“Mrs., uh… Mrs. Davidson,” she said timidly.
“Yes, Mrs. Baker,” replied Carolyn.
“I… uh, do not want to have to… but, well—it is just that… I hope you understand, but I simply cannot extend you further credit, without some payment on the Greenwood account.”
“Oh… oh, I see,” said Carolyn in surprise. “Yes… I realize we are somewhat behind in our payments. I am sorry, Mrs. Baker. You know how it is through the winter.”
“Yes, of course, Mrs. Davidson, but… the account is higher than usual.”
“Why don’t you give me the balance, Mrs. Baker.”
“I happen to have checked on it when you came in. It… amounts to $163, Mrs. Davidson.”
“Goodness, that high! I am sorry—I had no idea. I will talk to Richmond this afternoon and see what we can to do settle the account.”
“I couldn’t help overhearing, Mrs. Davidson,” said another woman in the shop, now walking up to Carolyn.
“Oh… hello, Mrs. Stretton,” said Carolyn.
“Things are bad everywhere,” the lady went on. “I heard that half the McClellans’ slaves are gone.”
“They are not the only ones,” said another woman, walking over to join them, Mrs. Perkins, wife of the bank manager. “Dozens of loans all around town are behind… but you heard nothing from me!”
“It is a shame what this war has done to Virginia,” added Mrs. Stretton.
“It will be over soon,” Mrs. Perkins went on. “Then everything will return to normal.”
“Will it?” said Carolyn with a sad smile. “I don’t know, Mrs. Perkins… I hope you are right.”
“Of course it will. Once the men are home they will put the Negroes in their place. When do you expect your boys home, Mrs. Davidson?”
The abrupt question took Carolyn by surprise.
“I, uh… I am not certain,” she said. “But… Thomas will not be coming home.”
She burst into tears and ran from the store, leaving the three women staring after her.
Two days later, the blacks of the community came to Greenwood for Sunday service as was their custom. Since the war they had taken to meeting in the largest of Greenwood’s barns and no longer tried to keep the unofficial church secret. Everything was changed. No one was worried about being arrested for teaching or preaching to blacks, or holding public gatherings with slaves, or former slaves, depending on one’s point of view. If anyone wanted to arrest her, Carolyn said, let them. She still regularly urged Richmond to take over leadership of the small black congregation. But he continued to insist that it was a unique ministry to the women that God had given to her, not him.
After several hymns, Carolyn stood to face the fifteen or eighteen women and handful of men. On this particular Sunday, Richmond, Cynthia, and Cherity had gone into Dove’s Landing for the services there.
“Good morning, ladies and you men who have come,” she said, trying to put on a smile and remind herself that all of these dear ones had suffered loss too. Nancy Shaw had lost a husband. To have been a slave in this country meant you lost loved ones. Her loss of a son was no more tragic than the great tragedy of slavery, or of this terrible war. Tens of thousands of mothers just like her were weeping for the sons they would never see again.
“This is a day,” Carolyn went on, Bible in her hand, “when it may be difficult for some of us to remind ourselves of all the Lord has done for us. But to help us remember that even in the darkest hours of life, God is always beside us and watching over us, I want to read to you the story of the Israelites and about something that happened to them in the desert when—”
She stopped and turned away. Hot tears stung her eyes. Again a great wave of fresh unplanned grief suddenly poured over her. She tried to regain her composure, but it was no use. The tears would not stop.
She sat down on the nearest bale of straw and buried her face in her hands.
The barn grew silent.
After thirty or forty seconds, Nancy Shaw rose and walked forward. Old Mary got up and followed her.
Carolyn felt a gentle hand on her shoulder, then another. Gradually the two black women were followed by others who gathered around her. She was no longer white and they black. She was no longer the wife of their former master. She was no longer their unofficial pastor. She was a woman, as they were women. They were all women together. When one of their hearts ached, they ached as one.
