Nathan's Book

First Chapter in an emerging trilogy set in the ugly and tragic era of the Civil War. Life in the border states was uncertain and often deadly. But before the first shots were fired there was hatred.

JOURNEY SONS-

© By- Leif R. HerrGesell

 

For my son Nathan who taught me so much- Someday I will follow you. . .

 

     The snow is falling gently in deep drifts outside of my window and I notice that much and little has changed in the many years that have passed before me.  I look back on those years before the War and think how sweet a time it was. The Negroes seemed content enough and for the rest of us it was a joyous time also.  It brings a smile to remember the family suppers, long rides over thrilling fences on my prized Thoroughbred, a chestnut mare named Seminole Lady, and the annual trips to New York and Boston to buy the wonderful treasures of our Florida home.

     I have not seen my blessed Suthern States since the sad end of the Confederacy when the General surrendered our tattered army at Appomattox Court House. I am unsure how I feel about living here so close to Yankee Land. Nova Scotia is now both my icy prison and my home.  Here there are no cypress trees, or palmetto groves. The bull alligator does not roar his mating challenge and the baying hounds of some Negro lad cannot be heard on the still night airs as a coon leads those grinning teeth and tar colored feet on a lively chase.

They tell me that I was wrong all those years for owning another man. I am unsure.   We are told in Genesis chapter twenty; verse fourteen that Abraham had man servants and women servants. Always I strove to be a fair and even handed master. I never in my fifty years raised a lash or cane against another human nor condoned the beating of my servants. I have fought in battle and may even have killed, though I cannot say for sure that the other fellow died and I pray he did not, but that was a desperate measure forced upon me by the chaos of war.  The folk who lived and worked on our place were of the happiest nature and I must confess that if they felt oppressed or feared me I was unaware of those feelings. Truly they seemed a happy family that surrounded me and lived in harmony with my family for three generations. My father was known to many in our parts as the Major because he had held a commission in the Federal Army during the Seminole Wars.  He died some three years before the ‘uncivil’ war and mama did not last long after the Majors passing. I remained in a state of blissful bachelor hood after their passing and I have no intention of marrying even now. I have not found a woman to interest my tastes and am far more amused with my books and the occasional company of my friends in the evening.  A glass of good bourbon and conversation with another educated man of taste is all that I have ever required to satisfy my desires. Events of the war, which shall be related to you have deprived me of my dear friendships, my happy homestead and the warm comforts of what some have called a life of unearned privilege.  Now I exist in this northern domain accompanied by two young men, both of whom I love beyond all explanation and whom I feel I shall call my sons before my creator calls me home.  It is strange, that I who never thought to marry, should find myself the protector of two such odd, but wonderous young men who are as unlike me or each other as two humans could be. Fondly then I shall tell you the story of my sons. . . Levi and Nathan.

 

Captain Clayton Gaylord Walker, CO. A 21^st North Carolina CSA, Stone Meadow, Nova Scotia- December, 1875

 

 

NATHAN’S BOOK

Baltimore, Maryland 1844-1862

 

His mother was a slattern, a bawd, but once she had been the daughter of a taciturn orchardman from Pikesville, a Methodist Episcopalian by denomination. Her yellow linsey dress with its leg-o-mutton sleeves was thirty years out of date and had been salvaged or rather stolen from the rag man. It was an ill fit and the bodice was baggy. Her dreary bosoms hung limply inside the drab material. The child she pushed out cared less about her attire and only slightly more for her teat. The father was a waterman whose name she had forgotten and his face she recalled only dimly. He had not been an unhandsome man. His brown hair had been long on his neck curling at the ends and his side whiskers grew toward his sculpted chin. If she recalled with any clarity- his eyes had sparkled like chips of blue ice and his narrow buttocks had fitted her well.

