The Bride of Texas, page 54
9
When the war was over, Jasmine left Cincinnati and vanished without a trace. We didn’t get a single letter from her. Shortly afterwards we moved to Chicago, where Humphrey had been given a professorship at the university. A letter I sent her from there care of Mr. Carmichael’s plantation was returned as un-deliverable several months later.
Weeks and months passed, and then years. The newspapers carried strange and unpleasant news from the South. Hordes of freed slaves poured into Chicago, and they soon created a ring of poverty around the noisy and dynamic city centre. There were also spectacular, if not entirely respectable, tales of success. Humphrey tried to see things in philosophical terms; the first step is freedom, he would say, then comes knowledge, then better living standards, and finally full equality of rights and prosperity. He spoke beautifully about it, and everything seemed simple and only a matter of time. I must say that he didn’t stop at philosophy. He became the heart and soul of all kinds of committees founded by the abolitionists while liberated slaves still interested them. He opened schools for Negro children and set up night courses for their parents. Then, unexpectedly, he died.
I was barely forty. I was still writing novels — not as many as before, because I didn’t need to. I had money enough. The children were growing and I had already put more in their bank accounts than they deserved — but no, they were good children. Loretta was a pretty and surprisingly feminine young lady. Jimmy was a diligent student and a star pupil at the Latin school in Chicago. And I went on writing. Why? Because I enjoyed it. Because my female readership was growing. And because, in between assembling the stories my readers were waiting for — stories that resembled reality as they wished it to be — I was working on Carolina Bride.
I never stopped thinking of Jasmine. It occasionally struck me as odd that I should think of her so much; I felt almost guilty about it, because I thought far less about my own former tomboy, even after she got engaged to a young New York attorney who had entered politics and was starting to get rich, quickly, steadily, and considerably. I preferred not to ask how; it was during General Grant’s infamous second term as president.
Once, a few years before Humphrey died, after I had spent a week wrestling with my serious novel without managing to get a single line on paper, I was overcome by an unbearable longing to see that lovely girl who used to pour Ambrose’s cognac in silence and then stare out the window at the stars over Cincinnati — who had once asked me anxiously, “Miz Tracy, do you think that — they’ll make peace?” My longing was so great that I dropped everything and set out by train to Mr. Carmichael’s plantation in Carolina.
I had never been there, and the ruins that remained of the plantation could only hint at its former beauty. The big house had been hit by cannon-fire and only a few scorched timbers remained, along with four Doric pillars that had nothing left to support. Even the Negro cabins looked run down. A few goats grazed behind them and an old man in tattered clothes sat in front of one of them, watching me with bloodshot eyes as I stumbled amid the wreckage of faded glory. I spoke to him and he mumbled something in reply.
“I’m looking for a young coloured woman called Jasmine,” I said.
The old man just shook his head.
“Or a cook that everyone here knew. She had only one leg. Her name was Gospel.”
Nothing.
“Wasn’t this Mr. Carmichael’s plantation?”
“Can’t say,” said the old man. “I ain’t from here.”
This poor unfortunate had joined the northward exodus, but when he couldn’t go any farther he’d been left to die at the Methodist manse in the village. The minister’s wife had fed him chicken soup and put him back on his unsteady feet, and now he was tending the minister’s goats out here and gazing longingly to the North, where he no longer had the strength to go.
I returned to my hired carriage and drove into the village, with the image of the lovely girl and her no-account Hasdrubal before my eyes.
The minister didn’t know them either. He had come to the village during the last year of the war, and had only witnessed the general exodus of Negroes from the plantation. The owner had died earlier, during a bombardment by General Sherman’s wild cannoneers. I went home to Chicago.
