Confederates in the Attic (5 page)

“Mary Custis Lee!” the commander yelled again.

“Ajax,” Dr. Sloop corrected.

“Right. How many Confederate regiments went into Pickett’s Charge?”

“Too many,” the color sergeant said.

“Forty-six to be exact. What were the odds of surviving a head wound in the War?”

“Not too good,” I volunteered, getting into the spirit of things. The correct answer was one in six. Dr. Sloop again.

“Oh gee, fellahs, this one’s a giveaway,” Ed Curtis said, reaching the last question. “How many horses did Nathan Bedford Forrest have shot out from under him?”

“Twenty-nine!” the audience shouted in unison. Of sixty-five questions, only Jeff Davis’s middle name—Finis—had stumped
everyone. I quietly resolved to hit the books. The store of Civil War trivia I’d carried around since childhood clearly wouldn’t suffice if I hoped to hold my own among latter-day rebels.

After the quiz, we were joined by the women of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, who had met across the hall. Sue Curtis was a stout woman with large-framed trifocals and a suit the color of strawberry daiquiri. Draped over her ample chest was a ribbon pinned with shiny medals, in the style of a Latin dictator.

“I’ve got seventeen Confederate ancestors I can prove,” she said, “and one who I think went Union.” She laughed. “I’m not doing any more research on him.”

I told her about the journey I’d just begun, and asked why she thought Southerners still cared about the Civil War.

“War Between the States,” she gently corrected me. “The answer is family. We grow up knowing who’s once removed and six times down. Northerners say, ‘Forget the War, it’s over.’ But they don’t have the family Bibles we do, filled with all these kinfolk who went off to war and died. We’ve lost so much.”

Strictly speaking, she was right. Roughly half of modern-day white Southerners descended from Confederates, and one in four Southern men of military age died in the War. For Yankee men, the death rate was about one in ten, and waves of post-War immigration left a far lower ratio of Northerners with blood ties to the conflict. Still, I was struck by Sue Curtis’s tone. She spoke as though her kinsmen died yesterday, not 130 years ago.

“Caleb Senter, my great-great-grandfather, was captured at Cold Harbor,” she said, fingering an “ancestor pin” that bore his name. “He was on his way to Elmira Prison, but a drunk telegraph man directed his train right into a coal freighter in Pennsylvania. Poor Caleb was squashed to death and buried by the tracks.” Her eyes misted over. “I made a magnolia wreath for his grave.”

We were interrupted by her husband, Ed. “Sue boring you with her War stories?” he asked.

“Not at all. Actually, I’m kind of jealous. I don’t even know the names of my great-great-grandfathers.”

Ed winked. “Don’t get her started on her great-great-uncles.”

The others began drifting out of the library. It was almost nine o’clock. “We’re going across the street to Miss Lucy’s for some iced tea and French silk pie,” Sue said. “Would you care to come along?”

I suddenly didn’t feel in any rush to reach Charleston.

A
WAKENING THE NEXT MORNING
in a $27 room at Salisbury’s Econo Lodge (“Spend a Night, Not a Fortune!”), I recognized the appeal of dwelling on the South’s past rather than its present. Stepping from my room into the motel parking lot, I gazed out at a low-slung horseshoe of ferroconcrete called Towne Mall, a metal-and-cement forest of humming electricity pylons, a Kmart, a garish yellow Waffle House, a pink-striped Dunkin’ Donuts, plus Taco Bell, Bojangles, Burger King, the Golden Arches of McDonald’s and the equally gaudy signs for Exxon, BP and Shell hoisted like battle flags above the melee of competing brands. A few exhaust-choked bushes poked from the greasy asphalt.

I’d gone to bed reading about the Confederate general Albert Sidney Johnston, who urged his men into battle at Shiloh by declaring, “Remember the fair, broad, abounding land, the happy homes and ties that would be desolated by your defeat!” I wondered sleepily what Johnston would make of the view from the Econo Lodge.

Over coffee at the Waffle House, I also began wondering about the crowd I’d met the night before. It had included not only the doctor and pastor, but also a textile worker, a rose grower, a gun-shop owner, a state bureaucrat and several farmers in overalls. Apart from sports, I couldn’t think of many interests that comfortably bridged such a wide range of people. I was curious to know more of what drew them together.

“Blood,” Sue Curtis said. “That’s all you really need to join this club.”

