When the Henry Ames finally left the dock, its absence revealed the bulk of three more steamboats, and the largest had her name in big letters across the sidewheel house: Sultana. In the complicated system of Muslim polygamy, a sultana is not necessarily the bride of a sultan; the name is reserved for a sultan’s mother, his sister, or his daughter, but if his wife becomes the mother of his first heir, then she can have bestowed upon her the title of sultana hasseky and is entitled to fifty eunuchs of her own. But that is so much Arabic mumbo-jumbo; throughout the American South, “sultana” is the nickname of the purple gallinule, or water hen, or swamp hen, a freshwater bird, and to Sam Dunlap this was the meaning: she was the bird that was going to fly him home…if he ever got aboard her. Night was coming on, making it hard to keep count, but twelve hundred or so men had already boarded the big boat, and still there were many ahead of him, between him and the wharf. A sergeant came into the midst of the ex-prisoners and said, “At ease, men. That’s all they’re going to take tonight. Maybe we’ll get aboard in the morning.” Through the night Sam waited. He really had his heart set on the Sultana, but wouldn’t be disappointed to take one of the next two boats; they might be less crowded. He was a patient man usually, except when he was trying to escape, and right now he wasn’t trying to escape from anything. The other men, too, although excited to giddiness by the prospect of going home, were patient; some of them had spent two years as prisoners at Andersonville or Cahaba; they could wait a little longer. Instead of sleeping, they listened to the sounds coming from the Sultana, where the soldiers who had already boarded were singing, playing harmonicas and a banjo, and celebrating their leavetaking from the South.
The next day the loading was resumed, and Sam’s place in the long line crept closer to the boat’s staging. By noon the rails of the ship were crowded shoulder to shoulder by the lucky boarders gloating at the men still waiting on shore. “If I aint number two thousand,” Sam said to himself, still counting, “I aint goin to make it.” But that number was passed, and still he had not boarded. When at last his turn came, he was Number 2,231. The legal capacity of the Sultana, one of the biggest boats then on the river, was, including the crew, 376 persons.
But Sam was aboard. The problem now was finding a place to stand, or occasionally sit. It was a four-day passage to Cairo, maybe five nights on the water, and the only prospect of sleep might be an hourly exchange of sitting or half-reclining positions among the packed hordes. There were only a hundred civilian passengers on board, and each of them had a tiny stateroom with a bunk, but none of them had any intention of sharing their space with the sick, lame, filthy soldiers on board. They kept their cabin doors tightly shut and latched. Once, on the next morning out and up from Vicksburg, the door against which Sam was leaning nudged him, and he let it open a crack to reveal a beautiful young woman, the first lady Sam had seen up that close in ages, wearing the fanciest, fluffiest, pinkest dress he had ever seen. She stared at him with obvious distaste but confessed, “I cannot summon the steward. He will not answer the bell.”
“Probably caint git here through all the crowd, ma’am,” Sam observed. Then, “Can I be of any service to ye?”
She studied him. Hesitantly she told him, “My chamberpot needs…” But she stopped. “Its all right,” she said. “I can manage.” She closed her door. Hours later the door nudged him again, and again he let it open. “Why are you leaning against my door?” the lady all in pink asked him.
“Sorry, ma’am,” he said. “It’s the only place I got to lean.” He indicated the two soldiers who were leaning against the wall on either side of the door, then asked, “Could I empty that pot fer ye?” But again she hesitated. “Lady,” he told her, without politeness, “I been up to my chin in worse dung than yours for the last six months. A little more won’t hurt me.” She let him into her cubicle. He took her chamberpot, carrying it gingerly so it would not spill, worked his way through the crowd, usually moving backward like a crawfish, to the taffrail, where he dumped the contents of the pot overboard, then returned it to her cabin.
“Thank you,” she said, and asked, “Where are you going?”
“Back out to my leaning post, against your door.”
“I mean,” she said, smiling, “what is your destination? I am going to St. Louis.”
“If they muster me out at Cairo,” he said, “reckon I’ll try to git on back to Blount County, Tennessee, up in the Smokies, where I’m from.”
