Voices of the Civil War: Camp Followers (Lady of the Evening, South)

(This is part of a series of historical fiction letters relating what life was like during the Civil War. For an explanation of this series, please click here.)

From a Lady of the Evening (South):

Dear Evangeline,

Having been displaced by the war and my dear William shot dead by the Yankee soldiers, I have no recourse but to follow the confederate army as they fight for land that is rightfully ours, but which has been taken by the dirty Yankees.

I have no other means of surviving and I pray to God that he will forgive me my sins on the day of judgment for what I am forced to live with in order to survive. I have made the acquaintance of several handsome officers and have captured the eye of a general. He dresses me in fine clothes and has given me money to send my dear little Emily to you. I shall come when I have the means to do so, but in the time remaining, I fear I must stay here and live the life I have reconciled myself to.

The general is a kind, jealous man, for which I am eternally grateful, since he does not allow any other man to share my favors. I get paid handsomely for not turning to other men for sources of income and for that I am thankful, for I cannot imagine how I should live with myself after my part in this mutant beast is finished – though I fear I will have a hard enough time of it as it is.

My only prayer is that Emily should not be tainted by this horror to which I am degraded to. I pray she does not start to loathe me for it, for it is for her I am doing such things.

I am shamed beyond all imagining at the fate to which I have been put to and I can begin to understand the desperation that drives these young women towards this fate. I pray you do not shun me for this decision, dear sister.

Forever yours,

Georgia Buchanan

Voices of the Civil War: Camp Followers (Emancipated Slave, North)

(This is part of a series of historical fiction letters relating what life was like during the Civil War. For an explanation of this series, please click here.)

I have a quick note on this particular letter before you read it. I deliberately formatted this letter to reflect the character and life behind that of an emancipated slave. The spelling mistakes (with clarifying brackets in some places meant for your understanding), single-paragraph usage, and all, are purposeful. I hope you enjoy it!


From an Emancipated Slave (North):

My der famly,

It sems lik sich a long tim[e] since I've seen yu. My hart aches te see yer lovly faces agin. I's ritin yu dis leter. Der is a small girl who teches us new free men to read an write our leters. She use te be a slave for a gran lady who died rite befor the yoonyin soliers cam an got us free. I bin hopin dey let me fite for em but dey says dey aint got tim[e] to tech us contraban how te fite sinse dem rebs breathin down deys neck an dems runnin an movin all de tim[e]. But I's follow dem anywher sinse deys give me what a man should have from de day o his birth. I's a free man an I aim te git yall free to. Ders a kin yoonyin man her[e] dat show me a map an I askd him wher yall was. He says we not to far from yall but dat reb army is standin in de way an I ask him why I's not abl te fite fer de on[e]s I lov an he says he thunk it woud help but de comander don wan us getin guns. All I [k]nows is dis, dat I's cumin te git yall soon.

Wit lov, yur husban and fathr,
Toby Smith

Voices of the Civil War: Camp Followers (Southern Officer's Wife)

(This is part of a series of historical fiction letters relating what life was like during the Civil War. For an explanation of this series, please click here.)

From a Southern Officer's Wife:

 My darling Emily,

Things seem quite bleak on the front. The men are always struggling to keep dry and fed, though weapon supplies seem to be of no shortage. After the last battle in Gettysburg, I was frantic in my panic to find if my son and husband were still alive; I finally reconciled myself to visiting the farm house which had been converted into a hospital.

Oh, Emily! Such a sight met my eyes as one who was sane surely could not imagine! There was no inch of space unoccupied with dirt-spattered, bloodied men – most missing limbs from their various persons. I find myself paling at the memory even now, so awful was it – I fear the image has been engraved into my mind forever more and I shall take it to my grave still wailing and bemoaning the horrors of war.

I steeled myself to enter, all the while thinking to myself – By God! If these boys can march into the mouth of death and back, I most certainly will enter this hospital and find my boy and husband! Looking at face after face, my heart sunk with the hopelessness of the place – would no end to this dreadful war ever come?

