In 1859 Frank Barton, James’s younger brother, built a handsome mansion near Mound City; here he ensconced his bride, John Fogleman’s firstborn, Alice, mother of the bachelor Frank Barton who continued to run the Mound City Cotton Gin for years after his father’s death. When Alice died in 1865, shortly after the death of her grandfather, old George Fogleman—both in the same year as the Sultana disaster—her husband married another woman and sired Mamie, who became the wife of Captain Gustavus Fogleman, he of the Mark Twain. Thus the captain had a father-in-law who had formerly been his brother-in-law, and a nephew, Frank G. (the bachelor) Barton, who was also his half-brother-in-law (it is very confusing), with whom he conspired late in life to build the levee that reclaimed two thousand acres of their cotton from the Grandfather of Waters but also drove the last nail into the coffin of Mound City.
The third brother (of James and Frank) was Bobby, known as R.B.; he raised cotton and supplied it to Frank, but after Frank’s death sold his cotton plantations and plowed the money into a railroad westward to Bald Knob. This growing town took its name from a treeless rise that supposedly offered de Soto and his men the only high-and-dry spot after their trudge through the eastern-Arkansas marshes and sloughs (eventually, however, the Great Flood of 1927 covered everything on all four sides of Bald Knob). Bobby Barton married Fannie, another of the daughters of John Fogleman.
If the skimpy history of Mound City has a central character, it is John Fogleman, who was eleven years old when he rode down the Ohio and the Mississippi on the keelboat of his father, George, and lived for seventy years through the history of Mound City. George Fogleman might have been the founder and namer of Mound City, but John was its builder and squire, until his death in our critical year, 1886. Two of his three sons were steamboat captains and later cotton growers on a plantation scale, and both married into the Barton family, as did two of John’s daughters, Alice and Fannie; a third daughter, named Mississippi, a lovely name for a girl and one that could easily be shortened to Missy, married aboard a steamboat at Fogleman’s Landing a man named Morris, Memphis’s first steamboat agent and later steamboat magnate until the Civil War.
When he was nineteen, John Fogleman witnessed the building of the Military Road commencing at Hopefield and turning westward at Mound City, and the “removal” of thousands of Indians over it. He watched the steamboat traffic on the river grow from an occasional brave boat or two to a constant flotilla of vessels. And he was a principal actor in the tragedy of the Sultana.
When Kim and Julie leave Miss Woolfolk’s house, they agree to meet later in the afternoon at Mound City, where Julie will take Kim to meet a man who is trying to exhume the skeleton of the Sultana from the soil of his soybean field. Kim drives Zephyra back along the country road to the cemetery at the St. John Church, where she pauses just long enough to confirm that no Bartons or Foglemans are buried there, only their slaves and descendants of those slaves. Then Kim confronts the Y in the road again, and this time takes the one less traveled by, which leads her into the heart of all that remains of Mound City: the abandoned general store beside the “Hanging Tree” and a historical marker erected during the Bicentennial celebration of 1976, which states that Mound City is “An old river town once located on the banks of the Mississippi River, deriving its name from Indian mounds. Federal troops burned it January 15, 1863.” There are several other historical markers in the vicinity and along the twelve-mile Esperanza Trail, which begins here and continues to the site of Hopefield, but this is the only one that offers any information about the town itself.
The store is bare of signs. No printed words on colored tin exhort the customer to drink Coca-Cola or Royal Crown, smoke Camels or Chesterfields, or spread Vicks VapoRub. These red-white-and-rusted rectangles of metal probably once crowded one another along the facade, but have been removed, like the store sign itself, whatever it once proclaimed: “Mays General Merchandise” or “Mays Plantation Store.” It never said “U.S. Post Office,” because that sign came down in 1886. Stripped of all signs, the building takes on even more of a classical purity of line. (Were the Greek temples at one time festooned with cloth banners of advertisements?) Its false front is not merely a raising of corners to give the illusion of a second story, but an honest echo of the roof pitch at the same time the roof pitch is denied. Like the false front everywhere in nineteenth-century architecture, its chief function is an aspiration to cityhood by imitating the city’s verticality, at least up to the level of the second floor, which isn’t there. In a way, the ancestor of the false front is the medieval cathedral, whose towered façade conceals the sloping roof, hiding unstable diagonals with assertive verticals. The retention of diagonals in the facade of Mays Store gives it almost a baroque flavor, like the Alamo. The porch is wide and deep, and without effort of imagination Kim can see the storekeeper and his customers relaxing there, shaded from the blistering sun or umbrellaed against the peltering rain.
The peltering rain has left this road unsuitable for traffic, especially such traffic as low-slung Zephyra, who absolutely detests Kim’s apparent intention: to climb the levee with her, to see if the Grandfather can be seen. He cannot, but with much slithering and spinning of wheels Zephyra ascends the road up to the levee’s level top, where she balks and refuses to descend into the quagmire beyond, though in good weather she could go all the way to Hopefield. Kim stops, gets out, and surveys the scene. Although there is no sign of the river itself, the filled-in oxbow lakes, which were once channels or chutes of the river, are now lined with willows and cottonwoods and turned into fishponds. The one directly below her, although she does not know this, is the Mound City Chute, which once held Fogleman’s Landing. A couple of fishing shacks stand there now. It was there that, in April of 1865, the Sultana exploded….
