“Mind your tongue, John Henry. Gentlemen don’t need to curse to make their point. But I promise I will keep your secret, as you must promise to keep mine, and not tell a soul until I give you leave. Now take those flowers left in the basket there, and do as I do, but make haste, for this heat will make them wilt before we’re half done.”
The Hollidays weren’t the only refugees that hot summer of 1863. It seemed that everyone in Georgia was going somewhere on the trains, trying to get out of the way of the Yankees. And swelling the crowds of civilians were thousands of Confederate troops, packing the rail cars as they followed their orders east to the sea and along the Georgia coast.
John Henry had never seen so many soldiers at one time or heard so much commotion, with the shouts of military commands, the frantic cries of lost children and frightened women, the roar and hiss of the steam engines and the grinding clang of the wheels on the rails. Everyone was hurrying, panic driven to get from where they were to somewhere else, and at every stop there was a fight for tickets, hoping that the cars weren’t already full of troops, vying with the other refugees for space on a box car, some place to put the household belongings that had been dumped on the side track at the end of the last leg of the journey. And when his family finally did get settled, crowding into the dark and airless back of a boxcar with the crates and Alice Jane’s piano, the train slowed to a stop at every little village so the conductor could pass along the news of the War to the anxious crowds gathered by the tracks.
“What do y’all hear from Gen’ral Lee’s army?”
“My boy’s in Virginia, have y’all heard anything from up there?”
“Is the fightin’ still goin’ on in Tennessee? We haven’t heard from Uncle in more’n two months now.”
“Where’s that damned Yankee Sherman? Give us one good fight and we’ll whip ‘em yet!”
Then finally Valdosta, near end of the line for the Atlantic and Gulf Rail, sixty miles from Thomasville, hundreds of miles from anyplace else one could call civilized. South Georgia was barely out of the woods and Valdosta was still just a frontier outpost in a humid, insect-infested wilderness. But rough as it was, just a scattering of business houses around a wooden courthouse, Valdosta was full of the bustle and building that filled all refugee towns.
Henry Holliday listened to the commotion, breathed in the thick piney air, and smiled. For $35,000 Confederate, his entire inheritance from his father’s estate, he bought three-thousand acres north of town, past Cat Creek. It was beautiful land, high fertile ground that ran across a ridge between the road and the woods. An old house faced onto the road, and behind the house the land spread out, sandy and level, covered in tall grass and dog fennel that waved in the slow summer breeze. Past the house, the road wound on around a bend and disappeared into the woods again. It was new land, wild country that still had a soul to it, ready for a man and his family to settle and tame.
They were far from the battlefront now, but in that primitive environment life itself was often a battle. Henry took his son out and taught him how to use a rifle—how to tear the paper cartridge open with his teeth and pour the black gunpowder down the barrel, slide in the mini ball and ram it home with the ramrod, set the percussion cap against the hammer and pull the trigger back to half-cock, then aim and wait. The waiting was the hardest part for John Henry, the huge gun pulled up to his shoulder, near as long as he was tall and near as heavy as he was, too. Even his father’s Colt’s Walker pistol was heavy in his hands, but John Henry seemed to have a natural feel for it, learning how to shoot the eyes out of a rabbit when it stopped to look at him before it started running.
There were other lessons Henry had for his son, things every Southern gentleman should know, like honor and responsibility and the importance of hard work. And with his father’s guiding hand, John Henry learned to care for a horse of his own, and spent long hours racing across the grassy fields and dirt roads that led from the farm toward Valdosta. He learned to hunt from horseback, one hand on the reins, one hand on his gun, firing low from the hip without slowing to aim. And in the cool evenings after his mother had gone to bed, he learned to play a friendly game of cards, bluffing without blinking, and besting his father so many times that Henry said he was glad he hadn’t taught the boy to wager as well. Those were happy days for John Henry, with his father’s time and attention, the sun on his skin, the wind in his face, and a wild new world to explore.