After hours of searching with no luck of finding either of my brave, foolish men, I passed by the cot of a young boy who couldn’t have reached his seventeenth year yet. He reached out and captured my hand in a grip that defied death itself. His hold on me was so tight I feared that I might not be able to use it again and I felt all feeling swiftly retreating from my hand almost immediately. His blood stained my skin and his mouth moved as if he wanted to say something to me. I leaned down real close, but as I did so, he suddenly choked on death and it conquered him, leaving him staring up at me with big glass eyes filled with a terror so acute I scarce could move for a long while afterwards. It took two nurses to help me pry away his cold fingers from my hand and the regaining of feeling in that part of my body only served to remind me that he would never feel anything again. I wonder who he was and if his family will ever know of his death.

With tears in my eyes, I returned to camp to find my husband there, a weary and heart-sore general that mourned for all his lost men as if they were his own boys. His eyes met mine and I saw a greater horror in them than such as were surely in mine. And I knew, without him speaking of it ... I knew that my boy would not return to me just as that young boy in the hospital would never return to his mother.

With love in these darkest of days,

Isabelle Harrison

Voices of the Civil War: Camp Followers (Northern General's Wife)

(This is part of a series of historical fiction letters relating what life was like during the Civil War. For an explanation of this series, please click here.)

From a Northern General's Wife:

My dearest Hannah,

I was so filled with pleasure at your last letter I’m afraid I startled poor Ulys with my sudden exclamation of delight. To hear of all the exploits of his father in the tanner’s shop made him smile, as nothing previously has done so. It made me want to dance with joy, for I’ve sorely missed seeing his handsome smile.

He has been through such a trial these past years of war, having been sent back into the fray by Lincoln. He comes back to me after battle with more cares on his shoulders than I've ever seen on anyone before this wearying war started. He puts on a brave face for me and the children, but I see through it since we have been in each other’s company as often as possible since our happy marriage day. I try to do everything that I can to ease his burden, but the weariness in the set of his shoulders gets heavier every day and my heart aches for him.

The children love being here, however awful it may seem sometimes, for they claim that they love seeing their dear father and mother rather than staying away from us for so long a time. It gives Ulys great joy in seeing their carefree, happy faces when he walks into the room.

As for me, I cannot bear to be parted with him, as you have suggested in begging me to come home to you. Poor Ulys admits he gets so lonely without me, and the children are such a comfort to him. The men have confessed to his drinking something awful when I am parted from him and I dare say he has become so dependent on my company that I cannot leave him, in all honesty, for fear of more losses on the front.

Do not fret yourself, dear Hannah, for your son is perfectly all right. We are simply surviving these bleak years; though I fear things may never be the same when we return.

With all my love and regards,

Julia Grant

Remembering 1861: the Sesquicentennial

As many of you are aware (and for those that aren't - either from a lack of news or lack of being a U.S. citizen [it's okay, we still love you!]), the sesquicentennial (150th anniversary) of the Civil War is happening right now. (If you want to check out some commemorative events going on right now, check out the Civil War Trust's website.)

I took a Civil War Literature course in university and I will never have enough words to convey how tragically awe-inspiring it was to study such a historic event in my country's history. Yes, there have certainly been plenty of events in my country's past that I've studied outside of school (what can I say, I'm a geek like that); but the Civil War truly touched the inner historian in me as no other historical event had previously dared.

I was sitting in class one day as we were reading Ambrose Bierce (if you ever get a chance to read his work, do it, he's phenomenal). As we were discussing his work in detail and depth, I swore that I could hear the sounds of battle and the tramping sound of feet running past me as cannons blasted nearby.

Maybe it was just my overactive imagination, but it made me think about time and how things that happened years in the past are still things that matter in the present.

In honor of this anniversary, I'd like to share with you part of my final project for the class. You won't be able to get all of it; I wrote and filmed a documentary-like narrative entitled "Voices of the Civil War: Camp Followers." 