I reluctantly returned to Carolina Bride and, with much editing, the kind my editor would have sought in vain in my other manuscripts, I tried to put into words reality as I remembered it, not as I wished it could have been. I reread what Poe had to say about consistency of tone, about how close poetry is to music. I even made a fair copy of excerpts from Jasmine’s story for Humphrey to read, something I had never done before. Humphrey used to tease me about my novels, and after his own literary fiasco I was reluctant to hurt his pride. But by then he had gotten over it, and besides, Jasmine’s story was no trip to the altar. It was serious; it mirrored real life — not mine, of course, but the life of my lovely girl and her race. Like so many professors, Humphrey understood literature better than I did; he just didn’t know how to write it.
Humphrey endorsed my theory about consistency of tone, although he did remark that Poe was thinking of forms smaller than a novel. And in Dickens, he reflected, one could hardly speak of consistency of tone, but there was no denying that Dickens mirrored life. “It’s odd. If there is anything at all to your — mm — artifacts, Lorraine, then it is consistency of tone. They are essentially farces in which nothing serious happens and nothing serious is said.”
This got me thinking. That couldn’t have been what Poe meant by consistency of tone. Or was it? He said, “In the whole composition there should be no word written of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the pre-established design.” If my trips to the altar had any compositional quality at all, it was in the way the tones harmonized with each other. There were no dissonant modulations to disturb their simple melodies. And hadn’t Poe also written that “He who pleases is of more importance to his fellow men than he who instructs”? Yes, perhaps — but I recalled Humphrey lifting a volume of Thackeray as if it were the host, and I thought of Gospel and her spell-casting son, of the gastronomical passion of the plantation-owner killed by Sherman’s artillery, of the philosophical debate between the benign slave-owner and the abolitionist manufacturer from the North as Jasmine had described it to me. And I struggled with my Carolina Bride.
Then Humphrey died, and in my grief, which lasted many long months, the work started to go amazingly well.
Everything in the manuscript was based on fact; unlike my stories of nuptial fun and games, Carolina Bride was written with exhaustive preparation. Everything I wrote was based on first-hand testimony and evidence I found in abolitionist newspapers, in Harriet Beecher Stowe, in Frederick Douglass, in Dickens’s American Notes, or in what Jasmine herself had told me or what I had observed myself during our occasional trips to the South.
And the plot unfolded. Jasmine and Hasdrubal attempted to travel north with the Underground Railroad, but only Jasmine made it. Bounty-hunters caught Hasdrubal and after many dramatic vicissitudes (all taken from life) the former domestic slave and the object of so much feminine attention found himself on a rice plantation in the deep South. Old Gospel, now an invalid living on the charity of the inheritor of the plantation, hanged herself soon after they sold her son Hasdrubal down the river. The novel was already five hundred pages long, and everything in it had actually happened. I had merely gathered all these authentic tales into a single story. But because I had managed to maintain a consistency of tone, the effect was not that of an unrealistic compilation, but rather that of a mournful epic critique of the times, and of one part of our beloved and afflicted Union.
The bass line — no, the ubiquitous lovely soprano — of the story was Jasmine, that sad caramel damsel, and her fear when she drummed up the courage to ask Ambrose about the war — because my assurances were not enough for her, since I was not a soldier — and the general, upset by his difficulties with Vallandigham, looked out at her from behind his chestnut side-whiskers and moustache and said, “When we defeat them, child! Not sooner!” Jasmine stepping off the train, going all the way to the Carmichael plantation on foot but finding it in ruins. The ancient Negro couple who had stayed there, eking a living out of what they could harvest from a wretched little field, telling her how Hasdrubal had been sold on the eve of good old Massa Lincum’s great war, and Jasmine travelling south, asking around, trying to get close to her sweetheart through the chaos that was Dixie.
The ugliest of the strange new events that the papers had started writing about was the appearance of a hitherto unknown organization of white Southerners. Jasmine finally meets Hasdrubal, but their bliss is only a few days old when the organization strikes. Hasdrubal winds up hanging from a tree, a burning cross behind him.
