by Ann Rinaldi
But in our hearts, here in the Stryker house, we have other specimens that attest to the fierceness of the fighting. As has everyone in Gettysburg.
And then there is this:
Those trees on Culp's Hill that waved in the wind that night when I sat holding my brother David's head in my lap when he died, all those beautiful, wounded trees eventually died of lead poisoning. But they still wave their branches in my heart.
* * *
AUTHOR'S NOTE
I WAS HESITANT, at first, to write yet another novel about Gettysburg. So many have been written, so many excellent ones. Did I dare even approach the subject with so much competition out there?
Then, simply because I could not restrain myself, I started to research the subject anyway. And I found things that I had never read about, matters never touched on in any novel I had read about Gettysburg, or, if touched on, just mentioned in passing. These were things that were never made an important part of any story, never integrated into any story; yet they jumped out and hit me in the face.
In particular, I am writing about the presence of between two hundred and four hundred free American black people living and working in the town.
And so I knew that if I made them a part of the story, at the very least, I could do my book and it would be different.
For instance, I intended to focus not on the battle but on my one family in town, the Strykers, fictional people trying to make it through this difficult (to put it mildly) period, as did all the real families in town at the time.
When I was a columnist on the Trentonian, the Pulitzer Prize—winning newspaper in Trenton, New Jersey, my editor F. Gilman Spencer (who won the Pulitzer Prize), always told me, when a major story or event or riot broke out in town (as often happened), "Go out in the streets, Ann, and talk to the everyday people and get their reactions, their feelings."
So that was my "beat." The everyday people. And still, in my novels now, I make it my beat, as I did in this one. I was not there in the middle of Pickett's Charge, or on Culp's Hill (until after the battle, anyway) or on Little Roundtop.
I was with Tacy Stryker in the Stryker House. I was with her when she went to visit Jennie Wade, her long-time friend, and argued with her. I was with her when she ran off in the night to find her friend Marvelous and bring her home, when she and the other girls ran off to the Lutheran Theological Seminary, to the top floor, to look out with binoculars at the world around them.
I was with her when she visited Marvelous and her mother in Christ Lutheran Church, and when she shivered, frightened, in the cellar of her home with the others, while shells exploded all around them.
There are no particular acts of bravery in the book for Tacy to accomplish. Through most of it she is scared, confused, uncertain, angry, and, in general, making the wrong choices, according to her brother David. She asks many questions but gets no final answers.
But she does come through, and that, in the end, seems to be enough for the moment, when she thought she never would come through, and coming through seems to be a gift for them all.
Still, she has questions. "How can God give us a blue sky and sun and singing birds, like it's an ordinary day, when David is dead?" she asks of her brother Joel.
His answer? He is older, wiser, an officer in the cavalry. He just shakes his head and says, "I haven't even had my coffee yet."
But she also has come to some conclusions: "When I grow up, things are going to be different. Women are going to be allowed to do things." And, as far as her older brother Brandon is concerned, he who is going to look after her and has said, "Something tells me I have a lot of work to do," she thinks:
"Today, is the first time I'd seen him smile in a long time. Something tells me I have a lot of work to do, too."
So as I say, Tacy Stryker has made no great strides in my book to shake up the world, or even the town of Gettysburg. She has not played the part of a spy for the Yankees, run any secret messages, saved the day for General John Buford (as a matter of fact, Buford personally kicked her and her friends out of the Lutheran Theological Seminary).
Of course, she held her brother David until he died on Culp's Hill, when others might have left, where they were burying bodies after the battle was over and he took his stand in guarding the dead. She waited alone in the dark for someone, anyone, to come.
No, she would not leave him there. He was, after all, her brother David, who had been so mean to her after her pa went to war as a surgeon and left him in charge.
So mean. He'd made her cry so many times. How could she leave him here now, alone and dead?
Some would. But not Tacy. So she waited in the dark with his head in her lap, for someone to come.
***
THE STRYKER FAMILY in my book is fictional. But many of the other characters are true to life as I have found them in research.
Jennie Wade, of course, is not only true to life, but famous.
She was the only civilian to have been killed in the battle of Gettysburg. She and her mother were in the house of her older sister, Mrs. John McClellan, on Baltimore Street, helping her sister with a six-day-old baby. Jennie was kneading bread dough on that Friday morning of the battle when a Rebel sniper's bullet came smashing through the door. It hit Jennie and she slumped to the floor, dead.
