IN THE SPRING OF 2008, THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER spilled from its banks, much as it did in April 1865. Pushing past the Memphis waterfront at about the speed an average person runs, it presented an awesome spectacle of velocity and force. Tow-boats strained against the flexing back of what was essentially a thousand-mile muscle of water. A lone canoe embarked from the city front, carrying a group of adventure seekers who wanted to experience the river at full force. At first the canoe had trouble gaining the main current, which was laden with logs and other debris, and so strong that it repelled whatever was outside its grasp.
The overflow spread through thousands of acres of adjacent forests and fields, and at some points the actual flow was three miles wide and perhaps a hundred feet deep, riddled with dangerous digressions—riptides, rogue currents that turned back upon themselves and bullied their way upstream, and standing waves that broke upon the surface of the river itself, creating the illusion of shoals. There were whirlpools of all sizes, interrupting and venting the flow, spinning wider and deeper until they broke in final upsurges, as if from muted explosions below. A quick dip of the hand revealed that the water was achingly cold.
People swim in the Mississippi in summer, usually in the slack water along sandbars, or perhaps all the way across on a dare, but not, by choice, in its open channel during a flood. Standing safely on the bank, it was easy to imagine the terror the Sultana passengers felt when they found themselves in the pull of bottomless water, fighting off others in the same predicament, in the middle of the night. Far more than the carefully preserved battlefields, interspersed with monuments and parades of insistent signs, the flooded river evoked its part of the Sultana saga with disturbing immediacy. The only comparable chance of observing the full power of the other trials—the violence of war and the implosive claustrophobia of imprisonment—would be to travel to Afghanistan or Iraq, or to the holding pens of Guantanamo.
In fact, most of the physical evidence of the Sultana saga is gone. The former town of Cahaba was unincorporated in 1989, after it had been reduced to a few hunting and fishing camps. All that is left of most of the nearby houses and stores, as well as the Bell Tavern Hotel, are overgrown piles of broken bricks. The gravel streets are empty, punctuated by a scattering of historical markers and picnic tables. A few derelict houses remain, sagging under the weight of flowering vines. Near the confluence of the Cahaba and Alabama rivers stand the columned ruins of the former riverfront mansion where Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest and his Union counterpart sat on a balcony sharing cigars and cordials while discussing a planned prisoner exchange. The site of the stockade is today a pleasant glen of moss-draped trees, part of a state park described in brochures as “Alabama’s most famous ghost town.” A casual visitor might conclude that aside from the scenic river views there is nothing much to see, and nothing to learn other than that something was here that went away. But after reading the survivors’ accounts, even the hint of Cahaba opens a portal into a terrible known, making it possible to telescope history, to resurrect a succession of thousands of flickering, pivotal moments—many of them someone’s last—that have otherwise retreated into the past. What appears to be an insignificant depression in the ground turns out to be the site of the stockade privy, where Jesse Hawes and his friends crawled through a bog of human waste a few feet from unsuspecting, armed guards in their attempted escape. The actual prison compound, delineated by unobtrusive wooden markers, reveals how small it was. It is hard to imagine three thousand men crowded into that space, even for an afternoon.
There are obvious limits to our ability to recreate the past from such scattered remnants, even with the help of dead men’s words. As Tolbert’s great granddaughter, Anne Woodbury, observed, sometimes you have to accept that certain details can never be fully known. But even incomplete survival stories shed light on how people react to mortal threats, and on the factors that influence our own survival, which is what interests us most in the end. While we may feel the weight of the Sultana survivors’ experiences as we stand by a flooded river or in an abandoned town, what we really want to know is what we would do. Survival challenges are today most often viewed from the opposite ends of a disturbingly wide range: In the context of an unexpected disaster like the September 11 attacks, or as a form of recreation—anything labeled “extreme.” In reality, life is a long series of survival challenges, and always has been. How someone reacted to a survival threat in 1863 is no less telling than how people react to very different, yet equally lethal threats today. It is all about luck, physiology, and a circuitous, sometimes obscure process of preparation. If there were a clear template to follow, it would certainly have made its appearance during the long-running, multifaceted experiment in human survival that climaxed with the sinking of the Sultana. The fact that some people survived the entire sequence of events, sometimes as a direct result of their own actions, means that in one way or another they were both lucky and prepared, even if they did not know it at the time. Before the war, Tolbert had never ventured far from his family’s farm, and as far as is known had never pitted himself against armed men, had never been denied crucial medical treatment or food, had never languished in a rank and crowded pen with festering fly traps of wounds, or been forced to flee a burning boat on a flooded river while most of those around him died. Yet he managed to survive. He may have been lucky, but he was also able to make the most of his good luck.
