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

by Donald McCaig

  “If it’s not too nasty for Aunt Opal, why’s it too nasty for me?”

  Aunt Opal choked and coughed and set her buttermilk down. “Went down the wrong pipe, I reckon,” she said.

  “Aunt Opal, did Miss Sallie help you with the stock?”

  “Reckon she did. Ewes used to follow Miss Sallie like they was dogs.”

  Abigail adjusted the spindle. “The world won’t ever be the same. But it wasn’t such a bad old world, was it?”

  Aunt Opal said, “I had a good life with old Uther, better than bein’ his wife. I never took to that foolishness. Never wanted to let no man do with me what they want. Now you never mind, Miss Pauline.” She shook a finger. “That’s all I’m going to say about it.”

  “Like the horses and cows,” Pauline said, giggling at her own comparison.

  “A might too much like the horses and cows for my liking,” Aunt Opal observed. “Take these glasses back to the kitchen house, and bring buttermilk up to your Grandma Gatewood and your mama. They prayin’ up a thirst.”

  After Pauline was gone, Aunt Opal removed a rolag from between two ancient wool cards. “Don’t know what we’d do, we bust one of these,” she said. “No way of getting another.”

  “We must make do with what we have.”

  “Every month we havin’ less to make do with,” Aunt Opal said. “Next time you write Master Duncan, don’t write none about the wool maggots. When he was little them things made him sick.”

  “I pray for Duncan. Seeking forage for horses cannot be so very dangerous. Poor Catesby. Poor dear Catesby.”

  “Master Duncan, he was a sunny child. Never did worry overmuch. Miss Sallie, oh, she were a fierce scholar. She’d be goin’ over her readin’ book and her little brow all knotted up. Master Duncan, he take one glance, learn it more or less, and Uther’d correct him and Duncan would laugh like the correction was the least thing in the world. Miss Sallie—how she hate to be corrected. She’d scowl and lift up her head, but next time she’d get it right, sure.”

  “I do wish Leona would get some fresh air. No doubt Grandmother Gatewood is an admirable women, yet . . .”

  “Listenin’ to that woman say grace is like taking a whippin’.”

  The wheel droned and thumped. Aunt Opal offered to take a turn.

  “I’ll keep at it for a time. It is so soothing. Sometimes when I spin by myself, I am almost mesmerized.”

  “When you think this war be done with?”

  Abigail frowned. “Samuel says that if we don’t lose Richmond or Atlanta, Lincoln cannot be reelected in November. Mr. Lincoln’s subjects are losing patience. Even yankees, it seems, have their limits. They say seven thousand Federals fell at Cold Harbor in just eight minutes. I can scarcely picture it. Although I suppose they deserved their losses, I am sick at heart to think of the misery General Grant has visited upon his own people.”

  “They’s right smart Federals yet.” Aunt Opal said, and her satisfaction was unmistakable.

  Abigail had heard that note before and did not remark on it. If Aunt Opal had mixed loyalties in this war, what could be expected? The Federals had promised the coloreds so much! “I read in the Richmond Examiner that a colored body servant, Levi Miller, fought with distinction at Spotsylvania. His captain praised his courage and military prowess. His was a Texas regiment, I believe.”

  “Coloreds fighting with the yankees too,” Aunt Opal noted. “Plenty coloreds.”

  Abigail sighed. “Perhaps you should take the wheel after all. I feel a headache coming on.”

  “This war!” Aunt Opal burst out. “I fears for Master Duncan and Miss Sallie and all our other folks. I hate that young Master Thomas is goin’ to enlist. I thinks about Jesse most every night and pray he got safe somewhere. I goes up to the cemetery yesterday and put a iris on Master Catesby’s grave. Why these things got to happen? Life too bitter in these times.”

  Abigail sniffed, blew her nose, said, “Aren’t the irises beautiful this year? I believe I’ve never seen them so blue. And the peonies. I was thinking I might walk down by the river and gather a bouquet for my room.”

  Aunt Opal worked the wheel more vigorously than Miss Abigail had, and the treadle clumped the porch. “I don’t like them green tomatoes fried up,” she said. “I likes to wait for the first ripe one and put salt on it and bite into it when it’s still warm from the sun.”

