In the confusion, John Wood eased into the trees and took a Federal horse and rode south toward the scent of salt air. From Terra Florida he went to Cuba and then to Nova Scotia, where he lived out his life. Bristol might have escaped similarly, though V never saw him or heard from him again. She still wonders whether he was killed in the attack and left dead in the woods or if he found his way home and shaped a life in the ruins and forgot all about her. She doesn’t even know whether Bristol was his first, middle, or last name.
A YOUNG YANKEE SOLDIER drove the ambulance with V and Ellen and the children in the back, while Burton, Jeff, and Delrey were under guard farther to the front of the wagon train. When they reached Augusta, the Federals paraded Jeff and V through town to a dock at the Savannah River in an open barouche, ancient with the wheels wobbling. The crowds jeered and hooted. A Federal soldier shouted, We’ve got your president.
A hard-shell Rebel yelled back, The devil’s got yours.
In the confusion of loading onto the shabby little river tug, all eyes fixed on the famous prisoners, Delrey slipped away. V saw him pretending to be working—hauling stuff, lifting and setting down, fooling with ropes—until he melted into the crowd, but she believed at the last moment he caught her eye and touched the brim of his hat with two fingers and then pressed his open hand to the center of his chest.
Late that first night on the river, Jimmie Limber waited until all the other children were asleep. He sat close against V and said, I don’t know what’s happening.
—You just rest, Jimmie.
—I can’t sleep. I don’t know what’s going to be of me.
V hugged him tight. Said, Nobody knows that anymore. But remember how you and Delrey said you could keep going one more day and then one more day after that?
—Yes.
—That’s what we’ve got in front of us. I’ll take care of you the best I can tonight and tomorrow and as long as I can.
* * *
V pauses and says, A few weeks ago you asked why I picked you up off the street. Why I took you into the Gray House.
—Yes, but you didn’t really answer.
—Because I didn’t know the answer. But I’ve been thinking and remembering, and I’ve come up with a theory. It involves a story I’ve never told anyone. This happened very early in the war. My father had gone broke again, and I’d arranged a job for him in a government commissary in Alabama, and he died there.
* * *
V floated downstream through Montgomery streets inside a haze of opiates. She wore a startling mourning dress—fine threads of Mexican silver shaping and repeating a wave pattern all down the snug ebony bodice and flowing skirt. The waist, though, cinched not nearly waspish as before the dead child and the living children. Black veiling blurred her face and enlarged her dark eyes.
Her father had died three whole weeks before, so by now he was no longer leaving—he was gone. V hardly thought of him. The word father rested like a distant place-marker in her mind, like finding the cast list for a forgotten play in a bureau drawer, your eye striking the name of the actor in the role of second footman. And despite her lack of feeling toward him, his passing brought on another bout of morphine nearly as strong as after Samuel’s death.
She bobbled traversing the slick cobbles. Red clay oozed between them like margins of recent wounds still weeping. Bubbles of medicine, though, levitated her, lightened her against the day, suds rising in a dirty washtub.
She felt the outside world must see her identical to the self she knew inside, unidentifiable and anonymous, disguised in a dim glow, an amber candle flame seen through seaside mist. Nevertheless, heads turned in recognition of the newish First Lady.
Fame. All it means is, people who don’t know one true thing about you get to have opinions and feel entitled to aim their screeds your way.
The war was still fresh. Some rushed up asking urgent, impossible questions. When will it end? Will we whip them good and hard? Others needed help contacting a husband or son fighting in faraway Virginia. Help finding the lonesome field where their dead might be buried. Help getting a semi-illegal letter to a relative north of the Mason-Dixon conveying important facts about recent deaths and births in the family, pleading that surely V could help, since it was rumored that she broke the law all the time writing to her own Yankee family. And also, could she pen the message, since the petitioner remained weak in writing but could talk it out to her by heart?
