Notes

PROLOGUE

1. My grandparents bought their home in 1916, when Highland Park was largely open fields. I grew up two blocks away from the black neighborhood.

2. Steve Orlen, “Abandoned Places,” Poetry Magazine 23, no. 6.

3. “Prisoner of Highland Park,” D Magazine (Nov. 1977).

CHAPTER ONE

4. Epigraph. Robert Pinsky, the American poet laureate of the day, spoke of Chief Seattle and Chief Seattle’s words about the dead in his commencement address of June 13, 1999, to the graduating class at Stanford University (www. english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/pinsky/speech.htm; see also www.chiefseattle.com/history/chiefseattle/chief.htm). Both Pinsky’s and Chief Seattle’s remarks are so germane to this narrative that I provide key excerpts here.
“Graduation exercises, like this one, embody one of the great secular rituals in our culture…. On some deeper level…what we see today is the celebration here of the two great obligations or standards, two great tests that apply to every tribe and culture on earth, the two values by which any human society must be judged…. [By this] I mean the two great requirements of the human animal, without which human community is corrupt or useless, namely, caring for the young ones and honoring the wisdom of the old ones, including the ways and wisdom of the dead. The tribe or community or nation that fails at either of these missions brings woe and destruction on itself….
“Maybe the most powerful, even disturbing, statement I know concerning that process of receiving from the old ones to give to the young is the legendary half-mythical speech given by Chief Seattle, the Suquamash Indian leader. In the most authentic of the many versions of Seattle’s speech, he recognizes that the white invaders have displaced and conquered his people, reduced now to a remnant who have to rely on the goodwill of the white leaders…. He muses that the white men have said that their god is the god of the Indians as well, but Seattle says he has to doubt that. Why, if the two peoples have this one father, does he treat the one so much better than the other? ‘And how can we be brothers,’ he says to the triumphant newcomers, ‘when we’re so different?’
“As his great central example of that difference, Seattle points to how differently the two peoples behave in relation to their dead. He says, ‘To us the ashes of our ancestors are sacred and their resting place is hallowed ground. You wander far from the graves of your ancestors and seemingly without regret. Your dead cease to love you and the land of their nativity as soon as they pass the portals of the tomb and wander away beyond the stars. They are soon forgotten and never return.’
“‘Our dead never forget this beautiful world that gave them being,’ he says, and he explains that they often return to advise and comfort the living…. And then Chief Seattle makes a remarkable statement, a sentence that has rung in my mind since I first read it: ‘They are not powerless, the dead.’
“‘They are not powerless, the dead.’ I believe that these famous remarks of Chief Seattle speak to something deep in the nature of the United States of America, as though Seattle intuited something profound about our possibilities and our risks. I associate his saying that the dead are not powerless with the nature of American memory—our particular national ways of honoring the old ones.
“It’s been said that while the United States is beyond doubt a great nation, it remains to be seen if we are a great people, or whether we are perhaps still engaged in the undertaking of becoming a great people. I propose to you that a people is defined and unified not by blood, but by shared memory—a people is held together and identified by what successfully gets passed on from the old ones to be remembered by the young. A people is its memory, its ancestral treasures.”

5. The following text is quoted from the AFRO-American Almanac Web site (www.toptags.com/aama/events/jtenth.htm) and lightly edited. It begins with the announcement General Granger read on a street in Galveston, Texas, on June 19, 1865, and refers to the Emancipation Proclamation:
“General Order Number 3:
‘The people of Texas are informed that in accordance with a Proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and free laborer.’
“Many attempts have been made to explain the 2½-year delay in the receipt of this important news, but no one really knows for sure why it took so long. For whatever reason, conditions in Texas remained the same well beyond what was statutory. When change finally did arrive in Texas, the reactions to this profound news ranged from pure shock to jubilation. While many lingered to hear about this new employer-to-employee relationship, many left before the offers were completely off the lips of their former masters. Even with nowhere to go, many felt that leaving the plantation would be their first taste of freedom. The North was a logical destination, and for many it represented true freedom, while the desire to find family members in neighboring states drove some into Louisiana, Arkansas, and Oklahoma.
“The celebration of June 19th was coined ‘Juneteenth’ and grew with more participation from descendants. The Juneteenth celebration was a time for reassuring each other, for praying, and for gathering remaining family members. Juneteenth became highly revered in Texas, and is celebrated throughout the United States.
“The civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s yielded both positive and negative results for the Juneteenth celebrations….” In 1968, the Poor People’s March on Washington revived interest in Juneteenth. Many attendees started Juneteenth celebrations in areas where the celebration had previously been unknown.
“On January 1, 1980, Juneteenth became an official state holiday in Texas through the efforts of Al Edwards, an African American state legislator. The successful passage of this bill marked Juneteenth as the first Emancipation celebration to be granted official state recognition. Today Juneteenth celebrates African American freedom throughout the United States while encouraging self-development and respect for all cultures throughout the world.”