 

The last draught of Jamaican had dulled her memory and the pain in her back and hips as well. Rum had dulled many things for her. Strong drink had helped her forget how her father had brought her to town four years ago to help him sell the autumn apples of their prim farm.  Romantic love had captured her innocent heart. Unfortunately the gentleman was of no account. Her father had found the couple in the back of the apple cart and when he left to return to the farm he had told her that if she wished to make her living like a Jezebel then she should practice less and charge more. The gallant lay on his back, the blood from his nose running into the gutter. Father left her crying in the street and shouted back over his shoulder that she should never come home and break her poor mother’s heart.

 

She had worked in a bustling and dirty oyster house near Baltimore’s waterfront for two years and then took up house with an Irish pimp from Dublin who sold her often. This baby was her second. The first had died of the influenza in its tenth month of life. Her friend remembered the dead baby’s name as Margaret Ruth. When the mother died not many years after her friend, there was no longer an earthly memory of Margaret Ruth.

 

The pain was nearly unbearable and then the child was free, a boy this time, the mother gasped in relief. She no longer felt as though she would split in two.  Once he was swaddled, her friend, a rouged w***e, placed the lad in her boney arms. She knew almost immediately that he was different, but she did not quite know how. His eyes were almond and he seemed long from shoulder to waist. His skin was the color of ripe raspberries and there was a tint of blue around his mouth and eyes. She had spent her days of budding motherhood sleeping and her nights on her back in a drunken stupor. The boy’s eyes were blue, like chips of ice.

                                  

         ************************

 

The brown felt hat fitted him poorly but, Nathan didn’t care it suited him well enough and he was quite happy to be sitting in the alley watching the other boys play at rolling their barrel hoops.  Nathan’s mother would not be free to watch him for many hours. Her looks had faded quickly in the dim corridors and on the dirty ticks where she performed sordid acts with rough men who found pleasure in her bruised and worn cleft. She had taken work as a washer woman in Nathan’s toddling years and her hours now were far longer and the work more arduous than when she had plied the street selling her womanhood.

 

Nathan was two before he could walk. By five he had spoken his first words. He said “mama” and “eat”, she decided then to ask her father to relent and take them in. She walked hand in hand with Nathan for many miles in the bright morning sun. The neighbor told her that her father had sold the prim farm and moved west taking her sad mother and younger brother.  Her papa was seeking his fortune in the gold fields of California the man told her. The shadows grew long before they finished the arduous walk back from the prim farm. A lone candle did little to dispel the gloom of the tenement rooms chipped brown milk paint and greasy floor.  The dirty brick building smelled of unwashed bodies and boiling cabbages and potatoes.  She did not notice the stale smell and added her own perfume to the redolent airs.  The dapper rent collector in his silky top hat and checkered trousers covered his nose with a handkerchief when he made his weekly visits.

 

Standing in the creek holding the marble sized nugget up to the sun her daddy did a dance, stamping and splashing in the muddy waters. The tin pan he held in his other hand.  His tall rough leather boots filled quickly, but thoughts of striking it rich kept him from noticing. He forgot the thousands of miles of buffalo grass, boiling hot desert, angry buzzing Indians and the prim Maryland farm he had left behind.  He did not see the coffin handled Bowie knife that was thrust into his kidney or the Patterson revolver that was slammed down on his bare head. She never knew that her father had died in a rapidly swirling pool of his own blood in the waters of  “Bad Mexican Gulch”. The man who killed him was not a Mexican. The tent town that stood on the banks of the burbling mountain stream was known by its residents as “Soddomville”.  The temporary village was populated by cardsharps, cutthroats, farmers, soldiers, sailors, plasterers, wheelwrights and a thousand others of this stripe or that, all turned miner or bad man. It was a rare night when the strains of one Mr. Steven Foster’s songs played on the fiddle and jaw harp was not interrupted by gunshots or vile and profane oaths. Many grew rich and lost their fortunes in California in those torrid days, most also lost their souls. Her mother and brother like so many thousands who did not strike it rich moved down out of the purple mountains and opened a boarding house in Yerba Buena (San Francisco). From the front porch of their unpainted house they could see in the anchorage, a thick forest of masts and yards.  They rented rooms by the week to sailors and other lean wandering men tired of the fo’csle or saddle blanket.  Nathan never knew that he had a grandmother and an uncle.

