An Acquaintance with Darkness (30 page)

There seems to be a controversy over Annie Surratt's age. Louis J. Weichman, author of A
True History of the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln,
has her age as twenty-six in the text and twenty-two in his chapter notes. Although his book is in my bibliography, I do not consider him a reliable source. He was a member of the cast in the Surratt house and the trial that followed. It would be like taking the word, a hundred and thirty years from now, about the "true story of the O. J. Simpson trial," by any one of the witnesses who gave dubious testimony. Other authors are more accurate about Annie's age. Gore Vidal has her eighteen in his
Lincoln.
Jim Bishop has her seventeen in his
The Day Lincoln Was Shot,
and in another book in my bibliography,
The Assassination of Lincoln,
Lloyd Lewis has her in convent school in 1863. That would hardly make her twenty-six years old in 1865. There also seems to be controversy about whether Annie was released immediately from prison after being taken for initial questioning. My sources tell me she was released within a day. We know she constantly visited her mother in Carroll Prison.

Of course, the fate of Dr. Samuel Mudd is well-known to all. Only within the last decade or so has his name been cleared in the assassination of President Lincoln. Mudd was sent to Fort Jefferson Prison on Dry Tortugas, an island a hundred miles off the coast of Florida. There he remained until 1868, when yellow fever broke out in the prison. Dr. Mudd offered his services and got the epidemic in hand. Officers of the fort appealed to President Johnson, asking for a pardon for Mudd, and this was done on February 8, 1869. Mudd took up his old life and died in 1882. I made him a friend of Uncle Valentine.

The
Sultana
riverboat disaster happened exactly as I depicted it, on April 27, 1865. And the accident with General George Armstrong Custer's horse in the Grand Review parade really happened, too.

Yes, they did hang Annie Surratt's mother. Annie did wait outside the gate for her mother's body, and they did refuse to give it to her. Johnny Surratt did stay away. Since his friendship with Emily is of my making, so, too, is the letter he wrote to her when he was in hiding. He did, however, have "a man in Washington" who was supposed to keep him informed about his mother's trial. This information was taken from a lecture Johnny Surratt gave on December 6, 1870, at Rockville, Maryland, on the conspiracy and assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

While his mother's trial was going on, Johnny was hidden by priests in Canada, then fled to Liverpool, England. From there he went to Rome, where he enlisted in the Papal Zouaves under an assumed name. In April 1866 he was recognized, and in November he was sent back to America. Some sources say Annie was living back in Washington and visited him in prison while he was on trial, and brought food. Their brother Isaac was at the trial, too. He was older than both Johnny and Annie, went south to join the Confederate army at the start of the war, did not return home, and was not in contact with his family until after his mother's hanging. I saw no need to bring him into the book.

Johnny Surratt's trial went on for sixty-two days. In the trial, a diary of John Wilkes Booth was introduced. Nobody had ever known before of such a diary. It proved that neither Mary Surratt nor her son, Johnny, knew of the assassination attempt. They knew only of a plot to kidnap Lincoln and hold him for ransom until Confederate prisoners held up North could be released.

The jury could not agree. Johnny Surratt was held for a new trial, but months later he was allowed out on bail and there never was a new trial. Johnny tried lecturing for a while, but it didn't work. He spent the rest of his life as an obscure clerk and died in 1916.

Annie Surratt does not appear in any factual accounts after the trial of her brother Johnny. Nobody knows what happened to her.

As for the nightflowers: My research tells me there are four hundred fifty members of the cactus family that bloom at night. The night-blooming cereus is one of them. The author of
The Evening Garden,
Peter Loewer, writes, "I have seen it bloom in September at Mohonk Manor, New York's famous resort hotel on the Hudson River." He furthermore writes, "These plants are native to every state in the United States with the exception of Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont." Of the yucca, he says, "During the day, the white, six-petaled blossoms hang down like bells at rest. At dusk, they turn up to the evening sky, open wide, and release a sweet soapy smell to the night air."

When I started writing this book, I didn't know if I would find even one flower that bloomed at night. Thanks to Peter Loewer, I found a book full of them.

