A comet’s tail of sparks streaked overhead. The shell crashed into a wall of St. Michael’s and exploded; they had another fire to chase. A hell of a Christmas, sure enough. Old Charleston couldn’t stand many more like it.
62
1864
“Can you cut one of these from a piece of wood?” Alex showed her pencil sketch.
Rolfe jutted his lower lip. “Looks like a paddle to beat on somebody.”
“Nonsense, it isn’t nearly big enough. This is drawn to size.”
“Then what is it?”
“A hornbook, a very old way of learning your letters. They’re pasted here.” She touched the large vertical rectangle with a narrower handle at its lower edge. “Usually there’s a thin piece of deer or elk horn to protect the letters, but we’ll have to do without that.”
Reversal of Rolfe’s sullen air was immediate. “Know just where there’s a scrap of cypress. Have it done for you late today.”
On a precious square of writing paper wheedled out of her brother, Alex inked the alphabet, three or four letters in each row. She separated a wafer of sealing wax from a letter of Drew’s, one of many she’d saved. She thought he’d be pleased to see it used this way.
Rolfe brought her the cypress paddle as the January sun was going down. She melted the wafer and dripped wax on the corners and the center of the wooden rectangle. She pressed the paper in place and held it. You couldn’t buy glue, not even for postage stamps, which had all but disappeared.
Rolfe studied at the homemade hornbook. “I seen all those letters in Miss Letty’s newspapers, but I don’t know what they are or how you ’sposed say ’em.”
“You know more than you think. Pull up that footstool.” Seated beside her, he watched as she pointed. “This is the letter a.” She sounded it. “Say it.” He did. “This is the letter b. Like the bee that stings. Say it.” He did. Her work had begun.
In the attic she found a boyhood slate of Ham’s and a little muslin sack of crumbly chalk. Among the offerings in the dining room at Marion Marburg’s house she discovered a worn copy of McGuffey’s Eclectic Primer. Reverend McGuffey taught at Miami College in Oxford, Ohio. A Cincinnati firm printed his series of instructional readers, literally by the thousands; parents, teachers, and the clergy approved of their moralistic approach. Children learned to read with uplifting poems and stories that inspired proper behavior. She asked Marion’s sister Helena to watch for a First Eclectic Reader as well as a New England Primer, an older but no less popular beginner’s text.
Little cargo had come through Bell’s Bridge in the last two years, and none since the preceding autumn. Planks spongy with rot sank under her feet when she went to inspect. The old storage sheds for rice and indigo were too large for her purpose. So was the scale house. The small kitchen building was ideal. She opened the rusty padlock and immediately stepped back, fanning the air to clear the fetid smell. Squirrels had gnawed through the eaves to make nests of twigs and Spanish moss. Her own Augean stable.
She and Rolfe labored for a week, sweeping and scrubbing, then applying a watery whitewash to interior walls. At one point Rolfe looked like a white-face minstrel. When Alex held up a scrap of mirror, he laughed with great glee. He’d done well with his instruction in a short time. He knew his alphabet and could sound out simple sentences from McGuffey’s primer. It is so. On we go. I am he.
As soon as the kitchen building was furnished with an assortment of rickety chairs and wooden boxes, and Ham’s slate and chalk, she went prospecting for other students. Marion Marburg’s elderly cook had twin nephews, fat little boys named Washington and Jackson. The cook’s husband won their mother’s consent and dragged the reluctant nine-year-olds to Bell’s Bridge one evening. He sat in a corner during the first hour-long lesson. He thwacked heads when either twin showed inattention or disrespect. The following week the boys came back without the older man.
At the end of every lesson Alex sang and played the banjo. The boys liked the music as much as Rolfe did, especially “The Camptown Races.” The instruction took hold gradually. One evening Jackson, the quicker of the twins, surprised her by running in and exclaiming, “I know where they sell beer. B-e-e-r. I read the word on a sign, what do you think of that?”
Alex flung her arms around him. “I think it’s wonderful.” How remarkable and thrilling—almost forty-nine, and she finally had children to teach.