6. Robert George, of the Botanical Research Institute of Texas (BRIT) in Ft. Worth, Texas, clarified that there is a variety of wisteria that is native to Texas. “Native” means basically that it was found during the sixteenth century, when European expeditions first came to this area and reported their findings (www. BRIT.org). George explained that there might be a seed of truth in the story, though. The Verhalen Nursery may have introduced a second kind of wisteria to Texas (at least to East Texas), a variety imported from China.

CHAPTER TWO

7. Epigraph. The Dagara people live in Burkina Faso in West Africa and have a rich cosmology. In an interview, Sonbufu explained the Dagara perspective on the ongoing relationship of the Ancestors with the living. To the layperson, their cosmology, like that of many indigenous peoples the world over, can sound remarkably like Buddhist philosophy, modern physics, and string theory. The Dagara world is seamless and includes both the living and the dead. Also see Karen McCarthy Brown’s classic work of anthropology on the African-based Voudon tradition of Haiti, Mama Lola: A Voudon Priestess in Brooklyn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).

8. The dogs were brought by individual owners. They were not dogs that belonged to the Marshall Police or Fire Department, it turned out.

9. Joe C. Truet and Daniel W. Lay, Land of Bears and Honey: A Natural History of East Texas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1984).

CHAPTER THREE

10. Epigraph. Robert Pinsky’s June 13, 1999, commencement address at Stanford.

11. The Love/Bennett Family Tree, 1830–1998, “The Love Line,” by Joyce Mack Parks, a descendant of Della Love (self-published, 1998). Courtesy of the Harrison County Historical Society Library.

CHAPTER FOUR

12. Epigraph. Randolph B. Campbell, An Empire for Slavery: The Peculiar Institution in Texas, 1821–1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 1. Campbell’s use of the phrase “the burden of Southern History,” comes, as he notes, from C. Vann Woodward, The Burden of Southern History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1960).

13. Interview with the dean of the Temple School of Forestry, Prof. Scott Beasley, Stephen F. Austin College, Nagodoches, Texas.

14. I consulted a variety of sources to piece together the picture I present here of the Caddo and the land. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly’s article on Thomas Jefferson’s 1806 exploratory expedition up the Red River (the second exploratory journey that he commissioned during his presidency, the Lewis and Clark expedition being the first) was particularly helpful. Dan L. Flores, “The Ecology of the Red River in 1806: Peter Custis and Early Southwestern Natural History,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 88, no. 1 (July 1984), 1–42. Gary Endsley of the Jeffersonian Institute’s Cypress Valley Education Center in Jefferson, Texas, generously shared this paper and others. Joe C. Truett and Daniel W. Lay’s classic Land of Bears and Honey: A Natural History of East Texas, was lent to me by Francis E. Abernathy. Randolph Campbell’s history of the state, Gone to Texas, and The Conquest of Texas: Ethnic Cleansing in the Promised Land, 1820–1875, by Gary Clayton Anderson, helped fill in more information on the Caddo. Also see the Web site for the Caddo Nation, headquartered in Binger, Oklahoma (www.caddonationnsm.gov). The Caddo Lake Institute (www.caddolakeinstitute.us) and various Web sites on the Gulf Coast Plain and the ancient seas that covered East Texas were especially helpful in understanding the landscape of East Texas (www.csc.noaa.gov/beachnourishment/html/geo/index.htm; www.tsha.utexas. edu/handbook/online/articles/GG/swgqz.html; www.emporia.edu/earthsci/student/salley3/). Dean Scott Beasley of the Temple School of Forestry at Stephen F. Austin College in Nagodoches, Texas, kindly took the time to read this material for factual accuracy.

15. Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), is an excellent book that recounts the successful rebellion of over 100,000 people in slavery in Haiti.

16. Benjamin Braude’s “The Mistranslation of Ham,” was presented at Yale University’s Guilder Lehrman Center on Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition’s annual fall conference, 2004. Also see the article by Felicia R. Lee on the conference, “From Noah’s Curse to Slavery’s Rationale” (New York Times, Nov. 1, 2003), which sums up the thinking of many contemporary scholars on the sleight of hand in biblical translation that made it possible for people to justify the institution of slavery. Also see David Brion Davis’s Pulitzer Prize–winning book, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York: Oxford, 2006).

17. See Adam Hochschild’s extraordinary account of the British movement to outlaw the slave trade and ultimately to outlaw slavery: Bury the Chains. The British abolitionist movement, begun by a handful of Quakers led by William Wilberforce, was an important influence on the U.S. abolitionist groups, and there was a great deal of interchange between them. American abolitionists, including Frederick Douglass, traveled to England, and British abolitionists visited the South, including Texas. Also see Robert Metaxis’s Amazing Grace (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2007), and the movie by the same name.

18. Campbell, Empire, 14.

19. Campbell, Empire, 35.

20. Campbell, Empire, 4.

21. Campbell, Empire, 4.

22. See David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage (New York: Oxford, 2006). Davis is also the director of Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. “Throughout the antebellum period cotton accounted for over half the value of all American exports, and thus it paid for the major share of the nation’s import and investment capital.” For more on the critical role that southern cotton played in the Industrial Revolution and world trade, see pp. 181–84.

23. Davis, Inhuman Bondage, 18.

24. Named after a minstrel show stereotype, the term “Jim Crow laws” was used for a wide range of antiblack legislation enacted in the 1880s.

25. Pete Daniels, The Shadow of Slavery: Peonage in the South, 1901–1969 (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1972). Daniels tells how debt peonage survived and fed off the corruption of local law enforcement and the laxity of federal law enforcement. For example, in the 1920s if a worker tried to escape the dreaded turpentine camps in the Florida woods, or the sawmills of the South, his “boss” could go to local law enforcement to find, beat, and arrest the man or woman and have him or her dragged back to work until the “debt” was paid. Debts could rarely be paid off because they were always being increased—for example, when a worker tried to attend a voter education class. Many paid with their lives.
As with Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans today, Daniels points out that “natural disasters had a way of exposing the unnatural caste system of the South.” Whether it was the flood from the 1917 hurricane in Texas City, or the infamous 1927 Great Flood of the Mississippi, African Americans generally lost the most. In 1927, African Americans were herded into “refugee camps” under the control of armed National Guardsmen. After the NAACP reported on the existence of the camps and the impossibility for blacks to move in and out, Herbert Hoover, who was in charge of the rescue effort, invited interested parties to visit “any of the negro concentration camps in Arkansas, Mississippi, or Louisiana.”
In the 1927 flood, as white women and children escaped in cars, black women and children rode away from the river in boxcars. Four hundred black men, pressed into service by the government to shore up the levees, were reportedly abandoned atop the levees and drowned. (pp. 151–56).

26. Daniels, Shadow of Slavery, 180.

27. Daniels, The Shadow of Slavery. Daniel’s book is essential reading on this subject. Debt peonage is as vicious today as it was in the Old and New South, only today it devours refugees and immigrants—men, women, and children alike—not only African Americans and people of color but whites too. According to Enslaved: True Stories of Modern Slavery, edited by Jess Sage and Liora Kasten, foreword by Gloria Steinem (New York: Palgrave, 2006), which was published by the American Anti-Slavery Group, 27 million people remain enslaved today.

