“Have I got both my feet?” I said.
“You’ve got a busted bone in your right foot,” the sergeant said.
The throbbing got worse in my foot, like the medicine had worn off. It was an ugly black and purple kind of pain that licked up the bone in my leg and gnawed like fire on a log. I took another sip of water, hoping the water would soothe the pain.
But knowing they had not cut my foot off soothed the pain more than anything else. I didn’t care about the pain so much as long as I knew I could walk, as long as I could carry my baby when it was born. My terror had been that I’d be a cripple and couldn’t walk into the blue mountains, away from armies, and find a place to live. I had to be able to walk to take care of the baby.
I raised up on my elbows and looked over the edge of the wagon. We were in a camp and fires blazed all along the edge of the woods. There were wagons and carts and men lying on the ground close to the fires. It was a camp for the wounded, for many of the men had their arms in slings and bloodstains on their shirts, or bandages on their heads. Rain fell in a fine drizzle.
An orderly brought me a plate of grits, but my stomach was too weak to eat, and the pain in my foot made me too sick to eat.
“Got to eat to get your strength back, Josie,” the sergeant said.
“How do you know my name?” I said.
“Cause you told us, when you was out of your head,” the sergeant said.
I was surprised, and then relieved, for I wouldn’t have to pretend anymore. I was tired of acting, of lying. I just wanted to be myself again.
“Oh!” I said as the pain rushed up my leg.
“We’ll have to leave you at the first house we come to,” the sergeant said. “We can’t have no girls in this army.”
“Don’t leave me out in the cold,” I said, and felt my belly.
A man was lying on a blanket by the closest fire. He lay on a kind of stretcher made of sticks. He didn’t have any legs. All he had was bandages above where his knees would have been, and the bandages were bloody and dirty. A jolt went through my heart and chest, for I thought that could have happened to me. I could be the one lying with only bandages where I once had legs.
The man stretched by the fire appeared to be sleeping. But there was a bruise or swelling on his cheek that made me remember something. In the flickering light I couldn’t see too well.
“Who is that man there?” I said to the orderly that had brought the grits. There were several men standing around the campfire.
“Which man?” the driver said. I pointed to the man on the stretcher.
“That be Sergeant Gudger,” the driver said.
I wondered if it was T. R. who had shot him in the knees.
While everybody was eating grits and drinking coffee around the campfire, I must have dozed off a little. Sleep is the mercy when you’re weak and in pain. I drifted off dreaming of Gudger with no legs and a horse with no legs. I saw trees in the woods cut down like soldiers. But as I woke up I heard singing. Was I dreaming music, or was there singing in the camp?
“Jesus shall reign wher-e’er the sun,” I heard. It was the sweetest sound. I’d heard that voice at the burial on the battlefield. I turned over under the blanket and listened.
It was the most beautiful sound. I must still be dreaming, I thought. And then I heard a voice pray, and I knew the voice, and I knew it was John Trethman. I had not just dreamed I’d seen him earlier.
I raised up and looked out over the side of the wagon. A tall man was standing by a campfire with a book in his hand. His back was to me, but I was sure it was John. He was speaking to the soldiers and the wounded. Everybody was turned toward him and listening.
“You have fought a terrible battle,” John said. “You have walked through the valley of the shadow of death today. The Lord has spared you and now is the time for healing.”
I tried to get somebody’s attention, but there was nobody close by. They were all listening to John, and I was too weak to yell out. John started singing again.
When the song was over John turned in the firelight so I could see his face. He was slimmer than ever, and paler.
“The moment of victory is the time to be humble,” he said. “If a victory has been won it is the Lord’s work and the Lord’s will. If you have come forward through the troubled times to this night of victory, it is because the Lord was with you and guided you.”
John turned away a little so I had to listen harder. He never did have a voice all that loud.
“This is a night of Thanksgiving,” he went on. “This is a night of praise and celebration. But it is also a night to remember the cost. I’m sure each of you has paid a great price to be here. I know I have. Some of you have lost friends and some have lost family. Some have lost those dearest to them. Some have lost limbs and some have lost eyes.”
John stopped and turned toward the wagon where I lay. I knew he couldn’t see me in the dark. I tried to wave, but was too weak to do more than raise my arm before falling back on the blanket.
“This must be a night of mourning also,” John said. “This must be our time of remembering those lost in this hard time. This will be our night to honor them and pray for them. This will be our night to be humble and sing of their memory and sacrifice.”
I had tears in my eyes, both because of what John was saying and because he didn’t know I was there. For all he knew I had burned at the cabin or frozen to death on the tree outside.
“Our only comfort is in the working out of the Lord’s will,” John said. “Our only comfort is in our dedication. You have won a victory that will benefit your children and your children’s children for a hundred generations, but the work of peace has only begun.”
After John sang another song and prayed for all the wounded, I was frantic to let him know I was there. I was too weak to holler out, and when I called to the orderly that had brought me the grits he didn’t hear me either. I banged on the side of the wagon with my elbow, and then with my fist. I kicked at the boards with my good foot.