I’d tracked her down at the Rowan County library, where she spent several mornings a week verifying applications for membership in the United Daughters of the Confederacy, or UDC for short. This meant hours of scrolling through microfilm copies of military records from the 1860s. I squinted into the machine at a muster roll.
In terse language and careful script, the records listed each soldier’s home, occupation, age, and eventual fate. “Died in hands of enemy,” read a typical entry. “Effects none.”

From scraps like this, Sue reclaimed whole lives. Muster rolls led to pension records, wills, marriage certificates, gravestones. Diaries and letters fleshed the story out. She showed me a notebook filled with documents on Caleb Senter, her great-great-grandfather. “I have seen the cannon-balls strike men and the pieces of clothing would fly as high as the trees,” he wrote his wife. In another letter he told of his constant hunger and pleaded, “If there is anybody coming to this company, send me a small ham of meat and some chickens and a few pies and a couple of onions and so forth.” Soon after, Caleb was captured and killed in the Pennsylvania train wreck Sue had told me about the night before.

“When you’ve researched these people, it gets very personal,” she said. “You know what color hair they had, if their eyes were brown or green, how tall they were, their dreams for when they came home. After a while the War doesn’t seem that far away. It becomes part of your life.” She paused. “Or it takes over your life.”

When I asked what she meant, Sue laughed. “Come over to our place tonight and you’ll see,” she said, returning to her microfilm.

L
ATE THAT AFTERNOON
, I went to see Mike Hawkins, the color sergeant I’d sat beside at the Lee-Jackson meeting. His fourteen-foot-wide trailer perched next to a narrow road through the red-clay farmland that surrounded Salisbury’s sprawl of tract homes and malls. Inside, cluttering the main living space, was a guinea-pig cage, a large TV and an elegant table Hawkins’s great-grandparents received as a wedding gift in the 1890s.

Hawkins was a spare man with pocked skin and a wispy mustache. He wore the same outfit I’d seen him in the night before: black denims, cowboy boots, red flannel shirt. He sat squeezed beside his wife, Kaye, a big woman who took up most of the couch.

“Mike told me he met a paper man last night,” Kaye said, with a nervous high-pitched laugh. “Never met a paper man.”

“Actually, I’m doing research for a book.”

“Oh, books,” Kaye said, laughing again. “Mike loves his books. Loves ’em more than me, I think.”

Kaye was Hawkins’s second wife. His first marriage had ended in an ugly legal fight that left him with limited visitation rights for his three kids. He pointed to their pictures on the wall. “It’s in the Lord’s hands,” he said. “I tell Him, ‘Do for me what you can.’”

It was soon after his divorce that Hawkins became obsessed with the Civil War. To meet child support payments, he’d moved in with his parents and worked seven days a week at a textile factory. At night, he went to the genealogy room at the library. “I was trying to get my life back together,” he said. “I had this want to find out about my kin.”

One night, combing muster rolls, he found his great-great-grandfather listed as a private in a North Carolina regiment. Fields Hawkins was a twenty-year-old farmer when he volunteered. Shot twice in the spring of 1862, he married while recovering from his wounds, then returned to the War—though only for two months. “He got his leg shot off at Sharpsburg,” Hawkins said.

Hawkins showed me Fields’s application for an artificial leg, and census records from the early twentieth century that listed Fields and his wife, then in their sixties, as cotton mill workers. “Just like me,” Hawkins said. But one crucial detail still eluded him: the site of his great-great-grandfather’s grave. “It’s been seven years, but when I find it I’ll finally feel like I’ve accomplished something. A connection with my past that I can reach out and grab hold to.”

Hawkins had taken his documents to the Sons of Confederate Veterans and paid $33 in annual fees to join up. He’d made every meeting since. “It brings people together, like the War did,” he said. “I sit in a room with a doctor and pastor and such, and I don’t see them otherwise. We’re all together for the same reason.” The only other club to which he belonged was his factory’s softball team, which competed in North Carolina’s Industrial League.

Hawkins took particular pride in his status as the Rowan Rifles’ color sergeant. “If we were going into battle, I’d be in front of everybody,” he said. “It’s an honor, though it would have been a short honor.” Flags had another appeal; Hawkins could buy them cheaply at flea markets and souvenir shops.

