I Am Abraham (53 page)

“
Paw
,” he said, “it’s my birthday,
Paw
.”

I had the marines learn him how to fire that sailors’ gun. Tad squeezed the trigger once, with his eyes shut; the carbine kicked against his shoulder and could have knocked him flat, if a pair of marines hadn’t formed a buttress right behind Tad; the carbine had a crystalline sound that reverberated from here to Richmond, and into the tympans of my skull.

I should have rejoiced, barked my pleasure, like Mr. Stanton, or scarified the Rebels, at least, grimaced like a donkey and yowled my own version of the Rebel yell. But I wouldn’t even have frightened my own boy. No, I was like a man rising up out of a nightmare, and realizing that the nightmare had shifted ground, and skirted along a river road. I reckon I wouldn’t find much release in Richmond—just smoke and blood in a war that was like a family feud. So I was starting to fear that ride to Richmond.

The Rebels had mined the river; torpedoes floated right past us with their humped backs bobbing out of the water; there were dead horses along the route, their bellies all bloated, their yellow eyes fixed on some horizon that had nothing to do with our struggles; there were broken pieces of ordnance and broken boats, put there by some devil’s design.

The rapids were fierce, and I was befuddled. I thought for a moment we were on the Sangamon, and I’d have to rise out of the river, declare myself to a town of dusty men, but it was no more than a disillusion of light on the James. I was a Pa now, and Commander-in-Chief, and I didn’t have to collect the gear of a land surveyor, or fight Injuns you could never find, though I’d rather have pursued Black Hawk’s invisible braves than ride past torpedoes with humped backs that could give a body the chills.

We heard strange noises, as if the spirits of the dead were crying out to us with their own muted lamentations. And I could have been with Mother at a séance on the sea, because for one flat second I pictured the dead, and they weren’t wearing butternut or blue but long white hospital gowns. They were right on our tail, in a little boat that was like a funeral barge, packed with guidons and regimental banners. The noises didn’t grow slack even after the cortège had passed, with the banners and the hospital gowns. I covered Tad’s ears with my hands, but we were all enfeebled by that incessant hum. One of the sailors looked as if he was going mad. We had to restrain him, or he would have jumped off the
Malvern
and been swallowed up by the currents.

Then, as suddenly as it started, the humming stopped. The
Malvern
had gone aground, and we had to remove ourselves to a rowboat. A sunken wheelhouse sat in the middle of the James, like a grim reminder that we’d come to Rebel country at our own peril; we passed fort after fort on both riverbanks that could have knocked us out of the water with a couple of
cannonades
; but there wasn’t a soul in sight, except for a single creature in a Federal cap who ran along the shoreline with gigantic shears and cut the electrical cords that could have tripped one of the
iron turtles
some ordnance captain had left us as a little surprise. The main ambition of their chief engineer, according to Stanton, was to fill the waters as full of torpedoes as there were catfish in the James.

Tad’s favorite marine steered around all those
iron turtles
with his own élan; it was like having Prospero on board, in a round blue cap. But my courage shriveled up after my first glimpse of the capital; I saw a city of black smoke on a clutter of hills, with burning embers that bumped along, like an army of locusts on some relentless trail; and behind that
curtain
I could catch the outline of corroded walls on hill after hill.

That army of locusts seemed to lift as we moved closer and closer, but not all the Rebels had abandoned Richmond; there must have been a few demolition demons around the river. A railroad bridge fired up in front of our eyes, shook like a palsied metal snake, and dropped into the water with a soft, angelic crump, as we arrived at Rocketts Landing—in Richmond—but couldn’t dock there. I looked at all the smoldering stumps, the disused sheds, the sunken warships, and broken torpedoes, like a land and sea surveyor. Rocketts had been a thorn in our side—the Rebel Navy Yard—where Mr. Jeff’s ironclads were made; it sprawled on both banks of the James like a series of carbuncles that populated the harbor with a monstrosity of sheds and machine shops—until the Rebels dismantled their own yards and set fire to their ships.

