by Alice Pung
Gettysburg had been a rural farming town of 2200, and only one civilian was reported to have been killed during the battle – a woman named Jennie Wade, who was baking bread in her house when she was hit by a stray bullet that went through two doors. The house in which she died is now a museum. It is incredible in this day and age to think that in a battle of 51,000 military casualties, only one civilian was killed.
But this war was not a civil one, fought brother between brother, as had been romanticised in the past for the purposes of achieving social cohesion in the new Union. This was clear when I saw photographs of piles and piles of amputated limbs, or pictures of all the bodies buried in shallow graves. As Professor Peter Carmichael of Gettysburg College led us through the battlefields, we stood in spots where thousands of men were killed in twenty minutes of battle, which later became the same place that the KKK held its rallies in the 1920s.
Today, confederate flags hang from shopfronts, and inside the souvenir stores you can buy grey (confederate) and blue (union) caps, Abraham Lincoln bobbleheads, and whole toy soldier packets for little children to re-enact the Civil War. I have to remind myself that this war was fought before the invention of plastic.
Almost every gift shop along Steinwehr Street advertises ‘Real Civil War Relics’, which largely consist of buttons and bullets. Everything back then, in the mid-nineteenth century, seemed organic except for bullets and buttons, everything melted back into the ground. But bullets and buttons – these were the only relics that did not decompose. Here, you can buy a bullet for three dollars (or four dollars for an unexploded bullet). I held a bullet in my hand. Encrusted with the lime of age, it was white and heavy, with a wide round tip. How strange to think that something so metallic, so inorganic, so tiny, could lodge in the living, breathing mass of a person. These Civil War soldiers back then would not have looked up at the sky to imagine that a little over fifty years later, tonnes of metal would be able to float in the atmosphere, able to drop iron eggs that exploded on the ground. Human beings can bring inanimate objects to life, but they cannot bring living creatures back from death.
So we preserve all that we can – the names of the regiments, the nameless remains at Arlington National Cemetery, the Gettysburg battleground, the letters from dead soldiers. In 1862, a college-educated northern lieutenant named Rush P. Cady wrote about sacrificing lives upon the altar of one’s country:
The march of progress always goes through the battlefield. Good men have always fought to maintain & defend great principles. Good governments cost blood & treasure in the founding & also the preservation. The individual man is but a tool for the promotion of the progress & welfare of the whole race.
However, John Futch, a 26-year-old illiterate Southern soldier who dictated his letters home, felt differently. He was a New Hanover County man who owned three slaves. In his letter dated 19 July 1863, to his wife, he had just witnessed his brother’s death:
Charley got kild and he suffered graideal from his wound he lived a night and a day after he was wounded we sead hard times thare … I am all … sick all the time and half crazy I never wanted to come home so bad in my life but it is so that I cant come at this time I want to come home so bad that I am home sick I want you to keep charleys pistol and if I ever git it back I will keep it … I staid with Charley until he died he never spoke after he was woundid until he died I never was hurt so in my life.
John Futch’s letters home reveal an increasing desperation, homesickness, and escalating desire to be away from battle. His wife Martha’s yearning for him sprawls across the pages (‘dear husband I shal come to see you if you aint back by april for I want to see you veary bad’); but he wrote to tell her not to come to find him, reassuring her that he would be home soon. Shortly after the death of his brother Charley, Futch deserted the army. He was caught, sent back and executed in front of his fellow soldiers. The Confederate government made an example of John Futch’s death: ‘We do hope that the melancholy fate of these deluded men will … put a stop to the crime of desertion from the army.’
This was an era where post-traumatic stress didn’t exist. Lieutenant Cady had left Hamilton College to fight in the war. While rallying his men on the first day of Gettysburg, he was struck by a minié ball and died of his injuries three weeks later. He was only twenty-two. Historians have asked whether his faith in heroic abstractions would also have survived if he too had survived the war. This was a time when personal feelings were subjugated for a greater cause, and the cause was meant to direct the course of a person’s feelings. So what exactly was this greater cause? The survival of the Union, the fate of slavery, and the common rights of citizenship. Only two of these issues are resolved in the United States today.