Jasmine stands above the morass of failed escapes, all of it painted in the sombre colours of mourning, the sombre consistency of tone, all of it the awful truth. As I dipped my pen to finish writing that song — and I’m not ashamed to admit I had tears in my eyes — the postman arrived with a large coloured envelope bearing the letterhead of a Chicago restaurant.
10
The disgrace — and if it was a disgrace, then whose was it? — in Chicago was not Ambrose’s final calamity. “The evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones,” wrote Shakespeare, and this applies exactly to Ambrose, if we replace the word evil with calamity or muddle or the greyer word setback: Fredericksburg, Chicago, the bungled opportunity at Petersburg that entered the history of the war as “The Crater”. I heard about what preceded the latter long after the war, from the lips of First Lieutenant Duty, in a Chicago restaurant called The Witches’ Kitchen.
Ambrose’s only successes were in trivial matters. They were not the stuff of ballads. Two months after the embarrassment in Chicago, after he had managed the exemplary transfer of troops to reinforce Grant at Vicksburg, while he was pondering the operation against Braxton Bragg across the Cumberland Hills to Knoxville in eastern Tennessee, he came up with an idea that might have inspired military bards to poetry, had it not originated with Burnside the bungler. He even carried his idea out, but — how else? — in a manner far less spectacular than Sherman would do it later, in Georgia.
He simply abandoned the clumsy wagons, which were the standard means of transporting supplies but a terrible hindrance on the steep hills, and ordered his soldiers to live on what they could pillage during their march across the picturesque mountain ranges. As a result, the advance of the Twenty-third Corps was so rapid that it took Rebel General Buckner completely by surprise in Knoxville. Two and a half thousand bewildered prisoners fell into Ambrose’s hands, along with eleven field-guns. Before leaving Knoxville, he developed a strategic plan for a march from eastern Tennessee across Georgia to the sea and wrote to Halleck, “It is proposed to take no trains but to live upon the country and the supplies at the enemy’s depots, destroying such as we do not use.… from the celerity of our movement and the destruction of bridges, etc. in our rear, the chances of escaping material injury from pursuit are in our favour. Our chief loss would probably be from stragglers.”
Halleck’s reply back then was terse and negative: “Distant expeditions into Georgia are not now contemplated.” The letter travelled the labyrinths of Washington corridors and eventually came into Sherman’s hands, and exactly a year later it was he who marched his great army swiftly across Georgia to Savannah and the sea. Later on, he was heard to say that he had had Ambrose’s plan “in his mind’s eye”.
It’s just as Maggie said: it’s not what a person wants in life, it’s what he accomplishes.
Ambrose wanted a lot — above all, to help the Union win the war. But what he accomplished were trivial things, or rather, the kind of things they don’t write ballads about: the orderly retreat at Bull Run, the first, though minor, Union army victory at Roanoke Island, the picturesque if undramatic march across the Cumberland Hills, and the defence of Knoxville, organizing all sorts of troop transfers, often in large numbers, which were always successfully (that is to say, professionally) executed. There was nothing in them to inspire the bards.
And then he caught Vallandigham.
11
Whenever I think of that man, I see in my mind a stretcher and on it a dying old man being carried to the gallows. The final court case of Vallandigham’s life also took place in the shadow of that inhuman apparatus. By then, in 1871, Vallandigham’s political career was only a memory. He’d finally realized that he was washed up and had returned to his law practice, which he conducted on the same principle as he had politics: nothing mattered but winning. He saw the presumption of innocence not as a challenge to the court to prove guilt, but as a challenge to himself to prove his skill as a lawyer. So he sent a dying old man to Golgotha on a stretcher.
Thomas McGehan was not a dying old man. The face in the drawing that stared out at me from the Dayton Evening Herald was that of a brute from a dark back alley, who hires out his fists for dirty work and who therefore has friends among politicians. Those friends asked Vallandigham to defend him, and Vallandigham accepted.