A sergeant walking away from the campfire heard me and stopped by the wagon. “Are you having fits?” he said.
“I need to see that man,” I said.
He asked if I needed to see a man about a dog, and he laughed and said what man is that. I told him I wanted to talk to the preacher.
I was going to tell him John was my husband. But the man walked away and I waited. It seemed like hours passed. And then I saw John walking toward the wagon.
“John,” I called out loud as I could. My throat was scratchy and cracked. I swallowed and tried again. “John,” I yelled as loud as I could.
John was walking straight toward me. He looked tall as a tree with the firelight behind him, and when he reached out toward me his arms were long wings of shadow and light stretching far across the camp to touch me. As he came closer I couldn’t see his face, but he looked tall as an oak with the lit droplets of rain behind him, tall as a house, as he bent down to see me better.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
MY FATHER, CLYDE R. MORGAN, first told me the story of the Battle of Cow-pens when I was a boy. He was a wonderful storyteller, and his vivid sense of history has inspired many of my stories. At least one of my ancestors, William Capps, fought at Cowpens.
But this is a work of fiction and most of the characters are imagined. In the case of historical figures such as Daniel Morgan and Banastre Tarleton, I have tried to stay as close to the known facts as possible. In instances where the historians disagree I have followed my own sense of the plausible.
For background information and descriptions of the Battle of Cowpens itself I have benefited from reading the following studies and documents: A History of the Campaigns of 1780–81 in Southern America by Banastre Tarleton (1787; reprint, Spartanburg, S.C.: Reprint Company, 1967); Life of General Daniel Morgan by James Graham (1856; reprint, Bloomingburg, N.Y.: Zebrowski Historical Services, 1993); Colonial and Revolutionary History of Upper South Carolina by J.B.O.
Landrum (1897; reprint, Spartanburg, S.C.: Reprint Company, 1977); The Green Dragoon by Robert D. Bass (1957; reprint, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1973); Daniel Morgan: Revolutionary Rifleman by Don Higginbotham (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961); The Battle of Cowpens by Edwin S. Bears (Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, 1967); From Savannah to Yorktown by Henry Lumpkin (New York: Paragon House, 1981); The Battle of Cowpens by Kenneth Roberts (New York: Eastern Acorn Press, 1981); With Fire and Sword: The Battle of Kings Mountain by Wilma Dyke-man (Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, 1981); Battleground: South Carolina in the Revolution by Warren Ripley (Charleston, S.C.: Post-Courier Books, 1983); The Patriots at the Cowpens by Bobby Gilmer Moss (Greenville, S.C.: Scotia Press, 1985); Cowpens: Downright Fighting by Thomas J. Fleming (Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, 1988); Cowpens Battlefield: A Walking Guide by Lawrence E. Babits (Johnson City, Tenn.: The Overmountain Press, 1993); A Devil of a Whipping by Lawrence E. Babits (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Partisans and Redcoats by Walter Edgar (New York: William Morrow, 2001).
Finally, I would like to thank Elisabeth Scharlatt and the staff of Algonquin Books for their unfailing help in bringing this story to completion. I am especially grateful to my editors, Duncan Murrell and Shannon Ravenel, for their crucial patience, wisdom, and faith in this book.
BRAVE ENEMIES
A Short Note from the Author
A Reading and Discussion Guide
REACHING ACROSS BOUNDARIES
A Short Note from the Author
Many reviewers and readers have noted that several of my stories and novels are told from the point of view of a woman. They speak as though it is uncommon for men to write from the point of view of women characters. I like to point out that Daniel Defoe published Moll Flanders in 1722, one of the earliest English novels, about a woman’s life, told in her own voice.
Reynolds Price, who has published several well-known novels narrated by women, says that all men are raised by women and therefore are familiar from infancy with women’s voices, women’s points of view. One of the models I had in mind when I first wrote from a woman’s point of view in my 1992 novella The Mountains Won’t Remember Us was Thomas Wolfe’s story “The Web of Earth,” a monologue spoken by his mother.
Modern fiction got started around the time a lot of women in Europe and England learned to read. From the first, novels were written primarily for an audience of women, whether authored by men or women. Fiction is about intimacy, about emotions and relationships, about detail, and often about the powerless and disadvantaged. Prose fiction is almost never heroic, in the older poetic sense. Novels are more often antiheroic; witness Don Quixote, Crime and Punishment.
It has been a great surprise to me to find myself drawn again and again to write stories about women, told by women. I always expected to write action stories, stories about warfare, wilderness, the frontier, stories about history and panthers, road-building and hunting. And I have written novels about all those things, but the surprise is that they are often narrated by women who happened to be there.
