Jacob's Ladder: A Story of Virginia During the War

by Donald McCaig

  JACOB’S LADDER

  * * *

  A STORY OF VIRGINIA DURING THE WAR

  * * *

  Donald McCaig

  Dedication

  FOR ANNE

  When I see you coming I will rise up with

  a shout and come running through the shallow waters,

  reaching for your hand.

  Epigraph

  And Jacob went out from Beersheeba, and went toward Haran. And he lighted upon a certain place, and tarried there all night, because the sun was set; and he took of the stones of that place, and put them for his pillows, and lay down in that place to sleep.

  And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it.

  And, behold, the Lord stood above it, and said, I am the Lord God of Abraham thy father, and the God of Isaac: the land whereon thou liest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed; and thy seed shall be as the dust of the earth, and thou shalt spread abroad to the west, and to the east, and to the north, and to the south: and in thee and in thy seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed.

  And, behold, I am with thee, and will keep thee in all places whither thou goest . . .

  —GENESIS 28:10–15

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  PART ONE

  Antebellum

  PART TWO

  The Bonny Blue Flag

  PART THREE

  The Year of Miracles

  PART FOUR

  Honor

  Acknowledgments

  Afterword

  More praise for JACOB’S LADDER

  Copyright

  Books by Donald Mccaig

  COX’S SNOW

  WINTERS WERE COLDER in those days; they remembered that. And the apples were smaller and tart and some of them so orangy they were more orange than red. And every plantation, even the poorest hardscrabble place, grew its own seed corn, so everyone’s corn was different—some plump-eared, some long and narrow; some flourished on the wet clay ground beside the river, some did best on the dry limestone hills. The sermons were longer in those days; those Baptist preachers could get to rolling at daybreak and never miss a lick until suppertime. Nobody went hungry—at least not anybody anybody knew. There were plenty of chickens and hog meat, and what Master didn’t provide, they could take out of the woods—possum and raccoon and squirrel.

  It was a long time before anybody got around to asking them how it had been in those days, seventy years, and the young people who came around with their spanking new notebooks to ask questions came, often as not, from the big house up on the hill and bore the same names the old masters had.

  One remembered seeing the butternut soldiers that first time they crossed into Maryland. She said they looked lean and dirty. She said they looked like wolves. Another remembered Confederate cavalrymen with dead horses’ hooves slung around their horses’ necks. She understood right away that they cut them off and kept them for their shoes and never forgot the way the bloody things bounced and spattered the living horses’ necks.

  Nobody remembered the day the war started but some remembered the day they hung John Brown because all the coloreds were locked up from dawn to dawn.

  The WPA interviewers were young, many fresh out of college, and their own beliefs about the war were so strong they found it hard to credit the memories of the ancient black people who’d lived through it. “How about Lincoln’s inauguration? You remember when Lincoln became the President?”

  “No, Miss.”

  Some of them remembered the day the general surrendered—how subdued and lost the white folks seemed. And they remembered Cox’s snow.

  “I was three years old, the winter of Cox’s snow,” or “That year I was working at Edgeworth Plantation, the year after Cox’s snow.” Most of them had never learned to read or write and that was how they remembered things. They remembered that the apples were tart and people prayed longer in those days and they remembered Cox’s snow.

  The girl was tired and her feet hurt and she thought she might as well leave her pumps at home and buy a pair of shoes like nurses wore. The heat shimmered over the James River and the air was so thick it was like breathing through wet cloth. The family had gone to the mountains as they did every summer and she surely wished she was with them. She would have lain down flat in the pine needles and looked up through the trees to the pale blue sky and been happy.

  Interview number three this morning and nothing to show for it. It was awfully easy to understand why people called them stupid. Couldn’t remember a thing. “Missy, that was a powerful time ago!” Except for the apples. Her last interview had insisted that the apples had been “the most tart I ever seed.” Now there was useful history—to a pomologist.

  The car Daddy gave her when she graduated from Sweet Briar was an elephant-back coupe, the sort of car salesmen drove. “Plenty of room for your samples,” her brothers had joked, but it was a Chrysler Airflow, at least.

  Things had been getting awfully serious between her and Phil, and she thought a summer apart might give her some breathing room. When Uncle Harry told her about this writer’s job with one of President Roosevelt’s new “alphabet soup” agencies, she jumped at the chance. But was any job worth August in Richmond?

  Perspiration crept down the back of her neck and the leather car seat scorched the back of her legs and would probably leave red marks—not that her interview subjects would notice or care. Her previous interview had taken place in a shotgun shack down the River Road in a room so powerfully “negroid” she’d sat beside the open window so she could breathe. The creature on the bed was so wizened and so swaddled in quilts she wouldn’t have known its sex except for the name on her interview list. The woman had remembered apples. All she could talk about was apples.

  She’d told her supervisor, “How can I write their stories if they have nothing to say?”

  Her daddy had asked: “If those government people are so all-fired curious about what happened on the plantations, why don’t they ask the people who knew what was going on? Why inquire among the servants?” Daddy said it was scandal-mongering, just like that Scottsboro business.

