Within minutes we were in the Yankee camp. It struck me that only two days earlier I had walked into the midst of a southern camp and now I was trodding among their deadly enemy, all men who if dressed in a common uniform would be inseparable. I figured that in order to kill and plunder their own kind as they did, their hearts must be choked with hate. I wondered if they hated each other or the worldly situation. I hoped it was the situation. It made the war easier to understand.
There did not seem to be as many soldiers here as in the southern camp, and those present were more scattered about. Signs were everywhere though of a great army freshly departed. The plantation was grazed clean from the bare, trampled ground to the height the tallest horse could reach on the trees. Thousands of fire rings charred the fields, and only post-holes remained as clues of fences burned to warm suppers and moods.
“I’m glad Pa’s gone,” the boy said. “He’d whup me fer sure fer jumpin’ in the lake.” He rolled the barrel hoop along with the stick as we walked. Once he rolled it between Chula’s legs, darting under his lead rope to keep it going. It almost set me to laughing again when I realized that before this morning I had not laughed in many months.
“Where is your pa?” I asked.
“He’s spectin’ the men down south,” he replied.
We came to the Richwood plantation house, which was not burned and was so new that the war had halted its construction. It was rectangular and supported by square, brick columns. The ground level was open all around to park buggies out of the weather. Wide brick steps led up to the first-floor gallery. These shaded porches wrapped around all sides of this level and the unfinished one above. Giant cypress cisterns, painted forest green like the house, stood on legs at each corner to catch rainwater from the roof. The house sat on the high bank back from the lake and spoke of wealth I could not imagine.
I followed the boy to the back of the house and watched as he washed his face and combed his hair at a basin carved into a large rock.
“Do you know what this is?” the boy asked as he pointed down at the brick path between the big house and the kitchen. I shook my head. “Them rebels call it the whistle walk. Ya know why?” I did not know. “They made the slaves whistle when they toted food from the kitchen to the house. Ya know why?”
“No, but you are stirring my curiosity,” I told him.
“Well, the master made ‘em whistle so he could hear ‘em comin’ and they wouldn’t catch him kissin’ on his wife. And somethin’ else—the slaves couldn’t be tastin’ his food while they were totin’ it if they wuz whistling.’”
“He must be a pretty smart man,” I said.
“Smarter than some I reckon cause he’s mostly a Union man. The slaves are free now. They’re servants. We don’t make ‘em whistle.”
He led me up back steps, down a hall, and into a room where two women sat in stuffed chairs knitting socks. A little girl played with dolls on the floor. The boy marched in with me on his heels and stood holding his wet cap before the older woman. He started to speak, “Ma—“ but she cut him off with a glare that would melt candle wax.
“Lizzy,” she called in a not unpleasant voice that gave me some respite, “May we have more light?”
A black girl I had not seen stepped from the corner and opened a tall, narrow window that reached to the ceiling. When she threw back the shutters, the brightness poured in to paint the boy and me in a shaft of radiance that stopped at the woman’s feet. She looked us over.
After some moments the boy tried again, “Ma, she needs the doctor. Just look at her face.”
“Jesse, please be presentable for the noon meal.” The boy took this as his cue and, still dripping on the fancy carpets, hurried from the room.
I would have been less forward and more embarrassed but for my condition. For days events seemed to sweep me along like bay leaves in the l’Outre’s autumn currents. The channel had become sinuous, and I could not see around the bends.
“I am sorry, mam. Your son tells me of a doctor here. I have a bad tooth.” So I told them of my mission, and they listened with kindness and interest. When I finished, the older lady spoke again.
“Perhaps we can help. Lizzie, will you run for Captain Waters? He is very likely at the peach trees behind the kitchen.”
As the black girl raced away, I realized that I had not introduced myself properly.
“My name is Abita Carter.”
The ladies stood and shook my hand in turn.
“I am Julia Grant and this is my friend, Mrs. Cummings.”
The beckoned Captain Waters entered the room with a basket of fresh peaches. His elegant silver mustache drooped on one side, revealing that he had savored at least some of the juicy offerings placed before the ladies. His impish smile froze when he looked at me squarely.
“Good Lord!” he cried.
Mrs. Grant spoke, “Captain Waters, being one of the finest surgeons in the army of this great nation, do you think you can offer relief to Miss Carter in her terrible predicament?”
The doctor placed gold-rimmed spectacles on the end of his nose and reared back his head. “A foul tooth, I presume?” His accent was heavy with the old English talk. I nodded. He bowed to the ladies and hurried away calling orders to soldiers stationed at the front door. One of them soon came back for me.
