Hell or Richmond (23 page)

“Tell you what,” Washburne said. “Sam, you finish off Bobby Lee tomorrow, we’ll give Old Abe a second term, then put you in the White House in ’68.”

Grant had had enough of such talk. He needed the grand attack in the morning to work. He could not allow Robert E. Lee to feel superior in any sense, to judge himself the master of this battlefield. Even if the Army of Northern Virginia could not be destroyed on the spot, Lee’s will had to be weakened, he had to feel doubt, to know that he had a tougher opponent now, one who would not relent. Lee had to learn to fear him. The onetime captain of engineers whom they had all admired in Mexico had to sense that this was the beginning of the end of things for his people and that continuing the war was naught but futility.

“Got any more of those cigars you were smoking?” Washburne asked him. “I’m all out.”

“Bill?” Grant called over his shoulder. In seconds, a black face—blacker than the surrounding darkness by a full degree—popped out of the depths of the tent.

“Suh?”

“Bill, fetch the congressman a handful of cigars. The good Havanas.”

“Yassuh.”

“That reminds me,” Washburne said. “Ferrero. His division. The Colored Troops.”

“What about them?”

“Careful how you use them. We can’t have another Fort Pillow. If the Confederates massacre those darkies, Lee won’t get the blame. The abolitionists will blame you, Sam. You’re the name in the papers now. And they’re still sore about that business with the Jews. They’ll claim that you used the Colored Troops as cannon fodder. Greeley and Stevens and the whole damned lot of them don’t really want their little black pets to fight, they just want them to march around bright and shiny.”

“Well,” Grant said, “they’re guarding the army’s trains. That’s about as safe as I can keep them. May get to a point where I have to use ’em, though.”

“Try not to. Really, Sam. I mean, you don’t really expect them to fight, do you? Against white men? They’d probably run at the first shot.”

“From what I hear, the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts didn’t run,” Grant said.

“And what did they accomplish? Sam, this is a political matter. And you just went on about how you don’t want to fiddle with politics. Trust me on this.”

Grant chose not to argue the matter further. He respected Washburne, was grateful to him. But he was not going to take military advice from the man. He turned to Rawlins:

“Heard anything from your bride, John?” He felt great affection for Rawlins, who had been one of the few to believe in him back in Galena. Now he worried about the country lawyer who had come so far beside him, worried about the cough that suggested consumption—the disease that had killed John’s adored first wife—and worried that his second marriage, to a Yankee girl they had discovered stranded in Vicksburg, might have proven a disappointment. Grant thought he understood the weight of the loss of a much-loved wife. His long separation from Julia, those grim years in the desolate Northwest, had given him a taste of it. He could not imagine how he could go on, were he to lose her forever. He was not certain that any war, or the fate of any nation, was as important as the existence of his living, breathing, gently chiding wife. She, too, had believed in him when others did not. Years before John Rawlins and Elihu Washburne had come along.

If a man needed anything, it seemed to Grant, it was for others to believe in him. When they did, he could believe in himself at last.

Bill delivered a fistful of cigars to the congressman, who skillfully avoided the Negro’s touch. Washburne rose, followed by Rawlins.

“Think I’ll retire to my lavish accommodations,” the congressman said. “After this, I’ll have some advice for Mr. Willard.”

“I need to see what Humphreys has cooked up while we were visiting,” Rawlins said. “Won’t come waking you, unless it’s a thing that matters.”

Grant nodded. He didn’t rise. Just didn’t feel like it. Not yet.

He watched his two closest friends descend the back side of the knoll and fade into the darkness. Out on the roads, the commotion continued: supply wagons, provost men, redirected infantry regiments, and the endless ambulances. Curses, cries, and commands.

He believed in getting what sleep he could. A few hours, anyway. Weary men made poor decisions. And the days ahead would be busy ones.

