by Robert Hicks
I can remember what I thought standing for the first time in the St. Louis Hotel, watching the traders and fixers mingling in the red and alabaster of the lobby, sharing their whiskey and passing around bills of sale. They were smooth-faced and tailored. Their shoes glowed. They moved lightly between couch and chair and bar. I stood on the precipice, a scarecrow, a lump of earth, a pile of broken things, and watched them flow and slip around each other like dancers. They were full of grace, the earthly kind, and I was full of heaviness. No one acknowledged me. The old man was wrong about that, I thought then, but now I knew he had been right: I was seen, recognized, and ignored. Negro waiters, wrapped in bright white coats and bearing trays of glasses and tobacco, drifted between knots of men who honked and brayed at each other in pleasure. The waiters bowed and shuffled just as they would have before the war. What had changed? Men laughed, they shook hands. The mirrors were polished, the landscapes framed in bright gold and hung straight. The whole place was easy, unperturbed, secure. In that one spot, in that one city in that singular state far from my enemies, this was how things had been, how they were, and how they always would be. I realized for the first time that the war had not been all-consuming. It had consumed me, but not these men whose suits were not pulling apart at the seams and whose legs did not thump and scrape across the gleaming tile. There had been men who had flourished while Chickamauga raged, men who had gone home to their wives and concubines while other men dragged their squadmates off the field at Little Round Top and laid them in bloody piles. I was not angry to realize this, though it was a shock even so. I became confident and certain in this knowledge. I became gleeful at the thought: These men owe me. My cause was right, and my cause was not just money but compensation. Look at my leg, I thought, pushing through a boisterous group of Creole cotton men and planters in gold cravats. Who will bid on my leg?
The city embarrassed me, or I was embarrassed for the city, one or the other. Blacklegs walked the streets like kings, arms thrown over the shoulders of the innocent, hands on the asses of whores. The whores dressed better and spoke more eloquently than the dark-haired and pious wives who spent their days fumbling with beads, their heads wreathed in cloying smoke. Stray cotton bolls, lifted across the quay on light wind, drifted against walls and collected in doorways like old, peppery snow that no one bothered to remove. The Italians lived like dogs in their secret courtyards redolent of the old vegetables and shrimp shells that brewed in their stews. In came the innocent and hopeful, and out went the dead. It was an indecent town.
Nothing mattered but the money. Oh Lord! How could there be so much money? It floated down the river, funneled from the mountaintops to the valleys to the fields to the docks, and on to the hive of cotton offices, insurers, bankers, and saloonkeepers. The money bought sculpture and flesh, tombs and exquisite gardens laden with lemons and bananas. It bought leisure, the most important thing.
Any man with even a little wit could open an office, buy a desk, hang a sign, and accept the money as if by right. It was possible to look out the window of the office and see each person as a chit to be banked, every crowd a living body of future accrued interest, every new friend a mark to be plundered for treasure. It was not so much different from imagining men as lines on a map, every small line merging into a larger one aimed at the enemy’s lines, each man merely a walking rifle.
I found partners in the city eager to open a cotton factor’s office with a famous, or infamous, Confederate general who had no experience of commerce. They told me I was a respected man with a well-known name, and that this would draw customers. They flattered, but what they meant was that I was a curiosity. I had friends upriver with cotton, brothers in arms who would surely prefer to sell to me rather than to the dissolute and lazy-tongued traders of the Creole classes. It took two years, nearly all of my own investment, and the disappearance of my partners to relieve me of those fantasies.
This is how I begin my memoir. I am older, I am wiser, I’ve got nearly no money. We have embarked on a new life that looks mightily like the old one, only with no servants, fewer changes of clothes, and no more days settled into the soft red chairs of the St. Louis’s lobby. Recently I have spent hours instead sitting in the parlor on a three-legged stool (“Two more than you have, Papa!” the boy John Junior says), carved from old river-strewn cypress. Right now I am in my library sitting on my unforgiving four-slat chair missing several inches of its cane bottom, bent over this piece of paper, this is what I do now.
