Silent Cavalry

Silent Cavalry: How Union Soldiers from Alabama helped Sherman burn Atlanta–and then got written out of history.

Howell Raines (2023, Crown Publishing)

        This one’s for the folks back home in Alabama. Many of my friends there are, like Howell Raines, descended from the settlers of Winston, Walker, and surrounding counties. Birmingham’s industrial base attracted thousands of men whose Scots-Irish ancestors had scratched out a living in the last mountains of the Appalachian chain. The residents of Winston County, in particular, have long enjoyed a reputation as combative and stubbornly independent people. They went so far, during the Civil War, as to secede from Alabama, declaring themselves the Free State of Winston. While this was more a slogan than a reality, the county sent more people than any other, to cross Union lines and form up as the First Alabama Cavalry, USA.

         That so many Alabamians took up arms for the Union is one of those stories that falls between the cracks of the standard histories. Howell Raines went looking for the history, and for the reasons it has tended to be lost. He’s actually been thinking about this for most of his life, in the background of his long career as a journalist. (I’ve been familiar with his name since the late 1960’s, when he worked at the Birmingham News with my father.)

        The First Alabama came into being after General Ormsby M. Mitchel pressed down from Nashville to seize Huntsville and Decatur in the spring of 1862, shortly after the battle of Shiloh. Controlling the Tennessee River was an essential step to splitting the Confederate State into two parts. It also made Northern lines a relatively short walk from all over north Alabama, and an attractive destination compared with conscription into the rebel army at the point of a gun.

       Contemporary reports from Union officers praise the unit’s toughness; it saw valorous action at the battles of Chickamauga, Lookout Mountain, and Missionary Ridge; Sherman used a couple of its companies in the vanguard of his march to Atlanta and beyond. Raines says, “Hill country partisan that I am, I take the First Alabama’s lack of legendary status as proof of the suppressive power of Lost Cause historiography.” The Lost Cause is a manufactured myth, in which “the war was not a heroic crusade to abolish slavery; instead it became a tragic story of undeserved suffering inflicted on a noble, if misguided, class of southern aristocrats….”

       The myth’s manufacture is quite an interesting story in its own right. An editor of the Richmond Examiner brought out a book called The Lost Cause in June 1866, which ascribed ‘aristocracy and chivalry’ to the slave-holding way of life: “The civilization of the North was coarse and materialistic. That of the South was scant of shows, but highly refined and sentimental.” The late-nineteenth-century historian William Archibald Dunning, of Columbia University, sent Lost Cause acolytes into leading universities all across the South, ensuring that the academy would tell a harmonious story for most of the twentieth century.

      In that context, the mystery of the First Alabama’s disappearance from history is not so hard to parse. Neither the University of Alabama nor the Alabama Department of Archives and History had any interest in memorializing Alabama’s poorest and least Confederate county. Lost Cause historians regarded men from the hills with scorn; by definition, they couldn’t have done anything noble or meritorious. In their loyalty to the Union, they were, by definition, traitors. Howell Raines begs to differ.

      This is a dense, chewy book. If you don’t already know a Bankhead from a Debardeleben, it might be a bit rich, but I found it delicious.

Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician: a novel

 

Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician: a novel

Daniel Wallace (Doubleday, 2007)

     “Every night Henry remained open to the possibility that this was the night his powers would return.” It’s hard to imagine a more down-on-his-luck man than Henry Walker, Negro Magician, in 1954. He’s been with Jeremiah Mosgrove’s Chinese Circus for four years, and his magical powers are long in the past. He was hired because, if a crowd comes to see a Negro doing magic, and he can’t do any, they’ll at least get some comedy out of it. 

 

      “How low he had fallen. The memory of all he had once been taunted him.” This is a story about memory and storytelling. We’re going to hear his story as he has told it to his friends from the traveling show: JJ the Barker; Rudy, the Strongest Man in the World; Jenny, the Ossified Girl; and Jeremiah Mosgrove himself. 