“Miz Dab’son,” said Nancy, “it’s gwine be all right. Dat’s what you’s always tellin’ us, dat da Lord’s good, dat he takes care er his chilluns.”
At last Carolyn looked up. She saw six or eight black faces in a circle around her. She wiped her eyes and forced a smile.
“I know,” she said softly. “You’re right, Nancy.”
“Dat’s gotta be good fo’ you too, jes’ like fo’ us,” now said Mary. “He’s got massa Thomas in his heart too.”
She paused a moment, then Carolyn was surprised to hear her break out in prayer.
“Dear Lawd,” prayed Mary, “we’s ax dat you’d comfort our dear Miz Dab’son an’ her man an’ da res’ ob dere family at dis time er grief an’ tribulashun. She’s taught us all ’bout you an’ how you takes care ob folks like us, an’ now it’s her dat’s needin’ sum takin’ care ob.”
“Amen!” said several of the ladies.
“So, Lawd,” Mary went on, “ef you’s dat good Father like she tells us, den she’s needin’ fo’ you ter show her sum ob dat compashun right now, ’cause dis be sum sore trial an’ dey needs you mo’ den eber afore.”
Carolyn looked up into Mary’s face.
“Oh, Mary, thank you for that lovely prayer!” she said. “I know God is good. But it hurts to lose a son!”
“Ain’t no mo’ den what God dun,” rejoined Mary. “He los’ a son too.”
When Richmond returned from town he found Carolyn facedown on their bed. He sat beside her and laid a gentle hand on her back. She wept again for a minute or two, then turned toward him. She drew in a deep sigh, then told him what had taken place earlier.
“Mary, the dear!” said Carolyn. “The dear woman! Everything I’ve been trying to teach these humble folk all these years about God’s goodness… and they prayed for me! More has been getting through than I realized.”
Again Carolyn let out a long sigh.
“Oh… but, Richmond, it is hard to practice what you preach!” she said. “Our poor blacks have suffered in life far more than we can imagine. And I tell them that God is good. Now it is my turn to find out whether I believe it or not.”
“And do you?”
“Of course. But even God’s goodness doesn’t make the pain go away. It just means that there is a goodness in the universe that lies deeper than the world’s pain.”
“And sometimes it is suffering that enables us to see the goodness.”
“If we know where to look,” added Carolyn with a sigh. “Perhaps I need to look a little harder.”
The next letter to arrive at Greenwood was more welcome than the last they had received from the battlefront. Though its news was not so shattering, it yet brought tears to the eyes of its Greenwood readers.
Dear Mother, Father, Cherity, and Cynthia, Seth began.
As is often the case, I sit down to write as a way to forget the dreadful sights with which my days are filled. In this small way I can be with you for a while in the midst of my aloneness. Not a moment goes by that I do not think of you. Yet sometimes writing is so painful it increases the loneliness all the more. The mere act of sitting down to a blank page can be almost too overwhelming. I miss you all so much that it is easier not even to try. This war wears me down every day. All I can do at day’s end is lie down in a cot in a tent or perhaps, if I am lucky, occasionally in a real bed, and try to sleep. Sleep is the only remedy for the horror.
The battles are indescribable to one who has not been there. How much more terrifying to be in the very midst of it, with gunfire and confusion and yel
ling and explosions all around. At least I am able to sit on a hill somewhat removed from it all and watch from a distance. But once the smoke and gunfire die away it is we photographers, along with the medics and nurses, who see the horrors of what is left behind—the bodies strewn everywhere, creeks and streams running red with blood, overturned wagons and carts, horses bloating because there are too many human casualties to worry about the animals. The one thing the camera lens cannot capture is the horrible stench of death after days of battle.