The operating theater was under the house. A high-backed rocking chair was leaned back against a long table used to clean vegetables and chickens. The surgeon’s instruments were spread on the table amongst butterbean hulls and feathers. His assistants stood on either side of the chair at near attention. They helped me onto this throne and put a pillow under my head.
Captain Waters spoke solemnly, “Miss Carter, I pray that you are able to reach deep into your essence for courage. The procedure is trying but mercifully short in most instances.” With that, one soldier held my shoulder and the other lifted high a carriage lamp for light. “Splitter, please,” said the doctor.
I tried to leave my body in the rocking chair and go to my mother in her village. Rising in the air and floating above the treetops was easy for me. I did so at will in my dreams. On this day I could not rise higher than the dirt dobber nests on the floor joists above the chair. I kept bumping my sore head, and it hurt dreadfully.
That night I slept on a pallet in the kitchen. Mrs. Grant looked in on me twice and gave orders to the cook to call at once if my situation declined. By morning I felt a new person and resolved never to forget the lesson that good health is seldom appreciated until suffering begins. I thought again of Minor and his health.
After breakfast Jesse came with the message that Mrs. Grant wished to see me if I felt able. I went at once and found her in the same room as the day before, still knitting socks.
“Good morning, Miss Carter. I must say you look much improved this morning.”
“You cannot imagine my relief, mam. I am forever thankful of your kindness.”
“I have something else that may ease your travels.” She handed me a folded slip of paper that smelled of cigar smoke. “It is a pass authorized by my husband. He returned late last night and I told him of your plight. He said it’s the least he can do for another player in this terrible drama. He left again early this morning before I could wish him Godspeed.” I saw in her then a loneliness that position could not overcome.
“Please tell him of my gratitude. I wish you both peace and happiness.”
I left to gather my belongings and read the pass. It was dated July1, 1863, and stated, “Pass Bearer, Miss Abita Carter, through the lines of the U.S. Army to DeSoto Point and beyond, this pass is good for seven (7) days from this date. By command of General U.S. Grant.” I felt the currents pulling me again in the direction that I needed to go.
Someone had fed Chula a tub of watermelon rinds and he was happy. We walked south down the road from Richwood and passed many Yankee soldiers and Negroes. The soldiers were going to and fro as on unhurried details while the Negroes were idle or wandering without purpose. In these black people and others that I encountered in days to come, there was a sense of unknown expectations. They stood at the starting line of a great race with promises of a wonderful prize at the end, but no one would fire the shot to send them forward. And no one would point out which of the many paths led straight away from bondage to happiness. There was a difference in these people and the ones I saw at Larksong who had not tasted freedom. The difference confused me.
Soon the levee came to run alongside the road. We climbed to the top to see the great Mississippi River, but it was across a field hidden by willow trees and cottonwoods. The levee was hard packed from traffic and littered with camp refuse. It was the only high ground during the spring flood. That is why the graves were there too—dozens of them marked by low mounds, some with simple wooden Christian crosses—all of them fresh. I learned that mostly Negroes were in the graves with a sprinklin’ of Yankees. They were dead of typhus or smallpox. Some of the freed slaves were just worked to death. The road was a better place to walk.
Fallow cotton fields lay flat like a heavy brown blanket on the front lands. Single mule trees offered shade at some point in a half circle on the north side during all of the summer day. The forest began way in the back after the ground dropped away. In some places a plow could run straight for a mile between turn-rows at the road and the swamp. We walked on past more plantations. Some of the houses were burned and some were mostly left alone. At one of these we stopped in the heat of the late afternoon, but only for a moment to water and inquire of Yankee soldiers about the road ahead. Their answer convinced me that we still had a day’s travel to the Point, fifteen miles beyond Milliken’s Bend, now in sight across a field. We skirted the village before I chose a campsite off the road on the edge of a canebrake. It came to me that the steady rumble to the south that my mind had unconsciously recognized as thunder was not. I fell asleep wondering if a cannon’s roar could be a siren’s call.
In the morning I witnessed a frightful battle. Chula’s stirring woke me at first light. I sat up to see the dust of a great number of horses passing across the field. The rebel colors floated above the dust leading the soldiers straight to Milliken’s Bend. The cloud began to jingle as the horses advanced to a stiff trot. Suddenly they stopped. A deep slave ditch ran from the end of the canebrake across the path of General Walker’s cavalry to a slough near the road. I do not know if the officers knew of this obstacle, but they quickly turned it to their favor. Crossings were found and all passed except for a hundred who stayed behind. These dismounted, tied their horses in our canebrake, and jumped into the ditch to form a line of defense.
