Confederates in the Attic

by Tony Horwitz

  “Blood,” Sue Curtis said. “That’s all you really need to join this club.”

  I’d tracked her down at the Rowan County library, where she spent several mornings a week verifying applications for membership in the United Daughters of the Confederacy, or UDC for short. This meant hours of scrolling through microfilm copies of military records from the 1860s. I squinted into the machine at a muster roll. In terse language and careful script, the records listed each soldier’s home, occupation, age, and eventual fate. “Died in hands of enemy,” read a typical entry. “Effects none.”

  From scraps like this, Sue reclaimed whole lives. Muster rolls led to pension records, wills, marriage certificates, gravestones. Diaries and letters fleshed the story out. She showed me a notebook filled with documents on Caleb Senter, her great-great-grandfather. “I have seen the cannon-balls strike men and the pieces of clothing would fly as high as the trees,” he wrote his wife. In another letter he told of his constant hunger and pleaded, “If there is anybody coming to this company, send me a small ham of meat and some chickens and a few pies and a couple of onions and so forth.” Soon after, Caleb was captured and killed in the Pennsylvania train wreck Sue had told me about the night before.

  “When you’ve researched these people, it gets very personal,” she said. “You know what color hair they had, if their eyes were brown or green, how tall they were, their dreams for when they came home. After a while the War doesn’t seem that far away. It becomes part of your life.” She paused. “Or it takes over your life.”

  When I asked what she meant, Sue laughed. “Come over to our place tonight and you’ll see,” she said, returning to her microfilm.

  LATE THAT AFTERNOON, I went to see Mike Hawkins, the color sergeant I’d sat beside at the Lee-Jackson meeting. His fourteen-foot-wide trailer perched next to a narrow road through the red-clay farmland that surrounded Salisbury’s sprawl of tract homes and malls. Inside, cluttering the main living space, was a guinea-pig cage, a large TV and an elegant table Hawkins’s great-grandparents received as a wedding gift in the 1890s.

  Hawkins was a spare man with pocked skin and a wispy mustache. He wore the same outfit I’d seen him in the night before: black denims, cowboy boots, red flannel shirt. He sat squeezed beside his wife, Kaye, a big woman who took up most of the couch.

  “Mike told me he met a paper man last night,” Kaye said, with a nervous high-pitched laugh. “Never met a paper man.”

  “Actually, I’m doing research for a book.”

  “Oh, books,” Kaye said, laughing again. “Mike loves his books. Loves ’em more than me, I think.”

  Kaye was Hawkins’s second wife. His first marriage had ended in an ugly legal fight that left him with limited visitation rights for his three kids. He pointed to their pictures on the wall. “It’s in the Lord’s hands,” he said. “I tell Him, ‘Do for me what you can.’”

  It was soon after his divorce that Hawkins became obsessed with the Civil War. To meet child support payments, he’d moved in with his parents and worked seven days a week at a textile factory. At night, he went to the genealogy room at the library. “I was trying to get my life back together,” he said. “I had this want to find out about my kin.”

  One night, combing muster rolls, he found his great-great-grandfather listed as a private in a North Carolina regiment. Fields Hawkins was a twenty-year-old farmer when he volunteered. Shot twice in the spring of 1862, he married while recovering from his wounds, then returned to the War—though only for two months. “He got his leg shot off at Sharpsburg,” Hawkins said.

  Hawkins showed me Fields’s application for an artificial leg, and census records from the early twentieth century that listed Fields and his wife, then in their sixties, as cotton mill workers. “Just like me,” Hawkins said. But one crucial detail still eluded him: the site of his great-great-grandfather’s grave. “It’s been seven years, but when I find it I’ll finally feel like I’ve accomplished something. A connection with my past that I can reach out and grab hold to.”

  Hawkins had taken his documents to the Sons of Confederate Veterans and paid $33 in annual fees to join up. He’d made every meeting since. “It brings people together, like the War did,” he said. “I sit in a room with a doctor and pastor and such, and I don’t see them otherwise. We’re all together for the same reason.” The only other club to which he belonged was his factory’s softball team, which competed in North Carolina’s Industrial League.

