Varina(77)
Then, before the Clyde turned around and headed back into the Atlantic for Savannah, Miles had V’s last few articles of clothing confiscated as evidence that Jefferson had dressed as a woman in Irwinville to elude capture. Virginia Clay tossed pieces of her own wardrobe—petticoats and stockings and a hat with a plume—onto the pile to confuse the matter and lighten the moment. Then, as a parting gesture, Miles had V and Virginia Clay stripped and searched by two garish Norfolk whores hired for the job. Several soldiers and an aide to Miles stood and watched.
THROUGH THAT SUMMER she lived under house arrest in a fairly nice hotel in Savannah, which after months of flight and capture would have been a relief, except she could not communicate with her husband. All she knew about him was gossip reprinted in the papers—that he had been shackled and chained. Soldiers guarded against her escape, but they let the children outside to play. The guards taught them to sing the John Brown song with the words We’ll hang Jeff Davis from a sour apple tree. They convinced the children that V would welcome a serenade with it. When the children finished, V kissed them one by one and then walked downstairs and through the lobby and out onto the street and told the soldiers they could shoot her if they wanted or beat her down with their rifle butts or throw her in prison, but she was laying a simple curse on them that could never be lifted. After they returned home—even into the next century when they would be old grandfathers—every time they wanted to tell their glorious tale of teaching Jeff Davis’s children that silly cruel song, they would feel small and ashamed for what they had done to innocent children.
She couldn’t communicate with Jeff, so she wrote letters to the old friends and acquaintances and dinner guests who still had influence in Washington. In letters to President Johnson, she begged for better treatment for her husband and to have her house arrest lifted. The president never responded directly but dismissed her to the press as an angry woman.
She read Our Mutual Friend, which she enjoyed, and then Anatomy of Melancholy, which she thought was scientifically filthy, but she copied a few words from it into her notebook—a ruined world, a globe burnt out, a corpse upon the road of night.
Around that time her mother took the children to Canada, hoping to find a safer place where they could go to school without being threatened. V wept when they left, of course, but for a while she wept whenever her body generated fresh tears. Every day offered its own calamity until she finally ran out of tears and became numb and then kept going.
Gradually, V’s travel restrictions were eased. First she could walk in four of Savannah’s beautiful squares closest to the hotel, and then eventually she could go anywhere in the city. Mostly she walked at night along the bluff over the river because it reminded her of childhood—moonlight on the water and lights from the boats and in the windows of houses on the far shore—except Federal detectives followed her and questioned anyone she spoke with beyond saying, Good evening.
EVENTUALLY THE RESTRICTIONS ALLOWED travel within the borders of the United States. But the children in Montreal remained off-limits, and she still couldn’t visit her husband, couldn’t even write Jeff a letter without government censors striking out every word not related to family matters, wifely concerns. Her mother had left her some money, and a few generous friends sent what they could spare. When a Federal officer gave her a small box of things they’d confiscated, V found her little pistol and nothing of value. She said to the officer, I’d much rather have the gold and silver coins you took from me in Irwinville.
Burton Harrison, though, had just been released from his imprisonment, and he took the loyalty oath and came straight south to meet her in Savannah. Burton had not quite reached thirty, and V still lacked a little of being forty—though the war had aged them both in unspeakable ways. When they first saw each other V held him tight and said over and over, My beautiful boy. Burton still coughed from the damp prison, and his chalky face seldom looked anything but blank. They traveled together for nearly two months, viewing the vast wreckage of the South.
They first went to New Orleans and stayed a couple or three weeks resting in their new freedom, breathing deep breaths, visiting old broke friends like General Wheeler, who had found work in a hardware store selling nails and nuts and bolts—the opposite trajectory to vile little Miles at Fortress Monroe who had risen from shop clerk to general.
The city retained its shabby beauty—spared the destruction of Atlanta and Columbia because it had fallen to the Federals early in the war. Bureaucrats and army still swarmed in great numbers, intent on reshaping New Orleans in the image of their beloved northern cities. Some days—though still beautiful—New Orleans felt like a corpse and other days like a ghost.
Every morning they walked through the French Quarter, enjoying Deep South December weather, stopping to drink strong black coffee at a place with outdoor tables and bougainvillea blooming rich against a south-facing wall—every day telling each other chapters of their stories since being parted on the Clyde at Old Point Comfort. Burton said, That first part—a very bad time.
He told her how they’d taken him up the Potomac to Old Capital Prison and then Fort McNair within sight of the Capitol dome. The Lincoln assassination conspirators faced trial there, and the Federals attempted to bribe and coerce Burton into confessing to having a part in the conspiracy. They offered him total clemency if he would testify that Jeff had been in contact with Booth and the others. The Federals even marched him into the courtroom to watch some of the trial and conviction of Atzerodt, Powell, Herold, and Mary Surratt.