Confederates in the Attic

by Tony Horwitz

  The ceremony’s site was a shady corner of the sprawling Union cemetery, near a plaque that read: “Forty Four Known By Name, Others Known Only to God.” Of the 17,000 soldiers buried at Vicksburg, only 4,000 were known by name. A motorcade pulled up trailing streamers and flags. Forty people climbed out, mostly graying men wearing army caps and medals. It looked at first glance like any veterans’ gathering, except that all but one of the participants was black.

  The group filtered in among the small stumps marking Vicksburg’s nameless dead. Someone laid a wreath and said a brief prayer. Then soldiers fired a 21-gun salute and a bugler played Taps. As the crowd fled the midday sun, I chatted with the ceremony’s organizer, a man named Willie Glasper. He said that Memorial Day observances in Vicksburg had stopped altogether in the 1970s. It had been his decision to revive the holiday with the wreath-laying and a short parade through town.

  “I’m a mailman, not a veteran, but I played here as a boy and used to study these graves,” he said. “I look at the War from a freedom standpoint. One side won, the other lost, and we became free as a result.” He paused. “Maybe that’s why the white folks don’t come.”

  Like July 4th, Memorial Day had a tortured history in Vicksburg, as it did across much of the South. It was Southern women who pioneered the spring custom of decorating soldiers’ graves (Columbus, Georgia, had perhaps the strongest claims to the first Memorial Day in 1866). But the ritual quickly caught on in both North and South. In 1868, the main Northern veterans’ group, the Grand Army of the Republic, designated May 30th as the date when all veterans’ posts should decorate Union graves. The South, characteristically, went its own way. Southern states declared their own “Confederate Memorial Day,” varying from state to state and timed, in part, to correspond with the peak of the spring blossom season. It was only in this century, as sectional bitterness waned and new wars produced a fresh crop of dead, that the late-May Memorial Day became a truly national holiday.

  But old habits died hard. Glasper said there had long been two American Legion posts in Vicksburg, one all-white, the other all-black. “Their attitude is, ‘You do Memorial Day, we’ll do Veterans Day,’” he said. Each year, Glasper went through the ritual of inviting the white Legion post to the wreath-laying. But the only white in attendance this year was a non-veteran: Vicksburg’s mayor. The white Legion post didn’t even open on Memorial Day. And its own observance, on Veterans Day, was held at a downtown median strip decorated with monuments from this century’s wars, rather than at the Civil War cemetery.

  “It’s that way with a lot of things here,” Glasper said. “If blacks put something on, whites don’t come. And too often when whites put something on, we don’t go. We’re self-conscious around each other.”

  Glasper invited me to a reception at the American Legion post, a small building on the back street of a black neighborhood. En route, he pointed out a new museum he and several others were setting up to honor black Vicksburgers (whose ranks include Sarah Breedlove Walker, America’s first black woman millionaire). I asked why the group didn’t try instead to include its exhibits at the city museum I’d visited at the Old Courthouse. Glasper looked at me strangely. “That’s theirs,” he said. Even the YMCA in Vicksburg had two branches: one white, one black.

  At the Legion hall, veterans and their families sat beneath balloons and bunting, slathering hot dogs with relish. The mayor circulated through the small crowd, glad-handing veterans and droning on about his achievements (“Reduced taxes, paved fifty-eight streets, built a new swimming pool and ballpark, halved unemployment, put in an eleven-million-dollar sewer system …”).

  I found a seat beside a woman who had been teaching at Vicksburg’s schools for twenty-five years. She said school integration occurred without incident and blacks were now well represented politically. But socially, the color line remained intact. “You’d think veterans, of all people, could cross the line. They have so much in common,” she said. “But then, most of these men fought in all-black units, even in Korea. So I guess they just never reached out to each other.”

  Across from me sat an eighty-year-old named Laura Jones, who served as president of the Legion’s women’s auxiliary. She was the granddaughter of a black soldier who had served at Vicksburg; his name was etched on the Illinois monument. When she was a girl, her family would visit the battlefield park every weekend. “It was free, we could play on the monuments, pick pecans and walnuts and plums, and look for Grandaddy’s name.” She shared two other vivid girlhood memories. “The Klan hanged a boy on Grove Street. I remember the tree. And I saw a woman with tar all over her. She washed clothes for white folks and some white man had taken a liking to her. That made it her fault, of course. Luckily, someone stopped the Klan before they put the feathers on her, so she just got the tar.”

