I Am Abraham (56 page)
I’ve invented very few characters—an odd soldier here and there, some African American farmers, a delinquent coachman who sets the White House stables on fire in a feud with Mary. But one invented character does have an important rôle in the novel: a lady Pinkerton named Mrs. Small. She’s no anomaly. Allan Pinkerton did use female agents during the Civil War, and I have
my
Pinkerton help foil a plot on Lincoln’s life in Baltimore.
I Am Abraham
is a family chronicle, where the fury of war and politics rumble in the background, while Lincoln does a macabre dance with his generals, feuds with his eldest boy, and tries to contain the furies of his wife. The novel is told entirely in Lincoln’s voice, that strange mix of the vernacular and the formal tones of a man who only had a few months of learning at a “blab school” and essentially had to teach himself. And so we have reverberations of the Bible in his letters and speeches and spoken voice, echoes of Blackstone and Æsop, and the yarns Lincoln heard as a boy (his Pa was reputed to have been a gifted storyteller). I also thought of Mark Twain, as I imagined Lincoln inhabiting the voice Huck Finn might have had as an adult. Twain modeled Huck on his own boyhood companion Tom Blankenship, who became a frontier marshal in Montana. And Lincoln himself was like a marshal in the “badlands” of wartime Washington, suspending habeas corpus and bending whatever laws had to be bent.
In a gorgeously crafted introduction to
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
, Lionel Trilling writes about the music of Huck’s voice, which revels in the dread and deep truth of the Mississippi, but also has another kind of power—“the truth of moral passion [that] deals directly with the virtue and depravity of man’s heart.” Lincoln embodied much of the same moral passion. We deify him now. Yet his own Party wanted to get rid of him in 1864 and nominate Grant. Lincoln prevailed, wearing his green shawl in the White House, and gripped with melancholy, his feet constantly cold, he preserved a nation that had begun to unravel, often holding it together with nothing more than the flat of his hand and his unfaltering sense of human worth—a frontier marshal with a sense of poetry and a profound sadness in his soul.
I
T
WAS
WHILE
WANDERING
through the nursery at the Confederate White House in Richmond that I re-imagined the ending of this novel. I would like to thank Dean Knight of the Museum of the Confederacy for taking me on a wondrous two-hour trip through the halls and rooms of Jefferson Davis’ White House and sharing some of his wisdom and lore about Lincoln’s voyage to Richmond.
I would never have discovered the enormous cloth checkerboard that Lincoln employed to play with Tad—and “whup” him sometimes—if I hadn’t visited Lincoln’s Cottage at the Soldiers’ Home in Washington, DC. And I would like to thank John Davidson and Callie Hawkins of Lincoln’s Cottage for allowing me to inspect every mysterious corner of the Lincolns’ summer retreat.
I would also like to thank National Park Service Ranger Clyde Bell, Civil War enthusiast Michael Plunkett, and novelist Fred Leebron for their many kindnesses on my own pilgrimage to Gettysburg.
I might not have written this novel if I hadn’t had lunch one afternoon several years ago with literary critic and social historian Brenda Wineapple, and talked about Lincoln as a prose poet rather than a politician.
I couldn’t have navigated the James River without the help of environmentalist Kurt Riegel, since that damn river always seemed to be going up when it was really going down.
I would also like to thank Georges Borchardt for his perceptive reading of the novel, Samantha Shea and Phil Marino for their particular insights, and Michael Gorman for his miraculous map of wartime Richmond. Most of all, I would like to thank Robert Weil for taking me to the furthest point on the voyage of
I Am Abraham.
Illustration Credits
Frontispiece | Lincoln Family at Home |
p. xii | Lee on Traveller (Corbis Collection) |
p. 1 | Lincoln wrestling Jack Armstrong (Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum and Library) |
p. 69 | Lincoln’s law office, Springfield, Illinois (Corbis Collection) |
p. 115 | Mary Lincoln, c. 1846 (Courtesy of Paul McWhorter) |
p. 167 | General George McClellan riding Dan Webster (Courtesy of Paul McWhorter) |
p. 235 | Willie Lincoln (Courtesy of Paul McWhorter) |
p. 273 | Lincoln and Tad (From the Lincoln Financial Foundation Collection, courtesy of the Indiana State Museum and Allen County Public Library) |
p. 299 | Gettysburg, 1863 (Courtesy of Paul McWhorter) |
p. 357 | Negro soldiers of the North (Courtesy of Paul McWhorter) |
p. 397 | Lincoln and Tad enter Richmond (Courtesy of Paul McWhorter) |
About the Author
J
EROME
C
HARYN
has received the Rosenthal Award in Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. He was named a Commander of Arts and Letters by the French Minister of Culture in 2002. His stories have appeared in
The Atlantic
,
The Paris Review
,
Narrative
,
The American Scholar
,
StoryQuarterly
, and other magazines. His most recent novel was
The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson
, published by Norton. He lives in New York and Paris.
OTHER BOOKS BY JEROME CHARYN
FICTION
Under the Eye of God
The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson
Johnny One-Eye: A Tale of the American Revolution
The Green Lantern
Hurricane Lady
Captain Kidd
Citizen Sidel
Death of a Tango King
El Bronx
Little Angel Street
Montezuma’s Man
Back to Bataan (young adult)
Maria’s Girls
Elsinore
The Good Policeman
Paradise Man
War Cries Over Avenue C
Pinocchio’s Nose
Panna Maria
Darlin’ Bill
The Catfish Man
The Seventh Babe
Secret Isaac
The Franklin Scare
The Education of Patrick Silver
Marilyn the Wild
Blue Eyes
The Tar Baby
Eisenhower, My Eisenhower
American Scrapbook
Going to Jerusalem
The Man Who Grew Younger & Other Stories
On the Darkening Green
Once Upon a Droshky
NONFICTION
Joe DiMaggio: The Long Vigil
Marilyn: The Last Goddess
Raised by Wolves: The Turbulent Art and Times of Quentin Tarantino
Savage Shorthand: The Life and Death of Isaac Babel
Gangsters & Gold Diggers: Old New York, the Jazz Age, and the Birth of Broadway
Bronx Boy
Sizzling Chops & Devilish Spins: Ping-Pong and the Art of Staying Alive
The Black Swan
The Dark Lady from Belorusse
Movieland: Hollywood and the Great American Dream Culture
Metropolis: New York as Myth, Marketplace and Magical Land
Copyright © 2014 by Jerome Charyn
All rights reserved
First Edition
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Charyn, Jerome.
I am Abraham : a novel of Lincoln and the Civil War / Jerome Charyn. — First Edition.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-87140-427-5 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-0-871-40772-6 (e-book)
1. Lincoln, Abraham, 1809–1865—Fiction. 2. United States—History—1861–1865—Fiction. 3. Presidents—United States—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3553.H33I26 2014
813’.54—dc23
2013041287
Liveright Publishing Corporation
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110
W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.
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Table of Contents
Prologue: The Silver Sword of Appomattox
I LLINOIS & B EYOND: 1858–1860
T HE D ISTRICT: 1862, Winter–Spring
S OLDIERS ’ H OME: 1862, Summer–Fall
T HE D ISTRICT & E NVIRONS: 1863 & Winter 1864
T HE D ISTRICT & E NVIRONS: 1864 & Winter 1865