These last ten years. Ten children, and in the spring our eleventh. I am married to a flower of the Creole world who had the bad sense to be dragged down with me. Yet she still looks at me and flirts during supper. She sits with me on the front porch overlooking Third Street, drinking the very last of our cognac. I have $173, which we keep in a can in the pantry next to the dried field peas. The children know of that money, but they do not steal it. Their friends parade the street in shiny calfskin boots aboard sweet, well-broken ponies. My children dig after bugs and capture butterflies in what Anna Marie diplomatically calls our wildflower garden. They are barefoot most of the time. The older children once had ponies. Lydia’s pony, Joan, was perfect black except for the white blaze and her four white stockings, and Lydia rode her through every yard and into every swampy and secluded stand of cottonwood and cypress she could find. The two of them often returned covered in sharp thorns and burrs. I am told by old friends that she resembled her mother most at those moments. Joan was the last of the ponies we sold. Lydia has never once asked me about her, nor does she look covetously at the neighborhood children who still have ponies. She is the leader of the butterfly snatchers now. She calls every butterfly Joan, but I think this is out of fondness and not out of resentment. She likes the name, she likes the things in her life that have been named Joan.
This sounds nothing at all like the memoir of a famous, or infamous, Confederate general. I pray that it is unlike such writings in every way. This is the record of a man finished with war. I spend my days in our house, or walking the fragrant wet streets, louche with jasmine and camellias and gardenias and unnameable strange rambling vines winking their purple and red and yellow blossoms at the sun. I spend my nights reading to children and holding my wife to my broken and amputated body. Ten years ago I would have thought such behavior foolish. What joys does a poor man have? These days there is love, to begin with, and also the possibility of salvation. I am the rich man who discarded (or, more accurately, lost) his riches. Perhaps I will know a savior now. Perhaps it is Anna Marie. Perhaps it is my own conscience.
Does this seem small, this new world I describe? It is not, but judge for yourself.
I write this on October 3, 1878. Anna Marie is pregnant. Again. That itself is something of a miracle. Last spring I thought I would never touch her again, never be allowed into that bed, never see her smile at me. I didn’t care. But much has changed, even in just a few months.
I should begin by telling you how I met the woman with whom I now live in blessed penury.
I was not such a chastened man ten years ago, no sir. I lived in red upholstered rooms high above the Vieux Carré, and in the mornings I received admirers in the lobby of the St. Louis. I did not drink on those mornings, sitting by the tall windows and talking the history of the late war with twiggy-limbed and swarthy Frenchmen whose closest encounters with the rage of battle happened right there, during the occupation, when their women were insulted by the Union occupiers and they plotted their imagined duels and sword thrusts over boiled shrimps and morning brandy in the clubs. It was outrageous, they told me. It was intolerable.
“And yet you are here, you must have tolerated,” I jested.
“We are a resourceful and proud race,” they said, very seriously.
I entertained offers of business partnerships on those days. I could have been a railroad investor, a restaurateur, an importer of West Indian cloth, a brothel owner, an investor in Mrs. Pontalba’s apartment houses around Jackson Square,
a maker of fine rum, and a partner in a firm that pumped water out of the city and into the river. I turned them all down, although I could picture myself ruling my own restaurant, tasting the soups, watching the butchering of the tender and giant green turtles, listening to the woody ping of fine knives chopped down on hard blocks. I could imagine inspecting the cleanliness of my plates.
But it was cotton I chose. I cared nothing for the crop, there is no romance in cotton, only the seas of white monotony. But I reckoned myself a clever man, cleverer than everyone else, and I knew cotton was the clever man’s bet. Cotton factoring—the brokering of cotton between farmer, shipper, and manufacturer—would be my business, though I knew nothing of it or, truthfully, about any business at all.
What did it matter? Men respected and admired me for being the General. Few could have named a single battle I’d engaged, a single victory, but no matter. I was a man to whom attention must be paid, and I felt capable of all things.
I hired men who knew cotton and installed our offices in the Vieux Carré, close by the wharf with a view over the river to Algiers. Not once in the three years of my proprietorship did I set eyes on a cotton boll. Cotton never came through the door except on the backs of men and in their handkerchiefs. I let the others concern themselves with the product.