  Laura Jones had seen that sort of terrorism vanish in her lifetime. But she despaired of ever seeing true racial amity in Vicksburg. “Instead of ironing out our differences everyone wants to go their own way.” She’d asked the local high school if its band might participate in the Memorial Day parade. “They said, ‘School got out a few days ago and the uniforms have been washed and put away.’ Well, we can wash them again. The cleaners aren’t leaving town. But that’s their excuse. There’s a Miss Mississippi pageant in July. I bet you the school band comes out for that. And they come for the Christmas parade, when school’s out.” In the end, the Legion hall had paid for several black bands to come from out of state.

  I was surprised to learn that the racial divide ran so deep. Vicksburg had largely escaped the civil rights violence that wracked so many Mississippi communities. And, like river towns everywhere, it seemed more open and cosmopolitan than inland communities. The Vicksburg economy was now strong, thanks to gambling, and blacks I’d spoken to over the past week had praised the casinos for their equitable hiring practices. Nor had I seen the sort of inflammatory displays of rebel emblems common to Todd County, Kentucky, and other places I’d visited.

  But Laura Jones said I shouldn’t be fooled by Vicksburg’s veneer of geniality. “Things haven’t changed because deep down people’s hearts haven’t changed. No law, no government, no corporation is going to make you do the right thing. That comes from inside.” She swatted a fly on the relish jar. “The outside’s changed,” she said, “but the inside’s the same.”

  I finished my hot dog and drove out of town in a tropical downpour; even the weather had conspired to rain on the Memorial Day parade. Vicksburg confirmed the dispiriting pattern I’d seen elsewhere in the South, beginning in North Carolina. Everywhere, it seemed, I had to explore two pasts and two presents; one white, one black, separate and unreconcilable. The past had poisoned the present and the present, in turn, now poisoned remembrance of things past. So there needed to be a black Memorial Day and a white Veterans Day. A black city museum and a white one. A black history month and a white calendar of remembrance. The best that could be hoped for was a grudging toleration of each other’s historical memory. You Wear Your X, I’ll Wear Mine.

  10

  Virginia and Beyond

  THE CIVIL WARGASM

  War is the congress of adolescents.

  —JOHN BERRYMAN, “Boston Common”

  We were hurtling down the interstate somewhere near Richmond when Robert Lee Hodge poked me hard in the ribs.

  “Don’t farb out!” he bellowed. “You think the Yankees got any sleep at Gettysburg? On Burnside’s mud march? Wake the fuck up!”

  Rob clutched the wheel with one hand, wrestling a windblown roadmap with the other. Tobacco juice had dribbled down his beard and stained the collar of his butternut jacket. He’d taken off his brogans; I could smell putrid sock wool. Or maybe it was me. I groped in my sweaty blue pantaloons and pulled out a pocket watch. Ten o’clock; must be spring, 1864.

  “Yellow Tavern’s this exit,” Rob said, tossing aside the map and swerving across two lanes of traffic. “If we don’t get lost, we can see where Jeb Stuart go
t popped and still make Cold Harbor by lunch-time.”

  I’D RETURNED FROM Mississippi to a phone call from Rob, announcing that the time for our “Gasm” had come. It was June, the days were long, and Rob had a brief window between a modeling date for a Civil War painter and a major reenactment at Gettysburg. “Are you ready to power-tour?” he’d asked.

  In truth, I wasn’t sure. I’d first heard about the Gasm while spooning with the Southern Guard months before. Rob and Joel Bohy, the wasp-waisted construction worker, told me how they’d first met several years ago at a Gettysburg reenactment. Striking up an instant kinship, the two decided to take a spontaneous tour of the War’s eastern theater. They drew up a list of must-see sites; it ran to over thirty, many of them several hundred miles apart. Joel only had a week before returning to work in New England.

  Where others might have seen a logistical nightmare, Rob glimpsed opportunity. “Everybody does the Civil War in a controlled way,” he said. “We wanted something crazy.” So the two set off on a high-speed trek from Gettysburg to Antietam to the Shenandoah Valley and dozens of battlefields in between. They traveled as hardcores, of course: clad in their fetid uniforms and camping on whatever battleground they happened to be near at dark. The one major concession to modernity was the car in which they raced between stops.