“Would you like to sit down, instead of leaning against my door?” she invited him. There was a chair in the cabin. He tried it. It was the first chair he’d sat upon since…he couldn’t remember the last time he had sat on a chair. It was so nice, he was afraid he might fall asleep any minute. “My name is Adeline,” the young woman said. Sam told her his name. She told him about New Orleans, where she had been visiting. He told her about Cahaba, where he had been visiting. She seemed to understand. They talked a long while. They exchanged birthdates, hers only a month after his. She seemed to need to talk, out of nervousness, and out of a great fear: would the boat ever reach Cairo, let alone St. Louis? “I’ve heard,” she told him, breathlessly, “that if we make Cairo, it will have been the greatest number of people transported on one boat in the history of the Mississippi River.” Then she told him, sadly, “We weren’t even supposed to stop at Vicksburg. I have heard that the only reason we stopped there, and then had to take on so many of you, was because one of the boilers was leaking, and had to be hastily patched. Do you know anything about boilers? This trip was supposed to be such a pleasant outing, and everything has gone wrong.” Sam, who knew nothing about boilers except that they had a bad reputation for exploding, told her that he hoped everything would be all right, that she would be in St. Louis before she knew it, even if she had to endure a few inconveniences. It was pity that a pretty gal like her couldn’t get out on the promenade deck and show off her several dresses, he said. Could he see them? One by one she took her dresses out of their trunk, unfolded them, and held them up before her. “Them sure is pretty,” he said. That night she told him that he was welcome to stay and stretch out on the floor if he liked. She slept in her bunk, fully clothed. He did not touch her.
When the Sultana docked at Memphis the next day, Miss Adeline told him that she was joining her fellow cabin passengers for a few hours on shore and would return before dark. Sam wouldn’t have minded going ashore, too, to see what Memphis looked like, but the ex-prisoners had orders not to leave the boat. Several of them sneaked off anyhow, or jumped from the decks to the wharf. One of the ship’s officers began rounding up able-bodied men to help unload the cargo, mostly heavy hogsheads of sugar. The pay was 75¢ an hour, and after working hard for three hours, Sam had money in his pocket for the first time in half a year. He joined some of the other men on a tour of an alley called “the Whiskey Chute” because it had fourteen saloons in it, a fine use for an alley. They tried to visit each one. It was the first liquor of any sort, and good liquor at that, that Sam had tasted since the previous summer. He had enough to feel good, but not enough to get drunk, as most of the other fellows were. Some of them were so drunk they couldn’t make it back to the boat; they couldn’t even be carried back to the boat, and had to be left behind. A few hours later Sam would stop feeling sorry for the ones who were left behind.
The young lady, who had changed to her purple dress, opened the cabin door for him but began to close it before he could enter. “You’ve been drinking,” she told him, wrinkling her nose. “You can’t come in here if you’ve been drinking.” She would not let him in. He resumed his former position, leaning up against her door, and watched as the lights of Memphis dwindled into the darkness. He listened to the steady threshing of the paddle wheels in the black water and reflected that he was feeling so good, it was just as well Miss Adeline wouldn’t let him in; he might even have tried to kiss her, or worse. One night of good sleep on her floor was enough for him. He could get through this night without any sleep.
In the distance across the darkened river he could just make out the trees on shore, and on small islands along the shore, or don-nicks projecting from it, and what looked like a mound. The water of the river was so high that only the tops of trees were visible. There were no lights left burning that late in Mound City; all the Foglemans were asleep, and all the Bartons, too. He watched the far shore drift past, knowing it was Arkansas, where he had never been, although friends and relatives of his from back home in Blount County had migrated to the Ozarks and had written back such glowing accounts of what an unspoiled and uncrowded paradise it was that Sam had often dreamed about going there. Now that the war had been won, maybe he could.
