A Passionate Girl

by Thomas Fleming

  “I told him to shut his mouth,” O’Connor said. “I told him ten times.”

  The black man was dead. His limbs sprawled loosely; his head lolled. Blood oozed down his blue coat, dark red in the flickering gas lamps. I gazed at the Irish faces surrounding this corpse in the hot Mississippi night and felt nightmare engulfing me again. What were we doing, shooting black men in the American south? For the first time I sensed, truly sensed, the power of history’s whirlwind and doubted my power—indeed, the power of us all combined—to control it.

  Some Shall Wake to Weep

  We left Vicksburg the next day with an armed escort of a dozen policemen. The black soldiers blamed us for the death of their comrade and were talking wildly about shooting a Fenian to even the score. I was plunged into gloom by the episode, but my three soldier companions, having seen thousands of similar corpses in their years of war, hardly gave it a passing thought. In fact, as we churned up the Mississippi, I noticed a distinct (and to me incomprehensible) shift toward cheerfulness in Dan McCaffrey. For most of the trip, especially when I was in range of his eyes, he had maintained a sullen, surly exterior. Now, twice in an hour I saw him smile. In the next hour he laughed three or four times at Red Mike Hanrahan’s jokes. I did not understand what was happening until the boat docked at Memphis.

  The moment the gangplank was laid, Dan was down it. He gave a piercing rebel yell, kissed the soil, and roared, “Here I am in the greatest state God ever made. I’m a whole team with two bulldogs under the wagon and a tar-bucket, yes I am. I’m ready to outholler the thunder, drink the Mississippi, and walk through a fence like a fallin’ tree through a cobweb. One squint of mine at a bull’s heel would blister it. I’m the genuine article, and anyone who don’t think so had better register at the cemetery before tellin’ me!”

  “Damned if it ain’t Davy Crockett hisself come home to rescue us,” said one of the grizzled old rivermen who had just finished tying up the boat. “Give us the victory speech, Davy.”

  Dan sprang up on a box and obliged. “Fellow citizens and humans,” he cried. “These is times that come upon us like a whirlwind and an airthquake. They are come like a catamount on the full jump: We are called upon to show our grit like chain lightnin’ agin a pine log, to extarminate, mollify, and calumniate the foe.

  “Pierce the heart of the enemy as you would a feller that spit in your face, knocked down your wife, burnt up your house, and called your dog a skunk! Cram his pesky carcass full of thunder and lightnin’ like a stuffed sausage and turtle him off with a red hot poker, so that there won’t be a piece of him left big enough to give a crow a breakfast, and bite his nose off into the bargain!

  “Hosses, I am with you! Where is the craven low-lived chicken-bred toad-hoppin’ red-mounted bristle-headed mother’s son of you who will not raise the beacon light of triumph, smouse the citadel of the aggressor, and squeeze ahead for Liberty and Glory!”

  Before he ended there was a crowd of a hundred Tennesseeans around him listening and laughing, as people elsewhere might gather for a song. Riding up the steep hill to Memphis, which sat on a bluff above the river, like Vicksburg, I asked someone to tell me who Davy Crockett was. I learned that he was a famous Tennesseean who had gotten killed in Texas fighting Mexicans in 1836. When I looked confused, Dan explained further. “For twenty or so years before the war, a fellow published Crockett Almanacs that had Davy’s speeches in them. They were my old man’s favorite readin’. He used to make me memorize them and recite them to his friends.”

  The picture saddened me, somehow. The wandering Irishman requiring his son to learn this new language instead of the beautiful poems and stories of his homeland. I was still in Ireland’s grip, unable to accept how quickly and totally people became Americans.

  Our steamboat brought the news of the Negro soldier shot at Vicksburg. It sent a shiver of anticipation through Memphis. Here, too, there was the same combination of Negro troops in the garrison, an Irish police force, and resentful Southern whites. An added ingredient was the fierce antagonisms the Civil War had bred in Tennessee. Few other states had been so violently divided.

  The day after we arrived the Memphis Advance published a curious poem, entitled “Death’s Brigade.”