His manservant came back out of the tent, carrying a shirt he’d been mending by lantern light—an excuse for listening in, Grant knew—and ready to receive the day’s final instructions. A freed slave, Bill had attached himself to Grant early on as well. He, too, believed in the “general in chief.” But not quite as unreservedly as the others. Life had taught old Bill a degree of skepticism a white man rarely attained, and the fellow had the biggest ears of any man Grant had met when it came to listening to every whisper around him. Even Washburne was a babe in the woods compared to his manservant. Or his “valet,” as Julia always wanted him to call the poor devil. Whatever folks might call the darkey, Grant enjoyed the man’s presence.

“Well,” Grant said, “did you give the congressman the good cigars this time?”

Bill shuffled a bit, fussing with the garment in his hands, then said, “No, suh. I give him the pretty good cigars, not the
good
cigars. That man don’t never know the difference. Them good cigars comes to you, ain’t nobody sent ’em to Washington.”

“You’re supposed to do what I tell you, you know.”

“Yassuh. I knows. I’m supposed to do ’zacly how you says, just like every man in this here army supposed to do ’zacly what you says.”

Grant’s lips spread in amusement. “Meaning … they don’t?”

“Some does, some don’t. That General Meade now, he do what you say, just like you say it. ’Least, he trying to. Downright pitiful, watching how hard that man try.”

“Think I’ll need one more of those good cigars myself. But hold on. Put the shirt down and sit down. And tell me something. What do
you
make of Meade, Bill? What do you really think? Given that you haven’t missed a word that’s been said since the day I brought you east.”

Bill laid the shirt, half-folded, on a camp stool. But he didn’t sit. “Not my place to say, suh. Not ’bout a general.”

Grant enjoyed their routines. Many a day it was the only play he had, the only enjoyment, other than his cigars, that he could allow himself.

“Well, then,” Grant said, “that suggests it isn’t my place to ask you. Do we have to go through this every time?”

“Yassuh. I reckon we do. That’s how we keeps things right.”

“So give me your honest opinion of General Meade. That’s an order.”

Bill pretended to think hard on the question. As if he had not been pondering it for well over a month. “Well, suh, that man has him a powerful temper, terrible powerful. But he wants to make things be right, that’s all, and some things are all mule and no filly. When he’s not blowing his head off his own shoulders, he’s got him all the fixings of a true gentleman.”

Grant smiled again. “And I don’t?”

Bill feigned deep thought. “Well, now, Genr’l, I been knowing you years on years now. And I knows you got the soul of a gentleman, and the spirit of a gentleman. You just wasn’t born with the fixings.”

Grant shook his head. “Bill, you’d make a better diplomat than Secretary Seward. I’d be downright fearful of dealing with you.”

“Nawsuh. You ain’t feared of nothing but Miss Julia.”

“That a fact?”

“You has
concerns
. That’s a different thing, Genr’l.”

“That I do. I have concerns. The congressman and every biscuit-grabbing journalist in this camp think I should wrap up things with a nice big bow and do it all by suppertime tomorrow. What do
you
think?”

“Ain’t my place to go telling nobody what I thinks about manhandling this here army. That’s your paid business. Like mending shirts is my business.”

“You do more thinking than half the generals I know.”

“Ain’t much of a compliment, Genr’l. If that’s what you’re intending.”

Grant laughed out loud. It was the first time he had laughed properly that day. The first time he had known reason to laugh. “Well, I’m appointing you a brevet major general. Commission to expire in five minutes. So tell me: You think we’ll whip Marse Robert tomorrow? And be done with it?”

Bill hesitated. Grant knew the man didn’t fear an outburst of wrath. This was just the way they played the game. Bill’s opinion had to be courted. Even though he was swollen with opinions. You almost had to bring him flowers. Or let him “test” a fair number of cigars when things were slow.

Another skirmish flared up in the distance. It was an uneasy battlefield this midnight, crowded, uncertain, unclear, a place of the lost, of small and fatal blunders. He refused, again and adamantly, to think of the suffering. The price had to be paid. He had to get at Lee, and keep at him, until there was no more Lee left, no will left to fight on the other side. The army was a great blue hammer, and he would not hesitate to wield it.

“Go ahead,” Grant told his manservant. “Before you bust open with not saying what you want to say.”

Bill shook his head. “There’s that song, suh. One of them songs to make fun of the black man, like white folks do.…”

“You know I can’t tell one song from another.”