 

 

She did not let Nathan be with the other children who played either listlessly or meanly in the grim alleys near their tenement. Other boys his age were learning to steal or were making pennies going door to door taking out the slop jars in the better parts of town. Nathan slowly added words as he came to understand them, but his mind would not let him rush forward greedily gobbling up notions like other children. For the most part he wore a small dirty linen smock and stockings for the first six years of his life. His shoes were much too large and often fell off of his feet.  His hair was very fine and was matted and knotted at the back.  He slept with his mother on a thin blanket which covered a straw filled tick that was stained with tobacco juice.  Other pinch faced women in the building chided his mother and said that she should leave him outside of the orphanage. He is darling now, but he is an idiot they added without rancor.  She knew that Nathan would never be a bright boy but, he was all the family she had now, and she loved his smile and the way he hugged her leg tightly while she stood and made their breakfast. The little black stove, its pipe snaking out of the only window which was covered with boards was both their heat in the winter and her kitchen.  Their meals were meager but adequate.  On all mornings they each had a bowl of mush. They ate no dinner, instead Nathan who played in the dim hall during the day would have a piece of cheese and bread. Once a week she boiled turnips or cabbage in hopes that their teeth would not loosen with scurvy. She longed for the tart red apples her father had grown.  A granny woman who had lived the last twenty years in the building watched over him and saw that he came to no great harm. She often told him stories of her father during the War For Independence and showed him a treasured button from her father’s uniform. Her daddy had been in the Pennsylvania Line and was wounded at the battle of Monmouth she said. Nathan did not care.  He did not understand most of what she said, but enjoyed her kindness.  Her deeply wrinkled face and toothless grin were happy despite her awful poverty.   In the evening when his mother returned, her hands red and raw from the lye soap, she made them a supper of a tasty gruel made from oats and bacon and sometimes thickened with stale bread. Other children quickly tired of calling him names and picking on him, as he would only laugh and chase after them. He soon became their mascot and the boys stuck up for him in any dispute and the girls often brought him a secret morsel and gave him the hugs he so dearly loved.

 

Baltimore is an important city, and thirty years ago it bustled even as it does today. The pretty oyster boats which they call skipjacks, sail the salty labyrinth and number in the thousands and everywhere that the eye looks are clams, oysters, crabs and ducks.  No where on earth I believe is there a greater profusion of the bounty of the deep than there is in Maryland’s great city on the shore of the wild Chesapeake Bay.

 

Nathan began to shuck oysters at a bar at seven. He had no book learning and could not spell his own name. His mother had six years of whitewashed school room learning, but she knew that her boy would never learn to cipher or even recite his letters, nor would he know that a Virginian was the father of his country. He could speak in short sentences and did what he was told, but often grew frustrated and stamped his feet and cried when his mother scolded him. As he had grown it became more difficult for the old granny woman to watch him and his mother left for work just after sunrise and rarely returned before sundown, so she could not watch him. One day the smiling granny woman did not leave her room and his mother found her lying stiff and quiet in her cold bed. The old pewter button from her father’s regimental coat, which she so treasured, was thrown out by the land lord when he cleared her room. He sold her few things for two dollars and pocketed the money. Once on Easter and twice on other Sundays she and Nathan had visited the old woman’s grave and placed wild spring posies on the healing sod.  Old woman’s name was entered on a plot map of the eastern potter’s field and then she was forgotten.