  “We only had an hour or so at major sites and a few minutes at minor ones,” Rob said. “So the whole War just washed over us at warp-speed.” Fatigue heightened the thrill. “It was dreamy, religious, a holy trek.” He and Joel read liturgically from soldiers’ diaries and memoirs; at some battlegrounds, they scooped up clods of sacred dirt. It was Joel who had dubbed their ecstatic pilgrimage the “Civil Wargasm.”

  The two had vowed to repeat their hajj each summer. But after their second trip, Joel returned to Massachusetts, got a girlfriend, drifted away from the Civil War. So the next year Rob did the Gasm with another buddy. Now it was my turn. I was flattered that he regarded me as a suitable partner. But I was also apprehensive. My previous brushes with Rob’s hardcore life had lasted only a day. This would last a week and come freighted with expectations. Could I measure up to the Gasm’s transcendent standards? More worrisome, could I hack a week of sleeplessness and scratchy wool in Virginia’s summer heat—not to mention the twenty-four-hour companionship of Robert Lee Hodge?

  On the Monday morning we’d chosen to begin our trip, I headed to Rob’s apartment. He lived in the basement of his brother’s place, a suburban town house beside Washington, D.C.’s beltway. Civil War gear lay strewn across the garage floor. “His brother doesn’t like this stuff all over the house,” Rob’s girlfriend, Caroline, explained. It was easy to see why. The unwashed clothes and utensils were so rank that I was surprised his brother hadn’t called an exterminator.

  Rob had run off to do a last-minute errand, so Caroline offered me a cup of coffee. A comely twenty-three-year-old with oversized glasses and brilliant red fingernails, she seemed as remote from the nineteenth century as the IdentiKit town house in which we sat drinking mugs of Mr. Coffee. “I think Rob likes that his girlfriend isn’t into the Civil War,” she said, “because all the rest of his life is.”

  Caroline had first met Rob at a restaurant where he waited on her table. His long, pointed beard struck her as odd, but it wasn’t until he turned up for their first date—clad in a Confederate jacket—that Caroline realized what she was in for. “I thought, ‘Oh no, he’s a complete dweeb,’” she recalled. “I told him, ‘The Civil War may be cool to you, but for me it’s, like, lots of names and dates and so what?’”

  But Rob hadn’t pressed his obsession on her, and gradually she came to enjoy his company—even to appreciate the Civil War. “Before, these people in the past seemed, like, not human. Something else. Now I realize they were the same as us, just in a different time.” She’d gone to a few reenactments and had even sewed a rough cotton shirt for Rob. But Caroline drew the line at watching the interminable movie Gettysburg, in which Rob appeared as one of Pickett’s men. “Anyone who just went to see it as a movie and wasn’t into the Civil War, they’d like die,” she said.

  Rob’s car pulled into the driveway. Caroline drained her coffee. “I tell friends, ‘He’s not as weird as he sounds,’” she said. “You just have to try hard to understand him.”

  “Do you?”

  “A bit.” She smiled. “But maybe that’s because I’m a counselor for the mentally retarded.”

  Rob burst through the door, smiling triumphantly. “I scored some sowbelly,” he said. “This pork’s so salty it’ll bring tears to your eyes.” He tossed the slab bacon in my lap, along with a potato and a wilted onion. “I didn’t have time to make any hardtack,” he added, apologetically.

  I’d told Rob I wanted to go Federal this time, so he’d set aside pale-blue trousers, a checked shirt, a scrunched forage cap, and a navy-colored sack coat with a flaky yellow stain. “Some candles melted in the pocket,” Rob explained. “Nice accident.” Otherwise, I wasn’t quite as disreputable as before, though no more comfortable. The pants were gargantuan, the jacket puny, and by the time Rob strapped on my bedroll, canteen, knapsack, tin cup and cartridge box, I felt like a snail toting an ill-fitting shell.

  “I got this one in ’81 and this one in ’84,” Rob said, tossing me brogans with huge holes in the soles. “It’s peak tick season, and Lyme disease is a big problem this year. So keep an eye out.”

  “What about bugs?” I asked. “Have we got a tent, or a mosquito net?”

