If Pride of character be of worth at any time, it is when it disarms the efforts of malice.
Thomas Jefferson
“Atlanta is taken at last!” Charlotte beamed as she opened the door of her town house to me herself on September 3, 1864. “Lincoln’s reelection is assured. The Confederates evacuated Atlanta after burning and destroying everything of military value in it. The following day, the bluecoats marched in with bands blaring ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’ Sherman has announced to the President that Atlanta is his and fairly won!
“Sherman and Farragut have knocked the bottom out of the Chicago platform and saved the party of Lincoln from irretrievable ruin,” exulted Charlotte. “They are going to be wiped off the face of the earth.” Charlotte’s voice stopped as she noticed the thin strip of a War Department telegram in my hand. I held it up, unable to speak.
There was the dull boom of cannonfire coming from the celebrations downtown at the docks as I stood there, holding in my hand the telegram which had been addressed to Thor.
HQ, ARMY OF THE POTOMAC,
PETERSBURG, AUGUST 1864
BY TELEGRAM TO THE SURGEON GENERAL’S
OFFICE, SANITARY COMMISSION WASHINGTON, D.C.
TO THE ATTENTION OF MAJOR GENERAL WILLIAM JOHN THEODORE WELLINGTON
I have the sad duty to inform you that on August 25, your son, Major Beverly Wellington, was tragically felled on the field of honor by loose artillery fire—as one hundred men of the 148th Pennsylvania, under the command of Colonel J. Z. Brown, went over our works in front of Fort Morton near the Crater and the enemy’s picket line opposite Fort Sedge-wick. The line for about two hundred yards was carried and eight prisoners taken. The casualties in these operations were: 4 officers and 63 men killed, wounded, or missing. Major Wellington, who was close to the Second Corps hospital tent, was killed by a round of Union artillery that mistakenly fell short onto the field hospital. This gallant young surgeon was conspicuous for his spirit and brave conduct, his Herculean efforts in securing the wounded and dying and rescuing them from the field. He was a remarkable surgeon and a fine officer.
I have the honor to be, Major, very sadly and most respectfully, your obedient servant,
T.H.S.A. McParlin, Surgeon and Medical Director, Army of the Potomac for General Ulysses S. Grant, General-in-chief of the Armies of the United States.
P.S.: General Grant did not want you or Mrs. Wellington to learn of Major Wellington’s death from the published casualty lists.
Charlotte gazed up at me through her thick spectacles like an owl, then down at me as I sank to my knees, the telegram fluttering to the floor.
“It’s not some kind of mistake?”
“No more than anything is a mistake.”
“He was scheduled to be mustered out in time for Lucinda’s confinement.” I looked up at Charlotte. “Must I lose them all? Is this the price?”
“Oh, my darling, darling, you must not give in to despondency. The President has authorized Horace Greeley to bring to Washington any proposition of Jefferson Davis’s in writing for peace that embraces the restoration of the Union and the abandonment of slavery,” she said gently. “This cruel war will be over soon, and with a victory for the Union. Beverly gave his life for it.”
Without ever knowing ... I sobbed, as I collapsed against Charlotte’s knees. Without ever knowing he was freeing his mother.
We clung to each other, entwined on the wide canopied bed. Charlotte kissed my face and hair and hands and tried to stop the tears that wouldn’t stop, not even for victory itself. We embraced as we had that day by the river so long ago, when our lives had been unwritten books, unbound, pageless, imprinted only with the passionate will to live and to love. Now it seemed we waded in the River Jordan, a river of grief and suffering beyond human understanding. Beverly had suffered it and had finally refused it. Had let it kill him ... his own people ... his own mother.
Charlotte and I lay quietly, listening to the noises of the celebration which reached us from Market Square.
“This stupendous, this outrageous, cruel war will surely be over one day, but I may not live to see it. … Perhaps I’ll see Beverly before you do, and will give him your love.”
“Charlotte . . . what do you mean? What is this insanity? Of course you’ll live to see the end of this war!”
“If God so chooses, I suppose. I, who have always been so fastidious in life, hate the idea of rotting inside with a tumor. No. Don’t say it, Harriet. The doctors have given me six months to a year. I haven’t told Andrew— my devoted Andrew. I haven’t told the children. I’ve told only you, Harriet. And you must keep my secret. Promise me. I’ve told you because you know I tell you everything; I could never lie to you or conceal anything from you. We are sisters.”
