Confederates in the Attic

by Tony Horwitz

  So I gathered sodden twigs and managed to start a smoldering fire. Rob deftly peeled away the pork’s whitish skin, then cut the meat in cubes and tossed it in the half-canteen he used as a fry pan. “Sometimes you find a pig’s nipple,” he said, poking at the sowbelly.

  Rob guessed it would take forty-five minutes to cook. I didn’t feel like staring at pig meat simmering in its own grease on the off chance that a nipple might appear. So I decided to forage, as the Confederates here might have done, and hiked back out to the car. Driving down one of the five roads, I came to a village called Dinwiddie and a restaurant with a huge sign saying “That’s A Burger!” I wondered, sleepily, if the food was so bad that it might be mistaken for something else.

  The place was shut but a newspaper box offered the Dinwiddie Monitor, whose banner proclaimed: “The only newspaper that gives a hoot about Dinwiddie County.” I returned to our campsite and read Rob the list of arrests in the Sheriff’s Log—public drunkenness, writing a bad check, “three counts of curse & abuse”—and reports on tent revivals and family reunions, summer staples in small Southern towns.

  This passed the time until Rob announced that breakfast was done. The fry pan now held a puddle of bubbling black grease with fatty chunks bobbing atop the scum. Rob poked his knife into the murk, insisting, “There’s lean meat in there somewhere.” Then he skewered a chunk of charred gristle and dangled it just beneath my nose. “Bon appétit,” he said.

  I peered dubiously through my spectacles and shook my head. Rob wiggled the knife. “C’mon,” he coaxed, “just think of it as blackened country ham.” I closed my eyes and bit. Rob stabbed another piece and popped it in his mouth. We gasped, eyes filling with tears. The meat didn’t resemble meat at all; it tasted like a soggy cube of salt, soaked in grease. Rob tried a second piece but quickly spat it out.

  “I bet this stuff killed more rebs than Yankee bullets ever did,” he groaned. By now we’d lost all appetite for a planned second course of potatoes and onions. So Rob emptied the pan, making sure to spill grease onto his trousers and dab a bit in his beard.

  THUS REFRESHED, we headed off to tour the Petersburg defenses, or what we could find of them. Fort Sedgwick, dubbed “Fort Hell” because of the constant mortar and sniper fire aimed at it, now lay beneath the franchise hell skirting town. When we stopped to ask directions, a policeman said, “Where the Kmart is, that’s the approximate location.” Fort Mahone, another famous rampart, had been leveled, too, and now lay beneath a Pizza Hut parking lot.

  What remained of the battlefield offered an even starker preview of World War I than had Spotsylvania or Cold Harbor. During the 292-day stalemate here (roughly a quarter of the entire War), the armies constructed sandbagged bombproofs, chevaux-de-frise (porcupinelike obstacles bristling with spikes) and trip lines of telegraph wire strung between tree stumps. The Union even experimented with a precursor of the machine gun known as the Gatling gun, a multi-barreled weapon that spat out bullets with the aid of a hand crank (this was also the origin of the gangster slang “gat”).

  It was here, too, that the Union pulled off the boldest engineering feat of the War. Seeking to break the deadlock, Pennsylvania coal miners burrowed a 500-foot tunnel beneath a rebel salient. Then they detonated four tons of gunpowder, literally blowing the defenders sky-high. But the Union assault that followed quickly degenerated into a gruesome folly. Advancing troops plunged straight into the huge pit the blast had created, allowing Confederates to gather round the rim and fire down at the helpless, close-packed Federals. The Union force lost 4,000 men before retreating.

  The Battle of the Crater, as it became known, left a hole 170 feet across and 30 feet deep that remained clearly visible today. Before the Park Service took control of the site in the late 1960s, the depression formed part of the Crater Golf Course, with fairways and putting greens laid out across the battleground and holes named for figures from the Petersburg campaign.

  Walking through the woods, we found a monument to the 1st Maine, which suffered the worst regimental loss in one action of any Federal unit in the Civil War; 632 of the 850 Maine men became casualties during a brief, futile charge. Broken beer bottles, used condoms and small glass vials now ringed the monument. A nearby plaque with a map of the charge was obscured by graffiti that said, CRACK HOUSE! Petersburg’s battlefield evidently doubled as an urban park after dark.