                                    ****************************************

 

The decade of gold fever, the Donner tragedy and conquered Mexican lands was closed. In those fated years many stories were told in our papers of intrepid pioneers. Yankees were trembling with a rush for change, like a fine race horse at the starting line.  They agitated for change for the fairer sex, seeking the vote for our delicate and divine wives and daughters. They assaulted our peculiar Suthern institution and they attacked the notion that the Bible ended with Jesus Christ.  Joseph Smith and Brigham Young tramped across a violent and savage continent and a wave of calico converts followed in their wheel ruts telling everyone they met about the book of Mormon- replete with talking toads and vanishing tablets.  Northern scolds bellowed in our ears incessantly about Universal Suffrage, most notably Mrs. Lucretia Mott.  She was of that same Bay state mob who sat in their velvet parlors and expounded upon the evils of human bondage while they enjoyed the fruits of our Suthern labors.

 

The 1840’s were a decade of momentous change for our nation, but we Sutherns merely sought to continue to live a quiet life in our demesnes- untrampled by that yammering, stampeding, mass of eager, industrious Yankees.  I am sad to say that no Suthern could catch a Yankee in a barefoot race for a silver dollar; always their greed coursed the faster. I can also gladly say that no northerner ever exhibited even a fraction of the civility- nay gentility and charm of a ravishing southern belle or a handsome beau.  The war did not begin with the first shots fired on the Star of the West from Morris Island or at Fort Sumter, but was waged for two score years on the floors of the house and senate and in state houses up and down the land. The 1840’s were as I look back, the beginning of the end for our society. The road to the War of Northern Aggression was layed in those days. Lee and Grant and dozens of others honed their trade at the gates of Chapultepec and on the fields before Mexico City. The immortal Stonewall Jackson trained his artilleryman’s eye shelling the army of the Generalissimo Santa Anna. 

 

The stage was set by eighteen and fifty and merely awaited the entrance of those actors who murdered the South- the insurrectionist martyr, John Brown and the “Great Emancipator”, Abraham Lincoln, two parts of the same whole. Surely there was bound to be more friction betwixt us and our northern cousins. While at that early juncture Lincoln, the railroad lawyer from Illinois had no grand design to deliver the black man from our ‘clutches’, already the wheels of providence were in motion. Perhaps that gangling westerner could not and would not have freed the Negro without the example and instigation of Brown and we mustn’t forget General Fremont’s pre-emptive role regarding emancipation in Missouri. 

 

I believe Old Abe’s part was as set as ours when the Lord wrote the story of humankind. Even Brown and Wilkes Booth must surely be His tools, though it seems odd that the Divine Being would work through such likes as theirs. The zealotry of Booth is well known and a sane man cannot condone the assassination of even an oath breaker.  Nathan cared nothing for any of this and some would think him the wiser.

 

Ancient Rome disappeared beneath the onslaught of German hordes and it seems that Richmond too was destined to sink under the weight of grease daubed mechanics from Wooster, Hartford and New Haven. We could not have seen it then with such clarity. Had we but known the wind we sowed was whirling down upon us we might have chosen to avert it by yielding on some political point rather than see the absolute rapine that was delivered us. I speak only for myself when I say that. The constant efforts to destroy slavery or confine it within existing Southern borders only lead us closer to conflagration.  I myself was intransigent upon the issue of bondage in those years.  I was offended that those who did not know me could accuse me of venality, cruelty and being devoid of compassion. The only recourse when attacked in such a manner is to defend the obstacle, compromise be damned! Slavery was our rampart, the bulwark of our society and we greatly feared its collapse. I see today the folly of chattel slavery and pray the heavenly host will forgive my transgression. I still believe that while the abolitionist mob was correct in principle they lacked the diplomacy and common sense the volatile issue demanded and it is on their heads that rests fully half of the blame for the slaughter of our American youth. More than half a million lads died for rich men’s pride or for the high minded principles of the Free Soil crowd. I think the Yankee lads got the better of that deal. I would prefer to stand in front of the Lord without needing to explain my argument.  Others today would still fight the Unionists just for the joy of it, even though they be certain they would lose. Their desire for revenge is extravagant.  I pray the future of the former bondsman does not become crushed beneath the inevitable and awful forces of hatred. While he was once my servant, he is now by law a free man, yet is seen by many as an enemy upon the only soil he has ever known.