 

     From Rudy, we get the story of Henry’s family coming down in the world, when he was ten. His mother died of TB, the house was lost to the bank, and his father took a job as janitor at a resort hotel. Henry and his nine-year-old sister, Hannah, had the somewhat illicit run of the place, and Henry has a fairy-tale encounter with a magician. Mr. Sebastian begins by teaching him tricks, proceeding to invest him, apparently, with magic, so powerful that he makes his sister disappear. It’s the kind of disaster a boy might never recover from. 

 

      Mr. Sebastian disappears too, as you might imagine; a desultory police search finds nothing. Henry and his father get on with their Depression lives, and find a manager for Henry’s career as a magician. Tom Hailey spots the pair as desperate enough to go for his suggestion that Henry pass as a Negro, with the aid of a sunlamp and some pills Hailey can provide. When Henry suggests that this might be telling a lie, Hailey says “Lying? Hardly. Do you think I could be in business for as long as I have if I were a liar? Absolutely not. It’s an illusion, Henry. It’s part of the act.”

 

      It’s an illusion that couldn’t be sustained if the black teenager had a white father, and so Henry faces another loss, another disappearance. “It’s not the number of losses but their size that counts….a boy whose mother dies before his ninth birthday, whose luminous sister is stolen from him before his eleventh, and whose father falls into the hopeless arms of death and lies there dying a little bit every day in plain sight of his son and the world–these are the real losses, the ones that tear into the body and bleed the soul.”

 

      This all sounds pretty bleak, but I found it compelling, too. The Chinese Circus is a perfect distillation of sacrifice and loneliness, but Henry has true friends there. The story of his life and losses gets told enough different ways, from enough different angles, to introduce doubt about which is the true story. The magic, for one thing–do you want to believe that Henry could saw a woman in half, and put her back together? Where did it come from, if it’s real, and where did it go? Was Mr. Sebastian the Devil, or was Henry just dazzled?

 

      And of course, a story can be true even when it isn’t quite factual. A story that’s all loss can still be beautiful. We go through life accepting hearsay evidence as the best we can get; we live first, and understand later, if we ever do.

March 1, 2024 by email.

Tom Lake

Tom Lake: A Novel

Ann Patchett (2023, Harper Collins)

    Sixteen-year-old Laura showed up at auditions for Our Town just to help out at the registration table. But you never know: watching the first people trying out gave her a strong sense that she could do a better job, so she filled out a form (casually dropping the ‘u’ from her name), stood still for a Polaroid headshot, and won the role of Emily for the first time.

    That’s chapter one of the story the now fifty-something Lara is telling her three daughters in the summer of 2020. They have a good deal of time for stories, because they are all home in Michigan, on the family cherry farm, working long days to get the sweet fruit in. There aren’t as many migrant fruit pickers as usual, but the daughters have been in these orchards all their lives. It’s familiar work, in beautiful circumstances.

    The story they want is how their mother knew Peter Duke, before he went on to become a dream-boat movie star. A decade before, when they were emerging teenagers, their father had dropped a bombshell: “You know your mother used to date him.” Since they’re now nearly as old as Lara was then, they want the real story. And she’ll give it to them, though not exactly all of it.

    Peter and Lara were thrown together in a season of summer stock at Tom Lake, a pretty little Michigan town whose theater provides work for up-and-coming actors; it’s also a refuge for third-rate television stars whose names will sell tickets. Lara is tapped to play Emily because she knows the part; she’s actually been to Hollywood and made a movie already, but this role is really her wheelhouse.

     Peter is to play her father, Editor Webb. He’s not yet famous, but he’s easily the most charismatic and athletic man in the company, the sort of fellow who can do a handstand on the back of a chair, in the middle of a conversation. Such casual physicality is part and parcel of the intensity of the compressed summer season. The actors indulge in lunchtime swimming and evening tennis, drinking and late nights, romances and betrayals, as though they’ll be twenty-four forever. It’s in the nature of such bubbles, however, to pop and be gone.