  Depressed by the scene, we headed to the visitors’ center to gather intelligence about where to go next. A ranger told us that Virginia had just opened “Lee’s Retreat Route,” a self-guided driving tour of the rebels’ 100-mile flight from Petersburg to Appomattox. At each stop along the way, roadside transmitters broadcast historical reports, which tourists could tune in on their car radios. “You just park, listen and drive on to the next stop,” the ranger explained, handing us a map and guidebook.

  Rob was ecstatic. “It’s Gasm heaven,” he crowed. “We’ll score twenty hits without getting out of the car.”

  The first stop was a crossroads west of Petersburg called Sutherland Station. As we sat with the motor running, listening on the radio to a report about the skirmish there in 1865, a line in the guidebook caught my eye. “For a down-home experience, visit the rather eclectic museum at Olgers Store if Jimmy is around.”

  Olgers Store perched just across the road. At first glance, it looked typical of the dwindling stock of country stores that once dotted rural crossroads across the South: a low-slung weatherboard building with a ramshackle verandah and the words “Olgers Gro” printed on an old Pepsi sign. Just inside the screen door stood a large statue of Robert E. Lee, spray-painted a brilliant gold. A sign around its neck said, “Come on In. Everything Else has gone wrong.”

  We were about to do just that when a giant appeared from around the corner of the store. He toted a machete and the largest watermelon I’d ever seen. “I unveiled that statue the day the retreat route opened,” he said. “You shoulda been here. Confederate blood hasn’t run so high since the Battle of the Crater.”

  He raised his machete and hacked the huge melon into three meal-sized slices. Handing us each a piece, he settled onto the porch’s sagging top step. “Hope you’re not rushing off anywhere. You know what they say, ‘Two weeks at Olgers Store equals any college education.’”

  Jimmy Olgers was the rare person who could be called, without hyperbole, larger than life. He was, first of all, extraordinarily large: six feet six and 320 pounds, poured into gym shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt from which his arms and legs poked like huge pink tree limbs. This towering physique was matched, incongruously, with the head of a 1950s science teacher—buzzcut, square head, black-framed glasses—and the syrupy, almost purring drawl of a Southern funeral director.

  Olgers did in fact work at a funeral parlor—when he wasn’t preaching, composing poetry, writing a column for the Dinwiddie Monitor, or serving as unofficial mayor of Sutherland Station, population 1,000. But his true avocation was minding the store, which his grandfather built at the turn of the century and where Olgers himself was born. However, “storekeeper” didn’t quite fit, either. Olgers Store wasn’t a store anymore and to call it “a rather eclectic museum,” as our guidebook had, was a bit like calling the Grand Canyon a rather big hole in the ground.

  “He’s exactly life-sized and made from a junk heap,” Olgers said, leading us inside to look at the Goldfinger Lee. The general’s sword grip was actually a hoe handle, the hilt made from roof shingle, the scabbard a piece of muffler—all of it covered with sheet rock. Strangest of all, the statue’s creator—a dissolute-looking man named Frank—suddenly materialized from behind Lee’s broad-shouldered figure.

  “I make everything,” Frank said, “I made my teeth too.” He yanked out his irregular bridgework and handed it to me as proof.

  “You shoulda seen Frank the day that statue was unveiled,” Olgers said. “He was so proud his head was bigger than a washtub.”

  I handed Frank his teeth and asked Olgers about an en
ormous cotton garment dangling from the rafters behind Lee’s head. “Largest pair of bloomers in the world, worn by Bertha Magoo, a 749-pound lady,” Olgers said. Before I could inquire further about Bertha, Olgers plunged deeper into the room to show us an old ham boiler, a whale vertebra, a section of tree limb labeled “largest pine in the world,” a colonial suit and horsehair wig belonging to a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and a photograph of an extremely hideous woman.

  “Juanita, my first wife,” Olgers said. “She was crazy about collards, which cause gas, you know. She ate a whole pot one day. I heard the explosion in the field, but by the time I got to the house it was too late. Nothing left.” He shook his head. “God I miss that woman.”