I was at Gettysburg and when it was over there were so many bodies that I could hardly walk ten paces without having to step over a dead boy no older than myself, bodies leaning against fences or on the slope of a hill, gray pale faces leering in grotesque silence at any who passed by. I always think that they are all boys like me, with families who probably do not even yet know that they are dead, families who will forever feel the pain ofa loss that seems to me so senseless. The longer this war goes on, rather than grow in significance, it means less and less. Does anyone in the Confederacy actually still think it is worth it?
I have photographed a boy with no arms, a man with no legs, a prisoner of war so malnourished he more resembled a skeleton. Many are the times I have turned away from my camera and wept inside, sometimes shedding tears, for the sights I have seen. They are images that will never leave my mind. Though every day I long to forget what I have seen, I also hope I will not forget. No one should ever forget the terrible cost in human suffering of war.
Yesterday I visited a field hospital. As I made my way through the rows of wounded, visiting some of the men, asking where they were from, suddenly the most horrifying shriek erupted, though the men lying nearby hardly flinched. What was that, I asked. Just another leg being amputated, someone told me. That kind of screaming goes on all day. It’s the lucky ones who have whatever they’re going to lose blown off in battle. That way it’s over quickly. That’s what the man told me. And he was one to know—he was lying there in bed without an arm, cut off, he told me, by a doctor with a saw two inches above the elbow.
I do not always observe the battles from a detached distance for I am often pressed into service with the medics. The sheer volume of injury and bloodshed is so great that they need all the help they can get. The nurses who follow the armies from battle to battle are the most amazing people I have ever met. Clara Barton is one of the most well known, but there are thousands like her. Their selflessness and compassion are some of the only bright spots of this war.
McClarin is grateful far my work and is exhibiting it in Boston as well as at the Brady exhibit in New York. But being the one to take the photographs is sometimes more than my stomach is able to bear. Simply keeping food down is a greater problem than you might think.
Being a photographer is not without its dangers. We are, as a class, lumped together as journalists, who enjoy a certain level of protection and freedom to move about more than a soldier in uniform. I can ride a train or walk through a Southern town or even, when I am lucky, stay in a hotel or boardinghouse. But when they learn that I work for a Boston paper, instantly they are suspicious. In the South journalists are almost despised, every one suspected of being a spy for the Union. They assume that journalists are listening and taking notes as they move here and there, and then running off to the nearest telegraph office to dispatch their news back to their paper. In the imaginations of many, all the dark secrets, by this means, find their way into the hands of the Union generals. Many journalists have been beaten, even shot.
My big news is that President Lincoln has named Gen. Grant commander of all the Union armies. And Mr. McClarin has secured an invitation in March for me to attend a reception at the White House to be held upon his arrival to receive his new commission from the president himself. We are hopeful that I will have the opportunity to photograph him! Now that he is coming east perhaps the war will not last too much longer.
What do you hear from Thomas? I hope and pray he is safe.
Carolyn broke into tears at Seth’s question and handed the letter to Cherity. She and Richmond left the house hand in hand.
“I will have to write and tell him,” said Richmond.
“I wish we did not have to tell him at all,” said Carolyn through her tears. “He has too much death around him as it is. But I know we cannot keep it from him.”
Twenty-Five
The war years had not been particularly kind to Harland Davidson, attorney at law, in Richmond, Virginia. The citizens of the Confederate capital had been too consumed of late with trying to keep the Union army at bay to require the services of a lawyer to draw up deeds, contracts, or depositions.
Things were not going well all through the South. For the first time in his life, Harland found himself envying Stuart living in Philadelphia. He wondered what things were like up there.
He set aside the newspaper in his hand and sat back in his chair thinking about what he had just read. Stuart had predicted it last Christmas, and now this news that Grant had been appointed Union commander and was coming east… it did not bode well for the Confederacy. He probably would have to get out of Richmond, as Stuart had said.
He thought back to Christmas when the four of them had been together at Pamela’s. When the conversation had turned to their cousin, as it invariably did, it came out that Harland and Stuart had received their end-of-the-year payments on time, but the two girls hadn’t.