The Sultana moved on imperceptibly upstream. Dark clouds further blackened the night, and there was a smell of rain, with small distant lightning flashes and peals of thunder moving closer. When the Sultana’s boiler suddenly exploded, Sam thought at first that the boat had been hit by a lightning bolt, but he had seen what lightning bolts can do to trees, and no lightning bolt was powerful enough to do what this one had done: smash the texas to flinders, rip apart the hurricane deck, topple the twin smokestacks, twist the whole boat slaunchways, and cause the raining down of boat parts and body parts, a great downpour of pieces of wood and iron, sections of human arms and legs, heads, torsos. The roar of the explosion had not faded when it was replaced by a scarcely lesser noise: human voices screaming, a great inarticulate howl of protests and pleas, lamentations and declarations of impossible pain, followed by the complete pandemonium of those still living trying to move, all at once, in every direction.
Clouds of hot steam obscured his vision, but Sam moved to inspect the source of the explosion, and found amidships a great gaping volcanolike crater, at the bottom of which were the remains of the engine room: exposed live coals with bodies burning on them, the bare fireboxes shooting their flames into all the surrounding woodwork. Soon the whole center of the boat was up in flames, which illuminated the whole scene all around him more garishly than his worst dream of hell: throngs of men were still standing though their skin was falling from their bodies in strips; others, blinded by the scalding steam, were bumping into one another in panic, while all the men not burned were pushing and shoving one another, trampling one another, in a senseless rush with no direction except a general direction toward the water, which was already littered with the bodies of hundreds who had willingly or unwillingly gone overboard.
In the next few minutes, more people were killed before Sam’s eyes than had been killed in the explosion: people killed by falling decks and collapsing timbers, people killed by flames they could not escape, people killed by people endlessly milling and stomping and running down one another, and most of all people killed by the Grandfather, who waited for those leaping into him, for the swimmers and the nonswimmers alike, for the would-be floaters. Mercifully the Grandfather consumed the non-swimmers first, almost instantly, although their last, panicked moments of consciousness were without mercy. Sam saw in the light of the flames a human “raft” of four hundred or so people together in the water, each of them clambering to get on top, each of them pushing or dragging others down under, until the entire raft of people disappeared beneath the surface. He turned away to watch the scenes on board: of the burned, the crushed, and those who, after the failures of Andersonville or Cahaba to crush their spirits, were driven insane with fear. At every moment a dozen or so leaped from the decks into the river, while another dozen crowded and kicked one another away from the rail. The Sultana’s captain was loudly addressing the survivors, trying to calm them but further panicking them with the urgent loudness of his implorations, asking them to keep calm and orderly. As the captain wildly exhorted the crowd to patience, a group of women passengers came out of their staterooms, dropped to their knees before the captain, and began praying loudly. Sam thought they were beseeching the captain, but they were only using him as an intermediary, as one used a priest or a parson between oneself and God; they were clearly trying to get into direct touch with God. Sam noticed that one of them was wearing a lovely purple dress. He moved to her, and raised her to her feet.
“Git up, Adeline!” he said. “Prayin won’t do you no good.”
She turned her attentions immediately from God to Sam Dunlap, and threw her arms tightly around him. “Save me!” she beseeched.
He pried her gouging fingernails out of his arms. “We got to wait!” he insisted. “Can you jist wait? And be easy? Jist a little while?” She searched his face, trying to understand, but could not. “Look at ’em!” he said, and pointed at the hundreds in the water, the dozens leaping from the rail. “The ones that go first are the first to die! We got to wait till the time comes.”
“I can swim!” she yelled at him. “I know how! I’ve done it before!”
“In this purty dress?” He fingered her violet taffeta. She began to rip the garment from her body, until she stood stripped of purple, in her white crinoline undergarments. She looked at him defiantly, as if challenging his decorum and his authority. “No, Addy, where would you swim to?” he asked. “The nearest bank’s a good mile of swift water over yonder. Can you swim a mile through a flood? No, stay close to me, and wait.”