  Olgers started his collection as a boy, first with arrowheads and minié balls he dug up himself, then with stray items that neighbors brought by the shop. So when the store closed in 1988, Olgers turned it into a display case for all the junk he’d gathered over the years. Now, every inch of floor, wall and ceiling was festooned with bric-a-brac. “I was born here the night Hitler sent a thousand bombers against London, and slept for many a year in that corner,” Olgers said, pointing at a pile of rusted tools and a bone I couldn’t identify. “Jawbone of an ass,” he said, moving to an adjoining room, cluttered with old lunchboxes. “Mom and Dad slept here,” he said.

  Olgers’s parents had recently died, a month apart. “When they ran this place, it was the hub of the community,” he said softly. “My momma was a doctor, not one that had gone to medical school but one that people brought sick babies to. Folks back then didn’t go to a doctor unless they were really sick. My daddy pulled teeth—I pulled a few, too. And my mother would write letters for people who couldn’t write themselves.”

  The store had also been general in the true sense of the word, living up to its advertising sign outside: “You Name It! We Got It!” A stain on the floor marked where a fifty-gallon barrel of molasses had sat for years, beside drums of kerosene-lamp oil, tins of lard, and tubs of hogs’ feet and heads. Hog parts also had hung from the walls: hog shoulders, hog jowls, hog ears.

  The house specialty was souse, a concoction of congealed pig’s ear and foot, shaped into a loaf and sliced like bread. “Nearest thing to God’s manna on earth,” Olgers said, smacking his lips. His mother also made chitlins (pork entrails, battered and fried), scrapple (a fried mush of hog scraps I’d gagged on once at a backroads diner), and a nameless mix of pigs’ digits and other bits: cooked, rolled in flour, and fried with sweet marjoram.

  “Whoooo Lord, it makes me squeal just to think of it,” Olgers said. “The new generation, they don’t know real eating, just hamburgers and pizzas.” They didn’t know real shopping, either. “Wal-Mart, Kmart, whatever-Mart. They and the car killed the country store. People would come here and sit and talk like they always did, but they didn’t buy anything.” Finally, after his family had operated the store for eighty years, Olgers was forced to shut the place down and go work at a funeral home. “The day that store closed,” he said, “a whole way of life went with it.”

  We sat on the porch, spitting watermelon seeds and watching traffic pass on the busy new highway bypassing town. I told Olgers about my journey and asked why Southerners like himself revered the past. “Child, that’s an easy question,” he said. “A Southerner—a true Southerner, of which there aren’t many left—is more related to the land, to the home place. Northerners just don’t have that attachment. Maybe that means they don’t have as much depth.” He paused, then added, “I feel sorry for folks from the North, or anyone who hasn’t had that bond with the land. You can’t miss something you never had and if you never had it, you don’t know what it’s all about.”

  I’d heard Southerners say this sort of thing a hundred times before, usually without irony while driving a Jeep Cherokee through traffic-choked suburban streets or watching TV in a ranch-style home that could be Anywhere, America. But Olgers had lived the life he praised. He’d rarely strayed more than a few miles from Sutherland until going off to college at William and Mary, an hour’s drive east, and then only for three months. “I was so homesick I couldn’t bear it,” he said. “The food was worse than awful, the professors were atheists, and my roomate was an animal.”

  “What do you mean?” Rob asked, obviously intrigued.

  “He took me to a Viking Party. There were men wearing hats with horns, throwing women in sheets over their shoulders. They brought a girl in to sacrifice, and by the time they were done with her she wished she had been.” Olgers shook his head. “This wasn’t any panty raid, child.” Soon after, Olgers retreated to Sutherland. “I feel honored because I wasn’t stained by college. Education isn’t everything, at least not the formal kind.”

  In the thirty-five years since, Olgers had left Sutherland only twice: to honeymoon in Washington, D.C., and to see the ocean in North Carolina. “I’m a homebody, a home soul,” he said. “Olgers Store has been my domain.”