But his mother made sure it wasn’t all too wild. She continued his music lessons on the spinet piano in the parlor, saying that his agile fingers seemed to have a natural affinity for the instrument. And though his father thought piano-playing sissified, his mother insisted that it was manners, not muscles, that were the real proof of a man. But a gentleman must be educated as well as mannered, so he was enrolled in the day school over in Valdosta, where the local children were taught grammar and history, mathematics and penmanship, and recited together the opening lines of their reading primer. His mother nodded in approval as he practiced for her:
“Do not lie, my son; a good boy will not lie. It is a sin to lie; and a good boy will not sin.”
The day school wasn’t the caliber of the fine institutions in Griffin, of course, but at least it was an education, and John Henry was sent packing every morning for the seven-mile ride into town, leaving the farm before daybreak so he wouldn’t be tardy. The first class sessions were held in the rough wooden courthouse until a real school building could be readied, though even that was a slap-dash affair with no sash or shutters and only boards nailed across the windows to keep out the weather, and the students had to do their work by the weak light of a lamp of plaited rags dipped in melted tallow. By the time class was over for the day, twilight was coming on and John Henry rode home watching out for “haints” and “boogeymen” as the darkness closed in. The woods were full of such things, he knew. He’d been raised on the stories told by the Negro slaves who worked the land and knew what kind of spooks hid out in the shadows. And just to be safe, he kept his right hand on the butt of his gun, ready to draw and fire at the first frightening sound.
But the most frightening sound of all in that wilderness was his mother’s coughing in the night. Her miracle hadn’t come yet, and she often took to her bed with fever and exhaustion. And though Henry was concerned and wanted to send for the doctor, she insisted that there was no need.
“I’m fine, Henry,” she would say with eyes closed as she drifted off to sleep soon after supper. “I just need a little rest, that’s all. I’m sure I’ll be feelin’ better soon enough. Now tell John Henry to play something for me on the piano while I rest. I do so love to hear him play.”
In the north the War dragged on as the Union General Sherman kept pushing his forces deeper into the Confederacy, and every week more refugees arrived in Valdosta fleeing ahead of the Yankee destruction. One Southern village after another was becoming a ghost town as the families refugeed and neat town squares and comfortable old homes were left empty, waiting for the destroyer. Sherman had promised to enter the South with the sword in one hand and the torch in the other and carve a forty-mile wide road to the sea where a crow could not find its supper. He meant to punish the rebels, and if the helpless wives and children of the South suffered, so much the better; their husbands and fathers, hearing of the carnage, would give up their Cause and surrender to save their families. But the Yankees had never understood the heart of the Southern people.
On through the summer of 1864 the Federal troops kept moving south, driving the Army of Tennessee and destroying the rail lines that kept the Confederacy alive. If the rail hub of Atlanta could be taken and her railroads crippled, the Confederacy would suffocate. The Yankees pushed on toward that goal, moving south into Georgia from Dalton to Resaca, past Kennesaw and on toward Decatur, where they made their headquarters while the siege of Atlanta began. The Confederates fought valiantly to defend their ground, but they couldn’t counter the flanking movements of a hundred-thous
and Yankee soldiers. Soon Atlanta was surrounded on three sides with only the southern roads toward Macon and Savannah still open. But as long as the Confederates could hold the southern railroad, Atlanta could survive.
John Henry listened with the excitement of a thirteen-year-old boy to the stories of the battles, imagining the gunfire and the cannon blasts echoing against the brass hot summer sky, the smoke hanging thick as thunderclouds before the sun. Then late in August, the fighting suddenly stopped as the Yankees disappeared into the wooded Atlanta countryside. At first there was the desperate hope that Sherman had given up and moved his troops back north to Tennessee, but it was only a hope. The Yankees were moving south in force, heading on toward the Macon and Western rail line, the final iron road that connected Atlanta to the coast. The Confederates tried to hold them at Rough and Ready, ten miles south of Atlanta, but the Yankees pushed on and headed for Jonesboro and the final bloody battle of the War in Georgia.
