—Problem is, I’m here now, V said.
—Cup or mug? Ellen said.
—Mug, please.
Ellen poured and then walked V back to the third floor. Ellen was a slim, serious young woman who looked about an equal mixture of white and black and wore her hair pulled tight to her head, parted down the middle. She set V’s mug down and said, I’d tell you Mrs. O’Melia’s bark is worse than her bite, except pretty often she bites too.
HALF AN HOUR BEFORE SHOWTIME, V and Jeff emerged from the front door of the Gray House. With Jeff’s upturned hand cupping her elbow, they drifted with the rain across the sidewalk and into the carriage, a wave of perfect black and white fabric and a dark violet sheen in V’s skirts. Jeff gripped his inaugural speech tight under his right arm inside a leather folder—written in V’s blue hand, which Jeff read more easily than his own because she silently acknowledged his diminished eyesight and wrote extra large. Settled in the carriage, Jeff tapped her wrist, the intimate coin-size exposure of flesh where the glove hooked and blue veins pulsed, a touch of fingertip subtle and intimate as a Masonic handshake. He looked straight ahead. She turned her palm up and gripped his hand, feeling the bones beneath the skin, all knuckle and joint, a tiny bundle of kindling.
She said, You can make a bad speech sound good.
An escort of footmen, six black men meant to walk alongside the carriage, began forming up—two ahead of the front wheels, two behind the back wheels, two by the doors. They dressed as pallbearers. Mourning clothes. Black suits, black vests, black top hats banded with black satin. One man even wore a hank of limp black veil trailing like a horsetail from his hatband down past the collar of his coat. They might as well have fixed black-dyed ostrich plumes from the brow bands of the horse bridles.
V sat observing the scene through her side window. A few colors—highly saturated—dazzled in the gray morning. Teeth in the pallbearers’ mouths, white and yellow, seemed exaggerated as colors of cake icing. Missing teeth deep black. One pallbearer’s cravat a bluebird splash at his neck. Everything else rendered in shades of black and gray like a photograph. Mud wetted the backs of their pant cuffs. The black of the mourning bands around their hats blacker than a moonless night sky. Blacker than a hundred-year-old mojo hand, blacker than the bottom of a Welsh coal pit, blacker than the iris of the devil’s right eye. A black with its own draw, a puckered suction pulling down.
V stepped out of the carriage and went to Jeff’s new secretary, Burton Harrison, and said, Who would be responsible for the costumes?
—Ma’am?
—The men alongside. The choice of their attire.
—I’d have to ask, Burton said.
—Well if you don’t know, who does?
—They would know, ma’am. The men. I could ask them.
—No, don’t start troubling yourself.
V stepped to one of the men, the one who seemed like the leader. Dignified, proud, his posture perfect. A shiny black silk band clasped his outside upper arm.
V said, You are all dressed so handsomely. Who chose your wardrobe?
The man looked at her, his eyes sliding by her face, pausing only half a second, but seeing what he needed to see.
—Show respect. Same way we do a burying around here, ma’am.
V let that roll over her. And then she decided to ease back without interference. Let suitable equipage for living in a dying world pass without further critique.
She said, Thank you for your respect. And please pass my thoughts along to the others.
As their carriage moved through the streets, pedestrians all moved their same way, tending alike, a flow going where V and Jeff were going, birds in October shaping strange and beautiful patterns as they swirl against the sky finding a common direction. The men walking alongside the carriage—the swing of their arms, their step, sway of shoulders—moved like a dance to entirely different music from the brass band’s march.
AT THE CAPITOL, V stood outside the carriage with an umbrella. The equestrian statue of Washington rose high above the proceedings. Very heraldic—rampant, dexter—all those conventions of honor. The bronze statue glowed wet and dark as obsidian above its pale, stone base. Behind Washington, clouds churned patterns of gray and black, ominous or meaningless. Trying to decide which of the two prevailed, V kept looking up toward Washington and his hat of ancient vintage. Knowing many eyes turned her way, making judgments against her slightest gesture, she collapsed her umbrella and stepped back into the carriage. She had been here before.
The band honked anthemic marching tunes from their bright horns—the flaring bells of trumpets and French horns, bright brass and at the center a black vortex. Most people stood under umbrellas—a field of tight black satin domes—and hunched shoulders against the cold and wet. From behind the crowd, V’s perspective, the arching ribs and scalloped canopies of umbrellas lapped each other into a cloud of descending batwings.