28. See www.usconstitution.com/40Acres.htm and other sites. Special Field Order No. 15, issued by General Sherman on January 16, 1865, did indeed give formerly enslaved people forty acres of land per family. See the website for the entire order. I excerpt this material because many have claimed that being given 40 acres and a mule was wishful thinking on the part of African Americans. It was not. The order begins:
“I. The islands from Charleston, south, the abandoned rice fields along the rivers for thirty miles back from the sea, and the country bordering the St. Johns river, Florida, are reserved and set apart for the settlement of the negroes now made free by the acts of war and the proclamation of the President of the United States….” and continues. [See also “What About My 40 Acres & a Mule?” Gerene L. Freeman, Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute: www. yale.edu/ynhti/curriculum/units/1994/4/94.04.01.x.html ]
In sum, by June, 1865, 40,000 freedmen had been allocated 400,000 acres of land. Within a year, President Andrew Johnson broke the good faith of the freedmen and rescinded Sherman’s order and instructed Brigadier General R. Saxton to take back the lands from the families living on them and farming.
Saxton was dismayed and wrote the Commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau directly noting that the lands “have been solemnly pledged to the freedmen. The law of Congress has been published to them…It is of vital importance that our promises made to freedmen should be faithfully kept…The freedmen were promised the protection of the government in their possession…I cannot break faith with them now by recommending the restoration of any of these lands. In my opinion, this order of General Sherman’s is as binding as a statute.” Nonetheless Saxton’s pleas went unanswered. The white planters, the former owners of the land demanded their property back and President Johnson gave it to them. Saxton was ashamed. The families were devastated but had no choice but to move on. Saxton had military orders to evacuate them and he had the U.S. Army behind him. Though the freedmen were removed, many still felt entitled to the land. Between 1865-1869 countless alternatives were proposed.
Still, “President Johnson…mercilessly vetoed any proposal having to do with providing land to the freedmen that reached his desk. Finally, Congress overrode his veto and passed a bill to extend the life of the Freedmen’s Bureau. However, it contained no provision for granting land to the Freedmen, other than to provide them access to the Southern Homestead Act at the standard rate of purchase.
“The issue of reparations refuses to die….”

29. Daniels, Shadow of Slavery, 170–92 .

30. R. P. Littlejohn, “A Brief History of the Days of Reconstruction in Harrison County, Texas” (Marshall, Texas: n.p., 1936). A well-known outrageous 9½-page paper that has been a subject of study for some time.

31. Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Their Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 327. Steven Hahn’s Pulitzer Prize-winning A Nation Under Their Feet and Randolph Cambell’s books lay out an important, different history of this period than most schoolbooks recognize.

32. Whether they ever debated Harvard University remains a question.

33. Gail Beil, The Banquet of My Years (unpublished manuscript), a biography of James Farmer Jr. and James Farmer Sr.

34. I interviewed Rev. Hamilton Boswell in 2005 and 2006 at his home in California.

35. Chris Moseley Jr., “The History of Scottsville, Harrison County, Texas, and Its Relation to the Land” (term paper, Baylor University, 1985). Courtesy of the Harrison County Historical Society Library.

36. Hahn, A Nation.

37. Todd Lewan and Dolores Barclay, “Torn from the Land,” Associated Press, 2001. Associated Press writers Woody Baird, Allen G. Breed, Shelia Hardwell Byrd, Alan Clendenning, Ron Harrist, David Lieb, and Bill Poovey, and investigative researcher Randy Herschaft contributed to this report. Dolores Barclay wrote and let me know that their series was read into the Congressional Record. Spencer Wood assisted and helped train the writers and showed them how to research old records. “A follow-up Associated Press story by Bruce Smith that appeared October 15, 2006, “Heirs Defy History of Blacks Losing Land,” tells of the Jones family who, rather than letting their land get sold off in increasingly smaller parcels, formed a corporation and are developing their valuable property on Hilton Head in South Carolina. See Associated Press, www.ap.org.