  But the old negroes she’d interviewed weren’t eager to repeat those awful stories. Yes, they knew there were whippings and wicked goings-on, but those things went on at other plantations, no’m, never happened to me. Truth was, the girl’s own Uncle Harry told more horrible stories than the coloreds did. Uncle Harry relished recounting tales of rapes and whippings and outright murders. But then, Uncle Harry had spent an awful lot of time up in New York.

  The onetime capital of the Confederate States of America dozed in the sun. Single-story unpainted clapboard buildings lined avenues broad enough for triumphal parades. So much of the city had been destroyed in the evacuation fire. Only here on Shockoe Hill had the grand old townhouses survived.

  She drove past Mr. Valentine’s house—Mr. Valentine had made his money in tinned meat juice—and the big white mansion Jefferson Davis had lived in. They’d wanted to tear it down but the Daughters of the Confederacy had stepped in and bought it. Fashion had abandoned Shockoe Hill decades ago, and most of the surviving mansions were rooming houses now.

  She parked in the shade of an enormous elm tree which filled most of the tiny front yard of 376 Clay Street. The iron gate dragged as she pushed it open, the sidewalk was cracked, and weeds flourished at the verges. The porch was a pinched vestibule—wood, painted gray—but she could see where they’d remove
d a wider, more generous veranda. The doorbell was encrusted with dried yellow paint, and she poked at it without confidence. The house felt like “nobody home” and she was surprised when the door opened.

  The servant was elderly, black, hunched. She wore a faded green print housedress.

  The girl said, “I am with the Works Progress Administration. Are you Marguerite?”

  “No’m, I ain’t. I’se Kizzy. Miss Marguerite inside.” She squinted against the noontime glare. “Powerful hot today,” she observed. “Powerful.”

  The girl checked her clipboard. “This is 376 Clay Street,” she said. “We are collecting recollections of negroes who were once slaves.”

  “What you want to do that for?”

  A trickle of sweat ran down the girl’s spine. It was unpleasantly intimate. “Marguerite’s on my list. Apparently she has agreed to cooperate.”

  Grudgingly the old black woman stood aside. “You wait in the garden room. I fetch Miss Marguerite. Don’t you go stirrin’ up no trouble.”

  Clipboard tucked under her arm, the girl passed through the long dim hallway. The rooms on both sides were closed off and the hall chairs shrouded in gray muslin. It was so cool goose bumps rose on her arms. At the back of the house she came into a long room facing the garden. The wide French doors stood open and the scent of climbing roses perfumed the air. A carpet of primroses bordered the brick path. The sun didn’t penetrate the canopy of tremendous old trees, and the room—done in shades of pale blue—was cool and comfortable. Unlike the front of the house, this room was lived in. Maritime lithographs were grouped on the walls: feral blockade runners plowed through crashing seas, pursued by angry vessels whose decks were wreathed in cannon smoke. Magazines were stacked on the table beside a plump couch: chintz patterned in oversized flowers. Reading glasses of a severe old-fashioned style peeped beneath a clot of blue yarn in a wicker sewing basket.

  Idly, the girl leafed through the magazines—Virginia Cavalcade, The Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, quarterlies of modest size but rigorous typeface from university history departments. Perhaps her hostess was the wife of a retired professor—or his widow—made comfortable by family money. The girl rather looked forward to meeting her. Afterward, of course, she’d have to interview the subject: Kizzy, no doubt.

  Who poked her head through the door. “Miss Marguerite wants to know, do you want tea? She say she’s having some.”

  “Tea would be nice, thank you.” The girl pictured a tall glass, full to the brim with icy tea. Perhaps a sprig of mint.

  The room was quiet. Though traffic passed on the streets outside, the loudest sounds that penetrated here were polite birdsongs from the garden. The perspiration dried on the girl’s forehead and her underarms were unpleasantly sticky and she hoped she didn’t know the hostess, that there was no family connection. It was one thing to traipse off for a bohemian summer interviewing negroes and quite another to do so in the presence of one’s respectable connections.

  The woman, ancient and no taller than a child of ten, was dressed simply in a silk wrap. Both hands gripped a gnarled black walking stick which preceded her every step. Her hair was wispy and white. The knuckles that clasped the head of the stick had been thickened and twisted by arthritis. When the girl rose to her feet, the woman motioned impatiently for her to sit. Her skin was yellowish-gray, like medieval parchment, and the bones of her skull were visible just beneath the skin.

  Kizzy brought in a tray: a tea service, and two frail porcelain cups. Hot tea. The thought of it brought fresh perspiration to the girl’s brow.

  “I have never become accustomed to tea with ice in it,” Miss Marguerite said. “During the War, coffee was scarce, but tea was practically unobtainable. We had our last cup of tea the week the Wild Darrell went down. After we fled Wilmington, there was nothing but sassafras.” She arranged herself at the end of the couch and leaned her stout stick against the arm. “I am told the government is interviewing those who were once slaves. That is correct?”