When Vallandigham was escorted to General Rosecrans’s headquarters to be shipped across the lines to the Rebels the following day, they say that Rosecrans, who saw the Copperhead hero as a traitor, said his farewell to him over a dinner that lasted until well past midnight, like a maudlin Pilate with freshly washed hands. I believe it, because in the courtroom in Warren District, when Vallandigham described the fist-fight between two scoundrels that put an end to the earthly sojourn of a blackguard named Tom Myers, he brought tears to the eyes of eight of the twelve jurors. That was why, at three in the afternoon, the judge adjourned the court until the following morning.
It was a sunny afternoon, and Vallandigham and the young lawyer Snopes went for a stroll in the woods. There, in the green shade of the elm trees, Vallandigham told Snopes his hypothesis about the encounter between McGehan and Myers.
The two men had got into a fight — all the witnesses agreed on that — and McGehan had knocked Myers to his knees. The furious Myers had reached into his breast pocket for a pistol and, as he tried to get up and pull out the gun at the same time, the trigger had caught on the edge of the pocket, the pistol had gone off, and the bullet had penetrated the left ventricle of Myers’s heart, with fatal results.
“And do you believe that’s what happened, sir?” asked young Snopes.
“I think it could have.”
“It sounds improbable,” said Snopes.
“It must be presented to the jury so as to sound probable.”
“But do you really think that’s what happened? After all, McGehan fired a shot too —”
“I think it could have happened. That’s why it’s my duty as attorney for the defence to convince the jury that it did.”
The young lawyer looked at the sun-drenched landscape, the butterflies, the beauties of life. “What if the prosecution brings in evidence that it wasn’t like that at all?”
Vallandigham smiled at the innocent youth. “There is very little evidence a good lawyer can’t discredit.”
“Even if he believes it’s true?”
“All the more reason to discredit it. He could be wrong in that belief, and defending a client is a matter of professional honour.”
After that, Snopes said nothing. When the trial was over he wrote an article about it, which was in fact Vallandigham’s obituary. During their stroll in the woods, Vallandigham had fired several shots at a piece of tweed fabric that he had Snopes hold at various distances from the gun barrel, to find out how close the fabric had to be to show powder burns. Then they returned to the hotel, where Vallandigham invited Snopes up to his room for a drink of whisky. He placed the pistol on the mantelpiece and poured Snopes a drink from a bottle that stood beside it.
Snopes noticed another gun on the mantel, identical to the one Vallandigham had been experimenting with. He didn’t mention it, though.
The next day the courtroom was crowded. Some of those present had faces like McGehan, others like Myers, and their rumpled clothes indicated that they had had to fight their way into the courtroom. Vallandigham entered, and the jury — or most of the jury — softened even before Comely Clem could open his mouth and start to demonstrate his hypothesis about the unfortunate accident. He stood with his feet apart, pulled a pistol out of his pocket, cocked it, and addressed the jury: “This is about how Myers was holding his weapon. Of course, he wasn’t standing, he was rising from his knees.” As a mouse’s eyes follow a snake, the jury watched the barrel of Vallandigham’s pistol as he turned it towards his chest.
“Something like this,” said Comely Clem.
12
Witnesses differ on what exactly Vallandigham said when the bullet entered his chest from the loaded pistol, the one that had lain on the mantel beside the whisky bottle. According to some he said, “God, I’ve shot myself!” According to the Dayton Journal he cried out, “Oh, murder! Oh, what a blunder!”
I think the latter version fits him better.
He fought for his life until the morning of the second day. He fought hard, the way people fight for their lives when they are convinced there’s nothing beyond this life. They even brought McGehan to see him, and McGehan shed tears as well — probably genuine tears, since his chance to escape the gallows lay on that hotel-room bed.
In the end, though, McGehan did escape the gallows. Vallandigham’s death affected the jury like a final unspoken oration for the defence, and not even the insipid performance of his successor, young Snopes, was of any help to the prosecutor. McGehan, who would not have needed a stretcher, eluded the gallows. Several years later, he died by another man’s bullet, and that event did not end with a hanging either, because the gun had clearly been fired in self-defence.