38. “New Study Shows Impact of Mercury Pollution: $8.7 Billion Lost Annually Due to Poisoning in the Womb,” Environmental Health (Feb. 28, 2005), available at http://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/members/2005/7743/7743.pdf . The article concludes that 600,000 babies are brain-damaged in utero from mercury poisoning, before they even take their first breath. Studies show that “mercury pollution is directly attributable to mercury emitted by coal-fired power plants…. The EPA has identified coal-fired power plants as the largest industrial emitters of mercury….” The highest concentration of mercury in the United States is in the lignite coal mined and burned in the Caddo area.

39. Joe Nick Patosi, “The Only Honest Lake in Texas,” The Texas Observer, July 8, 2005.

CHAPTER FIVE

40. Will Coleman, cofounder of BT, the Black Theological think tank, and author of Tribal Talk: African Ancestral Spirituality as a Resource for Wholeness, in Teaching African American Religions (Oxford: American Academy of Religious Studies, 2005), and several other works, introduced me to this understanding and to the work of other fine scholars and books on this subject.
Afro Caribbean scholar and author Gerard Pigeon, professor emeritus and former chair of the Black Studies Department at University of Santa Barbara, and anthropologist of religion Karen McCarthy Brown, professor of sociology and anthropology of religion at Drew University, author of Mama Lola: A Voudon Priestess in Brooklyn, have especially opened my eyes to the rich, complex world of Africa that’s been carried by the Black Diaspora throughout the world.

CHAPTER SIX

41. Brian Swimme, The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos (New York: Orbis, 1996), 108.

CHAPTER SEVEN

42. Moseley, “The History of Scottsville, 54.”

43. Sabine Farms was a federal project in the 1930s that helped black farmers buy 10,000 acres of farmland. A vestige of Sabine Farms remains today.

44. Spencer D. Wood, Ph.D., professor of sociology and a board member of the Black Farmers and Agriculturalists Association.

45. Telephone interview with Spencer Wood on his research for a forthcoming article on the subject of black land loss, January 10, 2006. Wood’s fellow professor, Jess Gilbert, a professor of rural sociology from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, is the coauthor, with Wood, of the article, “Experiments in Land Reform and Racial Justice: The New Deal State and Local African Americans Remake Civil Society in the Rural South, 1935–2004.”

46. Originally the land belonged to Monsanto, then the Department of Defense. Currently it’s being transferred to the Fish and Wildlife Service to be made into a National Wildlife Refuge.

47. In 1991, construction workers digging a foundation for the new Federal Building in New York City found themselves in a seventeenth-and eighteenth-century cemetery for slaves and freedmen in downtown Manhattan. The African Burial Ground Project continues to be an enormous, ongoing work of great historical significance. The burial ground itself encompassed an estimated five acres and held roughly 20,000 burials. Because of its location and the unique challenges of the site, only 419 remains were reinterred in 2003.
Since the site was designated a National Monument in February 2006, its administration has been taken over by the National Park Service and is managed in part by the Schomberg Center of the New York Public Library. ABGP is a magnificent work, which has given us a new understanding of the role that New York and the Northeast played in the history of slavery; indeed, it provides a broader, more accurate, and more complicated understanding of the history of the United States as a whole.

48. The book was published by the African American Museum in Dallas. The video, “Freedman’s Cemetery Memorial: A Place of Healing,” was produced by KERA television in Dallas, the local PBS station.

49. From the multitude of sources on this subject, I’ve chosen to rely on Adam Hochschild’s book on the British abolitionists, Bury the Chains (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005); as well as Johnson, Smith, and the WGBH Series Research Team, Africans in America.

50. Linda Tillery’s “From Slave Ships to Sanctuary,” a course on African American spirituals taught with Rev. Ann Jefferson at the Graduate Theological Union, used scholarship and song to deepen our understanding of the experience of people in slavery and the genesis of the black gospel tradition. Linda Tillery’s comment in a class sparked my reflections at the Dallas Freedman’s Cemetery. As we gathered in our classroom, designed for sixty people, she suggested that, before we sang, we take a minute to imagine four hundred people in the room, in chains, very few of whom could communicate with one another because of differences in tribe and language.