All this went on against the continuing drumbeat of war. Fear and privation stalked Charleston. Empty bellies growled louder; resentments grew, directed chiefly at the government. A letter in the Mercury called for President Davis’s impeachment. A dozen people wrote letters seconding the idea.
The area below Broad Street was a wasteland of mostly abandoned houses and lightless streets unsafe after dark. Beauregard’s artillery, his “circle of fire” defending the harbor, did nothing to forestall Union bombardment, which occurred at all hours. Alex seldom slept a night without interruption. While the guns boomed, she lay with her hands tightly clasped on her breast, wondering if they should have moved out long before.
In February the iron attack boat Hunley sank the Union’s screw steamer Housatonic offshore, only to sink itself, all hands lost. The Confederacy’s submersible warfare program ended on the bottom of Charleston Harbor.
Late in the month a screaming shell dug a crater directly in front of the house. Two artillerymen in the White Point battery died. Alex and Ham agreed they should go. Marion Marburg helped them find and rent a small house on Chapel, a block west of the Northeastern Depot. Alex, Ham, and Rolfe moved essential furniture north of Calhoun Street in a borrowed wagon, then returned to nail the shutters closed and block the downstairs doors with Xs of foraged lumber. The well-loved house, so full of memories, looked sad and disfigured as they drove away.
In the West, Lincoln found a commander who could win. He named U. S. Grant general-in-chief. A constitutional amendment abolishing slavery passed the Senate. Beauregard left Charleston, called to duty in Virginia as fighting there intensified. He gladly fled what had become, in his own harsh phrase, the Department of Exile.
Grant fought at the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, heedless of the number of men lost. Ham said Grant used regiments and battalions the way a smoker used matches. Marion Marburg observed that the North had many more match factories than the South, and Grant knew it.
In May gallant Jeb Stuart fell at Yellow Tavern. William Tecumseh Sherman thrust out of Chattanooga to hammer Joe Johnston in Georgia with a hundred thousand effectives. Off Cherbourg, France, the Union sank the South’s legendary commerce raider Alabama. The newly organized National Union party nominated Lincoln for president and an unknown Tennessee tailor, Andrew Johnson, as his running mate. The South’s faint hope lay with the Democrats, who called Gen. George McClellan out of retirement to run on a so-called peace platform.
The scorned treasury secretary, Memminger, resigned. Too late, cynical gentlemen said, and lit their cigars with Memminger’s currency. The exotic Confederate spy Rose Greenhow returned from England via Halifax and drowned trying to row ashore at Wilmington. In the heat of September, John Bell Hood evacuated Atlanta and Sherman marched in. Lincoln won reelection on November 8. A week later, Sherman’s great war machine lurched into central Georgia.
Horrific tales of plantations set afire, valuables plundered, wives and sweethearts raped, reached Charleston’s trembling elite. A rabble of white and black men followed Sherman’s army. When this horde passed by, they left weeping women and terrified children and, where great houses had once stood, only brick chimneys. People called them “Sherman’s sentinels.”
On December 21 Gen. William Hardee ordered his troops to evacuate Savannah and retreat north across the Savannah River. Hardee had replaced Gen. Robert Ransom as commander of the military district of Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina. Ransom had replaced Gen. Sam Jones, who had replaced Beauregard. Every man was a West Point graduate.
Sherman telegraphed Abra
ham Lincoln to present him the city of Savannah as a Christmas gift. It was evident to all but the blind that the South’s defeat loomed.
Christmas. At Prosperity Hall a meager fire of fatwood and pinecones burned in the cavernous hearth of the great room. Tall windows framed a gray-green world: palmettos, oaks, and pines lashed by heavy rain; wet Spanish moss fallen on the lawns like so many clipped gray beards. A northwest wind whipped up foam on the Ashley. Ouida peered at the rushing river, disconsolate. “Where is my boy? What have they done with him?”
“You’ll find out soon enough,” Gibbes said from the divan, where he sprawled with a cigar. Palmetto Traders no longer generated income. In November the partners had overridden minority shareholders and sold the company’s last ship. Gibbes continued to spend as though nothing had changed. He was sliding toward poverty with the desperate fatalism that was now epidemic in the Low Country.