  The wolf is in the desert

  And the panther in the brake

  The fox is on his rambles

  And the owl is wide awake

  For now ’tis noon of darkness

  And the world is all asleep

  And some shall wake to glory

  And some shall wake to weep.

  Ku Klux.

  The misty gray is hanging

  On the tresses of the East

  And morn shall tell the story

  Of the revel and the feast

  The ghostly troop shall vanish

  Like the light in constant cloud

  But where they rode shall gather

  The coffin and the shroud.

  Ku Klux.

  I showed it to Dan and asked him what it meant. He said he had no idea but would try to find out. While we went to the Union commandant’s headquarters on Court Square for the usual permission to address his troops, Dan visited his numerous friends in Memphis. The Union general, named Stoneman, was an old friend of John O’Neil. He showed us the telegram he had received from Stanton advising (not ordering) him to forbid us to approach his men. O’Neil showed him our letter from Andrew Johnson, and Stoneman said he thought that carried more weight in Tennessee. Obviously everyone, including army generals, was playing politics, waiting to see where the power in Washington would finally lie. General Stoneman cautioned us to say nothing that would inflame the tension between the Irish policemen and the blacks in Memphis and questioned us nervously about the soldier shot in Vicksburg. We satisfied him on our neutrality and departed.

  Returning along Main Street to the Gayoso Hotel, we saw an ominous sign of trouble to come. Four Irish policemen, striding down the sidewalk, confronted four blue-clad Negro soldiers. The policemen shouldered them aside, knocking one of the soldiers onto his back in the street. The Negroes called them insulting names and vowed revenge.

  At the hotel we found Dan having a drink of bourbon with an old friend, Captain John C. Kennedy. A fellow native of Pulaski, he had spent the war in a regiment of Confederate cavalry that mostly fought in Tennessee. I disliked him on sight. He was one of those handsome men who loved himself with more enthusiasm than anyone else could ever hope to muster. When we mentioned the altercation we had just seen between the black soldiers and the Irish policemen, Kennedy laughed nastily. “Those niggers are givin’ us a great opportunity to teach them a lesson they’ll never forget,” he said.

  “Just sound the call,” Dan said. “We’ll be there to join you.”

  “I hope not,” I said. “If we can have any influence, which I doubt, we should try our utmost to prevent trouble. Can’t you see the effect it will have in the North if we Irish are associated with attacking Negroes?”

  “Little bit of a nigger lover, ain’t she,” Kennedy said.

  “Oh, you know how it is,” Dan said. “Females tend to fret more over lovin’ your neighbor. My ma was that way.”

  “I don’t believe the Bible limited that teaching by sex,” I said.

  “Like to see what you think of it after one of them big buck niggers in the colored artillery regiment got off you,” Kennedy said.

  “Say another word like that to Miss Fitzmaurice,” John O’Neil said, “and I’ll lay you out on the floor.”

  “I apologize to the lady,” Kennedy said, with a sneer that belied his words. “If you mean to stay out of trouble, keep off the streets for the rest of the day—and especially tonight.” He stood up and smiled at Dan. “Ku Klux,” he said.

  He strode into the blazing sunlight on Main Street. Watching him go, I remembered the words from the poem. “What does that mean, that last thing?”

  “Nothin’ much,” Dan said. “It’s some kind of crazy secret society they
invented one night in Pulaski a coupla months back.”

  “What is its purpose?” I asked.

  “Search me,” Dan said. I had a feeling he was not telling the truth.

  We decided to disregard Captain Kennedy’s warning to stay in our hotel. Only Dan took it seriously. He said Kennedy had told him that there were “organized plans” to teach the black soldiers a lesson. We had grown so used to seeing Southerners crushed and dazed in defeat, it was impossible to believe. “Gwan,” Red Mike Hanrahan said. “There isn’t enough spirit left in the South to organize a tea party.”

  “This ain’t the South. This is Tennessee,” Dan said. But we paid no attention to him.