The platform—the stage, the scaffold—had been hammered together suddenly and raggedly from raw yellow pine like a coffin at a July Mississippi funeral, but elevated in tone by bunting drooping lower moment by moment in the rain, the red and blue bands beginning to stain the white.
V rested in the morphine and watched. A play—something medieval and full of morality—began unfolding on the stage before her, a story that ended bad, a tragedy. Raindrops on umbrellas beat faint Celt clan rhythms.
Jeff climbed the steps to the stage, ascending to the scaffold, a willing victim throwing himself onto the wrong pyre. A volunteer. At the podium he looked ashen, skeletal in the depth of his eye sockets and the prominence of cheekbones and hollowness of flesh below.
But when he began talking, his voice swelled. He stood in the rain speaking strong and clear. Projecting. It was a learned skill, a vibration in the vowels sounding completely natural but impossibly loud, a frequency riding over the hum of the audience. A matter of breath, muscle, volume of air pumped from the gray sacks of lungs across the vocal cords. Operatic, and yet just a matter of physics. From times she had sat onstage looking sideways at him against the light, V knew that spittle spewed with his effort. All his thin body leaning forward, muscles clenched. A fighting stance, ready to clash.
Drops of spit and rain mixed and fell on the paper. V imagined the large words she had penned for him dissolving before his weak eyes, the blue ink on the exposed page becoming like a faint precious watercolor depicting the surface of a pond, a distant mountain range. Finally Burton Harrison thought to step forward and hold an umbrella over him.
V hardly noticed individual words, only the music of Jeff’s speech. He believed in things—that much was clear from the rhythm and tone of his voice, the rise and fall of volume, the urgency. With those slight implements, he meant to shove a hot iron rod up the backbone of an entire collapsing culture.
He talked so much of God and the sanctity of property and the absolute rights of those who possess it this instant under a certain set of rules heretofore fluid but henceforth fixed. And no limitations allowed on the nature of property—land, gold, silver, houses, people, livestock. A deep belief that your moment in time is the pinnacle, the only standard of judgment extending from the creation of light until the black apocalypse, that what you believe right now is eternal truth because you believe it so fervently—those deep beliefs so crucial at the moment but none of them more permanent than a puff of air across a palmful of dry talcum.
As the speech trudged on, nearing its halfway point, V kept having to suppress a cough or a laugh or a yawn or a scream. Or an expression of mourning one degree short of weeping. Untoward remarks flooded into her mind. Funny and dreadful. Such as the feeling that if she were writing a review she would have to note that Jeff played his role with much less conviction than in her execution dream. She thought about how the flow of morphine through the human organism always carries with it so much clarity, so much objectivity.
Jeff stood up there minuscule and shouting, unreal in the distance, at the cen
ter of a parody of an inauguration. But not amusing, only terrifying. The wet black statue of Washington gleamed and expanded, a dark and indifferent god hiding behind his nose and strange hat, unwilling to pass judgment beyond his mere stern presence.
V felt a sort of vibration, a rattle, and wondered for a moment if this was what an earthquake felt like in its early seconds. She touched the window frame of the carriage and it felt still. She leaned out the window and saw the horses standing calm, resting and waiting, half asleep with their ears relaxed. So the vibration, the rattle, the unease rose from inside.
Still half out the window, she said to the driver, Home, please.
The driver twisted around, looked at her, and said, Right now?
V abided within herself a space of time until the driver grew uncomfortable and needed to say something.
—Ma’am, the mister’s talk’s not over. The president.
V said, Now, please. Now is the time to go home.
The reins snapped and the carriage lurched forward and rattled across the cobbles. Eyes closed, V took three breaths through her mouth and then three through her nose and then tried out an idea, a hypothesis. You’ve led an easy life. But everybody suffers. Judgment and punishment have hit with a light touch so far. The tap of a finger.
BY EVENING—the inaugural reception at the Gray House—V’s mood had lifted. A party usually had that effect. She moved from group to group of drinkers and eaters, being witty and gracious and sharp. She stood at a height that most women and quite a few men had to look up to meet her eyes and therefore resented her. Some in attendance found her too flirty with the men and tracked her progress through the rooms by clusters of their delighted laughter. Next morning, the papers noted her early departure from the inauguration ceremony but reported that as hostess for the reception, the First Lady performed with rare grace and unaffected dignity.