  MASTER ABRAHAM PAYS A CALL

  OUTSIDE PETERSBURG, VIRGINIA

  JUNE 21, 1864

  THE PITILESS DRUM rattled its summons and the soldiers of the 23rd USCT rolled out of their blankets and rubbed their eyes praying some mistake had been made: surely that was the moon, still big in the sky. By four o’clock they’d visited the sinks, shaved in cold water, and gathered on the red clay drill field they shared with two other colored regiments. Officers checked every man’s face against the muster roll. Master Lincoln’s army was as afraid of a man running away as old Master had been. Once everybody’d been counted and named, they were free to boil their breakfast except for those who went to see Surgeon—Acting Surgeon—Saxton. They had the flux, soldier’s disease, pneumonia, or cholera, and most who went to the big hospital at City Point never came back.

  After breakfast, as the sun was peeking over the horizon, they mustered again again for work details: “Twenty men under Lieutenant Seibel to report to the engineers.” “Fifty men under Captain Stiles to the wharves.” Somebody had to lay track for the railroad General Grant was building from City Point to his front lines, and somebody had to unload supplies and warehouse them. Somebody had to dig the canal through a bend in the James so the navy could get upstream of the obstacles the Johnnies had sunk in the river.

  Those who didn’t go out on working parties drilled: “Column left oblique into line” “Change of front to the right, by companies, march!” Since green troops were still dribbling into the regiment, these maneuvers were not always perfectly executed. A man kept going straight when he should have gone oblique and the men guiding on him clumped like wet curds. Although these confusions might have seemed comical, no one laughed. Not under that Petersburg sun; not in June; not with no rain in a month and the dust from marching feet in everybody’s hair and eyes and nostrils. The officers sweated and lost their tempers and in the evenings drank with officers from other colored regiments because white regiments’ officers shunned them.

  Jesse’s company marched toward the wharves and smartened their step when they tramped past white regiments. Veterans paid colored troops no mind, but new drafts just off the steamer gawked and made remarks. Although “murmuring” was punishable under military law, it was hard to pin on anyone, so Captain Fessenden took no offense.

  The James River was broad at City Point, almost a mile, and the plantations on the opposite shore had once been the best in Virginia. Side-wheelers, stern-wheelers, three-masted schooners, brigantines, and barques anchored in the channel. On busy days, two hundred ships unloaded here; General Grant’s harbor was the second-busiest in the world. The harbormaster’s officious little steam launch huffed among the ships waiting to unload.

  Behind the wharves were rows of warehouses, sutlers’ cabins, several morticians’ establishments, and a village of prostitutes’ cribs. Although the railroad wasn’t finished, a dozen locomotives stood ready in the completed yards and rails already extended onto the wharves.

  A Company marched past mounds of rations, stacks of cannonballs, a park of gun limbers, a pyramid of dismounted napoleons, their greased barrels inoffensive as lengths of sewer pipe.

  Jesse’s men clambered onto a powder schooner and down into the hold, where they wrestled barrels into nets, winched them onto the wharves, and rolled them into wagons, no more than two to a wagon. The cargo master stood beside the hatch eyeballing everything. “If one of your niggers elects to light up his pipe, we’ll all go to tarnation,” he noted.

  “Yes,” Captain Fessenden drawled. “I expect they know that.” The moment the schooner was empty, a ste
am tug dragged it unceremoniously out of the way.

  “That’s it, then.” The cargo master rubbed his hands. “Captain, what would you say to a spirituous libation?” He pointed at the river. “See that steamer?”

  “Which? There must be a hundred steamers.”

  “The white side-wheeler, just in the channel there. You know who is aboard? Well, it is President Lincoln himself, come to inspect our dispositions. No doubt Mr. Lincoln has come to urge General Grant to take Petersburg and thus assure Mr. Lincoln’s reelection. Even with all this,” the man indicated the acres of military stores, “I do not believe God himself could take Petersburg unless Bobby Lee gave Him the keys.”

  “Cynical speech disheartens the men,” Fessenden said.

  “I meant no harm,” the cargo master said but did not renew his offer of spirits.

