We set up camp on a rise above the village whose full name was Appomattox Court House on the eighth day of April in 1865. No one slept much that night as the grapevine was singing too loud. By sunrise even the contrabands digging sinks knew that General Grant had decreed that Lee would surrender, not in the courthouse as you might have expected, but in a redbrick farmhouse outside of town. On April 9, around noon, right after Solomon got the new crew of contrabands he had working for him lined out, we skinned out to join those gathering within sight of the farmhouse.
The crowd grew larger as the morning wore on. Though I had long ago accepted in my mind that I would never see Mama or Clemmie again on this earth, my heart would not be convinced, and as I always did, I searched for their faces amidst the strangers gathered on that hillside. My eye went to the female faces. A mother standing next to her man, red headkerchief faded to pink covering her hair, long, dirty apron, bare-butted child on her hip, two others clinging to her rag of a skirt. A flock of hardtack girls squinting into the sun, bodices pulled up proper. A clutch of hard-worn laundresses. Even a few ancient grannies with cob pipes stuck into toothless mouths.
“History gonna be made right down there, baby sister,” Solomon kept announcing, pointing at the two-story, redbrick farmhouse with its wide white porch running the length of the first story and a balcony doing the same on the second. Our soldiers were posted on every step of the broad stairs leading up to the front door. Color guards lined up outside, their regimental banners flapping smartly in the breeze. Grooms stood at rigid attention, holding the reins of the horses belonging to generals who were already inside. Sheridan’s black gelding that he now called Winchester in honor of the horse’s epic ride was easy to pick out for he shone like wet tar in the sun.
Solomon and I exchanged approving nods, proud that our general had the finest mount. “What’s Grant ride?” Solomon asked.
“Chestnut sorrel,” a tall man with a face wide as a shovel said.
“General Grant knows his horseflesh. Cain’t no one say otherwise.”
I wanted to brag on my General’s horse who saved the whole Union Army at Cedar Creek and was such a hero he had already been immortalized in a poem that was famous far and wide. That poem and the heroic ride that inspired it was so popular it had changed folks’ mind up North about how Lincoln was conducting the war. Just as I was about to pipe up and tell how my General and his horse had gotten Mr. Lincoln reelected, a man near old as Methuselah ordered us to hush and added in a deep, rolling voice, “He’s here.”
We all fell silent then. We didn’t need to see Robert E. Lee in his spotless dress uniform, golden sash dancing at his waist, black boots freshly polished, prancing up on an iron-gray horse with a long black mane and tail to know who we had before us.
The ex-slaves next to me shuffled around, their gazes bending down to find their feet. And, even though I was high up on that hill, standing above the commander of all the ones who had fought and died for the privilege of owning me and my people, and I was free now as the birds flying over our heads, my stomach pitched. It was all I could do not to cast my eyes down as well. That’s how strong the feeling was that a master, any master, the master, had ridden in amongst us. For us Lee was every dashing Southern gentleman riding proud and tall on account of him believing he was a knight in shining armor in spite of the fact that he held a whip ready to lash anyone bold or foolish enough not to bow their head when he passed.
None of us exhaled until he dismounted, climbed the front stairs, and disappeared into the house. I imagined Robert E. Lee walking into the room where my General sat waiting. I imagined Sheridan letting his fearsome black-eyed gaze show Lee the terrible death that waited for him.
“You see Lee’s knees shakin’?” the shovel-headed fellow asked. “That man scared.”
“Should be,” Solomon said. “He know what they do with rebels.”
“Hang ’em,” several men chimed in.
“Ones who lose,” agreed Solomon. “Gonna do him like Washington did Benedict Arnold for he’s ten times the traitor Arnold ever was.”
Glee rose in me at the prospect of seeing the tips of those polished black boots pointing down when the leader of the Secesh Army hung from a tall cottonwood.
Solomon’s motion was seconded. “Traitor tried to break up the Union and he will swing for it. Him and all the leaders of the Rebellion.”
“Man’s gon come down them steps in chains,” came one prediction.
Chains. We all liked that idea.
“Might not come down at all,” someone else suggested. “Might burn the traitor down on the spot.”
“Shootin’s too good for him,” a man in a slouch hat disagreed. “Lynch him!”
