by Pat Conroy
Each year my brothers and I would gather to hear my mother describe the lovely Elizabeth Barnwell Cotesworth, Harriet’s great-aunt, who once walked the wide board pine floors where we played as rough and tumble boys. She would tell her story with such passionate conviction that we, her worshipful sons, would think she was narrating the tale of her own maidenhood, when we thought she must have appeared as lovely and magical to young men as she did to us.
“Her name was Elizabeth Barnwell Cotesworth,” my mother would begin, “and she was born in the bedroom where my own son Jack was born well over one hundred years later. Her beauty was legendary by the time her parents sent her to a finishing school in Charleston. While attending a dance South of Broad, Elizabeth first met a presentable young lieutenant stationed at Fort Moultrie by the name of William Tecumseh Sherman. One dance with her put this West Point graduate under her spell.”
Whenever Lucy mentioned the name of the Anti-Christ, Sherman, a gasp would go up from the assemblage who were mostly Southern and had grown up with their relatives passing down stories of Sherman’s rape and despoliation of the South. No Southerner, no matter how liberal of spirit, could ever forgive Sherman’s prodigious March to the Sea when he broke the back of the Confederacy forever. My mother played the crowd’s abhorrence of Sherman for all it was worth. We would stand above her, lined along the banisters in our pajamas, and my mother would wink at us and we would wink back as her voice continued to weave the spell of Elizabeth and her suitor. Though the crowd never saw us, we kept in Lucy’s line of sight and her story thrilled us every time we heard her tell it. Each year, we heard the story grow and change as she added details of her own. Because the story of Sherman and Elizabeth belonged to my mother and to her alone, it marked the beginning of her transfiguration in Waterford society. All through my childhood, she met those well-dressed crowds on the Spring Tour who moved from street to street led by guides who carried silver candelabras to light their paths. Since she had been onstage before, Lucy found that playing her part of a Southern lady of breeding and leisure was easy. When she greeted the hushed, shuffling throngs who approached these old houses as though they were private chapels, Lucy could hear the indrawn breath of the entire group as she made her appearance on her own veranda wearing a dress that Ginny Penn had given her. Through the years, as my mother gained confidence in herself and in her position in the town, she became famous in the neighborhood for her storytelling gift. My mother gave credit where credit was due and claimed she owed it all to General Sherman. My poor brother Tee, who grew up mortified by his given name, Tecumseh, was christened in honor of the soldier, not the great chieftain.
When I was a senior in high school, one of my Christmas gifts was my own ticket to the annual Spring Tour of homes. Many of the parents of my classmates went in together and got a special group rate, thinking it was high time that their graduating seniors learned about the architectural glories of our town. That night, in 1966, I approached the house I grew up in as a tourist for the first time and I shared the crowd’s wonder when my mother stepped out in her Southern plantation dress, her hair done in ringlets, her face aglow in the soft, falling light of candles. I looked upstairs and saw my younger brothers positioning themselves between the spaces of the dowels on the upstairs veranda. In the early years my mother was callow and got many of her facts wrong but she told the story of the house on this night with an air of solid professionalism. Her voice was lovely as she welcomed the group that gathered in a semicircle before her front steps. When she welcomed the ten seniors from Waterford High, we let out a great cheer.
I was holding hands with Ledare Ansley and we were coming to the end of our high school romance. Jordan was dating Shyla and Mike and Capers had brought the sassy McGhee twins whose parents sat on the Board of the Historic Foundation. I had always heard the Sherman story hidden away in shadows, catching snatches of it as my mother led the crowd from room to room.
I cannot tell you how proud I was that night when I listened to my mother’s voice begin to tell the story of Harriet Varnadoe Cotesworth, which led to the story of Harriet’s great-aunt Elizabeth. She had been born in a rare Waterford snowstorm and some of Elizabeth’s extraordinary charm was attributed to the six inches of snow that blanketed the town on the night of her birth. As I heard Lucy list all the delicious details of Elizabeth’s life proclaiming the former occupant’s specialness and all-absorbing rarity, once again I fell under her spell.
Making a motion for all of us to follow, my mother led the visitors into the living room where she waited patiently for all to settle in before she continued. Shyla held onto Jordan’s arm, saw me watching them, and blew me an exaggerated kiss that I pretended to catch in midair. Mike Hess carried a passion for history even then and he hung on every word my mother spoke. Capers lifted up a serving dish from a secretary in the hallway, turned it over, and read the word “Spode” to himself. Capers knew well my mother was an upstart and a pretender and he hoped to catch her in an error of taste. But Lucy had a seventeen-year head start on him and she long ago had perfected her game plan. What was inauthentic in our house, and there was much, was kept well out of sight during these azalea-rich days of the Spring Tour. In the early years, she had made such missteps, but social humiliation was a fast cure for either oversight or ignorance. She covered her traces well and never made the same mistake twice.
“After that first dance, Lieutenant Sherman wrote to Elizabeth in the raw, honest prose style he would use in his memoirs. He told her that his dance with her had changed his life forever.”
“Do I have that same effect on you, Jordan?” I heard Shyla whisper near me.