When John Henry heard about Jonesboro, the War suddenly ceased to be just an exciting story for him. His cousin Mattie’s family lived in Jonesboro, in a pretty house on a shady lane near the railroad. He remembered it with fondness and disbelief. Jonesboro wasn’t a place where battles were waged. Jonesboro was sunlit summer afternoons and backyard barbecues, birthday parties and Christmas gatherings. Jonesboro was old trees big enough to climb and grassy hills just right for rolling down. Jonesboro was little girl cousins who played dolls on the front porch and dress-up in the attic, and let him be the hero of all their make-believe stories. Jonesboro was warmth and home and family, but not war; never war. But the Yankees were moving south, and Jonesboro would be caught in the firestorm that Sherman was lighting from Atlanta to the sea.
Surely the family would leave before the fighting started, surely Aunt Mary Anne would take the children and refugee south to safety as Uncle Rob had instructed her to do if the Yankees ever came near. Soon now they would hear from her, have a message that she was safe and coming to Valdosta with the children to wait there until Uncle Rob returned from the War. But no message came, not in the first days following the battle, not in the days and weeks that came after that. All through the warm days of Indian Summer and into the first cool days of fall they waited, and still no word came, and John Henry pondered on what the Yankees could do to the families of Confederate soldiers.
It was a crisp day in mid-October when Henry Holliday made the seven-mile trip to Valdosta to take care of some business and left his horse saddled at the rack across from the depot, and was done and about to go on home when the train pulled in. So he took his time packing his saddlebag, always waiting for what news the trains might bring. Maybe there would be some mail with a message of hope from Jonesboro, or word from his brother Rob, and he waited and watched as the passengers left the train. Then, in the steam that rose up from the engine, he saw a small woman climb down from a boxcar and help three little girls down after her. She turned to find her bearings, and for a moment she disappeared into the steam as if she’d only been a phantom and not there at all. But as the air cleared, Henry saw her again and recognized her at last. It was his own brother’s wife, Mary Anne Fitzgerald Holliday, and she was crying thankful tears at the sight of him.
That night after her little girls had been settled down to sleep, Aunt Mary Anne tried to tell her brother-in-law what had happened to the family. Alice Jane had already gone on to bed, worn out from the excitement of the day, she said, but John Henry stayed up, lingering in the shadows, hoping to hear about the War and the battle that had finally taken Atlanta. And he wanted to hear about Mattie and Lucy as well, away in Savannah for the time being, safe behind convent walls. But it would be ill-bred of him to interrupt the conversation and ask questions, so he watched and waited and listened.
Aunt Mary Anne looked weary as she sat in the old rocking chair in front of the parlor fire, her face drawn and dark-shadowed around deep blue eyes. She’d been beautiful once, he’d heard tell, in those long-ago days when she was the sixteen-year-old bride of his father’s younger brother. But five baby daughters and four years of wartime had aged her, like all the women he knew. Her voice was still beautiful though, a lovely lilting combination of Irish brogue and Southern drawl.
“I never believed the Yankees would get past Atlanta,” she said, speaking softly so as not to wake her sleeping children. “Who could? With General Hood in command I thought surely we were safe. Rob served with him and said he was a fighter if ever there was one.”
John Henry’s thoughts ran ahead of the story. He knew his Uncle Robert Kennedy Holliday’s line of command and recited it to himself: Seventh Georgia Regiment, Anderson’s Brigade, Hood’s Division, Longstreet’s Corps. Hood’s men served with General Lee at Gettysburg, some of the hottest fighting of the War. But General Hood had been injured there, and in Georgia he’d proven that the fight had gone out of him.
“Hood’s a fool,” Henry said, “sendin’ half his cavalry off to Tennessee. An army’s blind without the cavalry as scouts. He didn’t even know Sherman was movin’ on Jonesboro.”
“We had no word the Yankees were comin’,” Aunt Mary Anne went on, “not until Kilpatrick’s raiders came through town. They burned all the business houses and tore up the railroad tracks. We hid in the attic and watched them do their work—a whole regiment on horseback with their guns at the ready.”
“And why didn’t you leave?” Henry said, his voice was softly critical, but Mary Anne took no offense.
