Brave Enemies (42 page)

When the song was over John turned in the firelight so I could see his face. He was slimmer than ever, and paler.

“The moment of victory is the time to be humble,” he said. “If a victory has been won it is the Lord's work and the Lord's will. If you have come forward through the troubled times to this night of victory, it is because the Lord was with you and guided you.”

John turned away a little so I had to listen harder. He never did have a voice all that loud.

“This is a night of Thanksgiving,” he went on. “This is a night of praise and celebration. But it is also a night to remember the cost. I'm sure each of you has paid a great price to be here. I know I have. Some of you have lost friends and some have lost family. Some have lost those dearest to them. Some have lost limbs and some have lost eyes.”

John stopped and turned toward the wagon where I lay. I knew he couldn't see me in the dark. I tried to wave, but was too weak to do more than raise my arm before falling back on the blanket.

“This must be a night of mourning also,” John said. “This must be our time of remembering those lost in this hard time. This will be our night to honor them and pray for them. This will be our night to be humble and sing of their memory and sacrifice.”

I had tears in my eyes, both because of what John was saying and because he didn't know I was there. For all he knew I had burned at the cabin or frozen to death on the tree outside.

“Our only comfort is in the working out of the Lord's will,” John said. “Our only comfort is in our dedication. You have won a victory that will benefit your children and your children's children for a hundred generations, but the work of peace has only begun.”

After John sang another song and prayed for all the wounded, I was frantic to let him know I was there. I was too weak to holler out, and
when I called to the orderly that had brought me the grits he didn't hear me either. I banged on the side of the wagon with my elbow, and then with my fist. I kicked at the boards with my good foot.

A sergeant walking away from the campfire heard me and stopped by the wagon. “Are you having fits?” he said.

“I need to see that man,” I said.

He asked if I needed to see a man about a dog, and he laughed and said what man is that. I told him I wanted to talk to the preacher.

I was going to tell him John was my husband. But the man walked away and I waited. It seemed like hours passed. And then I saw John walking toward the wagon.

“John,” I called out loud as I could. My throat was scratchy and cracked. I swallowed and tried again. “John,” I yelled as loud as I could.

John was walking straight toward me. He looked tall as a tree with the firelight behind him, and when he reached out toward me his arms were long wings of shadow and light stretching far across the camp to touch me. As he came closer I couldn't see his face, but he looked tall as an oak with the lit droplets of rain behind him, tall as a house, as he bent down to see me better.

M
Y FATHER,
C
LYDE
R. M
ORGAN
, first told me the story of the Battle of Cow-pens when I was a boy. He was a wonderful storyteller, and his vivid sense of history has inspired many of my stories. At least one of my ancestors, William Capps, fought at Cowpens.

But this is a work of fiction and most of the characters are imagined. In the case of historical figures such as Daniel Morgan and Banastre Tarleton, I have tried to stay as close to the known facts as possible. In instances where the historians disagree I have followed my own sense of the plausible.

For background information and descriptions of the Battle of Cowpens itself I have benefited from reading the following studies and documents:
A History of the Campaigns of 1780–81 in Southern America
by Banastre Tarleton (1787; reprint, Spartanburg, S.C.: Reprint Company, 1967);
Life of General Daniel Morgan
by James Graham (1856; reprint, Bloomingburg, N.Y.: Zebrowski Historical Services, 1993);
Colonial and Revolutionary History of Upper South Carolina
by J.B.O. Landrum (1897; reprint, Spartanburg, S.C.: Reprint Company, 1977);
The Green Dragoon
by Robert D. Bass (1957; reprint, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1973);
Daniel Morgan: Revolutionary Rifleman
by Don Higginbotham (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961);
The Battle of Cowpens
by Edwin S. Bears (Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, 1967);
From Savannah to Yorktown
by Henry Lumpkin (New York: Paragon House, 1981);
The Battle of Cowpens
by Kenneth Roberts (New York: Eastern Acorn Press, 1981);
With Fire and Sword: The Battle of Kings Mountain
by Wilma Dyke-man (Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, 1981);
Battleground: South Carolina in the Revolution
by Warren Ripley (Charleston, S.C.: Post-Courier Books, 1983);
The Patriots at the Cowpens
by Bobby Gilmer Moss (Greenville, S.C.: Scotia Press, 1985);
Cowpens: Downright Fighting
by Thomas J. Fleming (Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, 1988);
Cowpens Battlefield: A Walking Guide
by Lawrence E. Babits (Johnson City, Tenn.: The Overmountain Press, 1993);
A Devil of a Whipping
by Lawrence E. Babits (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998);
Partisans and Redcoats
by Walter Edgar (New York: William Morrow, 2001).

Finally, I would like to thank Elisabeth Scharlatt and the staff of Algonquin Books for their unfailing help in bringing this story to completion. I am especially grateful to my editors, Duncan Murrell and Shannon Ravenel, for their crucial patience, wisdom, and faith in this book.