CHAPTER EIGHT

51. Epigraph. Martin Luther King Jr., “Great, but” (Ebenezer Church, Atlanta, Georgia, July 2, 1967), audiotape recording, MLKP-GAMK, 474. Cited in Stewart Burns, To the Mountaintop: Martin Luther King’s Sacred Mission to Save America 1955–1968 (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2004), 345 n. 52.

52. “Mosaics of Mary, the Many Faces of the Divine Feminine Around the World,” held at the Sophia Center at the Phoebe Pembrook House, with myself, Sue Monk Kidd, Peggy Rubin, Emily Devine, Janet McKenzie, and Carolyn Rivers.

53. This is how people in Brazil who go into trance in Candomble ceremonies are treated; they are upheld as they are taken over by the Spirits, saturated with their living God. Both traditions—Black Baptist and Candomble—are rooted in Africa, no matter how far apart they might seem on the surface.

CHAPTER NINE

54. Epigraph. The Biblical quotes at the beginnings of this chapter are taken from The New Jerusalem Bible Pocket Edition, edited by Henry Wansbrough, pp. 1400, 695.

55. The Antiquities Act of 1806 made it a crime to steal Indian artifacts or deface ancient and historical sites on federal land. The state of Nebraska has been the national leader in protecting Indian remains on private land and has created model legislation for this.

56. Available at http://www.texasbeyondhistory.net/timberhill/index.html.

57. Louise Levathes, “A Geneticist Maps Ancient Migrations,” New York Times, July 27, 1983, reported on the work of Dr. Cavalli-Sforza of Stanford University Medical School and his colleagues, and their then forthcoming “publication of a genetic atlas called ‘The History and Geography of Human Genes,’” by Princeton University Press. In sum, “Europeans are a mixed population that…appear to have 65% Asian ancestry and 35% African…. All races or ethnic groups now seem to be a bewildering array of overlapping sets and subsets that are in a constant state of flux.”
Also in 1983, Dr. Cavalli-Sforza and Dr. Mary-Claire King, a geneticist at the University of California at Berkeley, appeared at a hearing of the Senate Committee on Government Affairs to report on their project and the implications of their findings. “They called racism ‘an ancient scourge of humanity’ and expressed the hope that the[ir] extensive study of world populations would ‘undercut conventional notions of race and underscore the common bonds between all humans.’”
Dr. Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum, a generous author, scholar, and intrepid cultural historian, introduced me to the work of Dr. Cavalli-Sforza and the Human Genome Diversity Project.

58. Manning Marable’s The Great Wells of Democracy: The Meaning of Race in American Life is an invaluable examination of the double narrative in the United States and the burning need for a national conversation. I return to him repeatedly, especially his words, “To find a common future together, we must reconstruct our common past” (xii).

59. Fairness demanded that I telephone the minister to hear his perspective, but for whatever reason, my calls were not returned. The demands of ministering are immense, and I was not a member of his church.

LOVE CEMETERY BURIAL MAP LIST

60. List was current as of April 2006.

EPILOGUE

61. As of January 2007.

62. Known especially for her painting “Jesus of the People,” Janet was inspired to paint Nuthel and Doris after hearing only a fragment about Love Cemetery. See www.janetmckenzie.com.

63. With the support of the William Winter Institute, the Alliance for Truth and Racial Reconciliation (ATRR) has emerged and consists of a number of groups working for racial justice and reconciliation. www.olemiss. edu/winterinstitute. For the Alliance, see www.olemiss.edu/winterinstitute/ atrr.

64. Caroline Senter writes about this Louisiana Creole community of writers and poets . Her account of them and their commitment to envisioning America was so arresting that I’ve drawn in large part on her essay “Creole Poets on the Verge of a Nation.” Though their poetry was not especially meaningful out of context, some of it is in Senter’s account. See Creole: The History and Legacy of Louisiana’s Free People of Color, edited by Sybil Kein (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000), 176–294.

65. See E. L. Doctorow’s powerful fictionalized account of history, The March, on this brutal, chaotic period in the history of the United States following the Civil War.