Secrets. My own cancerous lie closed my throat as I gathered Charlotte into my arms. My friend. My sister. My mentor.
“The love we bear one another will outlast my death and this war. I hope only that our grandchildren will grow up to marry,” said Charlotte.
Tell me who has died, who has married, who has hanged himself because he cannot marry. …
And outside, the guns would not stop. Nor would my lips unseal, except to pray for Charlotte’s survival.
Victory was just a matter of time, everyone proclaimed. But the Confederacy remained as erect and defiant in defeat and deprivation as ever, and it was to break their spirit that Sherman set out on his march from Atlanta that September. He had expelled the civilian population from Atlanta in retaliation for the Confederate Army having burned the city down in their retreat rather than have it fall into his hands intact. Then he unleashed sixty-two thousand hardened Union veterans to march from Atlanta to the sea, living off the land, cutting a swath through the heart of Georgia, slicing the Confederacy in two, to advance on the rear of Robert E. Lee’s army. He would, insisted Sherman, demonstrate to the world that Jefferson Davis could not resist the overwhelming power of the North.
“I can make the march and I can make Georgia howl,” he had said. “War is cruelty and you cannot refine it. We cannot change the hearts of these people of the South, but we can make war so terrible and make them so sick of war that generations will pass away before they will appeal to it again.”
And I reveled in this vow of Sherman’s. I wanted the pain of Beverly’s assassination to be engraved in every southern woman’s heart, as it was in mine. And since I was a southern woman, I knew how to do it: with a cruelty equivalent to that which had been perpetuated on their slave population. They had made war on black people—men, women, and children—and now we would make the same kind of war on them; young and old, rich and poor, men and women, civilian and soldier—all would feel the hard hand of war just as we had felt the hard hand of slavery.
I stood in the middle of Charlotte’s Prussian blue bedroom and lavished my personal blessings on Sherman’s vengeance and thought how the women of the South would hate us, hate us with the same burning blood that flowed in my own veins—the best in Virginia.
IN THE FIELD NEAR NEW MARKET HEIGHTS, VIRGINIA
SEPTEMBER 30, 1864
My dearest wife Mary McCoy,
You can be proud that in the flash of dawn, your husband was in the column of three thousand colored soldiers in close column by divisions, right in front, with guns at right-shoulder arms, that charged New Market Heights. Seems damned strange to be toting a gun so close to home, Mary, but hadn’t I told myself that maybe I could kill for my freedom in this war?
We had to take New Market Heights, which faces Richmond. It is the key to the Seceshes’ right flank on the north side of the James River. It is a redoubt built on the top of a hill of some considerable elevation, then running down into a marsh. In that marsh was a brook. Then rising again to a plain, which gently rolled away toward the river.
General Butler told us “that work must be taken by the weight of your column: no shot must be fired.” And to prevent us from firing, he had the caps taken from the nipples of our guns. He then said, “Your cry when you charge must be ‘Remember Fort Pillow!’ “ How could anyone forget, I asked myself. Three hundred black soldiers had been murdered by the Confeds after Fort Pillow had surrendered, just like the Confeds had promised: a felon’s death for slave insurrection. If taken alive, we would be shot. Our white officers were to be put to death as well, for inciting Negroes and mulattoes to rebellion. Never mind that they were the Rebs and traitors, and we were United States soldiers. And the Seceshes murdered the black women and children of the fort as well, executed the wounded, and buried some Negroes alive. Just like the good old slavery days, I tell you.
And so, with all that in the minds of the men, knowing no quarter was to be given us, that capture meant death, the order was given to march forward. We marched forward steadily, as if on parade, went down the hill across the marsh. And as we waded into the brook, we came within range of the enemy, who opened fire upon us. We broke a little then, and our column wavered. Oh, it was a moment of most intense anxiety, but we re-formed when we reached firm ground, marched steadily on in closed ranks under the enemy’s fire until the head of the column reached the first line of abatis, some one hundred and fifty yards from the Seceshes’ works. Then the axmen ran forward to cut away at the wooden defenses while a thousand Rebel soldiers concentrated their artillery and poured heavy canister fire from the redoubt down upon the head of the column, hardly wider than a clerk’s desk. All the axmen went down under murderous fire. Other strong hands grasped the axes in their stead and cut away at the abatis. Again at double-quick, we moved forward to within fifty yards of the fort, there to meet still another line of abatis. The column halted and there was the very fire of hell pouring down upon us. The abatis resisted, and the head of the column seemed literally to melt away under the rain of shot and shell. The flags of the leading regiment went down, but a brave black boy seized the colors. They were up again and waved over the storm of the battle. Again the axmen fell; with our bare hands we seized the heavy sharpened trees one by one and dragged them away, and the column rushed forward, and with a shout which still rings in my ear, we went over the redoubt like a flash and the Rebs never stopped running for four miles. They knew what any black soldier would do to any Reb prisoner after Fort Pillow. In the track of that charging column, in a space not wider than six feet and three hundred feet long, lay the bodies of 543 colored men. Old General Butler came up from the rear on horseback and rode amongst them, guiding his horse this way and that way lest he profane with his mount’s hoofs what seemed, to everyone still alive, the sacred dead.