A Short Note from the Author

A Reading and Discussion Guide

A Short Note from the Author

Many reviewers and read­ers have noted that several of my stories and novels are told from the point of view of a woman. They speak as though it is uncommon for men to write from the point of view of women characters. I like to point out that Daniel Defoe published
Moll Flanders
in 1722, one of the earliest English novels, about a woman's life, told in her own voice.

Reynolds Price, who has published several well-known novels narrated by women, says that all men are raised by women and therefore are familiar from infancy with women's voices, women's points of view. One of the models I had in mind when I first wrote from a woman's point of view in my 1992 novella
The Mountains Won't Remember Us
was Thomas Wolfe's story “The Web of Earth,” a monologue spoken by his mother.

Modern fiction got started around the time a lot of women in Europe and England learned to read. From the first, novels were written primarily for an audience of women, whether authored by men or women. Fiction is about intimacy, about emotions and relationships, about de­tail, and often about the powerless and dis­advantaged. Prose fiction is almost never heroic, in the older poetic sense. Novels are more often antiheroic; witness
Don Quixote, Crime and Punishment.

It has been a great surprise to me to find my­self drawn again and again to write stories about women, told by women. I always ex­pected to write action stories, stories about warfare, wilderness, the frontier, stories about history and panthers, road-building and hunting. And I have written novels about all those things, but the surprise is that they are often narrated by women who happened to be there.

In the late 1980s I decided to write a novel about the battle of Cowpens in the American Revolution. At least one of my ancestors had fought in the battle, January 17, 1781, just down the mountain near Spartanburg. My dad, who loved history, had told me the story of the battle when I was a boy. I began doing research about the Revolutionary War in the Carolinas and found that Tarleton, the British commander who lost the battle, explained that he had ordered his men to fight after marching all night because he had reports the “Green River rifles” were on their way to join the Americans, and he wanted to fight before they arrived. I had grown up on Green River.

I wrote a version of the novel that became
Brave Enemies
in the early 1990s but knew it wasn't right. I knew the battle scenes were accurate but wasn't sure who the people fighting were. It was only years later, when I imagined Josie Summers, the sixteen-year-old who has been violated and is running away from home with no place to go, that the story really came alive for me. Once I heard her voice and began to feel her fear as she wandered into the wilderness, the story began to shape itself.

A writer's imagination is stimulated most by tasks that are difficult. Yeats talked about putting on an anti-mask, an opposite identity, to stretch the imagination and understanding. I think this may be the case with my fiction writing. Assuming the voice, the consciousness of a woman character in trouble, struggling to survive, is so alien, so difficult for me, it calls forth my best energy and discipline. I demand most of myself, for nothing less will work or bring the story into being.

I often say my best talent is for listening. I was the shy kid who sat in the corner while the women strung beans or peeled peaches. I listened to my mother and my aunts talking while the men were away. I became a fiction writer to get down some of the voices I heard by the fireplace or on the porch back then, and to tell the stories I heard about wars, about panthers and snakes and ghosts, about sickness and childbirth in mountain cabins, about the deaths of children.

I believe I write more about women characters than about men because women fascinate me. I am in awe of women, their toughness and vulnerability. I am drawn to stories of the powerless, people who survive in difficult times. I am drawn to stories where physical danger and hunger are real, and to vulnerable characters who can describe the struggles. I learn from my characters as I go, letting them tell their stories to me. They remind me of things I had forgotten I knew.

1. What lessons does Josie take away from her mother's marriage to Mr. Griffin? In what ways does her mother's marriage affect her relationship later with John?

2. Discuss Josie's actions leading up to her running away. Were they justified? What other choices could she have made?

3. In what ways is the harassment Josie experiences similar or dissimilar to what young women might encounter today?

4. The novel alternates between Josie's and John's points of view. What effect does this narration have on the way the story unfolds? With which character did you most identify and why?

5. Compare the role of faith in the lives of Josie and John. How does it inform who they are and how they behave?

6. Do you think that John has satisfactorily resolved his moral obligation to his church and his love for Josie? Was it ethical for him to support Josie's deception? And why doesn't he reveal Josie's identity to his parishioners? What exactly does he fear from them?

7. “Sometimes a woman has to be smart and swallow her pride,” Josie confesses. “I decided I would resist the sergeant, but I would not holler out. If he overpowered me I would have to let him have his way. I would not give in, but I would not let him kill me either. The Lord would forgive me” (
page 203
). In what ways does Josie succeed at being a woman in man's world? Do you believe women today still need to swallow their pride?

8. In what ways do Josie's and John's journeys parallel each other after they're forced to separate?

9. What drives Josie to not only dress as a boy but also risk her life in battle? How successful do you think Josie is at passing herself off as “one of the boys” in Cox's militia company?