“Like the Bible says,” the old man intoned, “‘Lord God of Hosts, do not show mercy to any wicked traitors.’”
“And Robert E. Lee is one wicked traitor,” Slouch Hat concluded. “He gon hang. All them gon hang.”
“Hang traitors and shoot deserters,” said a man with a battered campaign hat squashed down on his bushy head of hair. He wore a sack coat that bore dark rectangles on the shoulders where a captain’s straps had once been sewn. The insignia might have been gone, but this fellow still wore that rank in his words as he told us how it was gonna be.
“They’ll hang all the leaders of the rebellion who fought to destroy the United States of America, right down to the majors. Won’t be a telegram pole or sturdy oak won’t have a hung Reb dangling from it. And them flags they rallied behind? The Stars and Bars? Grant’ll make the biggest bonfire you ever seen out of them.” He nodded his head with such certainty, we all nodded along with him as he muttered, “Treason, uh-huh, no worse crime. Wouldn’t be surprised if, after they burn all the flags, and hang all the leaders, they make it a crime to even say the word ‘Confederacy.’”
We all amened that.
Half an hour later, a Union soldier with a wild, untended beard that had a stogie jammed into the middle of its whiskery mess, rode up at a full gallop on a chestnut sorrel.
“Unconditional Surrender Grant.” The old man pronounced Grant’s nickname like he was saying “Holy Lord Jesus Christ.”
If General Grant, savior of the Union, hadn’t had those three stars shining on the shoulders of the rumpled private’s blouse he wore, you’d of thought the man incapable of commanding his way out of a privy. Next to the pristine Lee, Grant in his borrowed, mud-splattered uniform looked like a mule skinner at the end of a five-day spree.
But when U. S. Grant dismounted and charged forward, his wide, flat-brimmed hat leading like he intended to knock the redbrick farmhouse down with his head, and then clomped up the stairs loud enough that even us way up on the rise could hear, it was clear as day that this soldier didn’t need a pressed uniform to command. He and Sheridan had a lot in common in that respect. Bulldogs, both of them.
As the hours passed the predictions about Lee’s death, and all the rest of his top men from Jubal Early to Braxton Bragg, turned so gruesome that, in the end, we had half the Rebel army greased up with pig lard and locked in a bear cage.
Given how greedy we were for the sight of the Confederacy shamed and brought low, it was a sore disappointment when, early in the afternoon, Lee strutted out every bit as dapper as when he’d pranced in. An orderly buckled his horse’s throatlatch and Lee reached up and drew the forelock out from under the brow band, then gently patted the gray’s forehead before mounting up.
To our utter stupefaction, when the leader of our enemies, the man most responsible for upward of half a million souls being ripped from this earth, rode away, General Grant saluted him. Our jaws unlatched and we gaped, listening in disappointed astonishment to the peaceable clop of hooves as Robert E. Lee was borne away, whole and unharmed.
I thought of Iyaiya’s stories. How, if a warrior got beat, she had to expect to be put in chains or have her head decorating the top of a gate. I was feeling cheated of the blood vengeance we’d fought for when Bible man boomed out, “‘He hath showed what is good. Showed y’all what the Lord require of thee. Got to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God.’ Mercy, y’all,” he repeated in case we’d missed his point. “Our General’s doing what Lord Jesus want him to.”
There were a few “amens,” which didn’t mean that if Lee hadn’t been chunked down to us from the top of a tower, most of us wouldn’t of taken a sharpened stick to that fine Southern gentleman.
Into the quiet moment of disappointment that followed someone whispered, “War’s over.” A few seconds later, volleys of celebration shots rang out until it sounded like a full-fledged assault was in progress. Instant the shooting started, though, Grant clomped down the stairs and marched into the sunny yard, head out, ready to butt through whatever brick wall he encountered.
Ulysses S. Grant held up his hand and the firing stopped. He unclamped his thin lips from the stogie he had wedged there and thundered in a voice harshened from a lot more than cigar smoke, “The war is over! The Rebels are our countrymen again, and the best sign of rejoicing after the victory will be to abstain from all demonstrations in the field.”
For a long moment, the only sounds we heard after that was the nicker of the Union generals’ mounts, the clanking of bridles as they slung their heads about, and wind rummaging through the high boughs.
Finally, the Bible man asked, “Any y’all recollect that today is Palm Sunday?”