American Dreams Trilogy

by Michael Phillips

  As quickly as they had come, the sounds of the chase soon died away in the distance and the four unlikely fugitives were left alone beneath the bridge.

  The hours passed slowly under the bridge. Thomas dozed fitfully. Deanna tried to make him as comfortable as possible though on the uneven ground and in wet clothes, and with nothing to eat, there was little she could do. Wherever the black man had led their pursuers, they heard nothing from them again.

  As evening began to descend, suddenly a voice sounded above them.

  “Dere be any travelers down under dere dat’s needin’ ter be gettin’ on ter da nex’ stashun?”

  Deanna looked up to see a black face leaning over the side of the bridge.

  “Dat dere is,” said the man. “You be da conductor sent fer us?”

  “Dat I is. How many ob you is dere?”

  “Dere’s suppozed ter be two, but dere’s four,” said the man. “We got us a Confederate soldier boy here dat don belong on da railroad nohow.”

  The conductor now walked down the slope and around to where three of his passengers stood waiting. Behind them he saw Thomas lying on the ground.

  “What dis all about?” he asked.

  “He’s with me,” said Deanna. “We were trying to get away and a man met us who said he was the conductor on the other side. He told us where to come and said to tell you that you could trust us.”

  The man eyed her a moment.

  “You hab a strange tongue,” he said. “Where you from, girl?”

  “My family and I were slaves in North Carolina. But before that we came from up north. We got captured and sold to a man in North Carolina. We were escaping a year ago but I fell off my horse and got captured and was sold again.”

  The man took in Deanna’s story and nodded slowly. “What ’bout dis here white boy?”

  “He saved me from some bad white men, and then they were going to kill him. They beat him and hurt him real bad, so I helped him get away. Please, Mister Conductor, he’s a good boy, but I’m afraid for him. He needs help.”

  The man thought a moment more, then drew in a deep breath.

  “All right, den, all ob you—let’s go. Foller me. Help da boy to his feet, miss,” he said to Deanna. “You’s gwine hab ter make sure he keeps up ’cause we gots a long way ter go.”

  The long night passed like a blur to Deanna. For Thomas it was like a waking dream of which he could remember nothing. When he finally staggered into the dry barn of their destination two or three hours before dawn, it was all he could do to make it to the pile of straw across the floor before collapsing unconscious in a heap. Deanna lay down next to him while the father and son made themselves comfortable some yards away. The conductor disappeared.

  Five minutes later, the creaking hinges of a door opened again. A tall white woman walked in holding a lantern. She was followed by a girl of twelve or thirteen who carried a tray laden with food and cups of water. Deanna wasted no time emptying one of the cups and attacking the bread and cheese with ravenous hunger. Then as the women took the tray to the father and son, she knelt at Thomas’s side, placed an arm under his shoulder and tried to raise him and put a cup to his lips. But she could hardly succeed in getting him to come to himself enough even to sip at it.

  “You poor dear,” said the woman. “How long has it been since you’ve eaten?”

  “We had some apples yesterday,” replied Deanna, “and before that it was a day or two. This tastes better than anything I’ve eaten in my life! Thank you, ma’am. But I’m worried about massa Thomas. He’s so weak and hurt—I can’t even get him to drink this cup of water.”

  The woman knelt down on Thomas’s other side. Now that she looked at him more closely she saw how pale his face was. She reached a hand to his forehead.

  “Lord have mercy!” she exclaimed. “The lad’s burning with fever.”

  She stood. “I’ll be back in a minute or two with a wet washrag,” she said. “We’ll try to cool him down. We have to get some water into him, and get him out of those wet clothes.”

  While the father and son ate and drank in silence, Deanna continued to try to get something into Thomas’s mouth.

  “Please, massa Thomas,” she said, “you’ve got to drink this water so you don’t get sick. We’re safe now. We got to the station and there’s a nice lady who’s going to help us. But you’ve got to drink, massa Thomas. You’re too hot. You’ve got to drink.”

  A feeble smile broke over Thomas’s parched lips. He reached up and touched Deanna’s hand holding the cup and eased it to his lips. He managed to take two or three swallows before falling back again on the straw, too weak to sit.

  When Travis Durkin and his three comrades caught back up with their regiment, Durkin went immediately to find Captain Young.

  “We lost him, Captain,” said Durkin, riding up alongside.

  “What happened?”

  “We got onto his trail, and we was close. He crossed the river and we followed him up the other side. We had dogs from one of the plantations and thought they was closing in. But them stupid mutts lost the trail. Before we knew it those fools was leading us back across the river, upstream across a narrow ford. We figured Davidson had crossed back. By then all we was doing was going around in circles. There weren’t nothing to do but give up. I don’t know where he got to, Captain, unless he’s hiding out in one of the farms round about. You want us to start searching them tomorrow?”