Unknown to me, a great number of Yankees were camped on the river side of the village. Their still-drowsy camp was the target of the raiders. A single rifle shot rang out, and its echo faded into silence. In another time this would have been a sign that Mr. Carter would soon return with squirrels for breakfast. This day it was a delayed trip wire to release piercing animal screams of attackers as they fell on their enemy. After the first volley, gunfire rippled about the camp like innocent fireworks. I could not see the fight because of the distance, but the sounds made my flesh crawl for long minutes. The men in the ditch before me stood to their posts and stared ahead. They felt the change first and pointed to black columns of smoke approaching from upriver. A cannon’s roar left no doubt as to the origin of the smoke. By chance or design a gunboat was close when the battle began and wasted no time in coming to the fight. With her first shot, men in gray came riding hard back in our direction from the village. They called to the men in the ditch to be vigilant. Soon all of the Confederate force were in retreat to the cover of the ditch and canebrake. Officers raced about giving orders. The soldiers dismounted and led their horses, three to a holder, to the cane with the others. The commotion waned then but not the tension. I was close enough to hear the high-pitched strain in their voices. Many were panting like dogs from the terror.
All of a sudden I became conscious of my being. We were in a shaded pocket of cane no more than sixty yards from the closest point of the ditch. Horses nickered and their holders cursed in the thicket behind. I hitched the lead rope to Chula’s halter and stood close by him. No one had seen us yet. To move would have brought discovery, so we waited like the others.
The Yankees came out of the village in a broad front. A few were on horseback and held sabers high in the early morning sun. Infantry men followed, many more than the Texas soldiers. The blue wave crossed the field quickly with little noise. Not a shot was fired as they came on. When it seemed they would fall into the ditch, a long cane pole with the rebel battle flag atop swept upward from the moat. The volley that followed wilted the Yankee line like scalding water on clover. Those behind hesitated and looked back over their shoulders. I thought they would turn and run away, but a group of their comrades came around the ditch at the road and attacked the Texans on their side. The Yankees in front were encouraged by the move and came forward again. Soon they were all entangled about the ditch. Men grappled and clubbed and slashed. They made noises far removed from civilized men. Some of the Confederates ran for their horses. One jumped from the ditch and tried to sound a bugle. He blew three notes and fell back into what likely became his grave. An overwhelming enemy was smothering the gray-clad raiders.
The gunboat broke up the battle and nearly killed us all. She had been silent since the first shot in the village. Without warning a shell fell from the sky into the midst of the savagery. Others followed quickly, reaping men of both sides without prejudice. Never have I observed such chaos as soldiers struggled to free themselves of close combat and get away from the invisible, whistling death. When a shell fell between me and the ditch, I pulled Chula into the cane and found a small opening where a giant oak had fallen. A boy stood at one edge holding three horses. Before my eyes an explosion swallowed them, the air cleared, and the boy still stood holding three horses—but they were dead, their bodies shielding him from the blast. I tried to force our way into the cane on the far side, but it was too thick. In desperation I led Chula to the log and threw half hitches around a front and hind leg. I jerked them together and pushed him sideways with all my strength. He fell with a grunt against the log. We lay there for a long time.
Guns on the war boat hushed. The soldiers had stopped firing long before her last shot. The morning became hot, and I was thirsty. I was afraid that Chula would twist a gut and die if I did not let him get up. When we could bear it no longer, we came out from behind the log. No one was in sight. We slipped back to our campsite at the field’s edge and saw the parings of battle. The sour smell of gunpowder lingered about and gave me a terrible ache deep inside my head. Ambulances were carrying off the wounded Yankees. A guard stood by bodies lined up beyond the ditch. Maybe there were twenty or thirty, all in blue uniforms. I could not see a live Texan on the field. The rebels had disappeared with their injured but left eleven men where they last took a breath. I gathered my belongings, loaded Chula, and headed west. A final memory of this place still firm in my mind is of a butcherbird impaling a lizard on a locust thorn. The thorn was on a cannon-shattered tree lying across a Confederate soldier.
We walked west along the canebrake until it sank into the field. The field yielded to the stark wall of the swamp, and we turned south again along its edge. No one saw us, or if they did they ignored us. Late in the day white and blue cranes and egrets began to fly from all directions into the swamp ahead of us. I suspected they were going to roost over water, so we followed them. Chula smelled it then and pulled me to the edge of a small, muddy pond surrounded by button-willows. The surface was covered with a mat of duckweed. Chula plunged into the shallows and sucked in the hot water, weeds and all. When he was filled to satisfaction, he backed straight out and turned to face me. With an emerald green muzzle, coal black mud to his knees, and a bullet hole in each ear, he shamed the court jesters in Dr. Barrett’s books. He also lifted my spirits on a cheerless day.
