by Jane Kendall
Demopolis was a pretty town, nestled in the V where the Black Warrior and Tombigbee rivers met. It had been founded almost fifty years before by French people fleeing a slave rebellion in Haiti. It hadn’t taken them long to make it their own, with wide streets, velvety lawns, and gracious houses. A few were in the Creole style, painted in pale colors with wisteria and honeysuckle twining up to lacy wrought-iron balconies. It was also peaceful. Demopolis residents were courtly, their voices seldom raised. Ladies would speak to us from vine-shaded porches, where they sat in the cool of the morning with their mending baskets or correspondence. The captain always tipped his hat and greeted them courteously. If the menfolk were home on our return, he would tie me up and join them. They would offer him a tot of bourbon mixed with sugar and crushed mint leaves in a frosty silver cup. No gentleman would refuse this hospitality. Many afternoons I stood for hours while they stretched out their long legs and discussed the price of cotton.
But one trip in April 1861 was different. It was around the middle of the month, as best I can recall. As we neared the main street, with the shops and the bank and the post office, I heard a buzzing noise like a swarm of gnats. We came around the corner and I saw a crowd of men in front of the post office. They were gesturing wildly and arguing, their voices loud and fiery.
“Randall!” shouted the bank manager when we drew up. His cravat had come undone, and he was waving a newspaper over his head. “We’ve done it!”
“Done what, man?”
“Captured Fort Sumter! That’ll teach the Yankees to mess with us.”
It was all very confusing, especially since everyone kept shouting and waving their arms. As far as I could tell, Abraham Lincoln had demanded that we give back all the Union forts in the South. We Confederates thought they belonged to us now. But the Union troops at Fort Sumter, out in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina, had refused to leave. On the twelfth of April the Confederates opened fire. They lobbed bombs and shells at the fort until it was a smoking pile of rubble. After thirty-six hours the Union soldiers surrendered, lowering the American flag in defeat.
“Lincoln’s called for seventy-five thousand volunteers!” the bank manager announced. “To put down what he’s calling the Southern Rebellion.”
“Aw, let him,” said an old fellow with fewer teeth than Charger. “One Reb’s worth ten Yankees. Everyone knows that.”
The captain stood in his stirrups and looked over the heads of the crowd, as if gazing into a bright and glorious future. “Gentlemen,” he declared in ringing tones, “if this means war, we’ll whup ’em in a week!”
Two things happened at Belle Rivière as a direct result of Fort Sumter: Jonathan Abbott took the first train north, and the captain went overboard with his newfound patriotism. The next day he joined the Fourth Alabama Infantry Regiment and was promptly made commander of Company D.
With all the horses at Belle Rivière, I asked Charger, why didn’t the captain join the cavalry?
That’s exactly why, he said smugly. I been in the cavalry, missy, and the first thing those stinkers do is steal every decent bit of horseflesh you own. That’s what happens in a war.
I don’t want to be in a war, Lily sighed. I want to stay here, at home.
Don’t think you’ll have much choice, said Charger. It’s up to the humans. But you’re no warhorse, he added in a kinder tone. I expect Miss Martha-Anne will want to keep you around.
The following week, the captain sent two wagons into town, which came back laden with every inch of gray woolen cloth that was for sale. He hired a tailor and two seamstresses to help Miss Martha-Anne and the house servants who were skilled with a needle and thread. “No one at Belle Rivière,” he said, “is going to look like a Union soldier. From this day forward it’s Confederate gray.”
He gathered up all the Belle Rivière livery jackets and had the brass buttons cut off. Jefferson Randall was a captain because he had gone to a military college up North called West Point and had served in the United States Army—that was why our livery was blue. Now it was as though that had never happened. He collected every scrap of dark blue cloth he could find, took it into a back field, and set fire to it. The bitter, scorched smell of burned wool hung in the air for days. He even had the carriage repainted in Confederate gray, which did look fine against Pearl’s and Papa’s silvery coats.
