Beauty From Ashes (63 page)

back to me. And, the most important thing of all is that we’re going to be married—right away!”

It took some urging by her mother and Pete for Selina to wait the two days until November 26 to marry George.

“Just because you’re finally going to tie the knot,” Pete said in her no-nonsense way, “there’s no reason you, Mama, and I should not have clean hair. Tomorrow, the day you’ve been plumping for, is just too soon. And I know it’s only going to be a small wedding with family and the Reverend Benedict, Louisa Fletcher, her daughter Georgia, who’ll be playing the organ, Henry Greene Cole, Sam, and Eve in attendance. But I want clean hair and it takes nearly all day for my hair to dry.”

“I agreed, didn’t I?” Selina snapped. “I don’t like it, but I won’t cause any trouble over it because it’s going to be an enchanted day. I’d give almost anything if Fanny could be here, too, but under the circumstances, maybe it’s best she can’t get

away from her hospital long enough. I 855 hate this war for a million reasons! Thanks to the war, my own brother can’t even give me away. What right has Mr. Henry Greene Cole to decide he’s the one giving me away?”

“Because he happens to be available and kind enough to do it,” Anne said. “Smile, Selina. In their wonderful hearts, both your brother and your papa are giving you in marriage, and as much as you and your Captain George love each other, what could possibly spoil your wedding day? I do thank you for thinking of Eve. That woman is walking two feet off the ground because you invited her as though she’s a member of the family.”

“Well, isn’t she?” Pete wanted to know.

“To us, of course she is. But I’m glad so few people will be there, because I know none of the guests will be horrified that a colored person is sitting right in the regular pews with us instead of upstairs all by herself in the servants’ balcony.”

“You don’t think Mina and her daughter will mind that they aren’t invited, do you, Mama?” Selina asked.

“Oh, no. Mina’s going to be too busy back here working on your fancy wedding cake, and

poor Flonnie’s so shy, she’d probably throw up if she had to walk into St. James Church.” Anne laughed. “That wasn’t very nice of me, was it? But I’m sure everything is being done just right and for all the right reasons. You’re certainly not marrying George because you want a gorgeous wedding gown and a huge, expensive wedding. You’re marrying him for the only reason anyone should dare take such a big step—love.”

As usual, when Eve turned the latch on the front door of their brick cabin, as she insisted on calling the snug brick house in which she and June lived on the Marietta property, she wakened her aging husband.

And, as usual, at the moment of awakening, June gave a loud, sleepy snort. “Who dere?”

“Who do you think it is, you old sleeping dog?” After she kissed him tenderly on his snow-white, wooly head, she twirled around the floor in a little dance that made her long, green-striped cotton skirt stand out in a circle. “June, it was a beautiful wedding and I’ll remember it as long as I live on this

earth!” 857

“Talk nigger talk, Evie,” he grumbled. “You done been wif dem fancy white folk all afternoon, but you home wif me now. You ain’t got Miss Anne tellin’ you to talk dis way an’ dat.”

“I’ll talk anyway I please, sir, and thank you for not scolding me. It just might take me a few minutes to come down off my puffy cloud where I been with all that beautiful music. Miss Louisa’s daughter, she make on that church organ.”

“You feel lak a po’ country girl from some coastal far-off Island, lak I say you would, wif all dem white folk dressed up in dere wedding finery?”

“No, I did not. I felt—beautiful too. Miss Anne told me I looked beautiful. I fix up her ole blue silk for her to wear an’ she look beautiful too. Miss Anne an’ me we bof still got our looks, June. Ain’t nobody kin say we ain’t. You so white in the head, you done forgot how quick dis weddin’ done happen! You ‘member lil Selina’s Cap’n George he come home from

de war all shot up? When he walks or try to, he limps so bad ebery step look lak he gonna tip ober! But he tipped right up to that altar and took his place ‘longside Selina an’ say all the right words after the preacher an’ now they married. Miss Selina, she now goes by the name Mrs. George Stubinger, but oh, dat girl be happy!”

Shaking his head slowly, June mumbled, “My, my, my, my! Jus’ think, Mausa John’s lil girl he usta call Eena an’ whirl ‘roun’ his head, she done growed up an’ got herself a man. Evie, I wonder how Mausa John, he take all this?”