I did a lot of research for this project and tried to keep everything as real as I could make it, so it's technically a work of historical fiction. I'll share the written aspect of the script and hopefully you'll get to experience a small taste of what living in America during the Civil War was like. 

You'll find links to each promised "letter" from the Civil War below (as I post them).

Northern General's Wife  
Southern Officer's Wife  

Emancipated Slave (North)  

Lady of the Evening (South)  

Laundress (North)  

Borders

Below is a little something I wrote a few years ago and stumbled upon in my backup files recently. I hope you enjoy it!

There is a line that separates my house from my neighbor’s. It’s invisible, marked only by pieces of paper that declares who “owns” each side. But, on the other side of that border, past the invisible line that our neighbors go to great lengths to keep erected, is a border of a different kind. Not visible to human eyes, but there nonetheless – a silent tribute buried a couple inches under the lush green grass. A tribute that, even after all these years, I cannot forget and have not talked about until now.

On our side of the invisible border, my dad keeps the grass green and well-cropped. He’s out there every weekend, mowing at seven in the morning with the other dads in the neighborhood. While I find their dedication admirable, I often grumble about how they should find a decent hour of the day to mow – preferably after noon. My dad is almost obsessive about it, to a newer level than before we had moved into our new neighborhood – it still, to this day, puzzles me a little. It must be a guy thing.

On the other side of the invisible border, there have been many neighbors. I wonder why none of them seem to stay for too long, and it amuses me that every single family has animals. The yellow-brown spots staining the otherwise green lawn is a standing testament to that. The newest family tore down a perfectly good wooden fence in the backyard to put another, taller, thicker wood fence in its place. I think that this is so that they won’t have to talk to us – they’re a real friendly bunch…

And yet, every year the same things happen in that yard across the border. The carpet of grass becomes more and more spotted as the summer progresses. The natural spring under the house emits a constant supply of water through the ground that will, every year without fail, flood the basement – so the neighbors installed a pump that re-routes the water away from the basement. Unfortunately, it seeps down the neighborhood (which is all downhill) and kills our grass and flower gardens.

And, I can tell every stray dandelion that has never dared to stay long in our yard that they can go right back to where they came from and be welcome there. A shower of white seeds blows from that yard every year, giving me a lot of entertainment in sitting on the couch and watching my dad walk around the house, looking out the windows and muttering under his breath.

My dog likes to eat the dandelions, I have no idea why, they don’t look very tasty and she always ends up spitting them out after they’ve been completely mangled. I think she thinks she’s giving me a present because she almost always does it by my feet. Since she is always following my dad everywhere (to my amusement, she even shoves her nose into the corners of the doors when my dad is on the other side and proceeds to breath heavily, just in case he didn’t know that he locked her out of the room while he was in there), she looks out the windows with him, too. When she does this, she drools on the windows, causing my mom to walk around the house later in the day and mutter under her breath about the dog being stupid for drooling on an otherwise spotless window.

The neighbor dog doesn’t drool on their windows, and doesn’t like to eat dandelions. Instead, he likes to cross that invisible border and wander into our yard incessantly. It’s funny how the neighbors yell at us if our dog crosses that border, but never care when their dog goes into our yard.

And still I think about that invisible border that separates our two very different lives.

When I was little, I was almost painfully shy. It didn’t help that there weren’t many kids in our neighborhood yet – our house was the second house built in our cul-de-sac. The only friends I really had after we moved were my sisters and it stayed that way even after more kids moved in. Well, as kids will do when left to their own devices, we ran wild, causing our parents no end of grief and filling our days with mischief and amusement at how our parents tried so hard to keep us more “tame.” It didn’t help when my dad gave up trying to civilize us and started encouraging us instead, showing us how to catch butterflies and put toads in buckets. We even caught tadpoles once and stored them in a bucket in our garage – I lost interest in them eventually since they weren’t growing fast enough, and we finally released them in a local pond.