  Hawkins took particular pride in his status as the Rowan Rifles’ color sergeant. “If we were going into battle, I’d be in front of everybody,” he said. “It’s an honor, though it would have been a short honor.” Flags had another appeal; Hawkins could buy them cheaply at flea markets and souvenir shops.

  He took me into the trailer’s cramped bedroom, lined with secondhand volumes on the War. Hawkins read everything he could find on Sharpsburg (known in the North as Antietam) and dreamed of visiting the Maryland battlefield, particularly the sunken road known as Bloody Lane where Fields Hawkins lost his leg. “I go there a lot in my head,” he said, flipping open a book with photographs of the Antietam dead. “I look at these pictures and it’s like the music from Twilight Zone kicks on, like I was there way back when.”

  Kaye turned on the television and started fixing dinner. Hawkins lowered his voice. Late at night, he said, when Kaye fell asleep, he often slipped out of bed and continued reading, by oven light. “It’s an escape,” he said. “When I’m reading, I feel like I’m there, not here. And when I finish I feel content, like I’ve been away for a while.” He smiled. “Sometimes I get brain fry from all the reading.”

  I asked him if he thought “there” was better than “here.”

  “Not better,” he said. “I mean, my great-great-grandpap got his leg shot off. But I feel like it was bigger somehow.” Hawkins flipped through pages of Civil War pictures. “At work, I mix dyes and put them in a machine. I’m thirty-six and I’ve spent almost half my life in Dye House No. 1. I make eight dollars sixty-one cents an hour, which is okay, ’cept everyone says the plant will close and go to China.” He put the book back on the shelf. “I just feel like the South has been given a bum deal ever since that War.”

  Hawkins unstuck a rebel banner from a small flag stand by the bed. He waved it and said, “Here’s a trivia question they didn’t ask last night. What state sent more troops to the Confederacy than any other, and took more casualties, too?”

  “North Carolina?”

  Hawkins smiled. “Not too many people know that. We gave a hundred twenty-seven thousand and lost forty thousand. Do you know one reason North Carolinians are called Tar Heels?”

  “No. Why?”

  “Because Lee said we stuck in battle. At Chickamauga, for instance—”

  Kaye poked her head in the bedroom. “Suppertime,” she said. Hawkins looked startled, like he’d been away for a while. Kaye invited me to stay, but I said I had to be going. For a few moments we stood awkwardly by the trailer door, as a chill wind rattled the storm window.

  “We were honored, really,” Kaye said.

  I blushed and said, “I was honored, too.”

  “I liked you right away last night,” Hawkins said. “There were all those doctors and such at the meeting. And you wanted to talk to me.”

  NAVIGATING MY WAY to Ed and Sue Curtis’s home, I discovered that Salisbury was a far more pleasant and prosperous town than I’d at first supposed. Its residential streets were lined with parks and gardens and gracious homes (funded, I later learned, with the millions that locals earned from investing years ago in a Salisbury-based supermarket chain called Food Lion). From the outside, the Curtis home appeared ordinary enough: a modest brick ranch house fronted by an American flag. But stepping inside, I found myself in a museum of Confederate kitsch. Portraits of Jeff Davis and Robert E. Lee adorned one wall. A bell-jar model of Ashley Wilkes perched on a side table. Statuettes of Lee, Davis, Jackson and Jeb Stuart sat atop the mantel. “I a
lways wanted something just the right color for that spot,” Sue said of the gray figurines. She nonchalantly pulled off Stonewall’s head. The figurines were actually flasks with necks made of cork.

  There were also Lee and Jackson paperweights, a music box that played “Dixie,” and a seashell filled with spent minié balls. “Goes with the painting,” Sue explained, pointing to a watercolor just above the shell showing General Beauregard on the beach at Charleston.

  That was just the living room. In the dining room there were plates and cups decorated with rebel generals and paintings of battles in which the Curtis forebears fought. Sue pushed open the door to the kitchen. I glimpsed rebel-themed fridge magnets and mugs decorated with Rhett Butler. “It sort of flows from here all the way to the garage,” Sue said. “But the War does not come to the bedroom. That’s where we draw the line.”

