslaught. He praised Maj. Stephen Elliott, commandant of Fort Sumter, who stood next to Beauregard, his military chapeau under his arm. The general was frowning at the sky.
“Charleston must not and I believe will not be taken by the enemy.” Applause. “Were it to prove otherwise, I trust yours will be the glory that I desired for my town of Vicksburg upon her surrender. I wished for the whole to be left a mass of rubble.” A hush then; he was speaking of the end. The unthinkable.
“Alas, it did not happen. Charleston’s fate must be different. If there should be a tragic outcome to your struggle, you face a choice. Will you leave Charleston naked prey for Yankee spoilers, or a heap of ruins?”
A man shouted, “Ruins.” A woman near the courthouse steps echoed it. “Ruins.” Soon the crowd was clapping and chanting. “Ruins, ruins, ruins, ruins.” Alex didn’t join in, nor did her companions.
At the conclusion of the speech the crowd disbanded and the President moved to his carriage. General Beauregard said good-bye and left with his aide, presumably to attend to duties. Marion said, “The general looked daggers at Davis, did you notice?”
“Davis didn’t recognize Beauregard by name,” Ham said. “Just that one reference to ‘our commanding general.’ I imagine the rift between the two just became a chasm.”
The German band serenaded the carriage as it rolled away to King Street. Davis would stay at the home of former governor Aiken while inspecting Charleston’s defenses. A well-publicized banquet was scheduled for the evening, courtesy of Palmetto Traders. Guests would enjoy boned turkey stuffed with truffles, baked and fried local oysters, tomatoes and peppers and other scarce vegetables, and quantities of Madeira “assured to be more than fifty years old.” Mr. Folsey Lark and his partner, Mr. Gibbes Bell, had been mentioned along with the menu in every newspaper but the Mercury, which printed nothing about the event. Marion planned to attend the banquet with Esther. Ham wasn’t invited.
Alex walked with her brother and the banker as far as City Market, then left them. She wanted to think about what needed to be done at Bell’s Bridge.
She strolled east to Church Street, then turned south again, past a work crew filling a shell crater. She didn’t notice a large coach stopped opposite St. Philip’s until she was almost upon it. The coach, shiny black with three glass windows on each side, was a conveyance of someone wealthy. She’d seen similar ones in Washington; they cost $500 to $1,000.
A Negro held the horse’s headstall and watched the sky as though expecting
a fatal round to come whizzing in at any moment. Alex greeted him with a nod and a smile. Inside the iron fence of the burying ground someone was speaking. She recognized Ouida, kneeling beside a Spartan grave, a rectangle of brick with a small marble slab laid in the middle.
Ouida’s enormous hooped skirt, white once, was yellowed by time. So were her white mesh gloves and a white half-veil that reached the tip of her nose. Springy English curls, long out of fashion, dangled below her ears. Scarlet lip rouge and an excess of face powder gave her a grotesque, clownlike look. Rimless oval pince-nez lay against a round chain holder pinned to her bodice.
Alex spoke softly to the driver. “I know that lady. I knew her husband too. Did they bring his remains back from Virginia?”
“No, missus, he’s buried up there someplace. That grave belongs to Mr. Calhoun.”
“John Calhoun?”
“Yes’m. Mistress comes here least once a month.”
Dogs yapped in the distance. Clearly vexed, Ouida shook her finger at the unresponsive person under the sod. Alex shivered and started away.
“Cousin? Is that you?”
Ouida came out the gate sideways, her immense hoops tilted up to ease the passage. She pulled a fine gold chain from the holder on her bosom, set the pince-nez in place. Her watery blue eyes enlarged behind the lenses. “I hardly expected to find you still in Charleston.”
“I have things to occupy me.” Alex spoke carefully, pleasantly, so as not to excite or antagonize her cousin. “I was very sorry to learn of Dr. Hayward’s passing.”
“He doesn’t deserve sympathy,” Ouida said with a toss of her curls. “He tried to help a Yankee and God punished him. The Yankees are devils. Lincoln is Satan.”
“Ouida, I think it would be best if we didn’t discuss—”
“I fear the Yankees have my son a prisoner. I’ve not heard from him in months. Every Yankee should burn in hell. They brought all this misery on us.”