“How far behind is he?” Harland had asked.
“I haven’t heard from him in two months,” replied Margaret. “Last quarter’s draft was a month late, and now this quarter’s hasn’t come at all.”
“And you, Pamela?”
“Its been about the same, I think.”
“Neither of you has received a check?”
Both girls shook their heads.
“Then we’ve got him!” Harland had exclaimed. “That is so like Richmond, paying us on time while he defaults with the two of you so that Stuart and I won’t get suspicious—it’s nothing but outright deceit.”
“But what can you do?” asked Pamela.
“File proceedings against him, of course,” replied Harland. “It’s what we’ve been waiting for all along.”
“But, Harland… do we really even want Greenwood now… I mean with the war and everything?” said Stuart. “Especially if it’s failing. I’m certainly not going down there. The way I hear it, Grant is going to ravage the whole area this spring and make an assault on Richmond that Jefferson Davis will not soon forget. You need to get out of there. And with all that going on, do we really want Greenwood? None of the rest of us want it—do you?”
“Probably not… though who can tell?” replied Harland. “Perhaps one day I might return there, after the war, of course. I was always fond of the place.”
“You’re not going to live there, Harland. Let’s be realistic—so what if the money is a little late? It is still the most practical way for us to get our portion out of Aunt Ruth’s estate.”
“The point isn’t about any of us living there or actually operating it as a day-to-day enterprise. Of course I don’t mean that. All I want to do is knock Richmond down off his holier-than-thou perch, and for us to get what is rightfully ours. I assume, once we have Richmond out of there, that we will sell it, perhaps break it into smaller parcels, have those huge oaks and other trees cut and milled into lumber. We stand to make a good deal of money—more than $225 a quarter. There are already opportunists from the North coming down looking for property to snatch up. All we have to do is provide it for them.”
“And you actually think you can pull it off?” asked Stuart.
“I am an attorney, Stuart. We can do anything!” he laughed. “To answer your question—yes, I’ve been saving a few cards up my sleeve for just such an occasion as this.”
“Will you file immediately?” asked Margaret.
“I think it will be best to wait until he reneges on payment to all four of us. So, Margaret… Pam,” he said glancin
g back and forth between the two women, “you have to let us know if you fail to receive another payment. I will get to work on the papers, and once he has missed a payment to all of us, or two payments in succession to either of you, I will file them.”
He raised the glass of eggnog in his hand. A cunning smile spread over his lips.
“To the future Davidson heirs,” he said.
“Hear, hear!” added Stuart, lifting his own glass to his cousin.
And now, in March, thought Harland, they just had to await developments… and hope Grant did not overrun the city.
Twenty-Six
Greenwood’s workforce and financial outlook continued to decline as the weather warmed and the planting season approached. By then Richmond knew he had no alternative but to ask his cousins for extensions on their loan payments. With no money in the bank, what else could he do? It wasn’t even a matter of asking for extensions. He would simply have to tell them he couldn’t pay them for a while.
Their aid to blacks fleeing the South had in some ways changed dramatically, yet in other ways was much the same. Since Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of a year and a half earlier, all slaves were supposed to be free. There was no more slavery.
Yet technically, too, in its own eyes, the eleven states of the Confederacy were no longer part of the United States of America at all. Abraham Lincoln wasn’t their president. His proclamations meant nothing. So plantation owners throughout the South, many more war-ravaged than Greenwood, tried to go on as usual, telling their slaves nothing and treating them as always, secure in the belief that the old Southern ways would go on forever. For the great majority of blacks in the South, therefore, slavery indeed continued as before.
But the Underground Railroad had by then established such an intricate system of stealthy communication that word of Lincoln’s proclamation spread through the slave shanties of the South like a silent, invisible brushfire. While their masters and overseers pretended that nothing had changed, the vast slave population of the South began, one man and one woman at a time, to look around and say, “Maybe we don’t hab ter live like dis no mo’.”
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