  Somewhere in this ancestral lava was the Bible a rebel forebear had carried into battle. One of Ed’s ancestors, a Confederate scout, had also preserved a piece of shin bone he lost after being shot from a tree. “He kept it in a bottle by his bed,” Ed said. But most of the Curtises’ relics and trinkets were gifts Sue and Ed had given each other on birthdays and anniversaries. They’d even courted on Civil War battlefields. “Instead of bells ringing I heard cannons boom,” Ed joked.

  It wasn’t until after their marriage, though, that the Curtises’ interest in the War turned from a casual hobby to an obsession. The spark was Sue’s curiosity about her rebel ancestry. “A lot of people like me first got deep into Confederate history in the late seventies, when genealogy really took off,” she explained.

  Ironically, Alex Haley’s novel Roots helped trigger this trend, inspiring blacks and then other Americans to dig through archives and ship records. Tracing pedigree wasn’t new to the South, but it had traditionally been most popular among blue bloods such as the FFVs, or First Families of Virginia. In the past twenty years, Sue said, there’d been a dramatic upsurge of interest in common forebears, including rebel foot soldiers.

  Sue’s duties as registrar often took her to the state archives in Raleigh. As a special treat, Ed sometimes drove her to the National Archives in Washington. I asked when they’d last taken a trip unrelated to the Civil War.

  Ed looked at Sue. “Have we ever?”

  She shrugged and shook her head. “Not that I can think of.”

  Rarely a week passed without some meeting, or a ceremony marking one of the anniversaries scattered like saints’ days through the year: Lee’s and Jackson’s birthdays, Confederate Flag Day, Confederate Memorial Day, Jefferson Davis’s birthday. Sue also corresponded with Northern women whose ancestors lay in Salisbury’s cemetery, and had even held a memorial service for a Michigan soldier with a wreath laying and the singing of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” “My great-great-grandfather died on his way to prison up North,” she reminded me. “I like to think some Northern lady might have done the same for him.”

  The Curtises had no offspring of their own to enroll in the Sons or Daughters of the Confederacy. At least no blood kin. “I started the first chapter of the Cats of the Confederacy,” Sue said, stroking a diabetic feline named Flurry Belle. “We wear gray ribbons with cat pins and get together and tell stories about cats in the War.” For instance, a Confederate mascot named Tom Cat who became the only casualty during a Federal bombardment of Savannah in 1863.

  Given all this, it seemed remarkable that the Curtises managed to hold down day jobs; Ed helped veterans find employment, Sue filled volunteer posts at schools, libraries and hospitals. But their passion for the War had crowded out everything else, including church.

  “We were raised Methodists,” Sue said. “But we converted to the Confederacy. There wasn’t time for both.”

  “War is hell,” Ed deadpanned. “And it just might send us there.”

  But Sue didn’t worry about the afterlife. In fact, she looked forward to it. “The neatest thing about living is that I can die and finally track down all those people I couldn’t find in the records.” She pointed at the ceiling and then at the floor. “Either way, it’ll be heaven just to get that information.”

  AT THE LEE-JACKSON BIRTHDAY PARTY, a shopkeeper named Michael Sherman had given me a business card labeled Firearms Etc. When I’d asked what etcetera included, he replied, “C’mon out and see for yourself.” So the next morning, I followed a country road winding out of town until I found a cement-block building with a sign in the shape of a revolver.

  Sherman stood behind the counter, demonstrating an assault rifle with a retractable bayonet. A man and a boy of about ten looked on. “The beauty of this one,” Sherman said, thrusting the gun at the wall, “is that if you’re down to just a few rounds, you can poke the guy through instead.”

  Across the shop sat two other men I recognized from the meeting: a bloated fellow in overalls and a camouflage jacket, named Doug Tarlton, and an even doughier figure, Walt Fowler, who sat drinking a diet soda and wolfing down Bugles.

  “Had to cut down on the sugar,” Fowler said. “Gout’s got me again. ’Course it could be the acid in those tomatoes I ate this morning, or the cheeseburger they came on.”

  “Walt’s a restaurant inspector,” Tarlton explained, “so he’s got to sample everything to make sure it’s safe for humanity. If you can call Walt human.”