But I’m alive, Mary McCoy. I refuse to die in this war. And I pray only that God spares our sons in their battles.
Brigadier General Butler’s Brigade
Forty-fifth U.S. Colored Troops
Army of the James
Your loving husband,
Madison Hemings
DECEMBER 23, 1864
Dear Mother,
This is probably the last letter you will receive from me before the end of the war. Beverly’s death has ignited in me a terrible lust for revenge. Our orders are to “destroy all we cannot eat, steal their niggers, burn their cotton and gins, spill their sorghum, melt their railroad rails, and generally raise hell.” If we didn’t have a reason before, just before Thanksgiving several prisoners who had escaped from Andersonville arrived within our midst. They had nothing but rags on their backs. Emaciated and starving, these prisoners of war wept at the sight of food and the American flag. Oh, Mother, the men howled with rage at the thought of tens of thousands of their comrades perishing in that pigsty in the midst of barns busting with grain and food; our goal now is to liberate that prison camp by Easter.
It is a terrible thing to destroy the sustenance of thousands of people, and I am sorely pressed to see it; however, nothing can end this war but some demonstration of the Confederacy’s helplessness. This Union must be sustained at any cost, and to do this we must war upon and destroy the Rebels—cut off their supplies, destroy their communications, and produce among the people of Georgia a thorough conviction of the personal misery which attends war. If the terror and grief of Sherman’s march shall help to paralyze the husbands and fathers who are fighting us, it is mercy in the end. It seems that some Georgians said to General Sherman, “Why don’t you go over to South Carolina and serve them this way? They started it.” But General Sherman had intended to do that all along. So now we are marching sixty thousand strong through South Carolina to crush Lee’s army, but also to wreak God’s vengeance on South Carolina. We wreck their farms and factories. We burn their plantations and kill their cattle. The people’s very will to resist must be devastated. We’re making something called “Sherman’s neckties” out of what’s left of their railroads. We heat the rails over a bonfire of wooden ties and twist the iron around the nearest tree. I almost tremble at their fate, Mother. But this is where treason began, and, by God, this is where it shall end! Our purpose is to whip them, humble them, stalk them to their innermost recesses and put perfect fear and dread in them. And in sorrow and pity we will do that.
Your obedient and loving son,
Madison Wellington
Christmas 1864. Lucinda brought Beverly’s twins and her new babe in arms to Anamacora permanently. I had insisted that Perez, Roxanne, and John William would be safer (although there was no danger in her staying in Philadelphia) and more comfortable there. Beverly’s death weighed heavily on everyone’s spirits, but Sinclair, who had been the last to see him alive, was the most despondent. Beverly’s death seemed to have triggered a latent melancholy in Sinclair that alarmed both Lucinda, his wife, and me. It seemed to us even more morbid than the long, never-ending, ever-inconclusive war. Everyone was sick of the war, and many were saying so. There was defeatist talk and talk of peace without the abolition of slavery, an idea so perverse and so obscene after the loss of so many lives that even the President was obliged to declare, “I hope this mighty scourge of war may pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled up by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, so it must be said, ‘The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’ “
It was another cold winter like 1856, and the conservatory windows were opaque with hoar and ice. On the Delaware, dark figures skirted the thick ice, and frosty laughter added to the mist that had enshrouded all of Philadelphia’s waterways and canals. Spidery snowflakes had begun to fall, and clung like lace mittens to the windowpanes. The air was so frozen it resonated like chimes, and against the whiteness surrounding us, we could only embrace once more the glittering green fir tree and the crackling fire which cast us all in bronze. Despite everything, we tried to make a joyful Christmas for the children. Maurice was back from Missouri, where he had fought against General Price and his “allies,” the Quantrill gang, at Pilot Knob. Thor was home from Camp Rapidan, and Madison was about to return with Maurice to active duty in Georgia under General Sheridan. We had a war marriage to celebrate as well, for Maria had fallen in love with one of her professors at the medical college, Zachariah Battle. Zachariah had served on the western front, had been wounded at Battle Creek, and was mustered out of the army in September. He had begun teaching at the Jefferson Medical School Hospital, which Maria attended for courses in biology. They had met in the hallway, and it had been love at first sight. Zachariah, brilliant and somber, soon joined the husbands of Lividia and Tabitha in running the now-sprawling Wellington enterprises, which included petroleum and railroads, shipping and coal mines, as well as drugs, medicines, and medical research.