“How will I find out?” Ouida wanted to know.
“Sherman’s in Savannah. The end’s coming. Then it will all sort itself out.”
Ouida’s eyes enlarged behind her spectacles. “Will Sherman come this way?”
“Only time can answer that,” said Folsey as he strolled in with a bottle of port and wineglasses. Folsey’s face had grown even more pale and puffy from indulgence. He’d installed a new white mistress in the Charleston cottage, but he never brought her around. He traveled everywhere with an adolescent waif named Kaspar Helios, whom he’d picked up from the streets. He called Kaspar “my little Greek boy.” Ouida thought there was something sinister to that but didn’t care to imagine sordid details.
“Dinner yet?” Gibbes inquired of his partner.
“Soon. Your wife’s tending to it with Kaspar’s help. Care for port, Ouida?”
“Oh, heavens yes, I’m freezing in here.”
Ouida took the glass with a trembling hand; wine spilled on her satin skirt. She drank like a parched traveler in the desert. Her spectacles reflected the popping fire. “They say Sherman did terrible things to women.”
Gibbes said, “Actually, I understand he issued orders prohibiting such. But of course he has all those bummers, those damned camp followers he can’t control. They do the damage.”
Ouida held out her glass for more. “They want to destroy Charleston, don’t they? God knows what will become of us.”
“We’re certainly in for a bad patch if Sherman marches up the coast,” Folsey agreed. “However, there’s always the possibility that he’ll spare us. He served at Moultrie twenty years ago, when he was a mere lieutenant. Painted watercolors, they say. Read some law. Got along famously with people, and loved the city.”
Gibbes snorted. “A more likely influence on General Sherman’s decision will be the present condition of Charleston. Why waste men and matériel attacking wreckage?”
Ouida shuddered. “Whatever he does, the niggers are sure to rise up. The Yankees will encourage it. We’ll be Africanized.”
“Now, there’s a pretty term I haven’t heard before,” Gibbes said. Seeing Ouida’s agitation, he hurried to her side and hugged her. “Don’t worry so. We’ll protect you.”
From his perch on the harpsichord bench Folsey said, “Frankly, I’ll be glad to see peace restored. I don’t mind doing business with Yankees if there’s profit in it.”
Gibbes shot him a look. “We’ve been friends a long time, Folsey, but I take extreme exception to that remark.”
“Why? We made a pile of money with the help of certain gentlemen from New York and Boston.”
“Not with my knowledge or consent.”
“But you didn’t mind using the money to buy fine clothes and set a decent table.” When Gibbes turned red, Folsey raised a placating hand. “Let it pass.”
“I will not. Ouida’s right, the Yankees want to Africanize the South. They’ve already destroyed our economy and butchered our finest young men. I may have to bow my head before them, but do business with them? Swear loyalty to their government? Never.”
Folsey saluted with his wineglass. “Spoken like a hero.” Gibbes thought he detected sarcasm.
Ouida’s hands clenched. “I’d kill every last one if I could.”
“By God, I believe you’re serious, sister. You should have been a soldier.”
“I still may be. There are ways.”
At that moment Snoo sailed into the great room trilling, “We are ready.”
She pulled up short, wondering what she’d interrupted. They all looked so grave. The fire snapped in the chilly silence, then subsided, leaving the forlorn sound of the rain.
They dined on deer meat. One of the housemen too old to run away had shot and dressed the buck. Snoo personally prepared rabbit from a German recipe. Dinner concluded, they played whist. Gibbes saw his partner cheating but said nothing; he was used to it.
After two hours Folsey excused himself. A servant brought his carriage around. It was a phaeton with a standing top and side curtains rolled down against the rain. Kaspar was already inside, feet on a charcoal warmer. The boy’s feral eyes darted everywhere, though he never looked at anyone directly.
On the piazza Folsey slipped into his hooded coat of green wool tweed. “I didn’t mention this earlier because your sister is too excitable. My friend Rex Porcher-Jones, the judge’s grandson, he’s picked up rumors of some kind of secret school teaching niggers to read.”
“In Charleston?”