  Fowler acknowledged this friendly jibe by rummaging in a plastic bag beside his chair and pulling out a crude, photocopied cartoon showing several men aiming pistols into a toilet bowl. “Polacks shooting crap,” Walt said, convulsing with laughter.

  Tarlton smiled. “Walt’s not prejudiced. He hates all minorities the same.” Tarlton pointed to a chair and offered me a chocolate-colored wafer that I took at first for a Mars bar. “Want some ’backer?” he asked. I tore a small piece from the dense plug of chewing tobacco and stuffed it in my cheek. For a few minutes, I concentrated on my cud and took in the rest of the shop. There were cases filled with Lugers, scopes, holsters, pepper spray, banana clips, Bowie knives, and felt bags labeled “soft cases for your dreaded ASSAULT RIFLE!” A sign by the door declared, “Shoplifters will be shot. Survivors will be shot again!”

  The only nonlethal item in the shop was a picture called “The Last Meeting,” a popular reprint of the most hallowed of Confederate images: Lee and Jackson parting at Chancellorsville on the day Stonewall was shot while flanking the Federal army. I pointed at the picture and asked Tarlton why he thought memory of the Confederacy was so enduring.

  “You’re looking at it, or at least one reason for it,” he said, gesturing around the crowded shop. “Southerners are a military people. We were back then, still are today. Every man in here has carried a gun for his country and probably a few of the women, too.”

  Tarlton had served in Vietnam and taken so much shrapnel in his leg that he’d had seven operations and now wore a prosthetic knee. “Up close, war’s kind of a stomach-turner,” he said, tapping the leg of his overalls. “I like it better in books.”

  After Vietnam, Tarlton worked as a police detective before turning to farming. He was also licensed as a lay minister.

  “What do you do now?” I asked.

  “Die for a living.” He lifted his hunting cap to reveal an entirely bald scalp. “Advanced leukemia.”

  I realized now that the puffiness around his eyes was watery and unnatural, due to chemotherapy or cortisone rather than Southern cooking. “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Don’t be. Doctor told me I’d be dead by Christmas. I’m enjoying the borrowed time.”

  Tarlton spent much of it studying the Civil War. “The present—I live it, it holds no mystery,” he said. “The past does.” He paused. “Plus the present to me is not all that attractive right now. When you’re puking in the commode, the past looks a whole lot better.”

  The Civil War also kept his detective skills sharp. Tarlton helped friends track down proof of rebel ancestry. As a detective, he’d spent much of his time busting drug dealers and
blowing up backwoods liquor stills. “Basically I was a narc,” he said. “So I had a close-up view of all the sickness out there. Junkies. Thugs. Guys who’d pimp their daughters for dope. You deal with that all day and you feel kind of soiled.” He pointed at the picture of Lee and Jackson. “When I read about them, I feel like man’s a noble creature, like maybe humanity’s just going through a bad patch.”

  He chuckled and pointed at Fowler, who was finishing off his box of Bugles. “Take Walt,” he said loudly. “You’d never guess it from looking at him, but when his great-great-uncle, Henry Fowler, got killed in battle, his commanding officer sent a note saying he ‘behaved with great coolness and courage.’”

  I asked Tarlton what he knew about his own Civil War forebears. “Bunch of poor dirt farmers, like most folks were around here, and like a lot still are,” he said. “Didn’t own any slaves.”

  “Why do you think they fought?”

  “The way I see it,” Tarlton said, “they were fighting for their honor as men. They came from stock that was oppressed and they felt oppressed again by the government telling them how to live.”

  “Same as today,” another man chimed in. “Government’s letting the niggers run wild.”

  “Amen,” said a third, looking up from a case of bayonets. “What they need to do is put all those crackheads on work crews and let them chop the right-of-way for a few years. You can bet your sweet bippy that’ll adjust their attitude.”

  I plugged my mouth with a fresh wad of tobacco. Walt Fowler broke the awkward silence by reaching into his plastic bag again. He extracted a piece of parchment that looked like one of those homilies people put on their living room walls. Fowler solemnly intoned: “Lord, give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, to change the things I can, and the wisdom to hide the bodies of those people I had to kill because they pissed me off.” He hooted and slapped his thigh.