An ancient gray man, Scot or Irish, rhythmic and oracular in his talk, called her Magdalene and cursed her to Hades where her husband would one day achieve his highest ambition and reign supreme. The man swayed and swept his hands in complicated gestures to make his dark dream come true. His long beard and his dingy black swallowtail coat moved with the rhythm of whatever dirge slogged inside his head.
V floated on to the market. A crowd gathered, bidders and window-shoppers. A young woman up on the sale platform saw her and screamed her name. Screamed Mistress V three times like a fairy spell until her breath gave out.
V settled in her walking, a leaf caught in an eddy. She stopped and turned toward the stage.
Everybody looked at the woman there in her loose muslin shift. A slight woman, perhaps seventeen, her dark hair wild and her skin coppery. She went barefoot, her ankles and calves wiry. Her face broke wide open at the eyes and mouth. She stood exposed at an extreme of existence not ever shared by the audience.
The woman called again, Mistress V.
Not a scream this time. Tired and pleading, her arms down, palms open to V alone, making an offering of herself.
The audience turned to V. An ominous swivel of necks and shoulders and backbones to aim hundreds of eyes through the veil into her two. She believed she heard the faint mechanical sound of those thousands of vertebrae shifting, clicking, grinding as the audience pivoted her way.
The woman onstage gathered herself. She drew a long breath and held her arms straight from her shoulders, hands open and fingers spread. She screamed again.
—I know who you are. I know you. You’re a good woman. Buy me. You have a daughter. Little boys. I’ll take care of them till I die. Buy me.
The sun broke a crack in the overcast, lighting the mute colors of red dirt and dirty cotton and muddy shoes, the black suits and dirty buff linen suits of the bidders. And V stood like a shard of midnight moonlight, ebony and silver, suddenly fixed in place and exposed to the day.
A mumble rippled the crowd. Who is she?
Some of them meant the woman on the platform and some meant V.
—She’s a whore.
—She’s the goddamn president’s woman.
—They both are.
Behind the chatter of the crowd, the woman on the platform kept screaming. Her face torqued by the extremity of the moment and by a gleam of hope focused on a pretty woman in a startling black dress drifting by the stage where the enslaved woman’s life reached a pinnacle of desperation.
A man in a Panama hat too new to be dirty even at the dimples where his thumb and forefingers pinched to lift it an inch in respect said, Mrs. Davis, please pay no attention. Her mind’s not sound. Look away.
* * *
—What I’m beginning to believe, V says to James, is that when I first saw you, that girl was in my memory. Maybe I did what I did more for myself than for you.
—A second chance? Atonement?
—I had never thought of it that way, but it’s possible. Those chances don’t come around too often.
—Is that what the man in the Panama said, look away?
—I think so.
—The refrain from “Dixie”?
—I doubt that was in his mind.
—That line in the song, Old times there are not forgotten. I could argue that maybe they’re not worth remembering.
—I’ve never forgotten that girl, and I wouldn’t want to. Remembering doesn’t change anything—it will always have happened. But forgetting won’t erase it either.
Fortr
ess Monroe
1865–1867
THE WILLIAM P. CLYDE ANCHORED OFF OLD POINT COMFORT in that convolution of water and scraps of land where the Atlantic becomes the Chesapeake, and the Bay becomes Hampton Roads, where three rivers empty. Fortress Monroe squatted huge and bristling with black cannons just past the shoreline, among them the Lincoln gun, largest in the world. A fort had stood on that strategic spot since Pocahontas convinced her father not to bash John Smith’s brains out with a big wooden mallet. The first fort would have been a small enclosure of earth berms and log palings, but the current one was an enormous, brutal piece of masonry architecture surrounded by a moat. Its final stages of construction had been supervised by Robert E. Lee when he was a young U.S. Army engineer. Also, Old Point Comfort was where the first Africans were set ashore from a Dutch ship in 1619. History loves irony, V thought.