At the beginning of the war petroleum had been discovered in western Pennsylvania. During the war it was soon recognized that it could serve as a substitute for the ever scarce whale oil used in lamps and street lights. Through the railroads we became the principal carriers of the black gold to its markets. Philadelphia also became a storage and refining center. Wellington Drugs benefited from the petroleum boom as a refiner and manufacturer of petroleum products, including a famous patent medicine, and as a storage center and transporter.
The Wellingtons had grown very rich, but the war had made hundreds of millionaires. The demands of war had boosted the northern economy to new heights of productivity.
Lincoln’s annual address to Congress had only confirmed what every prosperous merchant farmer and businessman already knew. The people’s purpose in maintaining the integrity of the Union was never more firm nor more unanimous. Our resources were unexhausted, and we believed them to be inexhaustible. With 671 warships, our navy was the largest in the world. With a million men in uniform, our army was the largest and best equipped that had ever existed. And despite the deaths of three hundred thousand soldiers, immigration and natural increase continually made up the loss. We had more men now than when the war began. We were gaining strength every day. We could maintain this contest indefinitely.
I thought of the deep waters closing over my white family in the South. There was no money in the Confederate treasury, there was no food to feed the army, and there were no troops to oppose General Sherman as he closed in on Savannah. Sherman’s latest telegram to Lincoln had read: “I beg to present you, as a Christmas gift, the city of Savannah, with 150 heavy guns and about 25,000 bales of cotton.” To which Lincoln had responded: “Many thanks to you for your great success. Taking into account the work of General Thomas, those who sat in darkness, see a great light.”
Indeed, as I gazed at my Christmas candles, I realized the defeat of the South and very old enemies was a matter of months if not weeks. General Thomas’s Army of the Cumberland, including an entire Negro division, had annihilated the Army of Tennessee at Nashville and was now chasing the remnants of the Rebel army back to Mississippi. The war had killed one-quarter of all the Confederacy’s white men of military age. It had killed two-fifths of southern livestock, ruined ten thousand miles of railroads, and destroyed forever the labor system on which southern riches depended. Two-thirds of southern wealth had vanished in the wair—it had simply strolled away, as I had done forty years ago.
“Play something, Grandma!” I looked down at three-year-old Roxanne. Her eyes danced in the reflected light of the lighted tree. I picked her up in my arms, a warm, living bundle of my flesh, and carried her over to the piano. There would be no romping mazurkas, or lilting waltzes or polonaises tonight. No Wagner or Beethoven, or Verdi transcriptions. I played “Tenting on the Old Campgrounds” as a dirge and “When This Cruel War Is Over” as a lullaby. I played “Bear This Gently to My Mother” for Beverly and “I Would the War Were Over” for James and “Tell Me, Is My Father Coming Back?” for myself.
Because I knew she was dying, and because I had never told anyone I loved who I was, I told Charlotte. My Christmas gift to her was the trust I had denied her all these years. What else could I give her except the gift of my black soul?
“I know.” Charlotte gently interrupted the end of my recital.
“You know”
“Thance wrote to me from Africa; his letter arrived after his death. Thance’s secrets have always been my province, ever since Thor’s accident. On the voyage of the Rachel, Abe Boss inadvertently let it be known that Thenia was your niece. Of course, Thance didn’t know who your father was.
“And you do?”
“Yes. I met your cousin Ellen Wayles Coolidge in Boston through Sarah Hale. She and her husband fled the South when Virginia joined the Confederacy.”
“Don’t tell me Ellen is opposed to slavery!”