“I couldn’t. My old Uncle Roddy was desperately ill, and couldn’t be moved. He lived with us, you know. All I could do was pray that the Yankees wouldn’t come back, or that Uncle Roddy would be taken soon . . .” She stopped talking for a moment and lowered her eyes in shame. “It’s a hard thing, Henry, prayin’ for someone’s death. But that is what I did, prayed for his release so the children and I could leave Jonesboro.”
“There was nothin’ wrong in it, Mary Anne. We do what we have to do in wartime.”
She nodded, understanding more of war than she ever should have known. “I sent for a priest, but no one could come. There were so many soldiers dyin’ in Atlanta—they said the streets were full of the wounded. I feared that Uncle Roddy would die without final confession, as if God wanted him to prove his perfect abandonment to the Holy Will, but Father O’Reilly blessedly came down from Atlanta in time for the last rites. Uncle Roddy passed away the end of August, peacefully, in his sleep.”
“Well, God rest him,” Henry said. “Roderick O’Carew was a fine old man.”
Mary Anne crossed herself, honoring her dead. “I had to take his body to Fayetteville for a Catholic burial in the family plot, but there were rumors the Yankees were comin’ back. A regiment of our boys, down from the fightin’ at Rough and Ready, warned us that Sherman himself was on the way.”
“And were the Yankees comin’?” John Henry spoke up from the shadows, so intent on the story that he forgot himself.
“Hush son! Remember your manners,” his father scolded.
“It’s all right,” Mary Anne said as she turned to look at her nephew. “Yes, John Henry, the Yankees were comin’. The day after we buried Uncle Roddy the Fayetteville Road was filled with bluecoats. We heard them comin’ before we saw them, like a low rumblin’ of thunder movin’ in from the west—thousands of men and hundreds of wagons, comin’ right toward us. The clouds of dust they kicked up turned the whole sky red as blood. I watched that red cloud movin’ in and knew that it was too late for us to get out of Jonesboro.”
John Henry’s eyes opened wide, picturing the whole Yankee army invading the town and the brave Confederate soldiers frantically digging in for the defense.
“By the time our boys got there the Yankees had the high ground outside of town, waitin’ for them, and we were trapped between the Confederate lines and the railroad. And just across the river was the Yankee artillery, pointed right toward Church Street. I had to get the children away from there before the firin’ started, so I
loaded the wagon with everything I could carry out of the house and set out toward my Uncle Phillip Fitzgerald’s plantation.”
“But Rural Home is south of Jonesboro,” Henry said, “right along the line toward Lovejoy’s Station. There must have been Yankee cavalry all through that countryside!”
“I kept to the old trails we used to use before the railroad came through, and took to the trees every time I heard a sound.” She paused before going on, sighing. “The Yankees had gotten there before we did and set up headquarters in Uncle Phillip’s house, but we were not harmed. Some of the Yankee soldiers were Catholic raised and remembered their duty as Christians, though they were not so honorable about Uncle Phillip’s property. They ruined his farmland, drivin’ their wagons and runnin’ their horses through the cotton and the corn. Then they set fire to everything else that remained, and when they left they took all the animals along with them, leaving Uncle Phillip destitute. I couldn’t ask him to care for my family when he had nothin’ for his own. At the end of two weeks when the soldiers moved on, I took my girls and went back home.”
She stared into the fire and John Henry watched the light flicker across her face, thinking of the fires the Yankees had set when they took over Jonesboro. They’d torn up the tracks and heated the rails over bonfires until the metal was soft enough to twist around the trunks of pine trees, leaving “Sherman’s Bow Ties” that couldn’t be straightened and re-laid by the Confederates.
“All along the road there were mounds of dirt where the dead had been buried—there must have been thousands of them. At the edge of town were trenches where the troops had dug in and breastworks beyond. Church Street was just behind the lines and had taken heavy fire from the Yankee artillery, and our house had been right in the middle of it. It was all but torn apart by the shelling, the windows shattered, the walls filled with spent bullets, everything inside broken or stolen.”
Southern Son Page 5