  The next vessel to dock had plied the China trade for twenty years but now transported conscripts from Boston to Virginia. Captain Fessenden took a step backward, the smell was so bad. Whey-faced young soldiers in vomit-stained new wool uniforms stumbled down the gangplank onto the blessedly immobile shore. Their officers and a guard of veterans formed them into an irregular column and started them toward the lines. Some of Jesse’s detail grinned, some chuckled into their hands. “Johnny’s gonna be glad to see you,” one murmured.

  General Grant’s bright launch edged alongside the white steamer and tiny figures boarded her.

  Jesse joined Captain Fessenden. “Men say Master Abraham’s in that boat.”

  How swiftly they know what Grant’s Pinkertons never discover, Fessenden thought. “That’s what I’m told,” he said. He also said, “We’ll be unloading shot barges this afternoon. We’ll be working with a detail from the 38th.”

  Commanded by a stocky, bearded sergeant, the 38th USCT detail arrived at suppertime. Captain Fessenden told the sergeant his men could take their break with the 23rd, but the sergeant said they’d eaten before starting out, and which shot barge was it they were supposed to unload?

  “Have it your way.” Fessenden found a seat on the warehouse steps and invited Jesse to join him. He tapped his hardbread sharply to drive the weevils out. “Grant’s building us a bakery,” he said. “God, how long has it been since you had fresh white bread?”

  Jesse smiled but didn’t say that the only time he’d had fresh white bread was twelve years ago when Mistress Abigail’s children brought it to Uther Botkin’s school.

  The 38th’s men formed a chain to pass shot from hold to wharf.

  Jesse dunked his hardtack in a cup of water and shared his dried beef with the captain.

  “Obliged. I hope the President doesn’t hurry General Grant. When General Grant gets hurried he doesn’t do well.”

  The cargo master poked his head out of his office window. “A word with you, Captain.”

  Captain Fessenden brushed his hands on his trousers before he went inside.

  The sergeant from the 38th ambled over too casually and loomed over Jesse. “I was wonderin’ if you was a white man,” he said.

  The sergeant was as black as Jesse, maybe blacker. His uniform was rumpled, and he stank powerfully for a man bivouacked between two mighty rivers.

  Jesse looked him over. “I’m wonderin’ what kind of officers you got in the 38th, when a sergeant’s uniform look so sloppy.”

  “ ’Cause if you ain’t a white man, what you doin’ takin’ your ease with them?”

  “I’m Second Sergeant Jesse Burns. I didn’t catch your name.”

  “First Sergeant Edward Ratcliff, 38th United States Niggers.”

  “Sit for a spell, Sergeant,” Jesse said. “I got more beef than I can eat.”

  “I ain’t hungry. You and that white captain related?”

  “How the hell would I know? White folks aren’t particular who they lay down with. You gonna stand in the sun or you want to sit in the shade? I heard you boys did good work the other day.”

  The sergeant relaxed enough to lift his hands off his hips but didn’t accept the shade. “We took eighteen of Johnny’s guns and killed a pile of Johnnies. Took prisoners too. Jesus, they was scared of us.”

  “The prisoners we took in the Wilderness thought we were gonna cook and eat ’em.”

  The first sergeant raised his eyebrows in mock surprise. “Oh, you 23rd Regiment is fightin’ niggers. I mistook you for totin’ niggers.”

  “Rosser’s cavalry was driving our Ohio boys. Colored or not, those Ohio boys were sure glad to see us. Afterward they gave us a cheer.”

  “What’d you do with your prisoners?”

  “Turned ’em over to the provost. Some boys had sport with ’em, and one of the poor bastards pissed himself, but those two Johnnies’re presently in Point Lookout Prison.”

  While the two sergeants talked, men drifted closer. The 38th stayed in the sunny street and Jesse’s detail lined the shady walkway. Everybody just happened to be there.

  First Sergeant Edward Ratcliff took a hitch in his pants. “You a house nigger?” he inquired. “Generally, any nigger loves the white man was a house nigger.”

  “There’s good whites and bad ones. Same as us.”

  Edward Ratcliff laughed. “They bleed the same as us, that’s sure. You don’t know how it feels usin’ a bayonet until you used one. Man with his hands in the air has his belly wide open!”

  Jesse forced a tight grin. “We’re soldiers of the Army of the Potomac.”

  “I was a field nigger, myself. Picked cotton until my hands bled, and when I couldn’t pick no more, Master whipped me.” He turned and jerked his blouse off his back so Jesse could see the web of scars. “Oh, Master cut me, he did. So now,” he added philosophically, “I cut him.”