All that gray cloth didn’t go for new livery, however; the days of barbecues and hunt balls were over. He had a uniform made for himself, and the rest went to clothe the neighboring boys who had joined his troop. Oh, but that was one handsome uniform! The long gray jacket had fancy gold braid on the high collar and cuffs, and he fussed at the poor tailor until it fit without a hint of a wrinkle. With it he wore a wide gray felt hat with a yellow band, and a wide leather belt. The buckle was shiny brass, with the letters CSA. He even went up to the attic and brought down his father’s sword from the Mexican-American War, which he had polished until it hurt your eyes to look at it. He saddle-soaped the scabbard and started wearing it. Even though it kept getting tangled up in the holster for his pistols, it did look very dashing.
The war didn’t happen right away. We heard tell of fights up in Tennessee and over in Mississippi, but no real battles yet. And so we drilled … and we drilled … and we drilled.
Why do I have to do this? I complained to Charger. You told me the infantry was all foot soldiers, that everyone walked. What do they need horses for?
All the important officers ride horses, he explained. They have to be able to see over their men’s heads, to see the lay of the land, to see how the battle is going so they can give orders. What would you have the captain do? He chuckled. Climb a tree?
I had not been so bored since Mr. Barks led me around in circles. The captain had all the underbrush cleared from a big field that was lying fallow. Every morning we would check on the crops—or as much as we could before noon—and then in the afternoons we drilled. The planters’ sons from all over Marengo County would come riding down the drive, whooping and hollering. Levi and the other grooms would organize their horses into the paddocks, which took quite a while. Then we’d all go down to the empty field, the boys on foot since they were now in the infantry, and we’d pretend we were at war.
First the captain made the troop line up in rows and practice marching. “Keep those rows straight, men,” he would bark at them. Then they had to turn this way and that way and salute crisply, and take their rifles on and off their shoulders. After that they’d line up in a row and imagine that the Yankees were at the other end of the field. “Charge!” the captain would call out, whirling his father’s sword over his head. That was the signal for everyone to race down the field doing the famous Rebel Yell. This was a high-pitched shriek that went Yeeeeeeeeeehaaaaaaaaa! It was meant to put terror into the hearts of the Yankees. I know it scared the wind out of me the first time I heard it! I couldn’t see how we could win a war just by yelling at the enemy, but at that moment I wasn’t sure. But it all seemed so pointless, marching up and down a hayfield in the hot sun.
I thought war was supposed to be exciting, I said to Charger one night. But this is dull as ditchwater.
Just wait, he said, shaking his head. Just you wait.
Leaving Home
If you had visited Belle Rivière that summer, you would have thought all was as it had been for decades … the stately white house on the hill, the green lawns and sweet-smelling flower beds stretching down to the wide brown river, mockingbirds singing in the pecan trees at dusk. That was the surface, and change was simmering underneath. Some of the braver slaves had escaped, despite the bounty on their heads. (If a valuable male slave was captured, the captain would pay as much as a thousand dollars to whoever returned him.) The captain wasn’t patrolling as he once had, and it was a long ride out to the farthest fields. So they started to slip away. Levi kept quiet, but every time we heard tell of another escape, he smiled to himself. “One day,” he would whisper while he was grooming me
. “One day we’ll get our chance, Rosie. One day we’ll be free.”
And I would remember how brave he’d been when the captain whipped him, and how he’d always stood up for me and comforted me. If Levi wanted to be free, then so did I. As long as we were together, that was all that mattered.
There was also a kind of tension in the air. Everyone kept asking, again and again: When will the war start? Regiments from all over the South were beginning to gather in Virginia. With the two capital cities little more than a hundred miles apart, it made sense that was where the fighting would be. That was what Charger said, and Charger, as we all knew, was seldom wrong about such matters. You take the enemy’s capital, he cackled, and it’s pretty much finished.
