Varina(15)

—Yes. I’d like to know about you and Mr. Davis. Particularly him letting me stay there, living in the same big room with his children, joining them with their tutor, learning to read. Me living like that in the presidential mansion of the Confederate States of America seems . . . James pauses, searches for the words, and finally says dryly, Of a low order of probability.

V smiles and says, You can take your tongue out of your cheek. However unlikely, it did happen. He went to the courthouse himself to get papers verifying you were free. We had photographs of all the children taken not long after you came. Maybe they still exist—I hope so. You’re in them, standing plump-cheeked wearing a little striped suit. I don’t know why he didn’t object to you being there—maybe because he didn’t have the energy to fight the war and me at the same time. To be able to live together we learned to pick our battles.

—Really, in blunt terms, my question is simple. If I’d been darker would he have let you keep me? Would he have picked that battle?

—Again, I don’t think you need me to answer that question.

—What about you? Would you have stopped my beating and taken me home? Included me in the family pictures? Taken me with you fleeing Richmond?

—Fleeing America, to be precise.

—Would you have done it?

—Truth?

James nods.

—I don’t know, V says. I hope so.

—Did we leave Richmond on a train? The other day I thought I remembered sleeping on a wood bench in a passenger car.

—Not bare wood, but a bad trip from the start, V says. At least I had my little suicide pistol to comfort me.





Falling Apart


March 1865


AT THE STATION A STUB OF TRAIN WAITED—A LOCOMOTIVE with a wood car, baggage car, and one old unpainted passenger car fitted with red velvet upholstery worn silvery bald in patches. V and Ellen and the children settled in. The Trenholm girls—beautiful daughters of the secretary of the treasury, one of the richest men in America before the war—arrived like they were embarking on a pleasure cruise. The only men were Burton Harrison, Jefferson’s secretary, and James Morgan, an officer—both in their twenties. Morgan had been yanked out of the trenches of Petersburg for this mission because Jefferson—still sometimes a romantic—knew love brewed between Morgan and one of the Trenholm girls and didn’t want him to be among the last to die. Burton had accompanied V on all her emergency flights from Richmond—as protector, assistant, substitute husband—and they had long since become tight friends.

For the children V and Ellen made pallets of quilts on the floor between the rows of seats. Maggie and Billy and Jeffy and Jimmie lay down and pulled covers to their eyebrows. Jefferson came aboard and kissed cheeks and made assurances. Wished Morgan and the Trenholm girls bon voyage. He took Burton with him onto the platform, and they talked pretty urgently.

V sat next to Ellen and took her hand and said, You don’t have to go with me. If it’s better for you to stay here, then stay.

Ellen sat a long time looking down at the floor before saying, There’s not anything here for me. And you can’t handle all the children by yourself.

—Coming with me could get very bad.

—Bad here too with no money and food scarce till crops start growing. And besides, if it does get bad the children will need us both.

Somewhere in the night, only an hour or two below Petersburg, the locomotive broke down. No explosion of steam or clash of metal. They coasted quietly to a stop in dark woods and then sat through dawn and sunset and another dawn before finally rolling again. Four days in all to cover fewer than three hundred miles to Charlotte, during which time the provisional nation crumbled and many people died. Sherman’s army still raged north after the burning of Columbia and no one knew what civilian target they would destroy next.

Word of V’s arrival in Charlotte preceded them, and an angry, howling mob waited at the station—people already beaten in war and now standing at a cliff edge with nowhere to go but down. Among them, deserters and draftees and relatives of the pointlessly dead. Manners collapsed into rage. They saw V through the car window and began reviling. They shouted curses largely aimed at her husband, but since he wasn’t present to absorb them, she would have to do. Burton convinced V and Ellen and the children to move away from the windows and huddle with the Trenholm girls in a corner, where they kept their courage up by making exaggerated shocked expressions at each angry vulgarity. V pulled her little weapon out and then realized the ammunition was packed away in a trunk, since she hadn’t anticipated needing to kill herself in Charlotte.

Burton and Morgan had just a pistol and a sword between them. They stood inside the door to the car, and when a few brave mobsters climbed the steps, Burton showed his pistol and said, No.

If ten men had decided to board the car and do whatever their rage told them to do once inside, they could have stormed the door and succeeded, losing only two or three men. But no one wanted to go first. They backed off and shouted a few minutes more about killing Jeff Davis and the whole bunch of rich slave owners their friends and family had died for. Soon they lost interest and drifted away.

Burton went door-to-door through Charlotte looking for lodging at hotels and private homes, but everyone feared retribution, whether from their own angry people or from Sherman if he swept through killing and burning—the same people would have treated V like the queen of England twelve months before. Burton finally found a man named Weil who said he would be glad to offer shelter. The Trenholm girls and Morgan were moving on, the train set to take them as far down the line as it could toward their house in upstate South Carolina, the Charleston house being out of the question because of Sherman. One of the girls said, Come join us. We’ll have a house party till they burn us out. Drink all the best wine to keep the Yankees from getting it.