“The same,” Jordan whispered in her ear.
“And you, Jack?” she said, winking at me.
“Elizabeth,” I whispered to her. “Oh, Elizabeth.” And Shyla curtsied and an older lady put her finger to her lips.
“Sherman told her that it was the first time in his life that he consciously wished for a band to play on forever and for a waltz to never end,” my mother said. “But he had to join a veritable army of low country gentlemen who knew that Elizabeth was the one exceptional prize of that season. All the Charleston boys were mad for our Elizabeth.
“But it was Sherman who intrigued her, Sherman she wrote home about to her mother and father, who read these letters in this very room. She described the walks that she and her lieutenant took in the long afternoons. The walks were slow and intimate and they told each other secrets about themselves they had never told anyone else.”
Capers raised his hand and Lucy said, “Yes, Capers, do you have a question?”
“Was Sherman handsome?” he asked. “I always thought he was ugly as homemade sin.”
The members of the group laughed demurely.
“Was Sherman as good-looking as Capers?” Mike said. “That’s all Capers really cares about, Mrs. McCall.”
Again there was good-natured laughing and Lucy said, “He was not considered a handsome man by his contemporaries. But as many of the women in this room could tell you, looks are not always the main thing. There is the matter of character, ambition, and passion. People speak of his intensity. There was even rumor of a Charleston boy from a good family who wanted to challenge Sherman to a duel because of Elizabeth. But it was Sherman’s look that made him think Sherman might be the wrong man to challenge.
“Sherman kissed Elizabeth, at least once, and there is proof of this in a letter that Elizabeth wrote to her young niece, Harriet Cotesworth’s mother. After that kiss, both felt themselves betrothed to each other forever. It was then that Sherman came to this house to meet Elizabeth’s parents. It was in this room that Sherman asked to have a word with Elizabeth’s father alone. He asked Mr. Cotesworth for his daughter’s hand in marriage. When Elizabeth and her mother returned from a nervous walk in the garden, both women broke into tears when they smelled cigar smoke. Let us go into the library and I’ll tell you what happened.”
My mother led the
way, slim-waisted and girlish, and I felt myself about to burst with pride for her bravura performance. She had turned herself, through years of dedication and hard work, into a woman worthy to live in this house. A fierce autodidact, she had remade herself into something she had not been born to be. I felt like carrying a sign saying that it was my mother conducting this tour and telling this story. Already, I could feel the group hooked by the unlikely romance of Sherman and Elizabeth.
“What happened?” Mike Hess said as the tour settled about the library with its leatherbound sets of books.
“Whatever it was, it sure wasn’t good for the South,” an elderly man said. “She’s talking about the devil incarnate.”
“The Sherman boy sounds kind of sweet to me,” the man’s wife said, teasing him.
“On May 13, 1846, Congress declared war on Mexico,” my mother said, “and the following week Lieutenant Sherman received orders that his battalion would join the Army of the West before moving out to the territory of New Mexico to defend Santa Fe.”
“What about Elizabeth?” Shyla asked.
“Did she get married, Mrs. McCall?” Jordan asked.
My mother played the crowd perfectly, then said, “William Tecumseh Sherman and Elizabeth Barnwell Cotesworth never laid eyes on each other again.”
There was an audible gasp and Lucy waited a moment before resuming her narrative. But now she had them all in the palm of her hand and I learned much about how to hold the attention of strangers by observing my mother closely that evening. Her voice began again, rising up above the breathless, ingathered group who strained to hear her every word.
After a full year passed, they broke off their engagement with great regret on both sides and six months later Elizabeth married Tanner Prioleau Sams, a merchant from Charleston with an impeccable family line and possessor of all the effortless grace of the Southern manner that Sherman, with his chilly Midwestern reserve, had lacked. Tanner Sams had been the spurned suitor who had talked of challenging the young Sherman to a duel because of his courtship of Elizabeth. Patience and the outbreak of a strange war won the heart of Elizabeth for Tanner Sams, who remained grateful to the armies of Santa Anna until his dying days.
So Elizabeth faded into her role of wife and mother and hostess and, by all accounts, brought a great dignity to every aspect of her life. Her character was true and her beauty deepened with the years and even Mary Chesnut cited her attendance at three balls in her Civil War diary and each citation was more glittering than the last.
After the Civil War began, Sherman did not come South again until he came to set it on fire. He made the South suffer and burn in the high octane of its own passionate codes. More than any other Northern general, Sherman loved the South because he understood both its pride and contradictions, but this knowledge did not keep him from moving through its mountains and river valleys with a cold and unstinting fury. He had come with his men from the Mississippi to the city limits of Atlanta and he had watched his armies choking on their own blood and leaving the corpses of tens of thousands of Illinois and Ohio boys planted forever in Southern earth his men had made holy by their sacrifices. Cutting his supply lines, Sherman laid waste to Atlanta and taught his soldiers the value of matches when you wanted an enemy whimpering and on his knees. Sherman remembered his elegiac time in Charleston and the extraordinary love that Southerners exhibited toward their fragrant land and comely houses. For five hundred miles, he ravished that pretty South and burned every house his armies approached. From Chickamauga to the Atlantic, he rode out the seasons, moved his men with relentless and inexorable cunning, and wrote his name in fire and blood across the sacrificial body of Georgia.
