Charleston (40 page)

After two hours Folsey excused himself. A servant brought his carriage around. It was a phaeton with a standing top and side curtains rolled down against the rain. Kaspar was already inside, feet on a charcoal warmer. The boy's feral eyes darted everywhere, though he never looked at anyone directly.

On the piazza Folsey slipped into his hooded coat of green wool tweed. “I didn't mention this earlier because your sister is too excitable. My friend Rex Porcher-Jones, the judge's grandson, he's picked up rumors of some kind of secret school teaching niggers to read.”

“In Charleston?”

“Rex believes so. He doesn't know where it is or who's behind it.”

“We must find it, put a stop to it.”

“My thought exactly. I'll make inquiries. When we have reliable information, we can take steps.”

Gibbes leaned against a white column, puffing a new cigar while Folsey took the reins and swung the phaeton down the oval drive into the river road. Gibbes had a suspicion about the person who might be responsible for such a school. If he was correct, he'd take enormous satisfaction in moving against it. He and Folsey would hire others to act for them and render appropriate punishment.

But the end for Charleston came too soon for them to accomplish it.

As the Union artillerymen advanced their works, shells began to land north of Calhoun Street. Alex and Ham subsisted on small portions of boiled rice and pieces of corn bread with mold scraped away. Both lost weight, until they resembled, as Ham put it, “A prime pair of bean poles.”

Sherman was in Carolina. Rumors about his route of march swept the city with the regularity of the tides. He was on the road to Charleston. No, he'd veered toward Columbia. No, Charleston. “Clever strategy,” Ham said. “Neither place dares send relief troops to the other.”

At Bell's Bridge, Alex tutored her pupils two evenings a week. Rolfe had quietly recruited a young man named Clem, who belonged to a neighbor of Letty Porcher-Jones. Clem's brain was quick, more than compensating for a bad stammer. Clem brought his sister Cora, ten years older. She cooked at a tavern; she was the slave of its black owner.

The pupils were a mixed lot. Rolfe was the brightest, but each one's progress gratified Alex. Fat Cora walked, moved, and thought slowly. Yet there came a moment when her eyes filled with a ravishing light of understanding and she put three letters together in her head and whispered, “Cat?” Alex almost wept.

January became February. The same harrowing tales they'd heard from Georgia reached them again: farms burned, railroad tracks torn up, a wide black scar of scorched earth left behind when the Union horde passed. Sherman struck Branchville, Orangeburg, crossed the Congaree. So he wanted Columbia after all.

Friday, February 17, Ham rushed to Chapel Street at two o'clock. “Hardee's evacuating all the troops, I have it on good authority.”

Alex set to work cleaning and oiling Edward's pistols. Her fingers moved slowly, so as not to accidentally spring one of the under-barrel bayonets. She was careful to scour out the priming pans; Lorenzo the gunsmith had warned her that even a slight residue of burned powder would suck up moisture from the humid air and likely cause a misfire.

Keeping the pistols on half cock, she carefully loaded dry powder and ball. She'd bought an old powder horn from a junk dealer; some long-ago marksman had carved it with the words
Josiah Biggs, His Horn
. She wondered whether he'd shot at the British or only small animals and waterfowl.

To the slow beat of snare drums General Hardee's ragged regiments marched out by way of the Neck beginning at dusk. Alex and Ham watched the sorry exodus on Meeting Street for a while. Never had she seen so many soldiers reeling along out of step and plainly drunk.

Sleep that night was impossible. Hardee wanted to leave nothing useful to the enemy. The Confederates burned and sank ironclads in the harbor, blew up the magazine on Sullivan's Island, set fire to stores of cotton and rice hauled to public squares. The night sky lit with a continual red fireworks whose noise gave Alex another headache. “Walpurgis Night,” Ham muttered.

By midnight a dozen fires were burning across the peninsula, fanned by a nor'east blow. Refugees streamed past the Chapel Street house in the small hours, jamming the already crowded Northeastern Depot in hope of finding space on a last train out.

Dawn came. Gritty eyed and hungry, Alex sprawled in a parlor chair, one pistol in her lap, the other at her feet. Ham walked in from a visit to the depot. “It's insanity. They're practically killing each other to get at a few sacks of rice.”

“And the Union soldiers?”

“No sign of them, but they can't be far away.”

“Ham, let's go home. I'd rather protect the other house.”

He agreed. Shortly before eight Alex slung her banjo case on her shoulder and they set out. She carried the pistols and powder horn in a croker sack. Smoke stung her eyes and made breathing difficult. From the Ashley to the Cooper fires ate away at rooftops.