While the captain waited for the Fourth Alabama to be called to Virginia, he cancelled the afternoons of drilling and went back to work. He had no choice, for as May slid into June it was shoulders to the wheel. It was all the fault of something called the Commissary Department, who came by several times a week to collect supplies for the army.
Worse thieves than the cavalry, Charger declared.
If everyone’s going to Virginia, I asked, why don’t they get food there? Why do they have to take ours?
What are they supposed to eat along the way? he said sarcastically. Buttercups from the side of the road? An army travels on its belly.
I’d like to see that, Pearl giggled. That must be some sight.
It’s just a saying, he said. If you can’t feed ’em, you can’t lead ’em. It takes a mighty amount of food to keep an army on the move, horses and humans.
I don’t think Miss Martha-Anne sat down all that month. She was everywhere, from the smokehouse to the root cellar to the vegetable gardens, where extra rows of beans and hills of yams had been planted. The commissary wagons would roll up empty and leave piled with sacks of apples and cornmeal and parched corn, yams and dried peas and hams. They took oats from the granary, bales of hay from the haylofts, and as much straw as the captain would let them. Our stalls went from a foot of fresh straw every day to six inches every other day.
They took horses, too, stallions from the north wing of the stable. Not as many as they wanted to—the captain argued fiercely—and no one I knew well. The paddocks were a sorry sight, with fewer and fewer horses every time I went by.
We also wondered who the captain would ride to war.
If he’s got a lick of sense he’ll take Tennessee Samson, was Charger’s opinion. It’d take more than a mess o’ Yankees to scare that boy.
He never rides Samson, I said, a little stung. He rides me, every day. I’m his favorite, leastways that’s what he says.
Oh, so you want to go to war? You make me tired, all of y’all. You think war is something grand, or a game. It’s anything but, Charger said seriously. You will see things no little gal like you should see, and death is all around you. You just thank your stars above, Miss Rose, if he doesn’t choose you.
But choose me he did. And as no gentleman—or a captain in command of a company—was about to groom his own horse, Levi was going, too. It was Levi who broke the news to me, and his hands that evening were shaking with excitement. “We’re getting away from here,” he said eagerly. “Who knows what could happen?”
We left at the end of June, on a morning that was so perfect it still hurts my heart to remember. The sky was cloudless, the smell of honeysuckle carried on the breeze. It was dreadful saying goodbye to Maggie and my other sisters, but I was glad for them. Too delicate for war work, they had been told, and so they would remain at Belle Rivière. Pearl and Papa were staying on as well, for how else would Miss Martha-Anne get to town?
As Levi led me out of my stall that morning, I pulled my head toward Charger. Levi knew immediately what I wanted, and we went over to the old warhorse. I reached over the stall door and nuzzled his bony head.
I’m going to miss you, I said softly.
Huh, he said gruffly. ’Spect you will. Be a good girl, Rosie. Take care of yourself.
Any last words of advice? I asked him. For old times’ sake?
He lifted his head, and the light of battle came into his rheumy eyes. Act like the intelligent horse you are and not some foolish human … and never volunteer for anything. Oh, go on now. Get along.
I’ll see you again, I said fondly. Everyone says the war will be over by Christmas.
Humans always say that, he said glumly. It never is.
We were going by train, and it had taken two days to organize the wagons and the horses and the supplies for the trip. We lined up in a long column, the captain at the head. The house servants were on the steps of the Big House, behind the family. Although Lafe was seventeen and old enough to serve in the army, his father had forbidden it. Lafe was to stay home as overseer, and you could tell he was mad as a wet peahen. (“That’s one recipe for a slave rebellion,” Levi had laughed when he heard the news, slapping his thigh in glee.) Miss Minnie was weeping loudly, and Miss Martha-Anne was trying to be brave.
“Oh, Jeff,” she said, reaching up for his hand. “I worry so. Promise you’ll write.”