     Though her one movie was an artistic success, Lara is thoroughly content to have wound up as a wife and mother in northern Michigan. The setting is an intentional nod to Chekhov; as in The Cherry Orchard, developers “are the enemies of stone fruit. They would leave just enough trees in the ground to justify calling the place Cherry Hills or Cherry Lane, then pull the rest up and build pretty white summer houses with picture windows and wraparound porches, places we could never afford.”

     At best, growing fruit is a tough business: sometimes the crop fails. Other times, everyone grows so much that the price craters, and nobody makes any money. “The farm is either the very paradise of Eden or a crushing burden of disappointment and despair manifested in fruit, depending on the day. I would love to leave my child Eden. The other stuff, less so.” 

    As surely as anything, though, you can’t leave your child only one side of the coin. For every first-act Emily, the smartest girl in school, there’s a third-act Emily, dying in childbirth, leaving a young husband who doesn’t know what hit him. Like Our Town, this book is about growth, change, and memory. It’s about how lovely the ordinary is, and how fleeting; and also how mothers and daughters can never fully know each other’s stories.

Feb 1, 2024

An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination: a Memoir

An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination: a Memoir

Elizabeth McCracken (Little Brown, 2008)

I’m a long-time fan of Elizabeth McCracken’s writing, and I’ve had this on the to-read shelf for a while; now I see what may have held me back. The subject is perhaps the saddest subject possible, a pregnancy that goes to full term and ends without a live baby; on that ground alone, I can’t universally recommend it. On the other hand, perhaps there are people who should be required to read it, including anyone who wants to treat pregnant people, or make laws about them.

You can tell early on, however, that McCracken is going to present to us all kinds of emotions. “As for me, I believe that if there’s a God–and I am as neutral on the subject as is possible–then the most basic proof of His existence is black humor. What else explains it, that odd, reliable comfort that billows up at the worst moments, like a beautiful sunset woven out of the smoke over a bombed city.”

McCracken and her husband, Edward, are both writers. In their early marriage, which is to say, their mid-thirties, they lived between Europe and the US, as teaching jobs or whim might dictate. For economy’s sake, during her pregnancy, they moved to the countryside in Bordeaux. It was a preposterous house, enormous and cold, which had once housed unwed mothers and their offspring. “The house was surrounded by farmland and vineyards, cows out some windows and horses out others, and a vast patio off the summer kitchen…” But all that is lost now, put away with the grief. It’s as if, she says, time forked as in science fiction; on one track, she and Edward can remember this as a happy time, and share its memories with their little boy; “on the other track, the one I accidentally took, he died, and we left France.”

Edward and Elizabeth moved to England for the summer of 2006, then back to the US, and had a second child just fifty-three weeks after the first, complicating the bifurcated track all over again. He’s an eldest child, who had an elder brother once. She wrote this book while he was still a baby, while her memory was fresh, but after it had begun to gel into a comprehensible shape. It’s a writerly response to the nine months that are now missing from her life, because they were so happy when they happened, and then their meaning flipped. McCracken doesn’t want to turn the first child into an angel, nor to erase him completely, so we have this book.

“Perhaps it goes without saying that I believe in the geographic cure. Of course you can’t out-travel sadness. You will find it has smuggled itself along in your suitcase. It coats the camera lens, it flavors the local cuisine….I travel not to get away from my troubles but to see how they look in front of famous buildings or on deserted beaches. I take them for walks. Sometimes I get them drunk. Back at home we generally understand each other better.” That makes sense to me, though I tend to do my traveling in books.

She went to New Orleans eighteen months after Hurricane Katrina, when she was seven months into the new pregnancy, where her sorrow had a sort of family reunion. Not just the orange tattoos on the buildings, but a woman who says to her, “My first child was stillborn, too.” There’s a sort of kinship, mostly invisible, like a very large club you never asked to join.