  We should have changed our minds when the chief of police strongly urged us not to try to hold a meeting tonight. He had information that there was trouble brewing, and he did not want most of his men in a theater, cheering for Ireland, when he needed them. We thought the chief was just playing politics with us and coolly insisted on our rights. We reserved the theater, got handbills printed, and hired a few young men to distribute them in the Union soldiers’ camp. Red Mike attended to most of this business, and John O’Neil and I wandered off to inspect Memphis. I thanked him for defending me with Kennedy. He dismissed it in his casual way.

  “Do you agree with me, that we Irish should look kindly on the blacks, John?” I asked. “Or am I a hopeless idealist, for which you can read female fool?”

  “To be honest, Bess, I haven’t given it much thought,” he said. “Before I was old enough to think, I was in a war fighting for my life and my head was filled with tactics, supplies, morale, from dawn until dusk seven days a week. ’Tis high politics, and I’ve never thought of myself as more than a soldier.”

  “Here’s a good place to start,” I said. “Let’s go talk to some blacks and see what they think of it all.”

  We wandered along Beale Street into the Negro section of town. It was a tumbledown mess, with worse shacks than I’d ever seen in Ireland. “They don’t live high, that’s for sure,” I said.

  By now it was close to four o’clock. We saw twenty or thirty little black children coming out of a ramshackle building. They were greeted by women in peasant costumes, many with turbans on their heads, obviously their mothers. They seized the little ones’ hands and led them away. In the doorway appeared a tall, handsome white girl, not much older than I was. She smiled down at the children, called to them by name, and patted them on the head as they streamed past her.

  She was obviously a Sassenach, but she had a cheerful face. I introduced myself and John and asked her what brought her to Memphis. Her name was Hannah Simpson, she replied, and her father had been killed in the war. She had accepted this job as a teacher in the South to fulfill the mission of her father’s life. He had been a foe of slavery for ten years before the war and had helped to raise a regiment in Maine to fight the Confederates. I was touched, even intimidated, by the intensity of her idealism. She was like a radiant power there in the doorway of her battered schoolroom, looking out on the littered street of the Negro slum.

  “I know I’m doing what Father would have wanted me to do,” she said.

  I asked her where she was living. “With a Negro family down the road,” she said. “I don’t think we can teach the children without understanding the parents. You can’t believe how passionate they are to see their children educated. Some of those women walk five miles from the country to bring their children to this school. I’ve had to turn away a hundred pupils. So far there are only four of us in Memphis.”

  John O’Neil was listening to all this with the greatest interest. “You mean they can be taught to read and write?” he said.

  “Of course,” said Miss Simpson. “As well as you or I.”

  John was only speaking out of the prejudice he had imbibed from his youthful years in Nashville, where he grew up.

  “Believe me,” Miss Simpson said. “They’re going to become useful citizens, if we give them a chance.”

  We left Miss Simpson planning her next day’s lessons. John O’Neil and I strolled back to Main Street and proceeded up it toward our hotel. Down the street toward us came a half dozen black soldiers, another phalanx pushing whites into the street. They were drunk, to make matters worse. Before they reached us, four policemen sprang from a store and blocked their path. The policemen raised their clubs. The black soldiers drew gleaming knives from holsters at their waists. A shot rang out, and one of the black soldiers toppled into the street. Another shot and one of the policemen tumbled backward, clutching his throat, to writhe on the sidewalk.

  A great roar arose behind us. A squad of black soldiers with drawn bayonets came racing down the street. They were met by a hundred policemen rushing from the other direction. Both sides had obviously been waiting for the signal to begin the battle. They met in roaring, cursing clamor in the middle of the street. John O’Neil drew a gun from beneath his coat. With that in one hand and his other arm about me, he fought his way past the melee and hustled me up the street to the Gayoso Hotel.

  For the rest of the afternoon, I watched from the window as the blacks and the police fought up and down Main Street and along the side streets. There were at least a dozen killed on either side from the looks of them as they sprawled in the street before they were dragged away. I could not understand why the white soldiers in the garrison were not called to restore order. It was obviously beyond the power of the Irish police, who were outnumbered by the blacks.

