“Then we shall forward them to Chimborazo.”
“Chimborazo full pretty quick, too, Miss Sallie.”
“Then inform Miss Semple we must release our convalescing patients to those private homes that will accommodate them. Matron Semple will make arrangements.”
“Come, Sallie,” the major said kindly, “you must take some nourishment.”
When Sallie wiped her hands on her dress, she left streaks of blood. “Soup. Some soup would be nice.”
The public rooms of the Spottswood Hotel were packed with men drinking, some to the victory, some to the death toll. One gray-faced elderly man sat on the stairs sobbing into his hands.
Before the war, the Spottswood had been Richmond’s most fashionable hostelry. Important planters and visiting dignitaries called it their Richmond residence. French wallpaper still adorned the walls and chandeliers (no longer glistening) still hung overhead, but the tables had been pushed together into long rows, the manager collected his twenty dollars (Confederate) at the door, and luncheon consisted of potato soup and cornbread. The clamor was Babylonian, conversation nearly impossible.
The man on the bench beside Sallie wore a cavalryman’s uniform and smelled like horse sweat and fresh manure. The backs of Sallie’s hands were blood-spattered. The crosspiece of the major’s crutch, a smoothed length of curved hickory padded with cloth, was propped against the table. The soup was light on potato content, but satisfactory as to broth, and the cornbread was hot and filling.
The room raised three cheers for General Lee.
What had life been like before the war? Unable to talk over those who were cheering Stonewall Jackson and intending to work through the entire Confederate command, Sallie and the major went back to work.
The last train emptied at dusk, nearly five o’clock, and when Sallie and the major left for Winder, the only men on the station platform were dead or dying.
Camp Winder’s three surgeons had been cutting since yesterday midnight. Unlike smoothbore musket balls, which broke bones, the new minié ball shattered them. Sometimes when the ball struck softer bone near the joint, salvage was possible. Usually, even when flesh and muscle were intact, the bone was splintered and the shattered limb had to be amputated. Most surgery was amputations, and almost all successful surgery was. Although the surgeons did search abdominal wounds for fragments, that work was futile and they knew it: a man shot in the bowels nearly always died.
Convalescents carried a patient into the ward, and on his litter what could be done was: the cloth saturated with chloroform was clapped over the patient’s dirty face, the affected limb was stripped of clothing and washed, the surgeon’s knife slashed quickly and completely through muscles, exposing the bone, before the fine-toothed saw went to work. As the surgeon cut, a matron kept the tourniquet tight so the man wouldn’t bleed to death.
In the pool of light the patient, a middle-aged Irish corporal, said, “And it is sorry I am to be meeting you under these circumstances. Can I keep my hand?”
A weary Surgeon Lane shook his head no.
“Well, that’ll be all right then. Me mother warned me about pinchin’ the girls. Religious she was.”
Underneath the stink of blood was the stink of men’s sweat and urine and feces and the faintest tang of gunpowder.
Men were brought to cots, laid on the floors between cots, finally in the aisles.
Cousin Molly came in and touched Surgeon Lane’s shoulder. The paper she held out to him was a telegram.
Surgeon Lane made no sound but he went white and tears leaked from his eyes and he did nothing to stop them. “I am obliged to you for this news, Matron . . . Molly . . .”
“I am so sorry, James.”
Tears pouring down his cheeks, Surgeon Lane amputated a left forearm, a foot, then a right arm at the shoulder. The next litter bore a Federal lieutenant. After his shirt was cut away, a bulge was apparent above his collarbone, perhaps a minié ball under the flesh or a canister ball. The lieutenant’s eyes rolled in terror. Surgeon Lane dropped his knife in the filthy bucket of surgical appliances and rubbed a bloody forearm across his eyes. “Take this man to Surgeon Chambliss,” he ordered. “I will not operate on this officer nor any other Federal soldier tonight. I cannot promise I will not do them harm.”
At noon the next day, Surgeon Lane lay down for an hour in the room Sallie had made over for her own use. At five that evening, Surgeon Lane lost patience with a convalescent who had failed to empty the limb tub so an arm rolled under the surgeon’s feet and he misstepped, slashing his patient’s thigh. “We are worse than our enemies!” he shouted. “We are better killers through carelessness than they are intentionally!”