After all is said and done, I am writing fiction here. Writing, just like medicine in Lincoln's time, is half magic, half art, and half hard work. And my story is
based
on the hard, dry facts that I have taken pain to substantiate.

So then, what happened to my fictional heroine, Emily Pigbush? I like to think she stayed with Uncle Valentine. Perhaps she became one of Mrs. McQuade's star pupils. Perhaps she sat in the courtroom at Johnny Surratt's trial. Did he see her there? Did their eyes meet? Did they speak?

I like to think she finished her schooling and went on to become a woman doctor.

Body snatching declined by the 1890s. The medical profession succeeded in getting decent anatomy laws enacted and scientific methods made it possible for cadavers to be preserved for a very long time. By the twentieth century body snatching had all but ceased.

Adams, George Worthington.
Doctors in Blue: The Medical History of the Union Army in the Civil War.
New York: H. Schuman, 1952.

Bettmann, Otto L.
A Pictorial History of Medicine: A Brief, Nontechnical Survey of the Healing Arts from Aesculapius to Ehrlich.
Springfield, 111.: Charles C. Thomas, 1956.

Bishop, Jim.
The Day Lincoln Was Shot.
New York: Harper & Row, 1955.

Campbell, Helen Jones.
Confederate Courier.
New York: St. Martin's Press, 1965.

Green, Constance McLaughlin.
Washington: A History of the Capital 1800–1950.
Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1962–1963.

Keckley, Elizabeth.
Behind the Scenes: Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House.
New York: Arno Press, 1968.

Lewis, Lloyd.
The Assassination of Lincoln: History and Myth.
Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 1994. Originally published as
Myths After Lincoln,
New York: Harcourt, 1929.

Loewer, Peter.
The Evening Garden.
New York: Macmillan, 1993.

Long, E. B., and Barbara Long.
The Civil War Day by Day: An Almanac 1861–1865.
Garden City, N.J.: Doubleday, 1971.

Russell, Pamela Redford.
The Woman Who Loved John Wilkes Booth.
New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1978.

Shultz, Suzanne M.
Body Snatching: The Robbing of Graves for the Education of Physicians in Early Nineteenth Century America.
Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co., 1992.

Weichmann, Louis J. A
True History of the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln and of the Conspiracy of 1865.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975.

1. What kinds of life lessons did Emily learn from the Grimm's fairy tales and nursery rhymes told to her by her father? Does his nickname for her, Miss Muffet, have any significance?

2. After the Civil War, what sorts of problems arose between freed slaves and more established African American people like Elizabeth Keckley, who had good jobs and more education?

3. Emily tells Maude that "People make lots of their own problems. Then they blame them on the war." What sorts of problems were blamed on the war in this story?

4. Compare Johnny Surratt to Robert. What qualities did they share? How were they different from each other? Why did Emily feel torn between her loyalties to the two men?

5. How did the people of Washington, D.C., react when President Lincoln was assassinated? What actions and emotions followed this tragedy?

6. President Johnson refuses to consider pleas for Mary Surratt's life, sending the message that "Mrs. Surratt kept the nest that hatched the eggs" in the plot to kill President Lincoln. Do you believe that Mrs. Surratt was fully aware of the plans being made in her home? Do you believe that she deserved to die for her crime?

7. Why did Dr. Bransby and his associates need to rob graves? Since studying bodies made Dr. Bransby a better doctor, do you think the grave robbing was worth the risk? Or is committing a crime such as grave robbing inexcusable?

8. Explain the symbolism of Marietta's night-blooming flowers throughout this story.

A
NN
R
INALDI
is an award-winning author best known for her skill at bringing history vividly to life. A self-made writer, Ms. Rinaldi never attended college but learned her craft through reading and writing. As a columnist for twenty-one years at
The Trentonian
in New Jersey, she learned the art of finding a good story, capturing it in words, and meeting a deadline.

Ms. Rinaldi attributes her interest in history to her son, who enlisted her to take part in historical reenactments up and down the East Coast, where she cooked the food, made the clothing, and learned about the dances, songs, and lifestyles that prevailed in eighteenth-century America.

Ann Rinaldi lives with her husband in central New Jersey.