“If I knows Mausa John, he be laughin’ ‘cause his curly-haired Eena laughin’ too. More-more-more! How she do love dat man, Cap’n George!”

His mind not at all on what Eve was saying, June asked, “You hab to sit all by yo’se’f in the gallery at de church, Evie?”

“I did not!”

“Where you sit at de weddin’?”

“Right beside Miss Anne downstairs in a white persons’ pew. I be Miss Anne’s

friend.” 859

He chuckled. “Yeah. When ain’t no other white person lookin’.was

“You tryin’ to spoil my day, ole man?”

June chuckled again. “No, Evie. But when Aberham Linkum sign his Emancipation paper, my Evie she kin sit right up in de pulpit wif de preacher if she’s got a mind to sit dere. You knows it be almost to the end of November? Just December to come an’ go an’ all us niggers be free! Free to do as we please.”

“You been talkin’ to Barber James Johnson agin.”

“Co’se I has! Barber James my frien’, too. An’ he keep up on eberthing.”

“Except common sense. You got more common sense in your lil finger, June, den Barber Johnson got in his whole head. He jus’ so high-‘n’-mighty ‘cause he be a free person of color dat cuts Mister Henry Greene Cole’s hair while dey talks together in whispers an’ Mister Cole so rich an’ strong fo’ de Union, Barber Johnson, he think dat mean he knows it all too. It don’t. His yellow skin gonna be as black as yours eben after

dat Proclamation be signed by President Lincoln. Ain’t no black slave an’ no black free person of color gonna live any different than now, an’ none of ‘em gonna live as good as you an’ me lives right today!”

Anne, perhaps more than anyone else in town, felt fresh panic when early in March 1863, the militia was called out and Cobb County members were sent to Atlanta with orders to head south for Savannah to protect the Georgia coast. James Hamilton Couper had written of the Yankee guns placed on St. Simons, but somehow, until this military action began to take place, Anne had not been too upset. Now, the thought of armed men and still more guns landing on her once quiet, peaceful St. Simons Island sent shivers up her spine. St. Simons, her birthplace, the birthplace of all her children, stretched its year-round greenness off the coast for laughter and living and family warmth and beauty, not for war.

Louisa Fletcher was right, of course, when she reminded Anne that the militia from Marietta was too poorly armed for violent action. The men

carried mostly ancient pistols, 861 knives, even wooden pikes—anything they thought might stop the invading Yankee soldiers. But to Anne, war was war and she hated everything about it. Young, unfulfilled lives were cut down foolishly. Husbands, sweethearts, brothers, sons, fathers, could be killed or at least horribly wounded even by the makeshift, handmade wooden pikes. But Southern tempers had flared in fresh rebellion at the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, in effect now since January 1, 1863. True, Anne could see little or no consequences from it, either good or bad, in Marietta. And she and Eve made jokes together about the unlikely situation in which two ordinary women—one black, one white—could be such close friends that without fail one of them came every single morning to prepare bathwater and see to the proper arranging of the other’s hair, the condition of her clothing. Then, as the cool spring turned into warm summer days, word came that the threat to the Georgia coast had not been as severe as feared, the militia returned, and life really didn’t change much after Emancipation for Anne and her friend —no longer her slave—Eve.

The frustrating change in all their lives came from the absence of clothing in the stores and the steady decline in the kinds and amounts of foodstuffs they could buy. Worst of all were the high, high prices of food still available in the once plentifully stocked grocery stores in the Marietta Square.

“I am painfully aware,” John Couper wrote to Pete in late March, “of your acute food shortage and, more troubling, your shortage of money to buy what is there. But don’t shake this letter for enclosed currency, because there isn’t any. I’ve not told you, wanting to save you worry, but my trusted, faithful horse, Bay Boy, was shot dead under me during the bloody fighting at Sharpsburg in September of last year. I have had to part with three hundred fifty dollars of my own money for a new mount because the Confederate Army is slow with compensation.”

Pete, who did most of the usually meager food shopping, decided not to tell her mother there was no money, then thought better of it and let her know. She’d find out from someone in town anyway or begin to think Pete a little mad for bringing home such a pitiful supply of food from the stores. No

wonder, Pete thought, that Confederate 863 President Davis issued a proclamation in April in which he literally begged Southerners to plant only food crops instead of cotton and tobacco.