Cousin Molly Semple brought a hand basin of clean water. “Wash up, James,” she said. “I have a meal for you outdoors. It’s time you came away.”
In the December evening surgeons and matrons ate wordlessly at a makeshift table beside the low shapes of men who awaited their ministrations. Their living breath rose from where they lay.
A CONTRABAND
WASHINGTON CITY, DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA JANUARY 22, 1863
“IT’S CHOKED UP,” Cuffee announced; without, however, leaving his perch atop the honey cart.
Jesse straightened from the pump handle, set his hands in the small of his back, and stretched. Swirling snow clotted his eyelashes and melted in rivulets down his cheeks.
“Can’t be much shit left,” Cuffee opined helpfully.
“Less ’n there was,” Jesse said. “Why is it I always go down in the pit and you always up top?”
Cuffee huffed himself up. “Because that’s the way the army want it done. I drives the team, you empties out the cesspool.”
The cesspool in question served one of Washington City’s makeshift army hospitals. Three brownstone rowhouses had been combined to care for the wounded. The cesspool out back was Jesse’s responsibility: no reason the surgeons or matrons need pay it any mind.
After the Fredericksburg fight, the hospitals had filled and Jesse and his teamster emptied cesspools every second day, but many of the wounded had died, some had been discharged as convalescent, and now Jesse worked no more than ten hours a day. His pay, twenty-five dollars a month, less the five dollars every colored worker was taxed to support frail and sickly colored the government cared for, did not vary no matter if Jesse worked ten hours or twenty. That, as the teamster had explained, was how the army did things.
Some of the city’s cesspools had been constructed in George Washington’s time, and stone liner walls sometimes caved in and suffocated the hapless cleaner. This was a newer one and the mortar was sound, the lid could be propped open for ventilation, but even so after a few minutes down, Jesse’s head would get a little swimmy.
Jessie took a deep breath and climbed down into the sludge on the bottom. He held the mesh-covered end of the sump hose under the liquid so he wouldn’t lose the prime as his hands plucked away material—most of it rotten bandages—that clogged the screen and then went up the ladder again to the light where he could take a breath. Jesse bent and coughed and coughed before he spat and began pumping again.
White men wouldn’t do this work. There seemed to be plenty of work white men wouldn’t do. If work got to be hard enough or dangerous enough or smelled bad enough, work got to be nigger work, and Jesse was glad of it.
Jesse had no objections to cleaning cesspools. If the Emancipation Proclamation had made him any man’s equal, it had not advanced him to a state where he needn’t earn bread by the labor of his hands. The work wasn’t hard except when the hand pump failed (usually its leather gaskets had torn), and then Jesse was obliged to bucket ordure into the honey wagon while the cursing teamster mended the gaskets.
Twenty-five dollars a month was more money than Jesse had ever had, and he was paying for his own food and his own shelter and he had bought these clothes—wool pants and wool shirt—secondhand, and the gumboots he’d bought too.
So much in the world wa
s new to him; sometimes Jesse felt like a child.
“I believe that has it dry.” Cuffee dismounted to remove his mules’ nosebags and make minor adjustment to their traces. Jesse coiled the stinking hose, hung the ladder on its pegs, and lashed the pump. He slid the pit cover closed.
When Cuffee climbed onto his perch and gee’d his mules, Jesse clambered onto the wagon and perched atop the pump. Although there was room for two men on the seat, the teamster rode alone. “You smell too bad,” he explained. “I been smelling shit all day. I ain’t gonna smell it on my way home.”
The younger teamster who took Cuffee’s place when he’d drunk too much the night before—he wasn’t so fussy. “But I been a field nigger, like you,” the replacement explained. “Cuffee, he was a house nigger. Cuffee come north as body servant to a Federal captain, and he’s disgraced to be on a honeywagon. That top hat he wear? Same hat he used to wear when he was driving Massa and Missus to the ball.”