The little things we managed to catch – mostly moths and butterflies – we learned to be careful with. It was a hard lesson we learned one day when we found out that once you’ve touched a moth or a butterfly’s wings, they can’t fly anymore and they die. It was harder still to have to bury our now-dead catch. We created a miniature graveyard on the border of our house and the at-the-time-empty lot next to us. Dad even buried a frog there once after we found it one morning half-mangled by the trash can after we moved it. I cried for the frog until my dad explained to me that it was suffering more by being alive and that he was happier in frog heaven because he wasn’t feeling pain anymore. The word “mercy kill” was introduced into my vocabulary that day.

That little unmarked graveyard, now covered over with grass, represents more than a lesson in loss and how things change. It’s the border between time; the time when I was a child and cried at the loss of a single butterfly, and time as I know it now – complicated, messy, and filled with the responsibilities adults have to face every day for the rest of their lives.

It’s a border beyond the tangible, the borders we hold in our own lives. That border separated us from our neighbors – not because of that invisible line that tells who owns the papers to the land, but because we had put it there.

It’s not something that is easily crossed, so we stand on the precipice and watch others cross it instead. It’s a crossing that we're sometimes afraid to make. What if on the other side there is no beauty? What if there’s only pain and heartache on the other side?

When we enter into the border, we go with the trepidation of being rejected and hurt,  and we get past it only to get pushed back into it again on the way back to our own side, experiencing the pain of loss every time, experiencing the soul-numbing sense of rejection. 

And after we’ve crossed the border that last time, only to get pushed back across it, we give up. We stop crossing the border.

But eventually, when we’ve been away long enough, we come back to the border and we stare at it. We wonder how other people can be so unafraid to cross it, when every time we cross it we're sent back to our own side, hurt. 

The seeds of friendship can cross the border, but they always die and when they do, we're sent back to our own side with the mess of what’s left all around us in pieces on the floor.

And yet, how is that any way to live life? To stay on your side of the border just because we’re afraid that things will get a little bit messy.

There is a sense of courage in being able to cross that border, even knowing that you might get hurt. And I think that’s how we should live, not in fear, but in courage.

The Story of How I Survived the Renaissance Festival

In all of my (short-ish) years of life, I have never been to the Renaisance Festival - which is kind of a big deal festival-wise in Minnesota. So this year, I vowed to finally get on my horse and ride to the festival.

Well okay, maybe I'm being a bit fanciful, but it's the Renaissance Fair - who wouldn't want to be fanciful?

Planning ahead of time, my two younger sisters (who have both been to the festival before and didn't invite me!) and I plotted our costumes. After all, you can't just go to the Renaissance Festival without dressing up, right? So we donned our costumes (I found a nice gypsy costume [which won several admiring glances and genuine compliments throughout the day], my sister donned a belly dancing costume [which gained her several cat-calls by the vendors as we passed by the food stalls, among others], and my youngest sister dressed as a lady knight [which apparently no one else thought was an eye-catching outfit... shows what they know]) and headed to the festival in our chariot (AKA: car).

We got there pretty early (as in 9:30-10am), and there really weren't that many people milling about at first. But one of the first things we noticed was a peasant fishing in a puddle that had developed in the middle of the dirt road off to our left. If I were writing about this on Twitter or Facebook, that would have been tagged #OnlyAtRenFest.

As for the pickle guys, well what else can I say but that they were hilarious? The food vendors will do pretty much anything to get you to buy from their stalls in the morning, including sing songs about blue (the color of my sister's belly dancing outfit) being their new favorite color and proclaiming quite loudly that gypsies are welcome at their stalls (that would be me!).

And don't forget the wandering entertainers at the festival. My favorite was the guy with the "No Jingle Zone" sign that jumped out in front of us and gave us a hard time since my sister's costume was a bit noisy. As for the stay-in-place entertainment, we saw hypnotists, belly dancers, gypsies (my people! lol), and a "Conversations" booth where a "troll" puppet offered to have a conversation with you.

(Photo credits: http://b.vimeocdn.com/ts/341/889/341889972_640.jpg)

So, being slightly shy by nature, I let my sister (the belly dancer) spin the wheel. It landed on "kisses & hugs." She immediately changed it to "beaver shoes" and after a short argument about the topic with the 'troll,' the conversation began.