In time of war, luxury boats become troopships. One of several sometimes metaphysical definitions of “transport” is “a ship used to transport troops or military equipment.” Transportation is, unfortunately, the only way to get home by water. Sam Dunlap, private in Company B of the 3rd Tennessee Cavalry, Army of the United States, was on his way home in 1865, toward the close of that cruelest month, April: on the 9th, the Confederacy had surrendered; on the 14th, the President, Abraham Lincoln, had been mortally wounded by a pistol shot to the back of the head; and on the 3rd, Private Dunlap had been “paroled” from a Confederate prison camp called Castle Morgan, at Cahaba, in Alabama. Cahaba is not as infamous as Andersonville, in Georgia; at the latter, thirteen thousand men, a third of the prison population, were allowed to die of starvation and disease. Cahaba had comparable conditions of overcrowding, exposure, water pollution, abominable rations of food, and mistreatment by the guards, but not quite so many died; those who did not, like Sam Dunlap, had a fierce, irrational desire to go home, to see the familiar contours of their land and their people before they died. Sam had been eighteen when he enlisted, in 1863, in Blount County, Tennessee; nineteen when he was captured, at Sulphur Branch Trestle in northern Alabama; and twenty when he was transported homeward, from Vicksburg, Mississippi. In between, he had seen a lot of different places, on foot, on horseback, on trains, and on boats. Of these means of transport, the forced march of the prisoner was the most familiar to him, and the least pleasant: as often as not, it had been a forced wade, or a forced swim. Twice he had escaped during these treks—once on the Tennessee River by swimming underwater for three minutes or long enough to be presumed drowned by his captors, and once on the Cahaba River by diving deep enough to elude the bullets fired at him—but both times he was recaptured after a few days and forced onward to Castle Morgan. This camp was so-called by virtue of its fortification, a twelve-foot-high fence of thick boards that Sam could not climb, although once, after months of being fed nothing but a supposed cornmeal that was actually ground corncobs softened with stagnant creek water contaminated by human refuse, he tunneled beneath the boards with his bare hands over a period of two weeks of spare-time nightly digging, only to have
the escape foiled when he broke through the other side to face a snarling dog held on a leash by a snarling guard. As punishment, he was denied even the supposed cornmeal thereafter, and kept locked in a dark, airless wooden box of solitary confinement; one side of this was the plank wall or palisade of the enclosure, but, weakened by starvation, he could only scratch feebly at it with a kind of small pick fashioned from what remained of his belt buckle. Slowly, over a period of a week, he pricked out a hole large enough to admit his body. This time he waited until the patroling dog outside the wall had been led around to the other side of the camp, then squeezed through and dashed into the woods to freedom.
Sam managed to get as far as Selma, twelve miles away, where on a March day one hundred years later—almost exactly—marchers would hike to protest the same continuing cause of human rights he had been a soldier for. There, like some of the later protesters, he was caught and jailed. The local civilian provost marshal who was Sam’s jailer gave him the first food he had eaten in weeks, a plate of beans, and carelessly locked him up in an unwindowed room on the second floor of a brick building. The room did have a fireplace, unlighted, and a chimney, up which Sam climbed and from the top of which he flapped his arms and flew into the branches of a tree.
From that tree to the outskirts of the city of Selma was less than a mile, but the roughest mile Sam Dunlap ever traveled. The streets were full of Rebel soldiers. Under the cover of night and of the chimney soot, which had blackened him thoroughly, he sneaked down alleys, narrow lanes between lots that were like those alleys Peter Mankins had planned for Sulphur City and doubtless shown to Sam, who was reminded by them of his attempted escape from Selma. An alley is both an access and an impasse. The Rebel soldiers, who were fidgety and sleepless while waiting for the Federal attack on Selma that would come any day now, and hearing the rumor that a Yankee had escaped from the redoubtable Cahaba, made a sport of blocking off all the alleys of Selma. Sam was caught twice, both times convincing his captors, because of his soot-blackened flesh, that he was a local Negro; the third time, his captors decided to have some fun with him anyway and, in the course of submitting him to their games, discovered that he was not a Negro. He was returned under heavy guard to Cahaba.
This time he was not put in the box up against the wall but chained to a stake out in the middle of the compound, supposedly where the other prisoners could watch him starve to death as an object lesson to them. But the other prisoners, thousands of them, were beyond the point of caring or even observing what personal suffering Sam was enduring. There were no longer any corncobs to be ground into mush. “Them fellers would’ve et each other,” Sam observed to Peter Mankins years later, “but nary one of ’em had the strength to butcher a chinch bug.”