She stood on the deck of the Clyde, studying the view and making an effort to believe that ten minutes of sunshine and salt air in fine spring weather might stop her trembling. She breathed and tried not to imagine how her life would go even a few hours into the future, not to wonder what the next loss might be. Directly in front of her, the brutal Fortress. Off to the side, across the mouth of the Bay, Cape Henry and Cape Charles, and beyond those two points of land, the Atlantic Ocean began and the whole world unfolded. She tried to picture a globe. A straight line across the Atlantic from where she stood would make landfall in France or Spain.
ALL THE WAY UP THE COAST and for a day after they arrived, the children hardly left their bunks, so terrorized that Jimmie had been taken and fearing they might be next. Small boats came and went exchanging messages with Washington. What to do with the prisoners?
Since Irwinville, their group had enlarged to include old friends Clement Clay and his wife, Virginia, and even the postmaster general, Reagan. Also former Vice President Stephens, who weighed even less than usual. His skin crinkled like dried corn husks, and he had spent most of the trip in his tiny cabin nursing his slave, Robert, who had been felled by seasickness.
Old Point Comfort, the Fortress, and history’s love of irony drove V back into memory. During the war between Brierfield and The Hurricane, one evening under the big tree, Pemberton told her about the finale of the Black Hawk War, back when Jeff was a young lieutenant in the northern wilderness. Pemberton had been there by Jeff’s side as always. Except the war was more a protest or an uprising over failures to honor treaties than a full-on war. The terrible enemy of the United States amounted to about five hundred people, all ages and sexes. The army quickly killed a bunch of men, women, and children and ended the matter. Jeff and Lincoln—both in their twenties—attended that conflict, and might have met briefly. After the army captured Chief Black Hawk, Jeff was put in charge of taking him down the river on his way to prison back east. Pemberton remembered Black Hawk as a man of sixty-four, beat and tired of living. Every river town they docked at, people crowded in, trying to see the famous conquered warrior. But Jeff refused to drag him out on deck for a show. The old chief, who spoke English, thanked him. Said the young chief—meaning Jeff—treated the old chief like he understood what it would be like to swap places. Pemberton remembered that along the way two of Black Hawk’s men got sick, fixing to die. Jeff put them off the boat in heavy woods and told Black Hawk they should pass to the hunting grounds together. At Saint Louis, a huge crowd at the dock demanded to see Black Hawk, but Davis stood in front of them and shouted that he wasn’t there to give them a show, a lion stuffed with straw, or some mummy king from Egypt. And the irony part was that at the end of his journey, the prison where Black Hawk ended up was right there—Fortress Monroe. And Black Hawk’s vision of Jeff swapping places with him was about to become prophetic.
GENERAL MILES, the twenty-five-year-old officer in charge—he’d been a shop clerk before wartime brevet promotions elevated him—had made the announcement. Jeff and Clement were to go straight into Fortress Monroe. Burton to Old Capitol Prison in the shadow of the Capitol dome in Washington, where Mary Surratt and the other assassination conspirators awaited trial and hanging, and Stephens to Fort Warren on an island in Boston Harbor. Burton looked terrified, and Stephens seemed dazed, as if the announcement had been made in a foreign language. All V could do was look at Burton with tears in her eyes and touch her lips as he was taken away.
Jeff and Clement Clay were frog-marched down a narrow wood dock to a shoreline where crowds of onlookers, jeerers, scofflaws, and journalists waited. A soldier walked by Jeffy and said, Oh, stop crying, baby. I doubt they’ll kill your father. Jeffy wiped his eyes and said, When I grow up I’m killing every Yankee I see.
Next day the papers said Jeff’s manner remained haughty throughout the public part of the ordeal. What did they expect? Contrition? Little General Miles took him not through the main gate to the Fortress but over the moat into a little side door through the thick walls and into the casemates. Jeff’s cell was a sort of burial between wide-spaced stone walls and beneath twenty feet of soil growing grass, all supported by subterranean low brick arches seeping moisture and growing mold. A dim meditative space suitable for penance. That or digging deep into self-absolution and bloody-eyed self-righteousness.