They walked toward Meeting against a flow of people still hurrying to find a train. Suddenly, behind them, an explosion blew the depot into the sky and sent the refugees into screaming retreat. “There was a sizable powder cache next to the depot, maybe something set it off,” Ham said.

Coming on the Bell house for the first time in weeks, she blanched and said, “Oh, my God, what happened?” One of the front gables was gone. Wedged in the hole, a curved piece of iron reflected the smoke-veiled sun. The big rifled guns along South Battery had been blown apart. Similar iron fragments lay in the sandy street to the east.

The two of them ripped down the boards nailed across the piazza door, opened shutters. Alex was thankful to find Joanna's portrait unharmed. While they worked, Union troops of the 52d Pennsylvania Volunteers marched into Charleston singing “John Brown's Body.” Color bearers carried the American flag and a banner blazoned with the word
LIBERTY
.

Black people crept into the street, terrified at first, then dancing and cheering when they saw that the two dozen soldiers were Negro. At Broad and East Bay a white officer, one Colonel Bennett, received the city's surrender from a deputy of the mayor.

From the garden Alex heard a brass band play “Hail, Columbia.” The music unsettled her in a peculiar way. The citadel of slavery had fallen, justly punished for its sins. For years she'd wished for nothing else. Yet she felt no joy, only weariness, and a formless sorrow. Her injured leg ached again.

By midafternoon two civilian wagons reached South Battery. Men unloaded bulky cameras and clambered over the ruined guns, exposing glass plates to make a photographic record of Charleston's defeat.

Alex thought it prudent to hide one of Edward's pistols behind books in the front office. That night she and Ham slept on pallets there. She left her banjo leaning against the wall on the first stair riser. She hadn't ventured up to the dank and dusty second floor, or the attic, to inspect the roof damage. She'd do that in the morning.

Before she could, the liberators came.

 

There were four, three Negro privates, young and cocky, and a white lieutenant. They stomped up the steps from the garden and pounded the butts of their revolvers on the door. One soldier used his gun barrel to break an inset of ornamental glass. Alex heard the crash and ran to the hall.

Revolver in hand, the lieutenant stepped into the hall. “Stand fast,” he said when he saw Alex with her pistol on full cock. “Put down that piece. I won't ask a second time.”

He seemed so young to be so fierce. In his twenties, turnip nosed but otherwise not bad looking, with a short growth of blond beard. His dark blue sack coat was dusty and stained, the brass buttons tarnished. His forage cap showed the gold-embroidered eagle of the infantry. His weapon was a .44 army Colt from a belt holster. Alex didn't want the confrontation to end in bloodshed. She laid Edward's gun on a side table.

“Now move away from it.”

She did as he ordered. The officer touched his cap. “Second Lieutenant Francis Wurtz, Company D, Twenty-first U.S. Colored Regiment. We're going house to house to declare the freedom of the city. Any niggers on the premises?”

Ham stood behind Alex, uncombed hair falling over his forehead. “No, sir, we own no slaves,” he said, emphatically and truthfully.

The lieutenant indicated the pistol on the side table. “We're authorized to confiscate weapons and search for contraband.”

Alex's eyes burned with resentment. “What exactly is contraband?”

“Whatever we say it is. Don't interfere. Boys, go to it.”

The soldiers bolted like jackrabbits, two heading upstairs, one to the dining room. The fourth grabbed the case on the stair and pulled out the banjo. Alex ran at him, pounding his shoulder. “Leave that alone.”

He cursed her, went up two steps, away from her. Alex held out her hand. “Give me that.” The soldier swung the banjo by its neck, smashing it on the newel post. Wood snapped; broken strings twanged. She hurled herself at him again. The lieutenant grabbed her from behind, bent her arm so that she dropped to her knees.

“That's no way to act, woman. Show us you're glad to see us.” Grinning, he hauled her up, pulled her against him for a rough kiss. His beard scraped her skin. She tasted tobacco on his wet tongue.

Ham leapt on the lieutenant. The soldier who'd broken the banjo dragged him off and pistol-whipped him twice. Ham staggered, blood running out of his hair and dripping from the tip of his nose. The soldier kicked his shin. Ham fell, landed hard on his chest, gasping.

Alex heard crockery break at the rear of the house. She darted past the lieutenant, almost reached the front office where she'd hidden the other pistol. “Damn you, woman, come back here.” Wurtz fired a round. The ball tore splinters from the doorjamb. One nearly nicked her eye.

“I'll put the next one square in your back if you don't behave.”