  Young thought a moment.

  “No,” he said at length. “I need you with the regiment. Besides, Davidson’s not worth it. We haven’t lost much. But I don’t want a deserter on my record. So you tell your boys to spread it around that you found him fallen off a cliff in the woods and you buried him right there. He went out in the night for his business, and with his wounds he stumbled and fell in the darkness and that was that. You got that, Corporal?”

  “Yes, sir, Captain. I’ll tell the boys.”

  Durkin wheeled his mount around and went back to join the others.

  Twenty-One

  The last letter to arrive at Greenwood from Thomas had been so full of despair that Carolyn was almost afraid to open the one that arrived midway through the month of October, 1863. She longed daily for some word from her son. Yet her mother s heart ached with grief for the loneliness she knew he felt.

  She stared at the envelope for some time until it gradually dawned on her that the handwriting on it was not Thomas’s. Nor had Thomas ever addressed a letter with the impersonal inscription: “Mr. and Mrs. Davidson.”

  A premonition seized her. She hesitated no longer but tore the envelope apart. With trembling fingers, she yanked out the single sheet inside and unfolded it.

  Dear Mr. and Mrs. Davidson, she read,

  I don’t know whether Thomas told you or not, but he and I have both been serving in the same regiment of Gen. Bragg’s army in Tennessee. Thomas was wounded pretty bad after the battle at Chickamauga last month. And during his recuperation, I regret to have to inform you, that he suffered a bad fall near where we were camped and did not recover. I speak for our captain, Capt. Young, and for the entire regiment, when I tell you that we are sorry for your loss. I told the captain that I knew you and would write to inform you of Thomas’s death.

  I am,

  Sincerely yours,

  Sgt. Cameron Beaumont.

  Twenty-Two

  During the week between November 19–25 of 1863, two events took place at opposite ends of the Union and the Confederacy. The one seemed so significant, the other insignificant even in the eyes and ears of those who witnessed it.

  At Chattanooga, with Ulysses Grant now in charge of federal forces, the Union reversed their loss at Chickamauga, and in another great victory for Grant, the Union now controlled the entire Tennessee and Mississippi river valleys. Atlanta was now in reach as Union forces in the West began inexorably to extend their control of the Confederacy eastward.

  Of far less note that week in the eyes of the nation
was President Lincoln’s trip to Gettysburg to speak a few words. He was billed as the second on the ticket to featured speaker Edward Everett, former governor of Massachusetts, at the dedication of a new Union cemetery at the scene of the horrific battle from five months earlier.

  Everett spoke for two hours. At last Lincoln rose.

  “Fourscore and seven years ago,” he began, “our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

  “Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

  “But in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that the government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

  PART FOUR

  BEGINNING OF HEALING

  January-September, 1864

  Twenty-Three

  Seth Davidson was no soldier. The captain of the regiment to which he had been assigned had tried to give him a gun to carry but he had refused it. He would rather be killed than kill.

  Neither was he a medic. The sight of blood sickened him as much as the thought of carrying a gun.

  But he could take photographs. He had learned his craft and was good at it. His editor, who sponsored and paid for his efforts, the Boston Herald’s Adrian McClarin, and the photographer who had trained him, Mr. Phillips, both said that he had a “cameraman’s eye” and knew how to capture on film the undefined essence that made this new medium unique. He was both artist and reporter. A silent reporter. He told stories without words. He had to point his camera in such a way that it could tell the story within the story, bringing out the emotion and pathos and heartache of the war. He wanted people to feel something when they looked at his photographs. Thus, photography had become for him far more than merely capturing images on film. He sought to capture the meaning those images had to convey.

  Seth began setting up his tripod as he had hundreds of times before. The fighting in and around the strategic Southern city of Chattanooga was in its second day. What everyone in the South had expected to be a turning point for the Confederacy was on its way to becoming yet one more victory for Union General Ulysses Grant.

  Seth could just see the general in the distance astride his horse about half a mile away. It was not his habit to photograph action. He had learned from experience that the movement was too rapid for his lens to stop sufficiently to get a decent picture. But he didn’t think there had yet been a photograph of Grant in battle. If he could preserve this moment on film, it would be historic.

  At last everything was ready. Seth lifted the black cloth hood and ducked under to make his final adjustments. Yes… Grant was still there… and not moving too fast. If he could just—

  The deafening explosion of an artillery shell sounded close beside him.

  He cried out as the blast threw him sprawling backward on the ground several feet away. Thinking at first he had been wounded, Seth struggled to his knees and felt about his legs and arms.

  He seemed to be all in one piece. He felt no pain. Then he remembered his equipment!

  He looked back to where he had been standing. The tripod and hood and camera were strewn all over the ground. But a second blast knocked him flat again. This time when he picked himself up and looked about through the dull haze of smoke and several nearby fires, he heard yelling and men crying out for help.