  Rob frowned. “This is the Gasm, Tony. The holy of holies. Bug bites are spiritual. You’re lying there listening to mosquitoes buzz in your ear, trying to sleep, and thinking, ‘This is what They experienced. This is the real deal.’”

  When I’d finally put on all the gear, Rob stepped back and nodded approvingly at my Union impression. “You look ready for Andersonville,” he said.

  Rob donned his customary Confederate rags. We made a strange pair: Johnny Reb and Billy Yank, stuffed into the front seat of my cramped sedan as we pulled into rush-hour traffic on the beltway. Glancing at the commuters in adjoining lanes, with their ties and jackets and stuporous expressions of Monday morning malaise, I felt suddenly giddy and burst out laughing.

  Rob smiled, obviously feeling the same absurdist glee. “This is my true calling—a Civil War bum,” he said, biting into the day’s first plug of tobacco. “The Gasm’s a Bohemian thing, like a Ken Kesey bus tour, except that we’re tripping on the 1860s instead of the 1960s.”

  Actually, the Gasm struck me as a fusion of the two decades: a weird brew of road culture, rancid pork, and the quest for the elusive “period rush,” the phrase hardcores used to describe the druglike high of traveling through time. “This is day one, so I wouldn’t expect too much,” Rob cautioned. “But wait till we’ve driven a thousand or so miles with no sleep and not much to eat. Then it’s goose-bump city.”

  For now it was mostly just city. We turned off the beltway and crawled along Route 29, known in the 1860s as the Warrenton Turnpike. Federal troops traveled this same route to Manassas in July 1861. They were trailed by politicians and picnickers who expected to see a festive afternoon spectacle that would quickly snuff the South’s rebellion. Also along was William Howard Russell, a London Times correspondent, whose diary we’d chosen for our inaugural reading.

  Russell traveled in better style than we did. Setting off from Washington in a horse-drawn carriage, he put “tea into a bottle, got a flask of light Bordeaux, a bottle of water, a paper of sandwiches, and replenished my small flask with brandy.” Crossing the Potomac, Russell entered what he called “a densely wooded, undulating country” interspersed with fields of Indian corn and wooden homes skirted by slave shacks.

  Today, the same route was studded with stoplights and franchise outlets: Staples, Subway, Blockbuster. Russell described our first stop, Fairfax Courthouse, as a village of forty houses girdled by gardens and fields. It now lay near the center of a suburban county of 900,000
people. Rob pulled off the road beside a few cannon aimed out at the swirling traffic. A plaque by the guns read: “This stone marks the scene of the opening conflict of the war of 1861-65, when John Quincy Marr, Captain of the Warrenton Rifles, who was the first soldier killed in Action fell 800 feet S 46 degrees W (Mac) of this spot.”

  Rob explained that Marr fell seven weeks before First Manassas, when his rebel riflemen encountered Union scouts. Some Southerners therefore regarded Marr as “the first Virginia martyr.” But for Rob, the real significance of the site was sartorial. “We’ll see Marr’s uniform later on in the Gasm,” he said. “His coat’s olive-brown. That’s because the Confederacy had weak vegetable dyes that oxidized quickly.”

  As we left Fairfax, Rob took out a notebook and pen, scribbling, “GASM, Day One. 10:00 A.M. John Quincy Marr memorial.” Book-keeping was a feature of the trip he hadn’t told me about. “By the second or third day it all starts to blur, so you have to keep a tight record before you get totally tapped,” he said.

  A little later, we paused again, at a roadside plaque stating that Clara Barton “ministered to the suffering” at a hospital near this spot, now a clotted intersection. Rob scribbled in his notebook again. “Two hits in half an hour, not bad,” he said. “That’s why Northern Virginia’s great Gasm territory. It’s high density.”

  Since moving to Virginia, I’d often glimpsed similar markers in roadside weeds or beside petunia-prettified malls, recalling minor engagements and forgotten figures from the War: ACTION AT DRANESVILLE, THE GALLANT PELHAM, STONEWALL JACKSON’S MOTHER. It was nice to finally have an excuse to pull out of traffic and read the details. But I couldn’t help wondering if we were the first in years to stop and read these signs—or at least since Rob had last passed this way on an earlier Gasm.