Although there perhaps still exist some in the Southern states today who maintain that the Civil War was about the Southern states opposing the control of the new federal government, these states were largely agrarian economies dependent on slaves for the cotton trade. So this war was also undeniably about the right of Southern landowners to own slaves, which had been outlawed in the North in the very early part of the nineteenth century.
In the South, fewer than four slaves out of a hundred lived past the age of sixty. By the age of twelve, when a slave was sent to the fields, they had rotten teeth, worms, dysentery. Slaves, with their owners’ consent, were allowed to marry, but their marriages were not recognised under law because they were considered chattels, not people. Preachers had to modify the wedding vows for them to till death or distance do us part, because slaves had three to four masters in their lifetimes. In 1860, four million men, women and children were slaves.
I went into Gettysburg Museum and saw the duplicate slave auction posters, which listed the slaves’ ages, descriptions and prices. Some who were of ‘unsound mind’ or ‘infirm’ cost around $200, others who were in their prime – and especially if they were of a ‘high yellow’ colour – were valued at over a thousand dollars. Beneath the poster would be a line stating: ‘Some cattle, and farm-stock also available at auction’ and ‘As prices are so low, cash only’.
Even after the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, human beings were still regarded as chattels. When we visited Birmingham, we were guided around the town by Pamela King, a professor at the University of Alabama who teaches a subject called ‘Mansions, Mines and Jim Crow’. Founded in 1871, Birmingham was a post–Civil War city, built during the middle of the Reconstruction era. Between 1875 and 1928, Alabama profited from a form of prison labour known as the convict-lease system. Under this system, companies and individuals paid fees to state and county governments in exchange for the labour of prisoners. Professor King explained that when the city passed its first vagrancy act, anyone not working the very moment he was spotted by police could be arrested and taken to the county jails, and then transported to the Birmingham mines. Between 20 and 43 per cent of the miners died every year. Unlike slaves, who had a value because they were personal property, these convicts were entirely expendable. More than 95 per cent of county prisoners and 90 per cent of state prisoners were African American, and whipping was the accepted norm for punishment.
From 1975 to 1979, Pol Pot of Cambodia and his Khmer Rouge soldiers also kept slaves, and they too did not buy or sell them. They all belonged to the revolution. The entire nation was divided up into different work collectives. Each collective consisted of a couple of thousand people, and they were worked to death or executed in the fields. That is why that area and era is known now as the killing fields. My father, along with the entire population of Cambodia, was kept working in Democratic Kampuchea, as the country came to be known. ‘To keep you is no gain, to kill you is no loss’ was the Khmer Rouge motto, drilled into the brains of every worker under the revolution, day in and day out. Pol Pot turned time back to Year Zero. He wanted to start civilisation from scratch, from a point of time that didn’t exist anymore.
How do you write about a completely subjugated human being – who also
happens to be your father and someone whom you love no end – when you were not there, when you can only see the after-effects, which in your childhood and adolescence you took to be an excessive need to control? I had hoped that this trip would help me understand this part of our personal history a little better by allowing me to see the larger forces that shape or contort human nature.
What had kept my father alive? Perhaps human will is stronger than subjugation. This is what we would like to believe, as people of faith and reason. But it could also possibly be that even animals locked up and tortured try and stay alive. Thomas Jefferson wrote that maintaining slavery was like holding a wolf by its ears, too afraid to let go in case it bit the master. At what point does a human become an animal? When they are sold alongside animals? When they start eating food left out for pigs? When they scrabble against their ailing father for a piece of bread, as Elie Weisel wrote in Night? When they start eating scorpions and rats, as my father did? Or do they get to become human again when they survive? To survive means to stay alive, and sometimes staying alive means shutting off certain faculties. You reduce your existence to your five senses, because anything more would use up energy. Often, it is only after the traumatic event that your full spectrum of feeling sets in. When my father had to cut up his leather belt and boil it for hours, in secret, to feed to his family, it was as François Bizot wrote: ‘A man’s life was reduced to his digestive tube.’