I found a trickle of running water at the pond’s outlet opposite the bird roost and strained it through a handkerchief into my pot. Mosquitoes drove us back to the field edge for the night’s camp. I put beans to soak, laid a fire, and watched the shadows grow across the field while Chula grazed. On this evening I came to a decision. The Mississippi River crossing and Vicksburg loomed just ahead. I sensed pending trials that would tax my will, so I decided to abandon Chula and face them alone during this piece of my journey. Tomorrow I would search for a worthy keeper of my faithful companion.
Cannon rumbled through the night. The noise seemed to swell from the exact point of sunrise on the horizon. We watered again with the waking, squawking birds and started for the source of the conflict.
DeSoto Point jutted into the path of the Mississippi River and forced it east against the bluffs at Vicksburg. The railroad met the river at this place. Before the Yankees came, trains had brought beef and produce from Texas to the Point where this freight was loaded onto a ferry for the crossing. Once across, cars of another railroad had carried the precious goods to hungry Confederate armies across the South. Now the army in Vicksburg tasted only famine.
I found the man to keep Chula under a burned-out trestle just west of the Point. He was living with a half grown boy there in a hut made with bridge timbers and pieces of a wrecked boxcar. Guinea hens cackled an alarm as we came up, and a goat jumped on top of the hut. The boy came out a carpet-flap door followed by a black man bare to the waist and barefoot like most. He stooped to pass through the threshold and stood tall and elegant like an African king. So startling was his appearance that I stepped back. The staff he held became a lion spear and the rags he wore a skirt of zebra hide. It seemed a long time before I could utter a word.
“My name is Abita Carter. I need someone to look after my mule while I see to a friend.” They stared and did not say a word. The man was the tallest person I had ever seen. “I can pay for your troubles.” The boy looked up at the man and after a while the man nodded.
“I am expecting you to take good care of him. He is blind,” I said.
The man stepped back into the hut and returned with a kitten that he clutched to his breast and gently stroked with long fingers. Then the boy spoke, “Atlas cain’t talk. He ain’t got nary tongue. Dem drunk Yankees done cut it out wid de ‘smiff tongs. Dem drunk Yankees tell Atlas to say bad words ‘bout the Massa. Atlas cain’t tell ‘em ‘cause he love Massa.”
At that moment the matter of slavery, which had been absent from my daily thoughts, came forward tangled in irony. I remembered a sermon about white souls and black souls. I brooded about my own and wondered its color.
The boy’s name was Quint. Old Atlas used throat noises and arm waving to pass his thoughts to us. His motions went past me, but the boy caught them and said that they would hide and tend Chula as best they could. Atlas walked to Chula’s side and made a humming, clicking sound. He offered him the back of his hand to smell and rubbed him in his favorite place under his jaw. I had never known another mule or horse that liked to be rubbed there, and I was surprised that Atlas could perceive this. It eased my worries about leaving Chula.
One of the canvas packs held the medicines and bare vitals I figured necessary until I could return. I left the rest and two gold dollars with Chula’s keepers. The Point was just a short distance down the train track, and I soon came again into the stirrings of an army camp.
A single picket guard on the road passed the time tossing a knife at a stump and paid me no mind as I walked by on the track. The place was a supply depot. Wagons loaded with goods were organized in groups with lanes between them. Barrels were stacked in piles amongst the wagons. From my vantage point up on the track it all looked like a game board maze.
Resting flags marked the Yankee headquarters. I spoke to a corporal carrying a journal. “My name is Abita Carter. Can you take me to the officer in charge?”
He seemed puzzled and stared me over. “The colonel is very busy—too busy to address your complaints today.” His manner of speech was like the Sanhedrins’.
“I have no complaints sir. I wish to cross the river.” I handed him my pass from General Grant. His eyebrows rose even higher when he read it, and he scurried away stopping to look back over his shoulder at me. I could not resist a small, coy wave that sent him into agitated motion once more.
I waited a long time. Many soldiers came and went in the headquarters area. I had begun to think that my pass was gone forever when the corporal finally returned.
“The colonel suggests that you return in the morning. There may an opportunity for civilians to cross then.” His manners were now pleasant. “There can be no guarantees but recent developments are promising. We have just received word that the infidels will surrender tomorrow.” He looked across the river at the towering bluffs. “What better way to celebrate the birth of our nation!”
The day was the third of July 1863.