V WOKE, COVERS OVER HER HEAD. She reached her hand to Jeff’s side of the bed, but it had already gone cold between the sheets. He’d long since dressed and walked to his office and probably skipped breakfast—which he knew he wasn’t supposed to do. V thought drowsily how no one knows the inside of a marriage except the two people impounded together. Not family, not close friends, certainly not town gossips and the papers. Just the two bound in matrimony, and nobody can trust a word they say to anyone. Some are liars who claim that after forty years they’ve never had a cross word or that they’ve never gone to bed mad. And then there are those couples exhausted and baggy-eyed and not bothering to hide their misery, just struggling to keep their heads above water, trying not to drown in the long aftermath of a bad match. Or those happy and unequal marriages like that of Mary Chesnut where she emerged into her future husband’s world at thirteen so unquestionably lovely and delightful and quick of mind that she swept over him—though he was twenty-one, son of a U.S. senator and later to become one himself—like an incoming full-moon tide, so powerful that he waited four long years to marry her and delight in her entertainment every day until death parted them. But if the marriage is at all between equals, the two will certainly disagree about many things at any moment of the day during their time together. Not just details and facts but the fundamental nature of the marriage, because the flow of power changes constantly, and the loser isn’t always fully aware of defeat until much later.
A moment from the previous night pulsed into her memory. Late—the dregs of the party—she wilted, tired, and unwary and perhaps a little influenced by wine and leftover medication. A journalist, a new face among the press, stepped up and asked a question about her husband, something concerning the rash of harsh criticisms from Jeff’s political enemies in Richmond, which landed vicious and endless with every morning’s collection of newspapers. The journalist spoke with an English accent and seemed in his manner and appearance and clothing simultaneously polished and shabby, and very bemused by our bloody war. A tray of Champagne glasses eased by and V swapped her empty for a full.
What V ought to have done was ask what publication he represented, and then immediately say that his questions should be addressed to Burton Harrison or perhaps to Judah Benjamin. But without thought or filter, she actually said, What those miserable political animals are doing to that beautiful man—a man, let me be clear, I have wanted to kill many times for my own reasons—is disgusting and heartbreaking.
Those words were true—her truth—but also dangerous. The society ladies of Richmond went about like beagles hunting rabbits, noses to the ground, yearning for the least whiff of damning gossip against her. And when they caught a scent they went barking and yelping, breaking down and examining every element of her in order to come up with their own explanations for her darkness, which they twined with musty stories about Jeff’s attraction to dark women.
So V groaned into her pillow, knowing that a passing thought or even a joke about killing her husband could carry heavy consequences. How might the ladies fire that powerful ordnance once in control of it? Some would have called her treasonous. However—be honest—name a marriage of equals without murderous thoughts now and then. Also, the damage from her comment wouldn’t have been only among the ladies. Their men—military and political and wealthy and powerful—already thought V had too much influence, that Jeff’s every action and decision bore her thumbprint like a sloppily iced cake. As if his experience in Washington politics and especially his legendary exploits in Mexico were all nothing. One rumor constantly circulating was that V sat outside Jeff’s office during meetings, eavesdropping. Occasionally true, of course, but only when Jeff knew he would want her opinion later and asked her to sit near the open door and listen. Goes without saying that her sitting on the inner side of the door would have been impossible.
But reconstructing those blurted thoughts about killing Jeff, she pictured the shabby handsome writer. The instant the words fled her mouth, he lifted his pencil from his little notebook without jotting anything. He looked at her very seriously and for a length of time, and then said, My apologies for the question. I should speak to Mr. Benjamin. But thank you so much for chatting with me. I hope I shall always enjoy your trust.
He kissed her hand and walked away. At that dazed moment of the party, she thought she had failed to charm him. Now, covers still over her head, she realized the gift he had given her in that simple lifting of pencil from page. Also, his eyes rising from the notebook to meet hers had been so personal, human-to-human. Evaluative and curious, of course—that was his job—but also possibly some unmediated impulse related to sympathy. She wanted to go straight to the Spotswood Hotel and find that man and kiss the back of his writing fist in acknowledgment of a shining moment of honor.
EVERY DAY THE SEVERAL RICHMOND PAPERS arrived at the Gray House, and V usually read most of them, trying to understand the city. She made note of interesting, strange, and awful stories in her journal.
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 Plantation
1865
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.