After the revolution, my family was lucky enough to arrive in a new country that accepted the shell-shocked, the frail and the sick-at-heart: a heavily pregnant young woman (my mother), a 72-year-old grandmother and her son (my father) who buried bodies with the same hands that held a soft-bristled toothbrush to brush the baby teeth of his four children. All of us born in Australia, none of us slaves, subjugated citizens or denied our human rights in any way.
From the ‘collectives’ of the killing fields to raising four children in Australia, adjusting to a new social and political order could not have been easy for my parents. ‘We never thought much about the future when we were in Cambodia,’ my mother told me. ‘We just lived from day to day, in the same way, all our lives, until the war broke out.’ Now they get the newspaper, and Dad reads through the lifestyle magazine section, mesmerised by the way people can choose to ‘style’ their lives like their houses. My siblings and I were taught at school from a very young age, by well-intentioned teachers, that we should dream large because we had infinite potential. Perhaps this was quite similar to the way American children are taught in schools, except for one significant difference: our individual aspirational narratives were never tied to the fate of our nation. Australia referred to itself as ‘the lucky country’ when I was growing up, a recognition that life was a bit of a gamble and we just happened to be on top of things for once. But there was also a deep-seated acknowledgement that this could very easily shift. After all, we do not have ‘inspirational’ presidents like Lincoln, Roosevelt or Obama. There is a tendency to cut our tall poppies down. Before the rise of sporting idols, our national hero was Ned Kelly, a bushranger who wore a tin can over his head as armour until he was caught by the police and hanged in the old Melbourne Gaol. Until his luck ran out.
I had not heard of the term ‘American exceptionalism’ until I was in the States. Somehow, to cultivate the idea that a group of people can be the chosen ones, can be gifted with a mission, can be blessed with an abundance that other countries in the world do not have, is to deliberately cultivate in the national psyche a guppie memory. But this selective spring clean-out of the country’s history has been so successful that it is difficult to imagine overseas that America – a country which presents itself to the rest of the world as a unified force imbued with immeasurable wealth, modernity and power – was once a group of warring states divided by an ideology deep enough to rival that of North and South Vietnam in the 1960s. Of course, during the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement was also taking shape in America. The Republican Party used to be ‘the Party of Lincoln’ while the Democrats in the South had imposed racial segregation by law. Steadily and stealthily, the course of history crept on and allegiances that men had once believed were immutable, allegiances for which they had even died, were now reversing, cooling, shifting. So to believe in any form of exceptionalism is to follow a narrative along a straight trajectory, like a bullet.
Yet to live in America is to know that there are places that have it much worse. Perhaps that is why some poor people in Morgan City, Louisiana and Alabama still have American flags planted firmly in the front yards of their properties, which house trailers or kit homes. Growing up in Melbourne, we lived in similar suburbs, but no one ever planted an Australian flag in the front yard.
When they first arrived in Australia and before their blind pursuit of the Australian Dream, our parents had friends. Most of them survived the killing fields; some fought in the Vietnam War; some were conscripted, like one of my uncles, who was pulled out of his village, an AK-47 shoved in his hands. Life in a democracy was baffling. The women sighed a lot; the men were reticent. They were all scared of authority – the government, police, ticket inspectors on public transport, even parking inspectors. Sometimes they talked about the Black Thieves, which was what they called the Khmer Rouge. Yet with the glassy-eyed unfaltering optimism of a Gatsby, my father believed in the Great Australian Dream, which was very similar to the Great American Dream and all those ‘Great Dreams’ of democratic Western countries, lands of the free and homes of the brave: the unfaltering faith that if you worked hard enough and never gave up, success was inevitable. This belief was their buffer against trauma and being stuck in the quagmire of the past.