Rocketts wasn’t a landing at all; its wharves had buckled in the fire, and there was hardly a landing slip left. I had to carry Tad ashore. The general and white officers of the all-black 25
^th
Corps should have been at Rocketts to lead the way into Richmond, but I couldn’t find one solitary soldier at the wharves. And without a general to guide us, the war had
devolved
upon me and my 3
^rd
Lieutenant, and Mr. Crook, and our six marines, who had to serve as a welcoming committee for the United States in Mr. Jeff’s conquered capital.

I stood on the burnt edge of Rocketts and stared into the hills of Richmond, with entire blocks where nothing but chimneys remained, like tall tombstones, surrounded by rubble, with ashes swirling in the wind. The smoke hadn’t quite settled, and tiny scraps of fire still flared up along the river, where some oil must have spilled. The
Confederates
had gone to Danville with all their ghosts and left us a town of ashes and dust. Dixie had become the heart of hell. Even a wild Injun like Tad could lose his soul in a place like this. I had to dig hard to recall what Prospero’s own sprite had whispered to his master.
Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.

And then I saw them, not devils—no, no, but colored families on a barge in the canal, with their spinning wheels and cradles, bundles of clothes and sticks of furniture—bureaus and tables and mirrors scattered everywhere on the barge, like landlocked items after a tornado, with children pretending they could rock along the water in wooden saddles, and old men in punctured bowler hats peering over the sides like cashiered pirates; they must have all been free or bonded blacks who worked in the tobacco warehouses and the shipyards and had lost their homes and their livelihood in the fire.

They were stunned to see a party of white men
walk
out of a burning river, and they whispered among themselves and leapt out of the barge and onto the wharves. They stood in that welter of ashes and dust, and they fondled my black coat with an aura of disbelief, as if I were a river god, and went down on their knees—men, women, and little girls.

“It’s the tall Messiah,” they said. “Glory, Hallelujah! Mr. Lincoln has come to town.”

I was struck by the unfairness of it, that such blacks should have been sent flying out of their homes by some mad
kindlings
of the Quartermaster’s men and had to scrounge on a barge with their spinning wheels.

“You mustn’t kneel. You mustn’t. I’m not the Messiah. I’m
jest
a man, come to help if I can,” I had to protest.

My words were straw in the wind. They’d still be on that barge into next season. The young men stood up like winsome giants—some were sappers who had dug the trenches around Richmond, and built the parapets of Petersburg; others had labored at the shipyards, and the Rebels had abandoned them all to the fire. They bowed to Tad and entertained him with a little
fandango
on those buckled wharves.

Then some black women in butternut appeared out of the same ashes and dust—I was astonished to see such ladies in Rebel cords, with boots and caps, and a couple even had sabers at their sides. They didn’t dance with the sappers and stevedores, but they clapped their hands. They were “Mollies,” bonded servants and slaves who followed the Rebel soldiers into battle as cooks and washerwomen, and became the mascots of some regiment or another.

Cooks and concubines.

That would have been the rôle of mascots and regimental wives among our own men, but we didn’t have colored mascots, only white
vivandières
who followed their sweethearts to war. And it was pretty damn peculiar to watch these ladies in their yellow bandannas and butternut caps.

“Bless the Lord! Uncle Abraham has come with his little boy.”

“Ladies,” I said, in my best Southern drawl, “I’m mighty glad to meet ye, but shouldn’t you get out of that Rebel attire? Richmond is a Federal city now, and if we ever find some general, he might decide to arrest you on sight.”

“Then we’d be
nek-kid
. We lost most of our apparel in the fire.”

I shut my mouth and we walked up Church Hill together, with its grogshops and groceries, its warehouses and mechanic shops, and we crossed the piss-colored waters of Bloody Run Creek, with my six marines clutching their carbines, and my escort of Rebel lady scouts. We arrived on Main Street, with its vista of rubble and burnt façades as far as the eye could tell, as if some ogre of an army had belched fire all along the route. We passed Libby Prison, a brick warehouse on Tobacco Row, where Union officers had been held in damp, dark rooms—until their own keepers fled; the walls were charred; a portion of the roof had caved in. We were always wheedling, throughout the war, to get our officer prisoners removed from those caves, where tobacco had once been cured. But I had been the culprit. Nothing was done on account of me. I couldn’t afford to swap prisoners with the Rebels and refurbish their supply of men. So
their
officers remained in Old Capitol, and ours were stuck here, in this sink near the wharves.