Sherman made the boys of the South shed their blood and their lives in a hundred Southern streams and fields and roadsides. He made Southern women scream out for their dead and wounded and he found out that the suffering of bereaved and hungry women could be as effective as a fresh regiment in bringing a war to its close. He cut through Georgia as if the state were made of butter and he taught the state some unalterable lessons about the horror of warfare. Through the long cool autumn of 1864, he rode with his army loose in the field, moving unappeasably through the smoke of burning plantations as the South’s first conqueror.
Sherman’s name became the vilest two-syllable word in the South. Beautiful women with the manners of countesses spat in the dirt after pronouncing his name aloud.
Sherman was leading his men toward Savannah and the trading lanes of the Atlantic and the history of military strategy. He was riding toward Elizabeth. My mother continued, “When General Sherman took Savannah after his pillage of Georgia, it was greatly feared that he would aim his armies at Charleston, the city and the populace that had begun the hostilities in the War Between the States. Charleston had endured a bitter siege and all were preparing to evacuate the city before the onslaught of Sherman’s army. The citizens of Charleston had already decided to burn Charleston to the ground by their own hand and not to allow the hordes of Sherman to put the holy city to the torch. Those who loved Charleston would burn it. The Yankees were not worthy of such distinction.
“Rumors abounded that Sherman had moved his armies across the Savannah River and those rumors proved true. The entire South and the entire nation waited to hear that Sherman had turned the fury of his forces on the city that had begun the terrible conflict. But as he reached Pocotaligo, Sherman turned his armies on a surprise advance and drove them toward Columbia, where he wreaked great havoc and burned that city to the ground.
“After Sherman made his surprise move and razed that city, he wrote a letter to Elizabeth’s mother, who still lived in this house. When the Yankees had taken over Waterford early in the war, her mother had refused to flee and spent the entire war under Yankee domination. They accorded her great respect. This is the letter that General Sherman wrote to Elizabeth’s mother,” she said.
My mother walked the length of the library as the crowd parted to let her pass. She flicked on an electric switch lighting a Chinese vase lamp that illuminated a framed, handwritten letter hanging on the wall.
“Since all of you can’t get close enough, I’ll read this aloud if you don’t mind.”
But my mother did not have to read the letter on the wall; she had long ago committed it to memory and there was not a sound in the house as we listened to my mother’s voice.
Dear Mrs. Cotesworth,
I remember my evening in your house with great pleasure and much sadness. I heard about the death of your husband at Chancellorsville and that news caused me much grief. I noted that the cavalry charge he was leading at the time broke the Union line and inflicted heavy casualties on the Union forces. There was honor in his death and I hope that brings you solace.
By now, you have heard that I am leading my army against the Confederate forces defending Columbia. The South is broken and the war will soon be over. I would like you to extend my greetings to your daughter, Elizabeth, and to tell her that I still hold her in the highest regard. I have never been sure if the war against Mexico and the great victories won by the American forces there were worth the loss of Elizabeth. I have thought of her many times as my army has moved through the South and inexorably approached that part of the world that Elizabeth once made magic for me by her simply being alive.
I would like you to pass a message to your daughter. Tell Elizabeth that I present her the city of Charleston, as a gift.
Very Sincerely,
Wm. T. Sherman
General of the Army
No tour group in history ever got more bang for their buck than those lucky house-lovers who were led through the Varnadoe Cotesworth house by my mother. I knew that every time she told that story she was trying to regain something for herself. My mother wanted someone to feel about her the way Sherman did about Elizabeth and she knew that my father would never be that man. I used to stand on our dock looking back at that sun-struck house of my childhood and tell myself that I would one day lov
e a woman the way Sherman did. I wanted to walk the whole world until I found a girl I could write letters to that her descendants would hang up on library walls. I would march to the sea with that girl’s name on my lips, and I would write her name in the sands until the tides washed over it. The story marked me. But it changed my mother’s life.
She had made the story hers and hers alone. It struck a chord of abundance and resonance deep within her. It could not mask the limitless hurt she had suffered as a child, but it could give her a rich faith in the future, in all the negotiable currency of pure possibility. This great story made the truth bearable for my mother. Against all odds, Lucy was the keeper of Elizabeth’s house, the owner of General Sherman’s pure cry of human loss and love.
As the crowd moved down the steps away from the house, my brothers called out to me and I turned around to wave good-bye to them. I would be leaving the house forever in several months and my sweet brothers would be left to their own devices.
“Hey, good-looking,” my mother called out, “you’re not getting away without kissing your mother good night.”
I blushed but ran up the stairs and my mother hugged me tightly to her. Mike and Capers and Jordan applauded loudly and I blushed again.
My mother rubbed the lipstick from my cheek and we looked at each other suddenly and all the swiftness and cruelty of time came over me in a rush and almost brought me to my knees. My mother saw it too and felt it. Her eyes fastened on me and her hand touched my cheek.