“No. She’s opposed secession from the Union. She loves the South. The stories she told me about her childhood at Monticello were the same stories you told me about yours. Was not her grandfather your father? She told me there were ‘yellow children’ at Monticello who were allowed to run away. It was common knowledge. Their name was Hemings. She confessed that when she was a child, she often envied you your freedom to run wild and do what you wanted while she was forced to act out a role and comply with all the conditions and expectations of her sex and her class. She always believed you went to Washington City. You know her son Sidney was killed in ‘63 fighting for the Union at Chattanooga. And his brother Algernon is a Union surgeon . . . like Beverly.”
I squinted hard against the light, which seemed to be streaming into the room from all directions. Like a white miasma, it surrounded me. Even my soul squinted. My arm rose as if I were drowning in the undertow of a thousand unspoken years. Too late.
By this wench Sally, our President has had several children. There is not an individual in the neighborhood of Charlottesville who does not believe this story, and not a few who know it.
“And Thor knows?” My overtaxed heart accelerated.
“If he does,” Charlotte said firmly, “I didn’t tell him.”
“Forgive me,” I begged.
“There’s nothing to forgive.” She turned her head away then. “I understand the color line doesn’t stop even at the grave. Still, I’ve waited for the grave to hear you tell me. All these years.”
I cried out then. I had broken her heart with my secrecy and lies, my mistrust and cruelty. And mine broke in return. I had no safe harbor now, not even my children. I was a stranger to them.
Charlotte died shortly after that, her hand in mine, of an overdose of morphine. She begged me to help her, and I raided my own storeroom for the lethal dose.
I was as mute in life as she was in death. No sound of the human voice could express the pain I felt. My grief for Charlotte was as boundless, immense, and inconsolable as hunger, anguish, and the sea. My lack of trust in her solely because of her color haunted me, and stung me, because she died believing she had never understood me, and that was a lie.
I bathed Charlotte’s body and draped the furniture in white silk, then filled the room with hothouse flowers. Even though their life insulted her death, I filled every vase with them and stood them on every surface I could find. Only then did I open the door for Andrew and her children.
I, Charlotte Waverly Nevell, white American matron, age sixty, wife of Andrew Nevell of Nevellville, mother of four children (none deceased), member of the Sanitary Commission Nursing Corps which served at Gettysburg, do swear I always knew Harriet’s real name and never saw in her anything but what she was, and I loved her for what I saw. I detest Lorenzo Fitzgerald’s idea that the accident of birth is irrevocable—an uncrossable frontier. No frontier for an American is uncrossable, including the so-called color line, and no person in the United States is an alien because of his color. I made Harriet’s fears my fears, her loves my loves, her desires my desires, because I choose, of my own free will, to love Harriet as my own kind—womankind—humankind. I waited almost fifty years for Harriet to tell me her secret—to trust me and love me as much as I trusted and loved her. I know Harriet considered me unfit for revolutionary love. In her mind, I was too weak, too sheltered as a white woman to assume her identity. By protecting me, by sheltering me with her own body from a fact of life she considered too dangerous for me, she, too, practiced a kind of racism against my color. I should have been Thenia. I wished many times that I had been Thenia. You say perhaps it is I who should have taken the first step and told her what I knew, but what if I had lost her over this? What if the despicable and insignificant fact of my whiteness had been enough to drive her away, separate her from me forever, if she had known that I knew? What strange people we are . . . willing to live sequestered from a person who might be our heart’s desire, because of a label, a taboo, a stigma, a fear we ourselves invented. Since I have wronged you, I can never like you. What Harriet and I had together, no one can destroy. I refuse dying as I refused living, to segregate myself from her, from my better half, simply for the sake of my country. Love is stronger than race, passion is stronger than race, esteem is stronger than race, even Race is stronger than race. Nothing can do all for us that we expect race to do. Love songs are scarce and fall into two categories; the frivolous and light and the sad. Of deep successful love, there is only silence. My soul is rested. May God rest Harriet’s. Amen.
I died this day of December thirty-first, 1864, in the arms of Harriet Hemings
CHARLOTTE WAVERLY NEVELL
On the last day of January of the last year of the war, the House of Representatives passed the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery by a vote of 119 to 56.
“The rebellion is not over yet, although slavery is,” reported Robert Purvis, sitting in my office at the Wellington Drug Company, drinking Wellington imported tea and holding little Roxanne on his knee. He was accompanied by Jean Pierre Burr. I studied Mr. Burr, the natural son of Aaron Burr and a Haitian freedwoman called Eugenia Bearharni. Jean Pierre was a founder of the Moral Reform Society, a member of the Banneker Institute, a conductor on the Underground Railroad, and the fair spitting image of his famous father.