But the flames were rising higher and hotter. He was uncertain himself how long they could stay aboard without being burned, and between drowning and roasting he would choose the former. He took Adeline’s wrist and led her toward her stateroom. Its ceiling had caved in, and someone had ripped off the door to use as a float, but he found beneath her bunk one life preserver, a cork-padded cummerbund, and he tied it around her waist, then led her out of the cabin and forward across the jumble of corpses to the Sultana’s bow, the only part of the boat not engulfed by flame and smoke, where a mob of several hundred passengers who were not injured and not inclined to try the water were huddled together watching the last act of the drama. The boat had been drifting stern-first ever since the engines stopped, and now the great paddle wheels and their housings were aflame and beginning to fall away from the sides of the boat. A fore-to-aft breeze was prodding the fire southward, downriver, across the entire length of the boat, whose upper decks had collapsed into the pyre; the last living passengers on that end of the boat were leaping from the taffrail.
Then the dying Sultana, as if diabolically determined to submit all her sides to the holocaust, began to swing around. As the paddle wheels fell away and their burning housings collapsed, the bow, on which the refugees huddled, began to drift toward starboard, slowly at first but then, as the wind and water rushed against the larboard side, swiftly, until the hull had spun completely around, with the bow pointing downstream and downwind…and downflame. The hundreds of procrastinators who had sought out the bow as a safe refuge were now being covered by billows of black smoke and red cinders. In the panic and confusion, Sam discovered that he had let go of Adelines wrist, and could not find her. “ADELINE!” he yelled, but his voice was lost in the screams of the crowd as they surged in a body up against the bow’s rail, knocking it down. Sam was pushed helplessly overboard and into the water.
The height from which he fell plunged him deeply into the dark water. In the depths, he struggled to right himself and climb to the surface. Other bodies fell against him, other struggling hands clawed at him. He felt his ankle locked in a clasp that would not be released by his most frantic kicking and seemed to draw him deeper beneath the surface. With hands and feet alike he kicked and thrashed and tore upward through the pile of bodies until his head surfaced and his lungs sucked in air for only the briefest space until other hands encircled his head and pulled him under again. Trying to find open water, where nobody struggled or begged for help, he back-paddled away from the drowning masses. But while he was seeking to avoid them, he was still searching for one of them: Adeline, whose survival had become nearly as important to him as his own. He realized that all this time, from the moment of the first explosion, his mind had kept itself calm with a serene fantasy:
of Adeline attaching herself gratefully to him for life in some pleasant valley of the Ozarks, of the two of them becoming lovers and outwitting this disaster.
Suddenly he caught sight of the bow of a steamboat bearing down on him, and for a moment he feared that he was in the path of the drifting Sultana. But the bow light illuminated the name Bostonia II, and it was not a maimed and deserted steamboat but a whole one, peopled, moving fast, coming right at him. He thought it was only the product of his imagination, a dream of rescue, like his fantasy of the pastoral future with Adeline, but there were other men in the water around him and they saw it, too. The swimmers, and the drowners, began to wave their arms to attract the attention of the men aboard the Bostonia. However, the rescue boat, if it was bent on rescue, did not slow, let alone stop: it seemed to be heading for the wreck of the Sultana, drifting toward the western shore downstream. The Bostonia paddled onward until it was lost in the darkness. The drowners went on drowning, in despair. The swimmers, too, one by one, gave up this last hope.
Sam knew he could never make it to the distant shore, with nothing to hold him up except his own lungs and his tired arms. He hoped that in another minute, when he would have to give up and let the Grandfather have him, it would be quick, without pain, without any more last-second hopes to be dashed. But when he gave up, he would be one of the last to do it; the other men around him had all disappeared, gone under…except for one, who was not a man.
Oh, it was Adeline, and she was alive, and floating in the cork cummerbund he had tied around her! She was smiling at him and holding out her arms to him, and he swam to her and embraced her and spoke her name, lovingly. “Dear Sam,” she said, and held him tightly in return, then helped him float. Somehow she had managed to put her pretty purple dress back on, and although the taffeta was wet and dark and clung to her, she was still radiant in it, the most gorgeous creature he had ever seen, and right on the spot he said to her, “Adeline, will you marry me? If you will but consent to be my wife, it will give me strength to deliver us out of this hell unto the salvation of a happy land where we may live happily forever after.” Or words to that effect; he may have been babbling, so happy was he to have found her and to be making his proposal to her.
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3 Page 121