Many of his survival decisions went unrecorded, and even in cases where other survivors left detailed accounts, it is necessary to separate conjecture from fact, to fill in the blanks from other sources and pit those accounts against their peers’. Sometimes the gaps and discrepancies in the record are significant, even when they concern minor details. The Sultana story is riddled with multiple choice and true-or-false questions. Reassembling the truth requires making judgment calls, which carries its own risks. Most, but not all of the discrepancies can be resolved by comparison, but if Tolbert, Maddox or any of the other survivors could read this book, they would no doubt recognize mistakes, and some might be meaningful. Imagine if someone set out to recreate the interior of your home a century and a half from now, based on a few surviving photos and letters and furniture catalogs from the period; what are the chances that everything would be there and in the right place? The best way to check the facts of a book is against facts in other books, which means, in a sense, that you are sleeping with everyone your sources have slept with, which has obvious disadvantages, but where else are you to turn? I hope I have not unwittingly or presumptively relied upon erroneous details, made stupid mistakes, or taken license. My aim has been to use historical events to summon the power of a process that anyone, at any time, may go through, and to breathe life into those dead men’s words. When I have been dubious about the veracity of a particular account, such as John Ransom’s occasionally incredible memoir, I have noted as much in the text, or used only those passages that reflect personal feelings or can be corroborated through other sources. The line of demarcation between a fact and a fabrication (or a simple error) can be both thin and profound, which is one reason I chose to follow characters from disparate groups, including survivors who left behind exhaustive accounts and others, such as Tolbert, who offered only the barest of outlines. Belaboring the story sometimes muddies it, but coming at it from every possible angle—through diaries, histories, army dispatches and memoirs—increases the chances of reaching, at least, verisimilitude. I chose Tolbert, Maddox, and Elliott as my primary subjects because they were from the same general area and because their records encompass both what is unknown and what is studiously, purportedly known. I was attracted to Tolbert and Maddox because they went through so much together, and because they chose not to sell their stories. I liked that in many ways they seemed determined to become outwardly normal again, despite everything. Elliott illustrates an opposing tendency, to incorporate utterly uncontrollable experiences into a highly controlled narrative, which is part of the story, too. Elliott would have been the first to go on Larry King Live. Fleshing out the story in ways that Tolbert, Maddox and Elliott could not alone were countless other supporting actors, bit players, extras, and even a few celebrity cameos, who represent the full range of narrative responses.
As part of my research I followed the routes that they and other Sultana survivors followed from Indiana through Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, searching for clues. In some cases there was nothing; in others, what existed seemed artificial and overwrought. Occasionally the physical evidence was satisfying in its plain details. Andersonville fell into both the latter categories. The site is today a national park, and includes a section of reconstructed stockade, a few earthworks and a fountain channeling the Providence Spring, complete with a sign warning visitors that it is not safe to drink. The cemetery is a sobering yet serene place—far from the stinking burial ground it once was. Groomed to within an inch of its life, like Elliott’s stories, it still manages to resonate. The visitors’ center contains a theater whose video illustrates life and death in the stockade, and dioramas concerning the experiences of prisoners not only there but in POW camps during other conflicts—a nice touch, considering that Andersonville was an extreme episode in a drama that unfortunately has no end.
The site of Tolbert’s capture is more or less physically frozen in time, though the sense of emergency today stems only from encroaching development. A few sections of the old roads tramped by the prisoners on their way to Vicksburg survive, including a half-mile of the Old Bridgeport Road, which coincidentally runs past my house. Most of the other routes have long since been bulldozed, and there is nothing to even indicate the location of Camp Fisk other than an empty field near a community college a few miles east of Vicksburg. There is a historical marker about the Sultana in Mound City, Arkansas, but the actual site of the disaster is unmarked. Memphis lawyer Jerry Potter believes he located the wreckage in a soybean field in the 1980s, after which he concluded the cost of exhuming it would be prohibitive, considering the likelihood that few artifacts survived. Instead he wrote a book, The Sultana Tragedy, one of the sources I slept with on my way here. There are historical markers summoning the Sultana in Knoxville, where a group of area survivors held their own reunions; in Memphis, where the Elmwood Cemetery contains the remains of many of the victims; and in Vicksburg, which also has a beautiful mural on the floodwall depicting the loading of the boat. The markers are useful reminders, though they have a way of pushing the episodes into the murky past. In fact, the point of the stories they evoke remains salient today: To survive a little longer. In that sense, not much has changed.
As I retraced the steps of the Sultana survivors I found myself searching for stand-ins—the soldiers in the Atlanta airport, the two guys in the Broadway Inn—who might help bring the story closer to home. There are obvious limitations in recreating stories in which all the key players are dead, because there can be no follow-up questions, and there is no way to observe the expressions on their faces or hear the timbre of their voices. But the more I read about them the more familiar and immediate their experiences seemed.