  Reaching for his walking stick—a ski pole—he led us through the 95-degree heat to what he called the “home place,” a stagecoach inn across the road where some part of his family had lived for umpteen generations. Then, leaning against the ski pole, he gave his own rendition of the fight that occurred in the inn’s front yard in April 1865. “Only four thousand Confederates faced twenty-three thousand Yankees, but Lee told them to hold the railroad line at all costs. So they dug in along a line of giant cedars that stood just so, and the North charged three times, at nine in the morning, at one in the afternoon and at five. The last time they broke through. One of those cedars had a cannonball in it for a hundred years.”

  At the turn of the century, Olgers’s grandfather replaced the inn’s heart-pine siding. “When he pulled it off, minié balls just came rolling out, there were that many of them.” Leading us inside, past a deaf eighty-year-old aunt who sat bottling pickles in the kitchen, Olgers pulled back the living-room carpet to reveal a splotch on the wood beneath. “Southern blood,” he said. “They dragged the wounded in here.” One of Olgers’s ancestors had fought near the inn and died of his wounds a few days before the War’s end.

  To me, it seemed sad and pointless for men to have fought and died at that late date, rather than surrender. But Olgers didn’t see it that way. He thought the South’s leaders were wrong—“if they’d won, we would have been a divided country and had slavery for a few decades more”—but he identified with the individual soldier’s allegiance to home. “A man has to make a stand in his life, at least once,” he said. “That’s what happened here. They knew they’d lose but they were going down defiant, right here on the land where they lived.”

  He walked us to a family graveyard and strolled between the headstones. The cemetery held enough Gothic characters to fill a Flannery O’Connor story, at least the way Olgers described them. There was a great-grandfather shot through the wrist in the War who was later hospitalized “for itch,” Olgers claimed. “The hole in his arm was so big that my daddy used to stick his finger in it as a child.” Another veteran swore that he’d never shave again if the South lost the War. “When I was a kid, he had a beard hanging like Spanish moss all the way down to his knees.” Olgers also pointed out the graves of a dozen aunts and great-aunts, all of them spinsters. “So many of the boys were dead in the War that for a while there was no one to marry,” he said. “Then it sort of became a family habit.”

  Olgers showed us his own plot, beside his parents, and said he had only one fear about meeting his maker. He was the first in a long line of yellow-dog Democrats to vote for the party of Lincoln. “When I meet up with my grandpappy at the Pearly Gates, I hope he doesn’t find out.” But in other respects Olgers remained true to his rebel forebears. He refused to travel the rest of the retreat route, and had never visited Appomattox, just a short drive down the road. “That way,” he explained, “it can always be early April in 1865 and we haven’t yet lost the War.”

  We wandered back to the store. Olgers had to c
lose up and go to work at the funeral parlor. But he offered us a parting gift: a Mason jar filled with murky turtle soup he’d cooked the day before. “I’ve got to get all the Yankees my grandpappy missed,” he said, slapping the back of my Federal uniform. Then, heading for his car, he broke into song:

  They killed half a million Yankees with Southern steel and shot,

  Wish it was a million more instead of what they got.

  Olgers waved and drove off, leaving us with our turtle soup and a bushel of homespun wisdom to digest. We peered through the store window and snapped a last mental snapshot. “That’s the epitome of the Gasm,” Rob said, shaking his head. “So much stuff that you can’t possibly take it all in, and you don’t know what to do with it anyway. So you just let it wash over you.”

  THE SAME WAS TRUE of Lee’s retreat route. We wound west from Sutherland Station, over narrow bridges and past forgotten towns where the Confederates skirmished with pursuing Federals. We paused at a wood-frame church with a floor still bloodstained from bodies laid out there 130 years before; at a tiny museum with a silver tray on which a local slave served lunch to Robert E. Lee; at the Amelia County courthouse, where the Confederate monument read, “O comrades, wheresoe’er ye rest apart, Amelia shrines you here within her heart.” The rest was a blur of rolling farmland and deserted railroad spurs with names like Deatonville, Jeterville, Farmville, Rice’s Depot.

  This was “Southside” Virginia, a rural enclave between the state’s flat Tidewater and the rolling hills of the Piedmont. Like Jimmy Olgers’s domain, Southside seemed to have largely escaped the modern era. Amelia County, through which we traveled for most of the day, had half its 1865 population. One of the retreat route’s stops was an extinct village called Jamestown, of which our guidebook said, “The town died around 1920.”