Obviously, I’m sorry about the death of little Pudding, who acquired this rather Dickensian moniker in his first days as an embryo. I’m happy for the birth of his brother, who must be about to graduate from high school. I’m happy that all that is so far in the past, though, of course, we’ve all had new sorrows to be going on with, and new joys. 

 

Jan 1 2024 

The Worst Hard Time:

The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl

Timothy Egan (2006, Mariner Books)

            Maybe if they hadn’t changed the name from the Great American Desert, those settlers would have known what they were getting into. Early surveyors of the southern half of the Louisiana Purchase found “a desolate waste of uninhabited solitude” in what would become the northern Panhandle of Texas, the no-man’s-land Panhandle of Oklahoma, the southeastern corner of Colorado, and the western half of Kansas. 

 

            After the Civil War, though, an optimistic rebranding as ‘the Great Plains’ went some way to concealing how inhospitable the land actually was. High and flat, with terrible extremes of weather, it had sustained bison and Native Americans, especially after they acquired horses; in fact, the Medicine Lodge Treaty of 1867 promised Comanches, Kiowas, and their kin hunting rights west of the 100^th meridian. You can picture how long that lasted. In the last third of the nineteenth century, Texas slaughtered bison in order to drive the native people out, and liberate the land for cattle ranching. There was plenty of grass: twenty million acres of it in the Texas Panhandle alone, home of the palatial XIT Ranch. The flaw in that program was that while bison can stand the extremes of temperature that the desert offers, cattle are not so hardy. “Droughts, blizzards, grass fires, hail-storms, flash floods, and tornadoes tormented the XIT. A few good years, with good prices, would be followed by too many horrid years and massive die-offs from drought or winter freeze-ups, making shareholders wonder what this cursed piece of the Panhandle was good for anyway.”

            According to the Federal government, at the beginning of the twentieth century, it was good for homesteading. Wells powered by windmills could reach the Ogallala Aquifer, though it might take a hundred feet of drilling. “The pumps broke down often, and parts were hard to come by. But nesters were convinced they had tapped into a vein of life-giving fluid that would never give out.” The soil under the grass seemed like another endless resource, as the Great War made wheat farming a can’t-miss enterprise. For a few years, every acre of sod busted with a plow meant a twenty-fold return, and there seemed no end to it. There were also a couple of boom years at the end of the next decade, and then, coincident with the stock market crash of 1929, it all came to an end. Though every city had starving people, prices for wheat were so low in 1930 and 1931 that piles of it rotted next to the railroad tracks.

            And then the wind began to blow, and bring the dust with it. And in short order, the dirt, as well. The duster was a completely new meteorological phenomenon, rolling along the ground picking up more dirt. There were no dwellings air-tight enough to resist the blowing dirt, even assuming the wind didn’t break the windows, or carry the whole house away. The storms also carried stunning amounts of static electricity, enough to short out a Model T’s motor or blight a watermelon vine. From time to time, they headed east to New York or Washington, D.C., and then on out to sea; more often, they carried Nebraska’s soil to Texas, and right on back again. People kept shovels in their cars to dig out of drifts on the roads, in the intervals between storms that darkened the world too much to even try to drive.

            The Dust Bowl was the worst ecological catastrophe of the twentieth century, but I don’t recall ever hearing much of its history before. Egan bases his telling on small-town newspapers, weather reporting, and interviews with a few hardy survivors, and he does a fine job of seeing both the human scale and the grand expanse. We meet the high schoolers whose class play is cancelled because the school gym has been turned into an infirmary, because so many people are down with dust pneumonia. We meet the tarantulas and the black widow spiders, the rabbits and the grasshoppers. We meet the photographers who left us images of desolation, and federal agents who promulgate their theories of land reclamation as part of the New Deal.

            It’s a captivating story, even when it reads like the Israelites in Egypt; we’re still living in its aftermath, and we forget it at our peril.

Any Good Books, December, 2023