“For God's sake, do what he says,” Ham pleaded, on his knees and blinded with blood.

A soldier ran down the stairs with pieces of her clothing. “Whole lot of this upstairs. Mighty fancy, Lieutenant.” He stuck a pair of Alex's cotton drawers on his head, the legs dangling like white braids. He curtseyed to Wurtz and wiggled his rear like a dance-hall soubrette. The lieutenant laughed.

One of the soldiers relieved himself against the wall at the back of the hall. Another returned from the kitchen with an armload of dishes. Alex froze when he stopped in front of Joanna's portrait. “Who this be?”

The lieutenant shrugged. “Some old secesh whore. Leave it, nobody would buy such a thing.”

The looters carried off a strange assortment of prizes: dishes, a rocker, a set of brass andirons, and the pistol from the hall. The books in the front room didn't interest them and no one thought to search behind them. Alex stood trembling, her arm around her brother. She felt violated.

She had long ago been purged of certain illusions about people. The North was not a community of angels, and color didn't confer sainthood on an entire race. Even so, she'd risked herself willingly on behalf of Negroes. Now she saw them behaving like animals, desecrating her family home as she was certain they'd desecrate her once-beautiful city. For a brief, feverish moment she was a Southerner again.

On the way out Lieutenant Wurtz paused to say, “You and all the other secesh in this sinkhole of treason are whipped. Better remember that, and show some respect, or it'll go hard with you.”

She met his stare, silently defiant. Then she spat on his boots.

His bearded face turned ashy. Alex ducked her head as he aimed his Colt. At the last moment he pulled the barrel up, firing three times at the ceiling. Pendants on the chandelier splintered. Glass and plaster dust fell.

“Old bitch,” he said, and stalked out behind his men.

She had a presentiment then. The surrender wouldn't bring a true peace, only more hatred. What astonished her was the ferocity of that hatred within herself.

Later that day Union ships in the harbor fired a hundred-gun salute to celebrate Charleston's fall. An onshore wind carried the smell of gunpowder through the open windows. Alex bent over her ironing with a continuing sense of foreboding.

Brig. Gen. Alexander Schimmelfennig arrived from Morris Island to put the city under martial law. Marion Marburg admired the general because he was German, an émigré who had fled after the failed revolutions of 1848, as Gen. Carl Schurz and other Union officers had. The wheel of history came around: the general set up headquarters in the Miles Brewton house on King Street, the British headquarters in Edward's day.

The Stars and Stripes replaced the Confederate flag on public buildings. In the attic Ham found an American flag he'd hidden in '61. He climbed a ladder and hung it on the piazza to the left of the garden steps.

Black soldiers worked alongside Charleston volunteers to put out the last fires. Confederate uniforms were banned. General Order Number Eight required all residents to take an oath of allegiance. The military evicted the
Courier
's editorial staff and brought in Northern journalists; Schimmelfennig wanted “a loyal paper.”

On Sunday, Ham and Alex went to church. Because St. Michael's and St. Philip's were badly damaged, communicants from both congregations worshiped at St. Paul's on Coming Street. A rumor buzzed through the pews that Colonel Bennett had ordered the rector to offer a prayer for Abraham Lincoln. Reverend Howe prayed instead for “our fallen comrades who made the ultimate sacrifice.” Schimmelfennig ordered the church closed.

The streets teemed with black field hands and Confederate deserters, more every day, homeless and hungry. At the request of a friendly city councilman Ham joined a com
mittee charged with locating any existing stores of rice and grain and distributing them to the needy. The wealthy had escaped to the countryside. Gibbes and Ouida were gone from Legare Street, but thuggish white youths stood guard at their town houses. Empty dwellings were still being looted, or invaded by squatters.

In March, schools reopened. Seven were operating by the end of the month, under a new superintendent of abolitionist persuasion. Alex decided Washington and Jackson belonged in a regular classroom. She took them to school herself. She was sent to a second-floor room presided over, surprisingly, by stout and gray-haired Letty Porcher-Jones.

“How grand to find you here, Letty.”

“I was a teacher before I married. Many of us have come back to help.”

“I don't see any white pupils on this floor.”

“Whites downstairs, colored up here, that's the rule. The Negro may be free, but he will never be our equal. Are these boys from the school you've been conducting in secret?”

“You know about that?”

“My son, Rex, sniffed it out. He followed Rolfe one evening and spied on you. Rolfe is an honest colored man. When I confronted him about his absences before curfew, he confessed.”

“And you didn't report it to anyone?”