A lot was going on in my own life at that moment, and it sometimes seemed like I was traveling back and forth between two particularly dark corners in time. On my end, it started with an unusual weather pattern that spawned tornadoes near my home every few days for several weeks, to the point that it seemed our area had been targeted by some malign meteorological force. While that was going on, my father was entering a precipitous, hopeless, downward spiral into dementia. There was more, but it is enough to say that when I became discouraged I reminded myself that nothing could compare with what the Sultana survivors went through, which was true. Still, the moment that is unfolding is the one that matters most, and as I vacillated between the troubling present and a disastrous past, I began having strange, composite nightmares in which the dark corners overlapped. At one point I dreamed I was caught in a hurricane, and when I took shelter in a barn, I chanced upon a dying Union mule, in all his army trappings—one of the thousands that populate the Sultana story. I live in Mississippi, where what was formerly the worst hurricane to strike the United States—Camille, in 1969—left many people with the feeling that they had survived the worst, that no subsequent storm could compare. Then, in August 2005, Katrina hit, far surpassing Camille by every measure. The same point was being driven home: You never know when you are experiencing the worst. In my dream, as the wind and waves mounted and buildings collapsed all around, and as I heard people dying with a sound that resembled the noise water makes as it is gulped down a drain, I told myself, “Katrina was the worst. This can’t be as bad.” That is the way the mind works, even in our dreams. We persist in believing the world is manageable, even when faced with evidence to the contrary. Sometimes that belief is fatally flawed, but sometimes it is all that keeps you going, and actually helps you survive.
Life is a process of gathering together different forms of energy, different experiences, different pieces of the truth, after which everything that has been collected is summarily exploded. It is a law of nature. Hurricanes dispel heat from the equator, destroying cities and old-growth forests with equal abandon, and afterward new combinations are formed from the debris. There is no steady state, aside from those that we create in our own minds. The mule in my dream was a refugee from a different onslaught, a misplaced character, down in his traces, dying from injuries received in the storm. I hunkered beside him and tried to ask questions, but the wind was howling and I could not hear his answers. That is the sort of state you can work yourself into when trying to reconstruct the momentous lives of dead people.
But as I struggled to make sense of it all, help came from a familiar yet now, sadly, unlikely source: My father, who had endured his own series of survival episodes while serving in the U.S. infantry during World War II, and who, even then, recalled the difficulty of assembling a reliable narrative of a frenetic event. “Your thoughts are quick and short,” he said of his war experiences. “There’s too much going on to get beyond a certain level.” In fact, he said, much of what passes for memory is reconstructed from bits and pieces, often from other sources, after the fact. At the moment all you hope for is to survive. You create the narrative later. Learning takes place in between. Though my father was never captured or wounded, he endured long marches, beachheads under enemy fire, combat, sniper attacks, sickness, and the misery of cold, remote winter camps. But on those occasions when he faced the possibility of his own demise, he did not recall feeling much of anything other than an urgent need to act, and the importance of keeping a level head. Like Tolbert and Maddox, he had never heard of the amygdala or the neocortex, but he understood the process. For him the worst moment came when he was holed up in a building in a small, abandoned town in northern Italy. He was the radio man for his company, and he and about forty of his men were cut off. The Germans were close. It was night, and as he listened to the low rumble of an approaching German tank, the clatter of its tracks reverberating between the stone walls of the narrow streets, he sent out coded distress signals, calling for reinforcements, alternately by voice transmissions and by telegraph. Soon the noise grew louder and he saw the tank enter the darkened square, stop, and pivot its gun upward, toward his window. There was a moment of quiet, apparently as the crew prepared to fire. Then, the moment was transformed. Two U.S. tanks entered from the opposite side of the square, in response to my father’s calls, and the German tank fled. The next day my father snapped a photo which graphically illustrated what his imminent death or capture had been reduced to: Track marks in the dirt.
He told me this story for the umpteenth time as he sat in a wheelchair in a nursing home, sixty-four years after the fact. He could still talk about the war in great detail, reel off the names and engagements and how he felt at different junctures, but the brain that governed his survival then, and governed it now, was failing. A lot of what passed for thought was just sparks shooting around the dying tissue inside his skull. He was aware of this, and at times became agitated. At one point he asked, “Why is this happening to me?” My answer was not entirely satisfying, but it was true: Because he had survived. He had lived to be an old man. He had overcome a childhood of intermittent loneliness and poverty, had made it through the invasions of North Africa and Italy, had endured the deaths, in separate tragedies, of three of his five grandchildren, had survived a series of minor strokes that rendered him unable to drive a car or make many important decisions on his own, and was now struggling with the worst assault he could imagine—the death of his own brain, the guiding force and the repository of everything he had experienced. His nervous system was going the way of the streets of old Cahaba. But the portal was still open. The story was still unfolding.
It is tempting to believe that part of what sustained Tolbert, Maddox, and Elliott during their trials was the dream of getting there, to the natural end of a long life. In Tolbert’s case, the dream of life’s peace and plenty might easily have been encapsulated in that scene in the photo of him and his family lined up along the picket fence. It was at home, in old age, that the results of the experiment were known. All the trials of the Sultana survivors’ lives were explored and assimilated there. But it was not as if the struggle was over.
Based on what I observed in my father, dreams are the last to go. Even after entering his last survival challenge, he dreamed of better days ahead. As the Sultana story illustrates, until the end you never really know. Every moment that came before carried the promise of more, and for better or worse, was part of the preparation for the one that is unfolding now.