I don't remember exactly how the conversation went, unfortunately (it was hilarious because if anyone can out-talk or out-confuse a troll puppet set on confusing anyone, it's my sister), but the conversation eventually turned to why "bail" had been crossed off the troll's change-collecting cup and replaced with "tips."

It turns out that if you are an activist for troll's rights, the king will shut you away in the dungeon. But don't worry, we were talking to a "free troll," because, "you see, 'bail' has been crossed off. It says 'tips!" After that my sister made up an outrageous story about why she had been in the dungeon; the troll gasped at her confession and promptly turned the wheel to "Gossip & Rumors." I wish I remember more of that entirely confusing yet altogether delightful conversation so you could be laughing with me, but I unfortunately must have gotten a little too confused in the process of it.

After that, we wandered around just looking at the things and I think the scariest thing that day happened just after lunch. There was a moving 'statue' that would move if you put coins into his collection bucket. Except the mask this statue was wearing was the creepiest thing I've ever seen!

 (Picture credits: http://farm9.static.flickr.com/8170/7968124950_b5728714b4.jpg)

He was staring at us. So my youngest sister, probably thinking she was hilarious, asked me for some coins. Being the pushover big sister that I am, I gave her the coins. Immediately, my mind started flashing with bright, neon red and white lights. I could see "WARNING" written across my eyeballs. And I think my stomach must have jumped out of its normal place in my body and run around a corner to hide.

As soon as she dropped the coins in the collection bucket, he started moving. Nothing fast or sudden, but for some reason, slow and sinuously hypnotic movement coming from something not completely human-looking that stares at you like you're a tasty meal is definitely more terrifying than fast, abrupt, scream-inducing actions.

First thing the statue did - and which definitely confirmed all of my fears of being eaten (hey, it's a legitimate fear when you have that thing staring at you like a predator!) - was look at my youngest sister (in the lady knight costume) and rub his belly. If the jaw on that thing had been able to move, I swear it would have been smacking it's sharp teeth together repeatedly. I think my morbid fascination with the thing was enough to sear that little detail permanently in my mind - because I swear I remember its mouth almost moving as if to do so.

Then he stared intently at my other sister (the belly dancer) for a while, but finally turned its gaze on me. Where it stayed. My stomach, which I had previously thought a deserter, very definitely was still inside way down in there somewhere because it promptly jumped up into my brain, jumped out of my body, and ran away as if the devil himself were chasing it.

And that's when my heart decided it didn't like where it was and tried to jump up my throat. One look at the statue, though, and it "slunked" back down in place and decided to beat ten times harder than normal. I thought I was going to pass out.

Then the statue moved. It's hand went to the place where I suppose a heart is supposed to stay and patted it, then reached forward as if asking for my hand. The eyes on that thing glittered maliciously, though. I was for sure going to be eaten alive in front of my sisters. What would my parents say?

Maybe I should have told my sisters to go away so they didn't have to watch a carnivorous monster violently eat their older sister, but I was too terrified to talk, let alone move. The only thing that scared me more than taking the thing's hand, though, was that it would follow me if I just walked away. So I held my breath and moved forward a little bit to take its hand.

Logically, I knew there was a person inside that suit, but when you're in the thick of things, logic consigns itself to some dark little corner at the back of your mind and only decides to come out much later when the coast is clear. So the only option I was left with was this thought that kept flashing across my brain like a news broadcast: I was going to be eaten.

Luckily, I narrowly escaped with my life, since the statue just bowed a little bit and then reluctantly let my hand go. But, despite the knowing that I was being a bit mellow-dramatic, I couldn't help but feel a great sense of relief when I finally turned the corner on that thing to search for my missing stomach. The knowledge that I was quite suddenly free to live the rest of my life - with all of my limbs intact, to boot! - was one of the best parts of the day.

All in all, I'd say it was a successful first venture to the Renaissance Festival. I wonder what next year will bring?