Selina, who would not have complained audibly for herself, fretted a lot because George Stubinger forgot himself and put his longing for a cup of real coffee into words.

“Nobody’s doing anything to help anyone in this dreadful war,” Selina said again and again. “I’ve never been the Unionist you and Pete are, Mama, but I think I’m less so now. Oh, I’m not one of these prickly Confederate women, either. But nothing’s working for anyone. George all but gave his life for the Southern Cause, and what did it get him? A permanently crippled leg, and now there’s no way to get him even a cup of weak coffee!”

Anne and Louisa Fletcher saw so little of each other, it frightened Anne. Daily, she realized how she had come to depend on time with Louisa to preserve her own balance. What, she asked herself again and again, will I do when Dix

Fletcher has their new house at Woodlawn in condition for them to move in? He’d proudly announced to Louisa that even with his piecemeal work, he hoped to have the main rooms ready by summer.

The only spot where Anne found any real peace or respite from the nagging worries of all their days, the only spot where she rested, especially after reading aloud to George in order to give Selina a variation in her daily routine, was the place she kept the old Cannon’s Point rocker—her second-floor balcony with its view of Kennesaw Mountain. If there was even a slight breeze, she could catch it out there.

The rocker had been Papa’s favorite when she was a child. It helped her to sit in it now. At times she went out onto the balcony for only a few minutes to collect her troubled thoughts. What difference had it made, indeed, that President Lincoln had issued a Proclamation freeing the slaves! Perhaps it had changed many things on St. Simons, where there were far more slaves than in north Georgia, but she doubted it. Her sister-in-law Frances Anne wrote that whites lived in fear of a slave uprising. So far as Anne knew, so far as

she’d been able to find out from daily 865 searching Mr. Goodman’s newspaper, the Confederacy had decreed the Proclamation of no importance whatever. The rebellious states mentioned in the document paid it no mind. But Anne remembered Louisa’s reminding her that the courageous act of Lincoln’s had roused sympathy for the North in both France and England— and most British people did love defaming slave owners.

Anne knew the Northern United States truly feared that Great Britain might soon recognize the Confederacy as a nation. Lincoln had at least stopped that, Louisa was right to keep reminding Anne. Today was May 3, 1863. The very next month would be June, and Louisa would surely be moving soon. How, Anne asked herself once more, will I live my days without seeing her? Louisa’s strong faith in God had almost always helped Anne through her dark, despairing times. As Anne tried to face the tragic truth that her beautiful grandson, Fraser, lay dead in an unknown grave somewhere far from Georgia, Louisa reminded her in her definite way that young Fraser was really with his mother, Annie, in heaven.

Of course, Louisa was right. But Anne was a grandmother, who seemed unable to attain lasting comfort without Louisa at her side.

Even with the Fletchers living on the outskirts of the city, she could have Big Boy drive her out to Woodlawn when her need became too great. Anne leaned her head back in Papa’s old rocker and tried to give thanks.

The next morning a little before ten, Sam, because no patients were due until afternoon, stood at the front window of his medical office idly watching the halfhearted drilling that seemed to take place all day long in the Marietta Square.

Suddenly his attention was caught by the running figure of a portly, unfamiliar man who, just before he reached the open door of the telegraph office, caught his boot and almost took a bad fall on the sidewalk. The stranger limped heavily through the door and disappeared inside the telegraph office, evidently intent on sending his message as quickly as possible.

Full of curiosity about the content of that

message, Sam stood there rubbing his chin 867 whiskers, wondering if there was any subtle way he might find out in case the stranger happened to be a Confederate. Almost everyone in Marietta knew Sam as a Union sympathizer, knew he had been born in New York. Those who didn’t know for sure savored the gossip that indeed he was a Unionist. Some of these, he felt sure, were patients of his—if for no other reason than their own curiosity about him.

Every day since he’d stood as Captain George Stubinger’s groomsman in November of last year, he had tried and tried to find the real reason Pete still refused to set their wedding date. That she loved him he had no doubt. He was so genuinely fond of her mother, he somehow couldn’t bring himself to blame her for Pete’s reluctance. Long ago his attractive cottage had begun to feel unnaturally empty. Since Selina and George had married, Sam’s own misery had grown. He’d been so sure that their standing together at the altar of St. James as matron of honor and groomsman would move Pete toward the longing to stand with him at the same altar as bride and groom. It did not.