“Nor did I punish him. It was apparent to me months ago that the slaves would have their freedom. I am not a complete ninny, Alexandra, or heartless. I know they need education to survive. What you're doing is worthy, if dangerous.”

“I thank you for your understanding.”

“Do you expect to continue teaching?”

“I must. I have pupils too old for public school. May Rolfe continue to attend?”

“How can I deny him? He's a free man.”

“Fine. I plan to move the class to our house. We have more space, and there's no longer any need for secrecy.”

“I wouldn't be too sure. I have no control of Rex now that he's grown. He and many of his friends despise any
one sympathetic to the colored.” Old echoes of Ham's warnings stirred. “Also, yours is a special case.”

“Because of the work I did up North?”

“Yes. Take my word. People have not forgotten.”

 

Heavy rain moved in from the Atlantic that night.

Alex happened to glance from a downstairs window just as dark was settling. Amid the abandoned South Battery gun pits and half hidden behind a weedy mound of earth, a solitary figure stood with an umbrella. A Negro, that much was evident, but whether man or woman, she couldn't tell in the poor light. The watcher wore a patchwork blanket like a shawl.

She lit a candle, carried it to the window, looked out with the light falling on her face. It had the desired effect: the watcher saw her and hurried away to Meeting Street, skirts trailing in mud puddles.

A woman, then. But who?

 

On March 29, Wednesday, Charleston Negroes celebrated the jubilee with a huge parade led by mounted marshals wearing red, white, and blue sashes, and a “Liberty Car” carrying thirteen girls dressed in white to represent the original colonies. The band of the 21st Colored Regiment provided music.

Companies of soldiers and sailors marched. Standing at the curb a block below Marion Square, Alex saw 2d Lieutenant Wurtz pass by, saber at his shoulder. He spied her in the predominantly black crowd, silently articulated a filthy name for a woman.

Hundreds of Negro tradesmen marched—carpenters, coopers, ironworkers, tailors, butchers. Schoolchildren marched. Letty Porcher-Jones struggled to keep up with her class, which included Washington and Jackson. Jackson waved a placard declaring
SLAVERY IS DEAD
.

Going home, Alex was twice forced off the sidewalk by aggressive blacks. The second time, one of them cursed her. After a flare of anger she realized she should expect such
behavior in the aftermath of sudden freedom. She needed to be tolerant for a while.

 

On April 9, at Appomattox Court House, the curtain fell on the last act of the war. A few Confederate forces remained in the field after the surrender. Jeff Davis was at large, having fled Richmond, where huge fires, deliberately set, destroyed records of his government.

In Charleston the victors quickly planned a symbolic celebration. Maj. Gen. Robert Anderson, who had surrendered Sumter in '61, would return to the city on Good Friday, April 14, to raise the American flag.

Friday dawned a bright blue day. Every ship in the harbor broke out flags and patriotic bunting. By eight o'clock rowboats and skiffs, shrimp boats and steam barges were ferrying guests across the three miles of water to the fort's rubble-strewn landing stage. The brick fort was a ruin. Three of its five sides had been blown down by bombardment. Second- and third-floor interiors had disappeared entirely.

Ham and Alex went over at ten. The skiff's owner pointed out a U.S. mail steamer,
Arago,
anchored outside the harbor bar. She carried more than eighty dignitaries from New York, including Anderson and his daughter; the President's secretary, Mr. Nicolay; the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, who would present the day's oration; and Alex's friend Garrison.

Alex and her brother landed and made their way into the fort's one-acre floor. Ham pointed out a well-dressed black man he identified as Robert Vesey, Denmark Vesey's son. Born a freedman, he'd survived his father's reputation and prospered as a self-taught contractor and architect.

Robert Smalls, now attached to the Union navy, piloted his side-wheeler
Planter
into the harbor and transferred to a ferry barge. People cheered when he walked down a dirt ramp from the fort's parapet.

Starting at eleven a transport vessel brought the guests from
Arago
. They joined army and navy officers on a plat
form decorated with baskets of greenery and wicker arches surmounted by a gold eagle. Alex pressed through the crowd to reach the monkish Garrison, older now, but still possessing the hot eye of a warrior. They greeted each other warmly. She said, “This must be a proud moment for you.”

“For almost forty years I fought the sin of sins. I knew a day like this would come, but often I wondered if I would live to see it. Your poor city has reaped the whirlwind, Alexandra.”

And still may,
she thought.

“I'm speaking to the congregation at Zion's Chapel tomorrow. Please come.”

“I will,” she said as they parted.