In my book I have Jennie Wade in a fictionalized past romance with David Stryker and a friendship with Tacy.
To this day she is a heroine in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
General John Buford, of course, is real, as was the unfortunate General John Reynolds, who was killed almost instantly at Gettysburg.
Marvelous is a character of my own creation. Although the man I picked for her father, Basil Biggs, actually lived. He was described in A Strange and Blighted Land, one research book I used, as "colored, of Gettysburg, was given the contract for disinterring the bodies on the field. He had a crew of eight or ten negroes in his employ."
Mr. Cameron, as well as Nancy Burns's old grandfather, in his seventies, who went off to fight, and even the horses who ran down the street and through the hallway of the house three doors from Tacy's, I got from research.
I got all the background for my story from research, of course. The rest, the interaction between the characters, I made up. I tried to keep as close as I could to the schedule of the battle going on as I led my characters through their paces; that is, when the shelling started and stopped, when the Rebs were prominent in town, ruling the place and when they were losing and just sneaking about. The provost marshall did issue an order prohibiting the exhuming of bodies. My research shows two conflicting dates for this. A Strange and Blighted Land cites August tenth, and Uncertainty and Dread, another book I used for research, says, "The business [of exhuming the bodies] was brisk until the heat of the summer became so severe that the Provost Marshall halted the exhuming of graves on the field until the cool of October."
I made my own decision as to the date for the provost marshal's order, for the sake of story.
I do believe that the presence of two hundred to four hundred free black Americans living in Gettysburg at the time of the battle needed to be addressed in some fashion in my book, since it has not, to my knowledge, been in any work of fiction yet published.
Some of those free black Americans were captured when the Rebels came into town and taken into slavery, as Mary told the Strykers when she and Marvelous escaped and fled to the Stryker house. I tried to deal with the possibility of Marvelous being taken when the Confederates forced themselves into the Stryker house and Tacy and Marvelous had to feed them breakfast. It was then that my fictional Private Joel Walker and Private John Calhoun of the Rebel army tell Tacy that because Marvelous is black she is "up for grabs," saying, "We can take this darkie girl here [with us if we want to]."
Now Tacy gets the chance to finally stand up and speak for what she believes in. She speaks out for her friend Marvelous, though she does not know what to say. If she had her brother David's Colt .45, sh
e thinks, she would kill them, never mind that she does not know how to use it. She would learn how to use it. Instead, she uses her words, all she has.
She begs Lieutenant Gregory Lewis Marshall, their commanding officer, for her friend's freedom, begs him to allow her friend to stay in Gettysburg, free as she is now, and not take her south to be a slave. She uses the only words she has. "She is a good person. And she is my friend."
Fortunately, the lieutenant considers himself insignificant in the scheme of things. Nobody ever asks his opinion about important matters, he tells Tacy. He is never allowed to make decisions. And he himself has lost many friends in this war. But here and now he is being asked to make an important decision and so, by the gods, he will make one.
Marvelous can stay.
Tacy has accomplished something important here, then. No, she has not saved the town. She cannot save her brother David in the end, or her father. Life does to her and all of them what it will. And she still has questions that she needs answered when the book ends. As do we all.
Unfortunately, I cannot answer them all for my readers, but hopefully I have given you all a good read and something to think about.
* * *
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Adams, George Worthington. Doctors in Blue. Dayton, Ohio: Press of Morningside, 1985.
Alleman, Mrs. Tillie Pierce. At Gettysburg, or What a Girl Saw and Heard and Saw of the Battle. New York: W. Lake Borland, 1889.
Bennett, Gerald R. Uncertainty and Dread: The Ordeal Endured by the Citizens of Gettysburg. Camp Hill, Pa.: Plank's Suburban Press, 1997.
Burke, Davis. The Civil War: Strange and Fascinating Facts. New York: Fairfax Press, 1982.
Coco, Gregory A. A Strange and Blighted Land: Gettysburg, The Aftermath of a Battle. Gettysburg, Pa.: Thomas Publications, 1995.
Conklin, E. F. Women at Gettysburg, 1863. Gettysburg, Pa.: Thomas Publications, 1993.
Faust, Patricia L., editor. Historical Times Illustrated Encyclopedia of the Civil War. New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1986.
Varhola, Michael J. Everyday Life During the Civil War: A Guide for Writers, Students and Historians. Cincinnati, Ohio: Writer's Digest Books, 1999.
Williams, William G. Days of Darkness: Gettysburg Civilians. New York: Berkley Books, 1990.
* * *