Barbara Ehrenreich writes in The Dark Roots of American Optimism about how the Calvinism brought to New England by the white settlers seemed to be a ‘system of socially imposed depression’, and how the movement towards positive thinking was a rebellion against the emotional austerity imposed by the Church and society. If you replace the religious purpose with political motivation, the following description sounds eerily like the ideology of a socialist dictatorship:
The task for the Living was to constantly examine ‘the loathsome abominations that lie in his bosom,’ seeking to uproot the sinful thoughts that are a sure sign of damnation. Calvinism offered only one form of relief from this anxious work of self-examination, and that was another form of labor – clearing, planting, stitching, building up farms and businesses. Anything other than labor of either the industrious or spiritual sort – idleness or pleasure – was a contemptible sin.
Ehrenreich argues that the contemporary glo-white-smile brand of American optimism derived not from conformity but from a need to rebel against the Puritanical past. Instead of toiling to uproot evil from one’s soul, one could work to enjoy the fruits of God’s blessings. This was epitomised by the cheery and stoic wagon-progress mentality of the March sisters in Little Women, and as the decades progressed it gave rise to writers like Emerson, and later Norman Vincent Peale with his bestselling The Power of Positive Thinking. Yet when the complexities and problems with American identity and citizenship culminated in civil unrest, particularly in the ’60s and ’70s, people’s peripheral vision could no longer be deliberately willed away. However, it could be distracted, with the ever-increasing lures of modern consumer society: things to own, things to be, things to eat.
The food in America looks and tastes good, in the way a child’s drawing of food might be good: yellow corn. Orange cheese. Red ketchup. Bright violet yoghurt. No green except diluted in lettuce leaves. What is the rationale for inventing food that contains less nutritional value than eating a leather belt? Perhaps the logic is that poor people are only going to get hungry again anyway, so let’s just focus on the taste of the food. Give the indigent a little bit of happiness before they lose their teeth and die of heart attacks inside their kit homes.
Travelling through Louisiana, we stayed in the Bayou Breaux Bridge Bed and Breakfast. I spent two
nights in the 1950s Elvis cabin, a cheery little space decked out entirely in the vintage optimism of the era – plastic flowers; crocheted bedspread; black and white Laminex tiles; and, of course, the King all over the mirrors, hanging from the wall with one finger pointed towards the firmament, and even as an enormous plaster bust on top of a cupboard. But we ate well. We went to the Crazy ’70s Bout Crawfish Cajun Café and feasted on boiled crabs, deep-fried Oreos and deep-fried bread and butter pudding.
We went to New Orleans, the Big Easy, where the food was slow and the music was fast. We watched the filming of the TV series Treme, met the creator David Simon, drank hurricanes and ate gumbo. Suddenly, this trip was beginning to become fun for me. It was beginning to remind me of my first trip to the States two years ago. Surrounded by its green paddocks and rows of cornfields, the University of Iowa was the ideal place for me to begin writing my first young-adult book. Two years later, I completed a book about a man who survived a genocide in Cambodia and his relationship with his daughter. The story that emerged had not been the story I had set out to write at all. After handing in the final edits, I set off for my second trip to the United States, on this Fall and Recovery tour, feeling much trepidation and anxiety about whether I should have written what I had.
Then I met Madeleine Thien, the extraordinary Canadian writer whose recent book, Dogs on the Perimeter, deals with memory and grief and reads like a gentle, heart-starting poem. Maddie and I spoke a lot about Cambodia. She had visited the killing fields and the genocide museum a number of times, and I learnt a lot from her about quiet courage. I also met Khet Mar, a Burmese writer who is on political asylum in Pittsburgh, and whose unfaltering knife-sharp sense of justice made me see the places we visited through new eyes.