I wanted to have a look at Libby before our little peace parade went into the depths of Richmond. So we walked back down the hill to Cary Street and stood in front of that brick and mortar mountain with its cobblestone path. A sentry stumbled out of a huge hole in the wall where the main door must have been. He was the first Union soldier I’d seen in Richmond, and he snarled at my Rebel ladies and poked at us with a bayonet that twitched like an errant tongue in the blinding sun off the river.

“You have no business here. This is Federal property. It belongs to the Army of the James.”

He must have recognized Tad and then me in my tall hat. He saluted and kept peering at the ladies, but he didn’t keep us from walking through the hole in the wall and entering that big barn with its metal shutters and banks of barred windows. Libby had been gutted by the Rebels; there were flights of stairs that didn’t lead to any landings, a cesspool the fire had sucked dry, howitzers with their own embrasures in the walls that an artillery captain must have put there as part of some fictitious last stand. It was a monstrous place, with its perfect pyramid of cannonballs, its dry latrine, its floors coated with blood like
impossible
shellac or the hardened gelatin of a slaughterhouse.

We were about to step back into the ghostly calm of Main Street when an odd murmur pricked my ears, like the fatalistic moan of dying cattle. But these were men hunched up in a far corner of the old warehouse, who’d been silent until now. They were Libby’s new prisoners of war, stragglers and deserters from the Rebel garrison in clownish clothes—hats and pantaloons that were far too big or far too small, and cummerbunds that some Oriental grocer might have worn. They were guarded by one of our irregulars, a boy of fifteen who must have been a graduate of the bugle corps. He didn’t have a rifle or a bayonet, but they still cowered. And they kneeled in front of our little cavalcade, while they looked at my Rebel lady scouts with anger and lust in their little pink eyes. All the saloons had been raided, they said, and the streets ran with rum and brandy right down to the river; they had lost time licking that rum off the stones like a pack of wild dogs, and that’s how the Union cavalry had captured them. “Black devils out of nowhere,” they said.

“They’re liars,” the bugler-sentry insisted. “My colonel found them lying in a ditch and asked me to hold them here.”

“At the Hotel Libby,” rasped one of the louts. “Without vittles or a place to pee. And no one could have captured us excepting that colored cavalry . . . say, ain’t you Mr. Jeff’s brother-in-law, honest Abe Lincoln?”

The bugler-sentry told him to shut up and shoved his stash of prisoners deeper into their corner. I had little interest in these louts, who’d robbed and plundered and made merry while Richmond burned, so we lit out of there.

We still hadn’t met
one
white inhabitant of the city, though we did see some faces staring at us behind the half-shuttered, broken windows of a mansion that remained in the ruins—women in bombazine mantillas, like Spanish maidens in mourning, with blue eyes and the pinched nostrils of Richmond aristocrats.

Mr. Crook thought he could see a sniper on one of the ripped roofs. There was a metallic flash from a dormer window. Crook floated in front of us like a dolphin in the middle of a ballet and put his own corpulence between that window and Tad—and me. Still, I wouldn’t halt our march because of some damn feller with a gun. He waved it at us, with the Rebel Stars and Bars twisted around the barrel.

I tipped my hat like some political genius at this first white citizen who had condescended to notice us, notice us with a gun. Then we ran into a company of black soldiers in bedraggled uniforms, with chalk on their hands and faces, who were among the first to enter this fire pit of a town. But their captain had obliged them to bivouac across the river, because he didn’t want to create civil unrest and frighten half the population of Richmond.

I asked them the way to the Rebel White House; and they fell into line, acted as our escort. A few white folks joined us—stragglers, I suppose, who’d come to jeer and then changed their minds. Others left their mansion-caves out of curiosity perhaps, to catch the Lincoln Show. A young lieutenant limped toward us in a butternut tunic, clutching a pair of canes; he’d become an invalid, he said, after his
second
horse was shot out from under him at Antietam and crushed both his legs.