I spent my time writing letters on fine letterhead to my West Point classmates requesting their help as I began the composition of my war memoir. I thought I would call it Advance and Retreat, which was both simple and complete, as was my life. I had been a titan of battle, now a respected man of business, and soon a writer of memoirs. I could not have lived according to the laws of civilized man with any more faith, except for the matter of finding a wife.
I wore my wounds proudly, but privately they revolted me, even after several years with them. In my rooms, which were spare and glowing and polished, crouched a monster who draped the mirrors in black as if in mourning. He didn’t like to see himself. He avoided the floor-to-ceiling windows that opened to the gallery that looked out over a street loud with the perambulations of the happy and the whole and the ignorant. The monster, withered and chopped, paced his rooms muttering of calumnies and, when moved, he flung himself at his desk to write down every slight he’d suffered at the hands of the graceless warrior victors and, even worse, from men of his own tribe, his Confederates. My war memoirs were composed in a rage and intended to offend and to destroy: reputations, lives, complacency.
I had deserved command, and I had commanded in victory and in defeat. There’s not a general who did not suffer defeat. I suffered defeat. I did. I suffered. Lee also suffered defeat. He stood at the edge of that battlefield at Gettysburg as what was left of his army filed back past him in retreat. I saw him that day. We had been defeated, but I had given a good fight. I expected to hear his congratulations as we passed, but instead he looked down from that great white horse, Traveller, and bent his head toward my men as if in supplication. “I am sorry,” he said. I thought his apology unbecoming, which shows how little I understood about General Lee, war, and the minds of men.
I felt at home in the city. Me, a Kaintuck country cracker. I had spent most of my life sleeping out on cold jabbing ground, and so I came to cherish my feather bed and thick blankets, the soft sound of my footfall on thick carpets, meals prepared in kitchens, meats diced and filleted rather than ripped off the bone and skewered on hot red bayonets in the starless dark. On the street I learned the mongrel language of English, French, German, and Spanish, not a language so much as a mercantile code spoken by shopmen in single bursts and grunts. One word, such as déjeuner, contained a weight of agreed directives and responses that, ultimately, brought poached eggs and ham and a chickory-laced milk coffee to my table. I admired the efficiency of our shared dumbness.
The most I ever saw of the Irish were the hearse carts piled with dead Irishmen newly fallen in the pits of the latest canal, all of them covered in dried yellow mud like totems of a lost civilization. I had known Irishmen in the war and knew them to be valiant if also sentimental and incautious. General Claiborne died at Franklin like a private. Well-loved, but dead, and what good is that? I listened to the banshee call from their lairs in dark pubs and from the backs of blue-dark sanctuaries. I pitied them.
The negroes controlled the market, they ran the wharf gangs without which none of us would have made any money. They built things, they spoke their beautiful, strange French and, all in all, seemed a closed society well in possession of itself. Then it came time to root them out like plague, and the Irish—and the Spanish, the Germans, the Americans, and even the white Creoles—burned and stabbed their way over the negro, establishing forever the hierarchy of piteousness.
I was invited to participate in the parade of the Krewe of Comus that first year in the city, my first Mardi Gras. The men of Comus, a secret society of white men, had imported from England a barge full of costumes, monstrous blasphemies all. A grasshopper with a bear’s head, a singing fish with a beaver’s tail. This was Mr. Darwin’s vision, or so they said. My eagle with a frog’s legs also had a negro’s lips. I took the costume to the Pickwick Club, home of Comus, and asked about that particular detail of my costume.
“Eagles don’t have lips,” I said.
“That one’s got nigger lips,” said the old, sun-blackened man who would be the King that year.
“Precisely my question,” I said.
“It isn’t a question,” he said.
“Pardon me?”
“I was just observing that your eagle has nigger lips, which is as it was designed. But, General, if you’d prefer a different costume we can arrange it.”
“I might like that…”
“We’ve got a mouse-giraffe with a Hottentot ass, and a pelican-snake in blackface.”