  “Between all this cuttin’,” Jesse mused, “I wonder when folks gonna find a moment’s peace.”

  “House nigger used to come out into the cotton, carry Master a drink of water had ice in it. I used to look up from my row and wonder how’d it be have a white man bring me a drink of water with ice in it.”

  “Don’t reckon you’ll ever find out,” Jesse said.

  “Only right thing you say today,” the first sergeant said. “In the army, out of the army, we still niggers.”

  “I am a man of color, Sergeant,” Jesse said, slowly rising to his feet. “Captain Fessenden is my officer and I’ve promised to obey all officers. Something about this arrangement seems to discomfit you.”

  “ ‘Discomfit’? Oh, you is a house nigger, indeed you is. I don’t think driver’s whip ever touched your black ass.”

  “ ‘Discomfit’ means, sergeant, you got somethin stuck in your damn craw, spit it out.”

  Jesse’s detail got ready to fight.

  The first sergeant grinned a gap-toothed grin. “Had me a dream, the other night,” he began. “Dream about the black man and the white man. I dreamed I was drivin’ Johnnies until a miníe ball laid me down. Set my soul free.”

  “Tell it, Sergeant,” one of his men said.

  “And I find myself at the bottom of the golden stairs lead up to heaven, and I tell you, brothers, them stairs steep and tall. Why, you start climbin’ in the morning—for that’s when I got kilt—and you don’t reach the first landing til evening time. Directly I get to the top, I come face to face with the gatekeeper, who is a heavenly angel, and I give my name, First Sergeant Edward Ratcliff, 38th United States Niggers. And angel, he looks at me for a long time.”

  “Yes!”

  “A loooong time! Angel say, ‘We don’t ’low no trash in here.’

  “And I say, ‘How you know I’m trash?’

  “And he looks me over good, and he say, ‘You buckra all right.’

  “And I say, ‘No I ain’t.’

  “And he stick up his nose and say, ‘If you ain’t buckra, where’s your horse? Never did let a man in here didn’t have no horse.’

  “So he shut that golden gate and leave me standin’. Well, directly, who come up the stairs but old Master. He a colonel of Johnni
es now and one fine morning he run into some soldiers from the 38th USCT and they promptly improve this earth by removing him from it.”

  Cheers, laughter. Jesse couldn’t stop himself from grinning too.

  “I tells him, ‘Master, they ain’t gonna let you in either. Where’s your horse?’

  “Master say to me the niggers killed him so quick he didn’t have time catch his horse.”

  More laughter.

  “Now while I was working in the sun, Master used to do right smart of thinking in the shade, so he got good at it. Directly he say he got a scheme and I say, ‘Oh, no, Master. Last scheme you have was to sell a dozen niggers and buy canal bonds and the bonds went busted but them niggers gone to Texas.’

  “ ‘No,’ he say, ‘this a good scheme.’ Way he got it figured is, I gets down on all fours pretending I’m his horse and he ride up to the gate and they let us in and we both where we want to be.

  “Well, I studies and I studies, and I say why not, and I get down on my hands and knees, and brothers, I am about wore out. I have been climbin’ stairs all day, and that was after I was kilt. But I figure I can bear it a few minutes longer. Old Master ain’t got much meat on him.

  “We gallop up to the gate and I prance best I can and the gatekeeper angel don’t even open the gate this time, he just call through it. He say, ‘Who that?’

  “ ‘Colonel John Palmer,’ Master say.

  “ ‘Is you ridin’ or is you walkin’? We don’t ’low no trash in here.’

  “ ‘Ridin’,’ Master say.

  “ ‘That fine,’ gatekeeper say. ‘Dismount, tie your horse, and come right inside.’ ”

  Jesse couldn’t help himself, he laughed aloud.

  First Sergeant Ratcliff sat beside him and said, “We ain’t gonna accomplish nothin’, ’less we stick together. I’ll take some of that beef. Jawin’ makes me hungry.”

  That afternoon they unloaded shot barges. The mortar shells were packed in wooden cradles it took four men to lift, but most of the shot was twelve-pounders for napoleons.

  “We gonna rain death and destruction on them Johnnies,” Ratcliff observed.