All the servants—enslaved black, free black, white—were taken away, and Miles wouldn’t say where they were going and wouldn’t let her write a letter to General Saxton to ask about Jimmie. Wouldn’t let her write to anyone. When they took Ellen away, she and V wept, and the children pleaded uselessly with Miles not to separate them from Ellen.
Then, before the Clyde turned around and headed back into the Atlantic for Savannah, Miles had V’s last few articles of clothing confiscated as evidence that Jefferson had dressed as a woman in Irwinville to elude capture. Virginia Clay tossed pieces of her own wardrobe—petticoats and stockings and a hat with a plume—onto the pile to confuse the matter and lighten the moment. Then, as a parting gesture, Miles had V and Virginia Clay stripped and searched by two garish Norfolk whores hired for the job. Several soldiers and an aide to Miles stood and watched.
THROUGH THAT SUMMER she lived under house arrest in a fairly nice hotel in Savannah, which after months of flight and capture would have been a relief, except she could not communicate with her husband. All she knew about him was gossip reprinted in the papers—that he had been shackled and chained. Soldiers guarded against her escape, but they let the children outside to play. The guards taught them to sing the John Brown song with the words We’ll hang Jeff Davis from a sour apple tree. They convinced the children that V would welcome a serenade with it. When the children finished, V kissed them one by one and then walked downstairs and through the lobby and out onto the street and told the soldiers they could shoot her if they wanted or beat her down with their rifle butts or throw her in prison, but she was laying a simple curse on them that could never be lifted. After they returned home—even into the next century when they would be old grandfathers—every time they wanted to tell their glorious tale of teaching Jeff Davis’s children that silly cruel song, they would feel small and ashamed for what they had done to innocent children.
She couldn’t communicate with Jeff, so she wrote letters to the old friends and acquaintances and dinner guests who still had influence in Washington. In letters to President Johnson, she begged for better treatment for her husband and to have her house arrest lifted. The president never responded directly but dismissed her to the press as an angry woman.
She read Our Mutual Friend, which she enjoyed, and then Anatomy of Melancholy, which she thought was scientifically filthy, but she copied a few words from it into her notebook—a ruined world, a globe burnt out, a corpse upon the road of night.
Around that time her mother took the children to Canada, hoping to find a safer place where they could go to school without being threatened. V wept when they left, of course, but for a while she wept whenever her body generated fresh tears. Every day offered its own calamity until she finally ran out of tears and became numb
and then kept going.
Gradually, V’s travel restrictions were eased. First she could walk in four of Savannah’s beautiful squares closest to the hotel, and then eventually she could go anywhere in the city. Mostly she walked at night along the bluff over the river because it reminded her of childhood—moonlight on the water and lights from the boats and in the windows of houses on the far shore—except Federal detectives followed her and questioned anyone she spoke with beyond saying, Good evening.
EVENTUALLY THE RESTRICTIONS ALLOWED travel within the borders of the United States. But the children in Montreal remained off-limits, and she still couldn’t visit her husband, couldn’t even write Jeff a letter without government censors striking out every word not related to family matters, wifely concerns. Her mother had left her some money, and a few generous friends sent what they could spare. When a Federal officer gave her a small box of things they’d confiscated, V found her little pistol and nothing of value. She said to the officer, I’d much rather have the gold and silver coins you took from me in Irwinville.
Burton Harrison, though, had just been released from his imprisonment, and he took the loyalty oath and came straight south to meet her in Savannah. Burton had not quite reached thirty, and V still lacked a little of being forty—though the war had aged them both in unspeakable ways. When they first saw each other V held him tight and said over and over, My beautiful boy. Burton still coughed from the damp prison, and his chalky face seldom looked anything but blank. They traveled together for nearly two months, viewing the vast wreckage of the South.