Purvis himself was now the son-in-law of a rich Philadelphia sailmaker, James Felton, mulatto half brother of the famous abolitionists, the Grimké sisters.
Not long ago, Purvis had confided in me that for the past twenty years many natural children of mixed blood had been sent from the South, and in a few cases their parents had followed and had been legally married here. Descendants of such children, he said, in many instances forsook their mother’s race; one had become principal of a city school, one a prominent sister in a Catholic church, one a bishop, and two, officers in the Confederate Army.
“There exists,” said Robert, “a penal law, deeply written in the minds of the whole white population; which subjects their colored fellow citizens to unconditional, unwarranted, and never-ceasing insult. No respectability, however unquestionable; no property, however large; no character, however unblemished will gain a man whose body is cursed with even a thirty-second portion of the blood of his African ancestry admission into their society.
“Why, Harriet? Why this ever-present obscene obsession with the color of a human being’s skin? Why this irrational fear of color? This unsubstantiated horror of blackness? Is this repugnance learned or innate? Based on philosophy, science, or morals? On the Bible and scriptures? On ancient knowledge or ancient ignorance? Edmund Burke, in On the Sublime and Beautiful, says that, though the effects of Black be painful originally, we must not think they always continue so. Custom, he says, reconciles us to everything. After we have been used to seeing black objects, the terror abates, and the smoothness, the beauty, or some agreeable accident of bodies so colored softens the sterness of their original nature. Black has been with us from the very beginning, but fanaticism against it has never abated one iota, never. Burke ends by saying black will always have something melancholy about it, but is this metaphysic or literary in our country? Why is it that the worst thing that can happen to an American is to be born not white? Because it means to be thrust out of all identity and recognition, to become a negation of everything America has appropriated as her banner—purity, power, whiteness. And so everything she does—rape, exploit, commit violence and war—she transfers to those dark subjects she so abhors. Yet this war proves that we are the center, the very center, of her soul, her history, her dream, her nightmare, her fantasies, her past, and her future. This war, Harriet, is the very watershed of American identity, and black people, we domestic aliens, are its very incunabula—the black, black soul of the United States. I marvel at how you cannot see it. You white people with all your knowledge, logic, money, morals, and enlightenment cannot see it.”
“I see it, Robert. Perhaps our very negation is a kind of recognition.”
“And you want to hear something else funny?” he continued. “Robert E. Lee has asked Jefferson Davis to draft two hundred thousand Negroes into the Confederate Army! We, who are manifestly and confessedly the cause of the war, are now the hope of both Union and the Seceshes!”
The war finally came to an end with the surrender of Richmond. There, amid the confusion and consternation, the disorder, the panic, and the flames, only the colored population stood still, waiting, as Lincoln entered the conquered city escorted by units from the Twenty-fifth Corps and with ten Negro sailors as bodyguards, only forty hours after Jefferson Davis had evacuated his White House. Thor, on behalf of the Sanitary Commission, went with him. The tall, silk-hatted emancipator found himself surrounded by a cordon of black people shouting and crying, “Glory, Glory to God. Father Abraham. The day of Jubilee is arrived!” Overwhelmed, the President pleaded with his fellow citizens not to prostrate themselves: “Don’t kneel to me,” he said. “That is not right. One must only kneel to God and thank Him for the liberty you will hereafter enjoy.” The air burned blue with the nine-hundred-gun salute the Union Army gave to celebrate its victory.
Thor had written for me to join him, and in Richmond, I felt an obsessive longing to see Monticello, even in smoldering ruins. Perhaps I could find my brother Thomas. Perhaps I wanted to crow over my prostrate white family huddled together at Edgehill. I felt as an old war veteran might feel—I wanted to go home even if it wasn’t there anymore. I wanted to end my incessant war with myself and my life. Peace was something I could achieve only by going back to the beginning, even if it meant deceiving Thor once more.
With the excuse of joining Thenia, I left Thor with the President and set out on the road to Monticello on the fourteenth of April, Good Friday, five days after the Confederacy surrendered at Appomattox Courthouse the day after my father’s birthday. My buckboard and driver fought the clogged roads leading out of Richmond, which were filled with refugees, black and white, all desperately searching for someone or something lost. Until at last, I stood arm-in-arm with Thenia at the top of the knoll on which stood the log cabin of my mother. I had been compelled by all I lived for to return to Albemarle County and the past, a displaced southerner, a domestic alien, a white Negro come home, the fourteenth of April 1865.