He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him. He is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.
Thomas Jefferson
The thicket of feathery crosses above which aerial ghosts still fought under round suns of Indian summer bled in pinpoints, like shafts of broken wheat that flowed to the horizon. Abraham Lincoln arrived at Gettysburg to dedicate the cemetery, laid out in the shape of a huge amphitheater, where eight thousand men lay buried under neat wooden crosses.
As I surveyed the wide, gently rolling valley almost a mile wide, I thought that the broad highway of white crosses could just as well have been that of those bell-shaped, purple-hearted white flowers I had waded through to reach Sally Hemings the day I changed my race. Like bouquets of them, the graves spread as far as one could see. They carpeted the valley like white thistle planted in rows, as if they would grow and be harvested, fertilized by the fresh bones of a whole generation. Silent cannon rested on grassy embankments like sleepy brown cows, sentinels of census takers, keeping watch on the dead, thirty thousand strong.
I had never found my uncle James Hemings’s grave, and I decided then and there that this cemetery, where James, my son, his namesake, lay, was his final resting place as well. I don’t know why I thought of him that day; I hadn’t thought of my uncle James in years. Yet there he was, as Adrian Petit had described him to me, his spirit, at my left elbow as I closed my eyes against the glare of the sun and the speechless memory of the battle I had lived through.
Up on Seminary Ridge, a sound gathered that I recognized from the third of July. It was a sound no one who had ever heard it would ever forget, the immense, woeful spectral groan coming from thousands and thousands of human throats: cursing, grunting, roaring, howling, and weeping their way through a fight to the utmost limit of primal endurance and savagery. There had never been and never would be another sound like that one, and my ears pricked up with it like those of an animal who scents his valetudinarian killer. Up my spine it rose, as my heart accelerated and my throat closed and Emily’s awful words came back to me: “This cannot be borne by men born of women or women who have borne men.” But it had been, the proof being that we were here, in this place, to commemorate its being borne.
The speaker’s platform, hung in red, white, and blue bunting, seemed terribly far away, as if it were a child’s cardboard playhouse painted onto the blue sky. On it ruminated a lot of black-clad men in black top hats, one taller, thinner, and uglier than all the rest. The black-hatted, black-coated, black-trousered, black-bearded men had stood back and parted for one of their kind, the granite-faced, half-shaven, beautyless, hollow-eyed man who had sent my son to his death. I stared down at the rushing armies now asleep. Behind me stood Madison and Sinclair, Emily and Charlotte, Raphael and Willy and Thor. It was not a time for pride but for pity, but I felt pride lifting Madison and Sinclair out of their grief as the President prepared to speak.
Far away, over the field, I saw him stoop, a piece of paper flutter, the Union flag snap in the wind then straighten, lift his hat and settle into slated immobility.
The tall, gaunt scarecrow’s voice shot back like a burst of thunder.
“Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
“Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure,” the high-pitched voice intoned, and to my surprise, the equally harsh and high-pitched voice of my father, but with a Virginia rather than a Kentucky accent, answered him:
When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another . . .
“We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we do this.”
and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them . . .
“But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract,” intoned the thin, tall man on the platform.
A decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
“The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.”
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. . . .
“It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us . . .” continued Lincoln, his voice flailing the stiff breeze.
That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed...
“... that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion . . .”
That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it . . .
“. . . that we here highly resolve that the dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom.”
And to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organising its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
“... and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
The two recitals merged in aria, one in my head, one on the platform below me, the voices counterpointing each other in a melodious fugue that wove in and out of the crisp afternoon as if two incomparable musical instruments, different yet in harmony, played a duet of lyric splendor.
“Father ...” My voice carried because there was little applause. The sound was as sharp as a rifle shot. But it was too late to stifle that cry. I was transfixed, as if for the first time I had heard him speak. Why had those long-forgotten words come back to me, and why had they echoed in the words of that distant black figure, now turning woodenly toward his seat. People were startled, yet they behaved with a strange subjection, as if the words still rested on the surface of the air, and, like water on parched earth, had not yet penetrated the roots of the crowd’s consciousness.
I remember, I couldn’t have been more than four years old. My father suddenly swung down from his horse and swept me up into his arms, then lifted me high above his head, his huge hands propelling me upward into the sky, which raced by my floating body in such a pandemonium of happiness that I shrieked with delight while my mother screamed with fright.
“This one,” he exclaimed, “will live!” I tumbled downward like a joyous angel fallen into his laughing chest.
“Mother?” said Sinclair. His tall body leaned protectively toward mine; his brave, innocent eyes held only the beginning of knowledge. He hadn’t been at Gettysburg. His superb uniform caught the sunlight and turned golden, the copper buttons gleaming, his dress sword like a stab of sunlight, his silhouette cut out against the field of crosses. I turned away from my white son as I had turned away from my slave mother that day she stood etched against a field of flowers, a blinding pain bursting at the nape of my neck. Tears came then, as I wept.