 

 

 Nathan was a bother now to the other children when they played or roamed about in their dirty tribes looking for mischief.  The boys smoked the stubs of cheroots they found lying on the sidewalks and in the gutters and they strutted about with their thumbs hooked through halyard rope belts. They watched older boys who lazed about drinking and fighting and so they learned to ape them, and their back alley tutelage was begun. In the hubbub of their voices a careful listener could discern the fading strains of their fathers from Kilarney and Limerick and every nook and cranny of the “Auld Sod”. By eight they had begun to sort themselves into specialties, Rory who could pick a pocket, Sean who could whip the other boys at fisticuffs and Paddy who commanded them all. Every building or corner had its own gang and every gang had its own name. The little boys kept their name a secret and told no one.  The older boys and young men brashly bragged theirs about and often challenged the other gangs like the “Butcher Boys” or the “Hawse Hole” gang and scuffled with them or looked for German boys to bully.  Bruises, deep cuts, gouged eyes and even the occasional murder were the bloody fruit of their viperous industry.

 

Nathan’s dark hair and gray almond eyes made him look like a China man and no one ever thought he was Irish.  He earned pennies a day and by the time he was eight he could shuck 20 oysters a minute. Customers used to watch the boy and marveled at the speed of his hands and occasionally a kindly gentleman would reward him with a coin. After the dinner crowd and before supper Nathan would nap in the backroom on a pile of flour sacks, surrounded by empty baskets used to transport the delicious oysters and clams. When he awoke, the head waiter would give him toast and milk sometimes with a bowl of clam broth.  Nathan liked the oyster house, it smelled good and the grownups often patted his head and said he was a good boy. 

 

Hattie Jane La Broue filled the steaming vats with oysters and melted down the butter that was stored in the cool slippery crocks. She was a laughing round bottomed colored woman, who hugged him often and called Nathan her ‘Singapore’ boy. She loved the little white boy who always smiled and talked simply of his friends and said he loved his mama.  He never shirked his share and told Hattie Jane he liked her pretty dress and head scarf.  Hattie tipped back her head and sang happy songs in French that her mother had taught her. Her mama and papa and three brown babies had escaped from St. Domingo. Napoleon Bonaparte and the republican terror had interrupted her daddy’s quiet life as a carpenter when the slaves of the island had taken over in a bloody uprising.  Hattie’s people were free mulattoes and they fled with the whites and with many others of their shade to Baltimore, settling in Fells Point. Hattie had been born here in Fells Point, but her mama had taught her the songs of her own childhood on the warm island and so Hattie Jane shared them with her “Singapore Boy” and he clapped his hands in glee.

 

Nathan lived his simple minded child’s life day by day as he still does. He did not have a wondrous scheme to find his fortune, or become a judge or a soldier or an engineer. He enjoyed shucking oysters and did not think much on Manifest Destiny or the federal government interfering in the issue of states’ rights and the expansion of our slave holding territories.

 

At Christmas when he was eight his mother bought him a shiny red wooden ball which he carried in a pocket in his trousers. The ball was his avocation and his passion and it occupied much of his time when he was idle or during church while his mother sat quietly in her shiny white pew. Nathan played at her feet. Other good Christian children were expected to sit with their hands folded in their laps and to sing psalms along with their silk and broadcloth mothers and fathers. It was a long walk to the Methodist Episcopal Church.  They lived near the brick fortress Roman church and not far from the white board Freedman’s Baptist church with its short square steeple. The well dressed lace glove wives and city aldermen of the Methodist establishment stayed within their iron picket and tree lined borders. 

 

The walk was a pleasant one and she pretended as she left behind her coughing, brown toothed neighbors that she was once again- a member of more polite society.  The parishioners ignored her drab clothes and her boy’s lack of manners. They forgave her poverty and his slowness and let the two sit in the back pew where Nathan disturbed no one. Some whispered behind their hands that she had been a Magdalene, others were more kind and knew pity and said nothing. She was never invited to a Sunday supper or a church social by the pious stalwarts.