I kept my costume, thinking it most appropriate that I mask as an eagle because of my service in the war, especially in light of the other options. I marched in a parade of menacing hybrids, a fantasia of men obsessed by purity and breeding, horrified at the notion of their daughters’ future half-negro children. Which is to say, their daughters’ negro children, as there are no half negroes. To transform their grandchildren into negroes as men from fish and apes seemed, to the maskers on my left and right marching down Canal Street, the worst kind of alchemy.
About the time I understood the full meaning of the parade I had joined, the stump of my leg began to ache, and so I pulled out and sat down on the banquette and removed my eagle head and, when I had gathered my breath, my wooden leg.
“That is an awfully scary costume, mister,” said a short, raven-haired boy in a harlequin’s stockings and mask. His parents, dressed as the Pope and His Lover, watched us closely and I smiled. They did not smile back.
“I reckon it must be hard pretending your leg been et off, mister. That’s what makes the scariness.”
Later that day the men of Comus attacked some negroes and some Republicans, and possibly one Italian potter hawking his beer mugs along the parade route. The police, many of them colored, beat them all, severely splitting the costumed heads down the middle with their clubs and gouging out eyes when they could find them in the riot of feathers and garland papier-mâché. I, luckily, had given my eagle head to the little harlequin and so I could watch the disaster unmolested.
This was what had become of our war. We had once fought with honor on the field and now we fought dressed like idiots in the streets. I vowed to avoid politics but I still needed a wife.
* * *
I began to attend balls, I trimmed my beard a little, I practiced French and Spanish. I bought new clothes. I learned to dance again, and to seduce. I was almost the man I had once been when I was a colonel, when I was strong and fiery and courted the finest women in Richmond, back when I didn’t limp.
And so it was that I found myself again in a mask, in May of 1867, at a ball in the old part of town. I masked, as they say it here, but I was easily recognizable. After a little while of turning about th
e edges of the ballroom and greeting the grave chaperones and their flowery charges, I sat down in the foyer and began massaging the stump of my leg until it tingled again, and watched a small, erect, audacious, and insolent young woman march across the foyer to confront me from behind her peacock mask.
“The Gallant Hood!” she said.
“I believe it is the protocol of these disguised gatherings to refuse such identifications, ma’am, and so please excuse me if I say, Who?”
I was tired and bored and could think of nothing wittier to say. I tried to get to my feet in proper greeting, but I forgot my leg on the seat next to me, and so it was easy for the young woman to catch me off balance and ease me back onto the seat. She did not sit, though I made a space, and so I was forced to look up at her. She let her chest heave in a great sigh, she watched me watch her in fascination. Then she chuckled.
“If you are not Hood, then I must go.”
It had been years, since before I had been wounded and separated from myself. I had been the tall Kentuckian by way of Texas, spinning round the parlors and dance floors of Richmond with the best young ladies, the proper young ladies, the kinds of women General Lee had meant when, back in Texas years before, he’d told me to marry well. During the war I had been a man in demand. I had shared many glasses of bourbon with nervous fathers. But then I was butchered and I took myself away, ashamed and weak. In four years I had not been seduced by any woman who wasn’t paid to do it.
“I’m Hood,” I said too loudly, half rising to my foot again. I surprised myself with my desire to keep her near. I’m tired, I thought. But what was true was that I was lonely.
What had I known of beauty? I had known nothing, that was instantly obvious the moment she removed her peacock feathers from her face. I had known prettiness, the prettiness of the shiny and extravagant, but not the beauty of singularity. What I mean is, there stood a young woman by a broken man unable to keep track of his leg. There was a horde of prettiness gliding in island silks behind her, but she had chosen to stand by the broken thing in the room. She chose to be alone with me, and by that gesture, she became alone in the world. Alone, but not lonely, for God’s sake. While we talked young men drifted by across the parquet, heels clicking and chests billowing before them like sails. They watched us out the corner of their eyes, or looked over each other’s shoulder at the cripple wooing the girl with the long white neck, the cascading dark hair, the thin waist. They admired her as they might have admired a horse at the track. I saw only her eyes.