“Rex believes so. He doesn’t know where it is or who’s behind it.”
“We must find it, put a stop to it.”
“My thought exactly. I’ll make inquiries. When we have reliable information, we can take steps.”
Gibbes leaned against a white column, puffing a new cigar while Folsey took the reins and swung the phaeton down the oval drive into the river road. Gibbes had a suspicion about the person who might be responsible for such a school. If he was correct, he’d take enormous satisfaction in moving against it. He and Folsey would hire others to act for them and render appropriate punishment.
But the end for Charleston came too soon for them to accomplish it.
63
Freedom of the City
As the Union artillerymen advanced their works, shells began to land north of Calhoun Street. Alex and Ham subsisted on small portions of boiled rice and pieces of corn bread with mold scraped away. Both lost weight, until they resembled, as Ham put it, “A prime pair of bean poles.”
Sherman was in Carolina. Rumors about his route of march swept the city with the regularity of the tides. He was on the road to Charleston. No, he’d veered toward Columbia. No, Charleston. “Clever strategy,” Ham said. “Neither place dares send relief troops to the other.”
At Bell’s Bridge, Alex tutored her pupils two evenings a week. Rolfe had quietly recruited a young man named Clem, who belonged to a neighbor of Letty Porcher-Jones. Clem’s brain was quick, more than compensating for a bad stammer. Clem brought his sister Cora, ten years older. She cooked at a tavern; she was the slave of its black owner.
The pupils were a mixed lot. Rolfe was the brightest, but each one’s progress gratified Alex. Fat Cora walked, moved, and thought slowly. Yet there came a moment when her eyes filled with a ravishing light of understanding and she put three letters together in her head and whispered, “Cat?” Alex almost wept.
January became February. The same harrowing tales they’d heard from Georgia reached them again: farms burned, railroad tracks torn up, a wide black scar of scorched earth left behind when the Union horde passed. Sherman struck Branchville, Orangeburg, crossed the Congaree. So he wanted Columbia after all.
Friday, February 17, Ham rushed to Chapel Street at two o’clock. “Hardee’s evacuating all the troops, I have it on good authority.”
Alex set to work cleaning and oiling Edward’s pistols. Her fingers moved slowly, so as not to accidentally spring one of the under-barrel bayonets. She was careful to scour out the priming pans; Lorenzo the gunsmith had warned her that even a slight residue of burn
ed powder would suck up moisture from the humid air and likely cause a misfire.
Keeping the pistols on half cock, she carefully loaded dry powder and ball. She’d bought an old powder horn from a junk dealer; some long-ago marksman had carved it with the words Josiah Biggs, His Horn. She wondered whether he’d shot at the British or only small animals and waterfowl.
To the slow beat of snare drums General Hardee’s ragged regiments marched out by way of the Neck beginning at dusk. Alex and Ham watched the sorry exodus on Meeting Street for a while. Never had she seen so many soldiers reeling along out of step and plainly drunk.
Sleep that night was impossible. Hardee wanted to leave nothing useful to the enemy. The Confederates burned and sank ironclads in the harbor, blew up the magazine on Sullivan’s Island, set fire to stores of cotton and rice hauled to public squares. The night sky lit with a continual red fireworks whose noise gave Alex another headache. “Walpurgis Night,” Ham muttered.
By midnight a dozen fires were burning across the peninsula, fanned by a nor’east blow. Refugees streamed past the Chapel Street house in the small hours, jamming the already crowded Northeastern Depot in hope of finding space on a last train out.
Dawn came. Gritty eyed and hungry, Alex sprawled in a parlor chair, one pistol in her lap, the other at her feet. Ham walked in from a visit to the depot. “It’s insanity. They’re practically killing each other to get at a few sacks of rice.”
“And the Union soldiers?”
“No sign of them, but they can’t be far away.”
“Ham, let’s go home. I’d rather protect the other house.”
He agreed. Shortly before eight Alex slung her banjo case on her shoulder and they set out. She carried the pistols and powder horn in a croker sack. Smoke stung her eyes and made breathing difficult. From the Ashley to the Cooper fires ate away at rooftops.