“Every day, my dear,” he said gallantly, and bent down to kiss her cheek. “Every day.”
Be very careful what you wish for, Fleur once said. It might come true. I had been caught up in all the excitement. I wanted to go to Virginia with the captain because I did long for adventure—and where Levi went, I went. But when we came to the end of the driveway and turned onto the main road, I realized what that meant. It wasn’t just leaving Charger and my sisters and Pearl and Papa. Belle Rivière was all I had ever known, and all my memories of Fleur were there. Then I shook myself hard and picked my feet up. I will not think about the past, I told myself. I will keep my eyes straight ahead and be the best mount I can be.
These pure and noble sentiments lasted until about ten minutes after I was loaded onto the train at Demopolis. If I never go on another train again, I will be one happy Walker. Trains are noisy and smelly, and they bounce and rattle until you think your teeth will shake loose. Clouds of oily black smoke from the engine rolled back over the cars and came in the open windows when we went around curves. But the stalls in the boxcars were roomy and fairly clean, and there was plenty to eat. It was also very interesting to look out the window and watch the little towns and farms sliding by. Alabama and Georgia were much the same, but the hills of Tennessee were beautiful, cool and green and fresh. I was proud that my ancestors had come from such a fine place.
I don’t think I would have survived if the Southern railroads hadn’t been so poorly built. Some lines had different gauges, which meant that the rails weren’t the same distance apart. We’d get to the end of one section and the train would stop, so we’d have to unload everything and somehow find the next train line. It was a relief to be out in the open air again! When we got up into Georgia, it took two days to find a new train. I could look at the stars and graze on grass and get the smoky smell out of my nose.
After Tennessee I rode the rest of the way in a boxcar that was filthy and crowded. By the time we arrived in Virginia, I no more resembled a finely bred Walking Horse than a pig does a peacock. But we were finally in the Shenandoah Valley, south of a small town called Manassas.
Manassas
I took to army life right away, which came as a surprise. I met horses from all over the South, and there was so much to see. The Confederate Army had been massing for months in the northern end of the Shenandoah. The encampments went on for miles alongside the rail lines to Manassas Junction, where troops and supplies arrived every day. Manassas was only about thirty miles from Washington. I thought of Charger and wondered if we would capture the Union capital!
The encampment was a city made of canvas. A sea of tents stretched as far as you could see; small tents for the lower officers and large tents for the high-ranking. (Privates slept in the open, but I can’t imagine they minded, as the nights were warm.) The captain had a sizable tent and Peter, one of the house servant
s, to cook his meals and tend to his wants. His cot was made up with bed linens from Belle Rivière, and he had brought a large hamper of china and silver. “No gentleman eats off tin,” he scoffed. Every evening Peter would set up a table and four folding chairs in front of the tent and lay the table with a cloth. And there the captain would dine, with others of his rank and class, waited on by Peter in his starched white jacket.
The soldiers sat around campfires on the ground, cooking pots of dried peas and side meat and black iron skillets of corn bread. At night, when their fires were lit, it looked like a swarm of lightning bugs, flickering into the distance. Some of the soldiers had even brought their families. Their tents were the coziest, with their wives attending to their cooking or mending, and children playing with toys and dolls and the young babies. Streams meandered through the camp, under the overhanging trees, and once a week the soldiers would strip off all their clothes and swim. I expect it was the only bath they ever got. There were church tents for Sunday services, and mail sacks were hauled off the train every morning. Merchants from the neighboring towns would come in their wagons to sell shaving soap and newspapers and writing paper to the men, hairpins and sewing kits and candy to the ladies. Men played card games in the afternoons, ran footraces to keep in shape, or wrote long letters home.
Horses drank water dipped from the streams, and the hay was sweet and fresh. We would mingle about in the large split rail–fenced paddocks, and talk about our lives and where we had come from. Whenever I met a horse from Mississippi, I asked about Fleur. One day I got my answer.