  The girl made a face. “I don’t make much progress, I’m afraid. The ex-slaves still alive are not always—well—compos mentis.” She laughed. “Perhaps they don’t wish to speak frankly to a . . . a . . . white person. We haven’t always treated them with kindness, you know.”

  The old woman produced a parsimonious smile. “I believe I’ve heard something about that.”

  The girl wondered why people shrank when they got old. She poured plenty of cream into her tea.

  “Most of those who knew slavery best have passed on,” the woman said. “And many others speak only negro patois. It is useful if you are a slave to have a language to which the masters do not have perfect access. There is some slight advantage to understanding them while they cannot understand you.”

  “Has Kizzy been with your family long?”

  The old woman smiled. “Patience, child. As you grow older you will appreciate its merits. After my son finished Harvard, he went west. Los Angeles. I intended him to stay in Richmond with the bank, but try and tell him anything. My grandson Joshua does something with the Los Angeles Water Authority. What do you know about water authorities?”

  “Not much, I’m afraid.”

  The old woman drew a shawl about her shoulders. “I see you find the day uncomfortable. Would that I did. Children, you know, can abide the most daunting cold. I fear my plumbing is clogged with scale. I dread the winter.”

  The girl’s Longines had been a graduation present, and each time she consulted it, she felt newly important. “This tea is refreshing,” she said. “Who would have thought it—hot tea on a hot day.”

  The old woman set her cup on its saucer without a clink. “What is the purpose of your inquiry?”

  The girl lifted her shoulders. “ ‘Government make-work,’ Daddy calls it. All through the South, WPA writers are conducting interviews. There are so few written records.”

  “I suppose,” the old woman replied distantly. “And once the WPA has this information, what does it propose doing with it?”

  “One day it may be of interest to historians.” She gestured at the stack of university quarterlies. “Was your husband an historian, by chance?”

  “Oh, no. My husband was a gentleman.”

  “I’m sure, ma’am. I had noticed your historical interests and thought . . . Might I . . . Perhaps I could speak to Kizzy?”

  The old woman’s sigh emitted no more air than a bird’s. “My doctor tells me I shan’t survive much longer and I’m not certain I wish to. We’ve had a death in the family.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry.”

  “Yes.” The old woman’s milky eyes were blank. “Most unexpected.” The birds sang their self-involved tunes. The woman’s voice strengthened. “My family lives on the other coast and can no longer be hurt by the truth. When I read of your project, after due consideration, I wrote the Senator and asked to be included.” She cleared her throat. “Would you ask Kizzy to bring me a glass of water? The other homes on this street are on municipal water, but we have always had our own well.”

  As they waited the old woman remarked, “Although we have many negro depositors, our bank is not known as a negro bank. Virginia’s negro banks failed to reopen after President Roosevelt’s bank holiday, did you know that?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Insufficient capital, too many small loans.” She drank the water and dismissed Kizzy, who seemed inclined to linger. She rubbed her high forehead. She said, “I became a woman the year of Cox’s snow. I don’t know how old I was, twelve or thirteen, I suppose, and when I had my first effusion, I mentioned it to no one. The whites believed that we primitives matured younger than white girls, and their theory was of economic benefit to them, since a negress’s greatest value was her ability to bear children. We were bred as early and frequently as could be managed within the decencies of Christian convention. . . .”

  A chill raised goose bumps down the girl’s neck and arms. She was suddenly nauseated. “Excuse me,�
�� the girl whispered. “Do I understand you correctly . . . ?”

  The old woman looked into her cool, orderly garden. “My mother was light-skinned, and of course my father, the Reverend Mitchell, was white. It is curious, is it not, that the lighter-skinned we are, the more anxious the dominant race is to mate with us. Those first white men to sleep with the dark-skinned daughters of Africa were such bold pioneers!” She raised her invisible eyebrows mockingly. “I suppose it is more agreeable to make love with creatures that closely resemble oneself. Narcissism is one of the South’s notable frailties.”

  The girl wanted to leave this place. Surely she could leave.

  The old woman sipped, then swallowed, her throat clenching painfully. “The city wishes me to cap my well and accept their water, which, I believe, they pump from the James. I tell them I have lived beside the James for too many years to have any great desire to drink of it.

  “That January it started snowing on Thursday afternoon and continued through Sunday—the winter had been uncommonly mild and we had no reason to anticipate harsher weather. As I have told you, I had recently become a woman but was determined to conceal my new circumstances. I was a house servant, Mistress Abigail’s personal servant, and intended to retain my position at any hazard. Mistress Abigail’s children were grown, her daughter, Leona, married with two children of her own. Her son, Duncan, was her husband’s confidant and favored companion, and I expect Miss Abigail was lonely. I was a clever child and unusually confident. I thought I was ‘the cat’s pajamas.’ ” The old woman paused. “You young people still employ that expression, do you not?”

  The girl felt trapped. “I don’t know.”

  “My grandson William was annoyingly fond of it. He owned a Stutz roadster. I haven’t seen a Stutz in some time. Do they still manufacture them?”

  “I don’t believe so, no.”

  “My grandson was fond of his.”

  “You . . . you are a negress?”