  As the sun sank, there came a lull in the battle. I lay down for a nap, sickened by what I had seen and the knowledge that Irishmen had been the chief combatants. I could practically read the headlines in the North. Little did I know that the worst was to come. The battle between the police and the Negro soldiers at least had the makings of a fair fight. They fought mostly with clubs and bayonets and limited their assaults to each other. But when night fell, a different army entered the fray.

  We had just finished a very poor dinner. Most of the Negro help had not dared to venture up Main Street to the hotel. We had to make do with cold meat and tired vegetables. Dan McCaffrey and Mike Hanrahan had been out on the street watching the fray and possibly participating in it, if I was any judge of the bruise that Dan had on his cheek. He claimed to have gotten it from a chip of wood torn from a house wall by a bullet.

  Suddenly we heard the pounding of hooves on Main Street. Dan seized my arm, and we rushed to the front door. Half a hundred horses were prancing past, their riders each wearing a white hood over his head, with two eyes and a mouth cut in it. “Ku Klux,” one of them cried when he saw me and Dan. I was sure it was John Kennedy.

  The hooded horsemen swung east at the foot of Main Street and galloped toward the Negro quarter of Memphis. Within minutes there came a volley of shots, followed by the ringing of church bells and a glimpse of flames flickering against the darkened sky. Screams and shouts and rebel yells echoed faintly in the night-shrouded streets. From the opposite end of town, where the black soldiers were camped, came cries of alarm. Soon the blacks appeared on Main Street, rushing furiously past the hotel, guns in hand. A tremendous crash of rifles broke their charge. From buildings on both sides of the street, hidden marksmen poured bullets into them. It was a well-laid ambush. Some tried to return the fire, but it was a lost cause. Dozens toppled before the devastating volleys. The survivors broke and ran in terror. Their enemies emerged to pursue them, whooping like Indians. I was dismayed to see that they were mostly policemen in uniform.

  For the rest of the night, Memphis was a city in chaos. White and black men fought from rooftops and store-fronts, while flaming terror reigned in the Negro quarter. Screams of pain and fear, shouts of anger and defiance, and bursts of gunfire shattered the darkness.

  Not until dawn did General Stoneman send white troops into the city to restore order. We stared from our hotel at a sight that made Vicksburg’s single dead Negro seem trivial. At least twenty black soldiers sprawled on Main Street in various po
stures of agony. Among them lay one or two whites. When army wagons took away the dead, I ventured down to the Negro quarter with Red Mike Hanrahan, who was gathering facts for a report to the Irish-American. There lay more Negro dead, and one or two whites, their hoods still on their heads. The blacks had fought here, too, but equally in vain. Their shanties and tumbledown houses had been put to the torch. Almost the entire quarter was in ruins, including Miss Simpson’s school house. We found her weeping in the wreckage, smeared with dirt and ashes, trying to salvage a few charred books and writing slates.

  “We’ll build a better school,” she said, when she saw me. “We’ll build a better school. Wait and see.”

  “Are you all right yourself? Did they—insult you?” I asked.

  “Only with words,” she said. “They did far worse to at least five colored women, including the daughter of my—my friends. Where I was staying.”

  She began to weep uncontrollably. “We’ll make them pay for this,” she said, raising her clenched fist. “I’m going to write to the president, to every man in Congress. I’m going to tell them what happened in Memphis. We’ll make these people pay.”

  She glared with wild eyes up the hill toward the white section of the town. All traces of angelic innocence were gone from her face. She looked capable of murder.

  I felt capable of it myself when Red Mike and I returned to the hotel. Who should I encounter strutting across the lobby but Captain Kennedy. “I see you took my advice and stayed out of harm’s way,” he said.

  “I did because I had no choice,” I said. “I have no training as a soldier. But if I had, I know where I would have gone.”

  “Where is that?” he said with his complacent smile.

  “Down to the Negro quarter to shoot a few more of you hooded heroes out of your saddles,” I said. “I have strong opinions about men who attack defenseless women and children.”