He took me into the trailer’s cramped bedroom, lined with secondhand volumes on the War. Hawkins read everything he could find on Sharpsburg (known in the North as Antietam) and dreamed of visiting the Maryland battlefield, particularly the sunken road known as Bloody Lane where Fields Hawkins lost his leg. “I go there a lot in my head,” he said, flipping open a book with photographs of the Antietam dead. “I look at these pictures and it’s like the music from
Twilight Zone
kicks on, like I was there way back when.”

Kaye turned on the television and started fixing dinner. Hawkins lowered his voice. Late at night, he said, when Kaye fell asleep, he often slipped out of bed and continued reading, by oven light. “It’s an escape,” he said. “When I’m reading, I feel like I’m there, not here. And when I finish I feel content, like I’ve been away for a while.” He smiled. “Sometimes I get brain fry from all the reading.”

I asked him if he thought “there” was better than “here.”

“Not better,” he said. “I mean, my great-great-grandpap got his leg shot off. But I feel like it was bigger somehow.” Hawkins flipped through pages of Civil War pictures. “At work, I mix dyes and put them in a machine. I’m thirty-six and I’ve spent almost half my life in Dye House No. 1. I make eight dollars sixty-one cents an hour, which is okay, ’cept everyone says the plant will close and go to China.” He put the book back on the shelf. “I just feel like the South has been given a bum deal ever since that War.”

Hawkins unstuck a rebel banner from a small flag stand by the bed. He waved it and said, “Here’s a trivia question they didn’t ask last night. What state sent more troops to the Confederacy than any other, and took more casualties, too?”

“North Carolina?”

Hawkins smiled. “Not too many people know that. We gave a hundred twenty-seven thousand and lost forty thousand. Do you know one reason North Carolinians are called Tar Heels?”

“No. Why?”

“Because Lee said we stuck in battle. At Chickamauga, for instance—”

Kaye poked her head in the bedroom. “Suppertime,” she said. Hawkins looked startled, like he’d been away for a while. Kaye invited me to stay, but I said I had to be going. For a few moments we
stood awkwardly by the trailer door, as a chill wind rattled the storm window.

“We were honored, really,” Kaye said.

I blushed and said, “I was honored, too.”

“I liked you right away last night,” Hawkins said. “There were all those doctors and such at the meeting. And you wanted to talk to me.”

N
AVIGATING MY WAY
to Ed and Sue Curtis’s home, I discovered that Salisbury was a far more pleasant and prosperous town than I’d at first supposed. Its residential streets were lined with parks and gardens and gracious homes (funded, I later learned, with the millions that locals earned from investing years ago in a Salisbury-based supermarket chain called Food Lion). From the outside, the Curtis home appeared ordinary enough: a modest brick ranch house fronted by an American flag. But stepping inside, I found myself in a museum of Confederate kitsch. Portraits of Jeff Davis and Robert E. Lee adorned one wall. A bell-jar model of Ashley Wilkes perched on a side table. Statuettes of Lee, Davis, Jackson and Jeb Stuart sat atop the mantel. “I always wanted something just the right color for that spot,” Sue said of the gray figurines. She nonchalantly pulled off Stonewall’s head. The figurines were actually flasks with necks made of cork.

There were also Lee and Jackson paperweights, a music box that played “Dixie,” and a seashell filled with spent minié balls. “Goes with the painting,” Sue explained, pointing to a watercolor just above the shell showing General Beauregard on the beach at Charleston.

That was just the living room. In the dining room there were plates and cups decorated with rebel generals and paintings of battles in which the Curtis forebears fought. Sue pushed open the door to the kitchen. I glimpsed rebel-themed fridge magnets and mugs decorated with Rhett Butler. “It sort of flows from here all the way to the garage,” Sue said. “But the War does not come to the bedroom. That’s where we draw the line.”

Somewhere in this ancestral lava was the Bible a rebel forebear had carried into battle. One of Ed’s ancestors, a Confederate scout,
had also preserved a piece of shin bone he lost after being shot from a tree. “He kept it in a bottle by his bed,” Ed said. But most of the Curtises’ relics and trinkets were gifts Sue and Ed had given each other on birthdays and anniversaries. They’d even courted on Civil War battlefields. “Instead of bells ringing I heard cannons boom,” Ed joked.

It wasn’t until after their marriage, though, that the Curtises’ interest in the War turned from a casual hobby to an obsession. The spark was Sue’s curiosity about her rebel ancestry. “A lot of people like me first got deep into Confederate history in the late seventies, when genealogy really took off,” she explained.