The replacement teamster had suggested Jesse seek work on the fortifications. “You strong as a ox. You come on down there and they take you on, sure.”
Men didn’t stay with cesspool cleaning long. They took a cough or the soldier’s disease or a fever and the army had to find another man to climb down into the pit. Jesse had been at it as long as anyone.
Jesse thought it was all right. Rufus had dared to speak up, dared to say who he was. Jesse had broken hard soil with Rufus’s farrier’s hammer and scooped dirt over Rufus with their battered tin cup after Rufus said who he was.
Washington City was crowded with deserters who wore civilian clothes but walked like soldiers, and when the provost’s men rode by, they slipped into doorways or around corners. The provost’s men never did much about them, they just rode on by. Despite their new blue uniforms, their well-fed horses and brave epaulettes, the provost’s men were discouraged too.
It had been a discouraging war. General McClellan and General Pope and now General Burnside. Cheerfully, drums tapping, bands playing, they’d crossed the Potomac and headed south, “on to Richmond,” and one general after another had his army killed and came back with a list of excuses as long as his casualty list.
Some coloreds—the replacement teamster was one—were talking about moving farther north. The pay was worse, but if the Federals did quit the war, a man farther north wasn’t so likely to be taken back into slavery.
Jesse hadn’t ever seen Father Abraham, but other coloreds told Jesse all about him. Many evenings, Father Abraham took a horseback ride along the Potomac River, and the coloreds would wait for him there, so they could see he was real and not a dream.
The honey cart paused at the C&O Canal. Jesse stepped down and gave the teamster a wave, which he didn’t respond to. He walked along the wooden sidewalk—just another colored worker going home.
The sun had dropped into Virginia, gaslights were on in the shops, colored maids lined up at the bakery windows for aromatic breads and rolls. Jesse turned into an alley behind the big townhouse which had become headquarters for the Military Chaplains’ Association. The first-floor curtains were drawn back and several chaplains were drinking tea, conversing, smoking cigars.
Jesse slept in the stone washhouse on the alley. The chaplains’ servants did laundry on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and on those nights Jesse didn’t have to buy coal.
He stripped off his trousers and washed his hands and arms. His second trousers, spare socks, brogans, knitted woolen scarf, and blanket were tucked behind a cabinet. He’d rented this sleeping space from the chaplains’ houseman, after promising he’d be out of the washhouse before five in the morning and that his belongings would be hidden when he wasn’t here. Jesse dunked his sodden stinking trousers and socks in the wash kettle. The amulet which hadn’t protected Rufus hung from Jesse’s neck.
He brushed his brogans before he went out. With a few other colored laborers, Jesse waited at the back door of a grocery on M Street, the snow falling heavier now, whitening hats and shoulders and bare heads. It was a beautiful snow, big white flakes swirling in the gaslights.
Although the little store sold a full range of provender to any white person who entered the front, its back-door fare was more limited: meat pies wrapped in cabbage leaves, slabs of rat cheese, and popskull whiskey at half a dollar the quart.
Jesse bought a pie and a half pound of cheese. As he turned into the storm, some laborers were already sharing their whiskey.
Back at his washhouse, Jesse lit his candle, wrung out trousers and socks, and hung them near the stove to dry. He emptied the wash kettle, rinsed it, and hung it up, because it was important, the houseman said, that he leave no trace. The chaplains would object to his furtive presence among their drying linens, socks, and drawers.
Jesse’s rent was eight dollars a month. Another ten went for meat pies and rat cheese and his nightly candle. He had three dollars put away for new trousers when he should require them. He felt fine sitting on the stone floor beside the warm fireless stove. Sometimes, after a day’s work, his back throbbed where Samuel Gatewood had whipped him, but next to that warm stove, it uncramped and eased.
He’d picked up a newspaper discarded on the street, and as he ate his meat pie he read every word, including government notices and morticians’ advertisements—“Prompt, Sanitary Transportation to anywhere in the U.S.”
Drying shirtfronts hung in ghostly rows on washlines over his head.