  He struggled again to his knees. Medics were running toward the scene from the medical wagons back behind the fighting where he had his own supplies.

  Seth managed to stand. He walked toward what was left of his camera. Thirty feet beyond a man lay moaning. Seth tried to walk, then, as his strength returned, ran toward him and stooped down.

  “Where are you hurt?” he said.

  “Are you kidding!” groaned the man. “I feel like my leg’s blown off!”

  “You’ve still got them both,” said Seth. “Come on, let’s get you out of here.”

  He slipped his hands under the man’s shoulders and legs and lifted him off the ground.

  With the man in his arms, Seth staggered back the way he had come, but had only managed to take a few steps when the whine of another shell screamed past them. He heard a thud almost at the very spot where the man had been lying.

  “Run, kid!” cried the man. “Run before it goes!”

  Seth stumbled on. But the man was heavy and his own legs were still wobbly.

  He managed to get back to where he had been standing before the shell suddenly exploded behind them, throwing both again to the ground. When the echo died away, once more Seth picked himself up and hurried back to the soldier. He slipped as he went and fell in a wet patch, again picked himself off the ground then lifted the wounded man once again and struggled toward the medical wagons, stepping over bodies as he went, artillery exploding and whining through the air everywhere. When they were out of the range of fire, at last he set the man down beside one of the wagons.

  A medic thanked him and took charge of the man.

  “Guess I’ll get this mud cleaned off, then go see about my camera,” said Seth.

  “What mud?” said the medic. “What you slipped in back there wasn’t mud.”

  Seth glanced down. The entire front of his shirt and trousers were covered with blood.

  “I wouldn’t go back for that camera of yours just yet,” added the medic. “Not until the fighting shifts. But you saved this man’s life. That’s pretty good work for one day, even if you got no photographs.”

  Seth stumbled away, repulsed to see the blood of another man all over him.

  After Chattanooga, though there was little fighting throughout the winter, McClarin had wanted him to travel through the western states where Grant had subdued the western armies of the Confederacy, and down the Mississippi. Seth visited and photographed Shiloh, then Memphis and Vicksburg and then traveled down to New Orleans. He would much rather have gone home. But for now, McClarin was his boss.

  All this would not last forever, he told himself. As the first few months of 1864 passed, he hoped that maybe this would finally be the year it would all come to an end.

  As much as he loved photography and was grateful to Mr. McClarin, he hated this war.

  Twenty-Four

  One fine afternoon in March of 1864, Carolyn Davidson bounced along the road to Dove’s Landing in a solitary buggy. Cynthia and Cherity had both offered to accompany her, but she needed some time alone. Since the arrival of Cameron’s letter, the entire Greenwood community had grieved, each in his own way. But no matter what happened, the women looked to her and the men looked to Richmond for strength. Right now, however, she didn’t want to be strong. She wanted to be weak, vulnerable, confused, angry, hurt. She didn’t want anyone watching her. No, she didn’t want to have to be strong, because she wasn’t strong.

  Still… life continued on.

  It always did. The best—indeed, the only—way to move beyond grief, was simply to continue on. To do what God set before you to do.

  Though sever
al months had passed, the grief continued to come and go in unexpected waves. A good week or two… then more tears and heartache. How long would it be before she got used to it?

  The needs of the household did not stop, even for a tragedy. Just yesterday Nancy brought word that one of the black women in town was sick.

  As Carolyn rode into Dove’s Landing, she carried a list for supplies, and a basket of provisions for Mrs. Thomkins. She intended to call on the invalid first, drop off a jug of soup and loaf of fresh bread, then continue to Baker’s Mercantile to pick up what they needed from Mrs. Baker. It was a relief to get away. And a relief to know that Mrs. Thomkins knew nothing about Thomas.

  The day was warm and pleasant. By the time she reached the Thomkins’s shack at the edge of town, Carolyn had managed to push away at least some of the sorrow of the last few days and summon a smile to her lips.

  After a brief visit with Mrs. Thomkins, Carolyn climbed back in the buggy and continued into town. But Delaware Thomkins’s words still rang in her ears.

  “Dis be a turrible, turrible war,” the old woman had said. “How long it gwine last? How much mo’ bloodshed duz dere hab ter be? It’s a turrible war! Too many boys dyin’… too many boys!”

  A tear fell down Carolyn’s cheek. So many days, so many long nights she had prayed and cried and worried over Seth and Thomas. Now her youngest was gone.

  “Why, Lord?” she whispered silently.

  She rode up to Mrs. Baker’s store, climbed down from the buggy, and walked inside. As she greeted Mrs. Baker and began to fill her list from about the shop, she thought she detected a cool response from the shopkeeper. Finally Mrs. Baker walked toward her with an embarrassed look on her face.