There is a point in starvation beyond which hunger pangs are no longer felt. The despair in camp was such that when news reached the prisoners that General James Wilsons “Lightning Brigade” had struck Selma and captured it, no one seemed to care that Wilson might move on south to liberate Cahaba. Before that could happen, though, the entire population of Cahaba was made to stand and file out through the gates on their last forced march, westward, out of Alabama. The men were so weak and listless that only a few mounted guards were required to keep them moving, but Private Dunlap was assigned a guard of his own to prevent any further escapes. He had no idea where he was being taken.
Hundreds of men died on this march; the ones who did not were allowed to capture anything edible that moved or stood along the route. Ironically, it was springtime, and things were coming up out of the earth. They ate reptiles and at every stream they crossed caught minnows with their bare hands. Somewhere in eastern Mississippi they were herded aboard the cattle cars of a train, but it was not exactly a rest from their march: they were packed so tightly they could not sit. The train moved slowly westward. Sam Dunlap no longer had his personal guard but was packed in with the others; though he considered escape, he was too curious to know the destination of the train, which proved to be Jackson, Mississippi, the capital of the state, and still a Rebel fortress. It was full of alleys; Sam did not attempt escape, but remained with the thousands of prisoners as their march resumed, again westward, again with men dying at every mile along the route, until they had only one more river to cross, the Big Black, and there was an encampment of thousands upon thousands of men, all prisoners, more human beings than Sam Dunlap had ever seen at one time in one place in his life before. On the heights above the far side of the river were rows of neat white tents beneath a flagpole on which Old Glory was flying, the first time Sam had seen his flag since the previous September, and his voice was not alone in cheering it.
But the immense throng of prisoners crammed into the fetid fields on the east side of the Big Black were not celebrating their impending delivery into Union hands, which was still uncertain. The Confederacy was not beaten. Lee had not yet surrendered at Appomattox. This encampment of prisoners, many of them taken from the dread Andersonville and the remainder from Cahaba, was not technically under Federal control. It was a “neutral” ground, a chessboard on which the pawns were still negotiable. For days, weeks, the men waited, watching from afar the daily raising and lowering of their flag across the river. Catholic nuns called “Sisters of Charity” moved among them, distributing hardtack and jerky: rockhard dried bread and leather-tough dried beef, a banquet compared with their former fare. The number of daily deaths from starvation dropped, but still prisoners died of old wounds, scurvy, cholera, and dysentery.
Then one morning word spread through the camp that its inmates were being taken across the Big Black to be officially “paroled”: released to the Federal side on condition that they never fight against the Confederacy again. Few of them were able or willing to violate that condition if they had been given the chance, or if the Confederacy itself had had any chance to live a little longer. The Rebel guards ordered the men to fall in with their respective regiments and prepare for muster. Since Sam Dunlap could find nobody from his old Tennessee regiment, he fell in with a company of Germans from Ohio, who were soon swallowed up by a battalion from Michigan and surrounded by a regiment from Indiana. In droves they were ferried across the Big Black, and put aboard a shuttle train that conveyed them to the bluffs of Vicksburg, where they marched down to the waterfront of the biggest water of all: the Grandfather, muddier than ever, swollen with spring rains. Only when Sam caught sight of all the steamboats docked on that river did he allow himself to believe that he was truly going home, heading north toward home. “Goin home,” he said aloud to the man next to him, and the man replied, “You bet.”
The riverbank was lined with steamboats being boarded one at a time by long files of soldiers, who stood in their ranks patiently waiting their turn. These steamboats were not troopships but luxury sidewheelers, spotlessly clean and decked out with pennants. The passengers already on the promenade decks, silently watching the soldiers beginning to board, were well-dressed civilians, women and children, rich old men. Sam became acutely conscious of his attire: his once-neat blue uniform was reduced to grimy rags, though all around him were thousands of men no more soldierly dressed than he. Many were standing with the aid of crutches or canes, or being supported by their fellows; Sam was one of the few who stood, if not at attention, at least on his own unassisted feet. There was not a clean-shaven jaw in the throng, or a head of combed hair, and the civilian passengers already on the big boats were obviously not happy; they became less happy as the ex-prisoners, by the dozen and then by the hundred, began boarding the vessels. While he waited his turn, which might take hours, Sam counted the troops being loaded upon a smaller steamboat named Olive Branch; he knew enough of the story of Noah and the Ark to know the significance of the name, and the symbolism of peace. When he had counted to seven hundred, and the boat could not possibly hold any more, he stopped counting, but still soldiers were ordered to cross the gangplank and find room.
“Where are we going?” the man next to him asked Sa
m.
“Cairo, Illinois,” Sam said, pronouncing it “kay-row,” as he had long known how to do. “If they don’t run out of boats first.”
The next boat, whose name, Henry Ames, had no symbolism that Sam would have appreciated, took much longer to fill. There were a thousand when he stopped counting, and he still wasn’t very close to the head of the line waiting to board. The man next to him, who must have observed Sam’s lips moving as he counted, asked him how many; when Sam replied, “One thousand, so far,” the man swore an exclamation and said, “She wasn’t meant to hold more than two hundred.”
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3 Page 120