Bill shook his head in exaggerated mournfulness. “Ain’t the singing part, Genr’l, just the words.”

“Which words?”

“‘Richmond am a hard road to travel.’”

May 6, twelve thirty a.m.
Grant’s headquarters

As he lay on his bed of pine branches and blankets, Bill was glad the general had not asked him about the use of Negro troops. He might have spoken his mind, really spoken it. Saying as how the general needed to let them fight, let them do what they hurt and ached and just plain wanted to do, to settle debts of a hundred years and more. Would black men fight? Near as he could tell, only army discipline was stopping them from fighting.

The general was a good man, easy, half nigger himself after the low way he lived back in Missouri, back in his bad times. That man knew what it was to be shamed. But even he didn’t understand it all, no white man could. Mostly, they got it terrible wrong, body and soul, especially the ones who meant to do black folk good, the abolitionists. He had his letters solid, and he had thought over some of their writings. Heard them talk, too. And they were good Christian men and women, no denying. But it was like that book they all loved so much,
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
. Poor little white woman didn’t understand slavery at all, not one little bit. All that fuss about whipping. Wasn’t all that many niggers got themselves whipped, not even downriver. And half of them who did were like to deserve it, for one thing or another. No, it wasn’t the whipping. Bill had never seen a master take a lash to a black man’s body, although he’d heard tell. Anyway, whipping just wasn’t a mighty doing like folks said. Ugly and unwelcome, surely. But whipping was an outside thing, like a bad storm come by, and it passed over, maybe leaving its mark, maybe not. The hellfire evil in slavery was the inside, everyday part of it, the mountain piled up from little bits of shame and insult, the way a man was lifelong caught between the place of an animal and that of a man. Scars on a black back were one thing, but the true scars were the ones white folk couldn’t see, the scars of shame, the un-ableness to stand up on your hind legs and choose ways for yourself and be admired for what you made of this span on earth—God’s blessing—and not for what you could steal, or how well you tricked white folks, or just for your sin-loving.

“You let the black man fight,” he had wanted to tell the general, shout at him. “You just let them niggers fight out all the meanness they got built up in them, and you’re like to see what fighting really is. Just turn those black men loose, Genr’l, turn those black men loose.…”

But he had held his tongue. He had spent a lifetime holding his tongue. Even with a good man like the general, there was a limit, clear as the words of Jesus Christ, past which no sober black man was going to step. Even with Grant, he affected a degree of coon speech because that was expected and easier. Safer. A black man who spoke well worried a white man. Any white man.

Nor was he always honest in other things. Truth-telling every minute was a prideful matter even most white men couldn’t afford. And when a white man told the plain-dealing truth, the way that fireball, hellhound Griffin done told them all what was chewing on him that afternoon, he just got everybody riled up and no good come out of it. Take that General Meade, the fellow General Grant was always weighing in the scales, even when he claimed he wasn’t. Wouldn’t tell a lie, that man, and it hurt him like a sharp pain in the belly to pretty up the truth even a little. Anybody could see it. But all it did was make folks walk on tippytoe around him and say hard things about him behind his back. General Grant, now, he was wise as a church elder in his quietness. He understood the black man’s law that there was a lot to be said for not saying a lot.

And he didn’t mind if a good cigar turned up in a Negro’s mouth every now and then.

Nearing sleep, Bill smiled. The hard, brute world was fading, the crack of gunfire a distant lullaby, the occasional screams no worse than he’d heard before. He’d told the general a little lie this very evening, though for the general’s own good: He hadn’t given Mr. Washburne the pretty good cigars. Those were for the general, too, way he went through them. He’d given that high congressman the not-too-bad cigars, the way he always did. Man was so deep in love with himself, he never noticed one bit.

Let the black man fight!
Let him carve out justice for himself. Don’t hand it to him like a Christmas gift. Let him take it. Bill was too old for that nonsense now, nearly too old for the other, private, close-up, young man’s doings. But, just once, he wanted to see a black man with a foot on a white man’s back. A dead white man, if he had his druthers.

Meanwhile, it didn’t trouble him to see white folk kill each other by the bushel.