In the late 1980s I decided to write a novel about the battle of Cowpens in the American Revolution. At least one of my ancestors had fought in the battle, January 17, 1781, just down the mountain near Spartanburg. My dad, who loved history, had told me the story of the battle when I was a boy. I began doing research about the Revolutionary War in the Carolinas and found that Tarleton, the British commander who lost the battle, explained that he had ordered his men to fight after marching all night because he had reports the “Green River rifles” were on their way to join the Americans, and he wanted to fight before they arrived. I had grown up on Green River.
I wrote a version of the novel that became Brave Enemies in the early 1990s but knew it wasn’t right. I knew the battle scenes were accurate but wasn’t sure who the people fighting were. It was only years later, when I imagined Josie Summers, the sixteen-year-old who has been violated and is running away from home with no place to go, that the story really came alive for me. Once I heard her voice and began to feel her fear as she wandered into the wilderness, the story began to shape itself.
A writer’s imagination is stimulated most by tasks that are difficult. Yeats talked about putting on an anti-mask, an opposite identity, to stretch the imagination and understanding. I think this may be the case with my fiction writing. Assuming the voice, the consciousness of a woman character in trouble, struggling to survive, is so alien, so difficult for me, it calls forth my best energy and discipline. I demand most of myself, for nothing less will work or bring the story into being.
I often say my best talent is for listening. I was the shy kid who sat in the corner while the women strung beans or peeled peaches. I listened to my mother and my aunts talking while the men were away. I became a fiction writer to get down some of the voices I heard by the fireplace or on the porch back then, and to tell the stories I heard about wars, about panthers and snakes and ghosts, about sickness and childbirth in mountain cabins, about the deaths of children.
I believe I write more about women characters than about men because women fascinate me. I am in awe of women, their toughness and vulnerability. I am drawn to stories of the powerless, people who survive in difficult times. I am drawn to stories where physical danger and hunger are real, and to vulnerable characters who can describe the struggles. I learn from my characters as I go, letting them tell their stories to me. They remind me of things I had forgotten I knew.
A READING AND DISCUSSION GUIDE
1. What lessons does Josie take away from her mother’s marriage to Mr. Griffin? In what ways does her mother’s marriage affect her relationship later with John?
2. Discuss Josie’s actions leading up to her running away. Were they justified? What other choices could she have made?
3. In what ways is the harassment Josie experiences similar or dissimilar to what young women might encounter today?
4. The novel alternates between Josie’s and John’s points of view. What effect does this narration have on the way the story unfolds? With which character did you most identify and why?
5. Compare the role of faith in the lives of Josie and John. How does it inform who they are and how they behave?
6. Do you think that John has satisfactorily resolved his moral obligation to his church and his love for Josie? Was it ethical for him to support Josie’s deception? And why doesn’t he reveal Josie’s identity to his parishioners? What exactly does he fear from them?
7. “Sometimes a woman has to be smart and swallow her pride,” Josie confesses. “I decided I would resist the sergeant, but I would not holler out. If he overpowered me I would have to let him have his way. I would not give in, but I would not let him kill me either. The Lord would forgive me” (page 203). In what ways does Josie succeed at being a woman in man’s world? Do you believe women today still need to swallow their pride?
8. In what ways do Josie’s and John’s journeys parallel each other after they’re forced to separate?
9. What drives Josie to not only dress as a boy but also risk her life in battle? How successful do you think Josie is at passing herself off as “one of the boys” in Cox’s militia company?
10. After all John has seen, he comes to a realization: “I had come to believe there was really no right side or wrong side in war. All killing was wrong and all hatred was wrong” (page 274). To what extent do you agree or disagree with this statement? How were you affected by the author’s vivid depiction of the battle scenes?
11. The book opens with the epigraph from Thomas Jefferson: “Whensoever hostile aggressions . . . require a resort to war, we must meet our duty and convince the world that we are just friends and brave enemies.” To what degree does that hold true in the Battle of Cowpens?
12. Who do you believe is the real hero of Brave Enemies, and why?
13. It has been said that in the best fiction there is no character who is
entirely bad and no hero who is entirely good. Does that apply to the characters in Brave Enemies? And if so, in what ways?
RANDI ANGLIN
Robert Morgan is the author of seven previous books of fiction, including The Truest Pleasure, a Southern Book Critics Circle Award winner for fiction, and the award-winning New York Times bestseller Gap Creek. He has received the 2007 American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature and the North Carolina Award in Literature. He was raised on his family’s farm in the North Carolina mountains and now lives in Ithaca, New York, where he teaches at Cornell University.
ALSO BY ROBERT MORGAN
Fiction
The Blue Valleys
The Mountains Won’t Remember Us
The Hinterlands
The Truest Pleasure
The Balm of Gilead Tree
Gap Creek
This Rock
The Road from Gap Creek
Poetry
Zirconia Poems
Red Owl
Land Diving
Trunk & Thicket
Groundwork
Bronze Age
At the Edge of the Orchard Country
Sigodlin
Green River: New and Selected Poems
Wild Peavines
Topsoil Road
Nonfiction
Good Measure: Essays, Interviews, and Notes on Poetry
Brave Enemies - A Novel Of The American Revolution Page 32