She guessed that three or four thousand had gathered on the hard benches by the time the program began at noon. After the invocation and opening ceremonies, Anderson and a sergeant who had taken the flag down in '61 stepped forward carrying a large leather mailbag holding the flag struck in '61. Anderson was a gaunt and wrinkled Kentuckian with stiff gray hair that reminded Alex of Calhoun's. He drew a paper from his pocket, consulted it, then frowned and put it away. Without notes he spoke briefly and movingly, concluding, “I can only say to you that I thank Almighty God I have lived long enough to perform this last act of duty to my country.”

Noncoms attached the old flag to the halyards of the 150-foot staff. Anderson seized the rope and pulled. A wind had come up; it unfurled the flag, thirty-six by twenty feet, riddled with shrapnel holes and ripped by the weather. The sight brought a roaring ovation.

Others took a turn: Gen. Quincy Gillmore, Garrison, Reverend Beecher. When the flag reached the top of the pole, six cannon on the parapet fired in sequence, ear-pounding detonations that touched off a hundred-gun salute from ship and shore batteries. The cannonading went on for half an hour.

Beecher experienced difficulty with the whipping wind. His hat blew away. He was forced to grip the pages of his speech with both hands. Before the war he'd been burned
in effigy in Charleston; now he spoke of reuniting the nation. He pleaded for universal education of Negroes. He praised the President and accused “the cultured and unprincipled ruling aristocracy who wanted to maintain their power at any price. They wrought the destruction so tragically on view in this once beautiful city.”

The day, if not necessarily Beecher's oration, was a triumph. Alex returned home weary but happy. That night the assassin Booth shot Lincoln at Ford's Theater.

 

Word of the President's death on Saturday morning wasn't telegraphed to Charleston until after Alex set out for Zion's Chapel, a large colored church on Calhoun Street. Walking along Meeting a block above City Market, she came on one of the many vendors who had set up little stands around the city.

The vendor was a colored woman, dimly seen except for a gaudy red-and-yellow turban. She sat on her haunches in a shaded recess in the stucco wall. A dozen small brown nut-cakes and some benne-seed cookies were laid out on a box in the sunshine. A palmetto whisk drove off hovering flies.

Alex paid less attention to the woman than to her companion, a white boy. Perhaps eight or nine, he had stubby legs, thick arms, a round Nordic face, and white-blond hair badly in need of barbering. He stepped in front of Alex, played an Irish air on a mouth organ, and did a little heel-and-toe dance. She dropped coins into an old straw hat at his feet.

“Very good, young man. What's your name?”

“Bob.” He slitted his blue eyes as he spoke. There was a teeth-gritting tension about him. He didn't smile.

“And your friend?” Alex turned to acknowledge the woman in the dark recess. She couldn't have been more stunned if the earth had opened.

“Maudie?”

“Yes'm, Miss Alex, it's me. They call me Maum Maudie down Grahamville way.”

“Heavens above. What are you doing here?”

“Trying to keep from starving, me an' Little Bob.” She emerged from the dark alcove and they embraced.

Tearful, Maudie said, “I knew you were back, I heard people say so. I went to call but I was too scared to knock on your door.”

“Were you the person I saw watching the house?”

Maudie nodded. “Little Bob, say how do to Miss Alexandra Bell. She owned me when we were girls, but she set me free.”

Alex shook hands with the cheerless boy. Maudie said, “I found him wandering after the fighting at Honey Hill 'way last November. Georgia militia was trying to stop Sherman, but one of 'em killed Bob's widowed mother right on her doorstep, a stray shot. I took him in.”

There were age lines on Maudie's face, patches on her shapeless dress, blisters on her bare feet. A long crescent scar marred her left cheek. “How did you get that?” Alex asked.

“Bad man I was married to, he cut me. Only did it to me once. I sharpened up my rice hoe and next time, I gave him better'n he got. Never saw him again.”

“You're so thin, Maudie.”

“Thought there might be more food here than in the country. I was wrong.” Maudie waved her whisk over the cookies and cakes. “Woman over by the east docks rents me her oven. Sometimes what I pay her cancels out what I make selling. Still, a body's got to try.”

“Do you have shelter?”

“A blanket and my old umbrella. We sleep wherever we can.”

“We'll remedy that. You two are coming home with me, no argument.”

Little Bob shot a look at Maudie, as though their bubble of sudden good fortune might pop at any second. Alex clapped and beamed. “We'll be a family again, Maudie. Oh, we have so much to catch up on.” She clasped Maudie's hand and silently asked Mr. Garrison to forgive her for missing his speech.