After he finished his thorough reading, Jesse rolled the paper and put it in the stove. Housing for free coloreds and runaway slaves was so scarce that hundreds were living in the old slave jail in Alexandria in the same cells where their fathers and mothers might once have been held. But here was Jesse, alone, in quiet, with clean water from a hand pump and a coal stove and the servants’ necessary not fifteen feet away. He was a rich man.
He wondered what meat was in the pie tonight. Sometimes it was light meat, sometimes dark. It was always salty and always greasy, but that grease warmed his stomach. He ate the cabbage leaves which had wrapped the pie and served as his dining platter. The rat cheese would be his breakfast. His drink was water, drunk from the metal cup he’d used to bury Rufus.
Jesse touched the amulet and thought: All my friends are in the stars. He turned to the window, but there were no stars tonight, only falling snow, fat moth flakes illuminated by lights from the house, where the Christian soldiers held their nightly discourse.
Sometimes Jesse eavesdropped. The chaplains were convinced that eternal life was assured only to soldiers who never played cards, never drank whiskey, and “suffered not from temptations of the flesh,” which meant, Jesse supposed, visiting the brothels beside the canal. The notion that God would care about cardplaying or finding affection seemed strange to Jesse. There were several brothels where older colored women serviced laborers for a dime or a quarter, but Jesse wasn’t tempted. Strong and young as he was, he didn’t dream of women, and sometimes when he searched the stars for Maggie, he thought himself more like a child seeking his family than a grown man hunting his rightful wife.
He sipped his water with the delicacy of a white man drinking fine wine.
If he were to go for a job on the fortifications, he’d risk losing his present job. He could probably miss one day, but two days’ absence and one of the new contrabands pouring into Washington City would climb on the back of the honey wagon and down the narrow ladder that was so much like the orchard ladders Jesse had once used to pick Uther Botkin’s apple trees.
Jesse had been climbing down the cesspool ladder since October, and though he had plenty to eat and a roof over his head, something was gone from when he and Rufus were together. The mountains were bitter and the rivers hazardous, but now it seemed, as Jesse leaned against the washrack, warm stove and belly full, it seemed to him that all the mountains and rivers had disappeared when Rufus died.
He unfolded his blanket and crawled under the laundry table, where he slept. Tomorrow he’d go down to the fortifications and see i
f they had work for him.
MRS. OMOHUNDRU
WARM, GREASY RAIN slid off the hood of the girl’s coupe. As she passed the C&O station, she rubbed her fist against the windshield to clear the condensation. Her daddy had told her to stop wasting her time on that crazy old woman. Her supervisor wanted to know how many real ex-slaves she’d interviewed. Her uncle, who had been the girl’s staunchest supporter, wondered, aloud, if Marguerite Omohundru had “a screw loose.”
“Honey,” he said, “she’s had a long life and done some wonderful things in Richmond. Mrs. Omohundru has been a godsend to the Historical Society. But she’s not herself anymore. Pretending she’s a negro, and an ex-slave to boot! Why, Silas Omohundru was a hero in the war! Poor Marguerite! She must be in her nineties.”
“She became a woman the year of Cox’s snow,” the girl said.
Letters from Phil lay on her bureau unanswered. Her mother wondered if she had “female problems.”
She couldn’t even pretend she was working. After her first visits she quit taking notes and stopped asking questions. Their routine was unvarying. She’d take her seat facing the sofa in that garden room and accept a cup of hot tea—just one—never a second no matter how long she stayed—and she’d listen as the ancient woman spoke about a past and a people that were as strange to her as the heathen Chinese.
Sometimes, after she parked before the overgrown front yard of what had been among the grandest homes in Richmond (so Daddy said), she sat for ten minutes before she found strength to get out of the car.
“That woman is mesmerizing you, sugar,” Daddy said. “That crazy old woman has put you under a spell.”
Daddy said that one night after he’d had too many drinks with the juniors from the law firm and he never repeated his theory. Nonetheless, the girl wondered if maybe it wasn’t true. As the old woman talked, she seemed to grow stronger. The color returned to her cheeks, her hands moved more fluidly, she could talk for hours and never tire. In contrast, the girl sank into a curious apathy, a passive state that wasn’t restful at all.