Did God's eyes see the past,
present and future taking place simultaneously, perhaps on a
mist-shrouded, alluvial landscape threaded by Indians and Spanish and
French explorers and Jesuit missionaries, its hummocks surrounded with
either saw grass or endless rows of cotton and cane, its earth pounded
with the hooves of mounted jayhawkers and Confederate guerrillas or
covered with flocks of birds and roving herds of wild animals, its
mists flaring with either the spatter of musket fire and the red glow
of burning crosses or lanterns lighting quiet residential streets and
children at play in the yards?
Sometimes in the clarity of
his sleep Willie Burke saw the same protean landscape he believed God
saw, and a long column of soldiers wending their way toward the
horizon, their butternut uniforms crusted with salt, their bullet-rent
flags aflame in the sunset, a sergeant-major in a skull-tight kepi
counting cadence, "Reep, reep, reep," while a brass band thundered out
a joyful song like the one that had made
Jim Stubbefield wonder if
there
wasn't
something glorious about war after all. For reasons Willie did not
understand, he wanted to join their ranks and disappear with them over
the rim of the earth.
But in the mornings the dream
escaped his grasp and his days were often filled with memories he
shared with no one.
Then, five years after that
late August afternoon when Abigail Dowling shot down Ira Jamison,
Willie woke to an early frost, to the smell of wood smoke and the sound
of trees stiff with ice and breakfast wagons creaking across stone. He
walked out into the freshness of the dawn and, in a place inside his
mind that had nothing to do with reason, he once again remembered his
speculation about how the eyes of God viewed creation. He stood on the
gallery in his nightshirt, the sunlight breaking on his bare feet, and
imagined himself caught between the Alpha and the Omega, in the hush of
God's breath upon the world, and for just a second believed he actually
heard the words
I am the beginning and the end. I am He who makes
all things new.
In that moment he let go of
his contention with both the quick and the dead and experienced an
unbridled gladness of heart. He was a participant in the great
adventure, on the right side of things, a celebrant at the big party, a
role that until the day of his death no one would ever be able to deny
him.
IN THE year 1868, one year
after her release from the women's prison at Baton Rouge, Tige McGuffy,
Flower Jamison, Robert Perry, and Willie Burke stood on the gallery of
the school and watched Abigail Dowling become Mrs. Quintinius Earp.
Later the same year Lieutenant
and Mrs. Earp would find themselves stationed on the Bozeman Trail, in
southern Montana, in the middle of Chief Red Cloud's War. After the
discovery of gold in the Black Hills, she testified before the U.S.
Congress in hopes of gaining support for the protection of Indian
lands, but to no avail. Until her husband's retirement from the army,
she worked as a volunteer nurse and teacher among the Oglala Sioux and
the Northern Cheyenne. Later, she moved with him to a small town
outside Boston, where she became active in the Populist and early
feminist movements of the 1890s. In 1905 she became a founding member
of the Industrial Workers of the World, was the friend of Molly Brown
and Elizabeth Flynn, and before her death in 1918 marched with the
striking miners at Ludlow, Colorado.
Willie Burke became a teacher
and later the superintendent of schools m
New Iberia. For
the remainder of his life he was known for his bra
very as
a soldier, his refusal to discuss the war, his prescience about human
events and his irreverence toward all those who seek authority and
power over others.
Flower Jamison married a black
veteran of the Louisiana Corps d'Afrique and taught at the school she
and Abigail Dowling founded until her seventy-ninth year. The school
remained open well into the twentieth century and changed the lives of
hundreds, if not thousands, of black children. Among the many
distinguished educators who visited it were George Washington Carver
and Booker T. Washington.
Robert S. Perry read for the
law and practiced in St. Martin Parish, served in the state senate, and
was appointed an appeals judge in 1888. He died in the year 1900 and is
buried in New Iberia, in St. Peter's Cemetery, not far from his friend
Willie Burke.
Jean-Jacques LaRose moved to
Cuba and became a planter and shipbuilder and supposedly increased his
fortune during the Spanish-American War by scuttling a ship loaded with
gold coin off the Dry Tortugas and salvaging the wreck after the owner,
who had made his money in the illegal arms and slave trade, committed
suicide.
Captain Rufus Atkins continued
to prosper immediately after the war, buying up tax-sale cotton acreage
in the Red River parishes and supplying convict labor in the salt and
sulfur mines along the coast. Then he began to drink more heavily and
wear soft leather gloves wherever he went. After a while his business
associates were bothered by an odor the nostrums and perfumes he poured
inside his gloves could not disguise. The lesions on his hands spread
to his neck and face, until all his skin from his shirt collar to his
hairline was covered with bulbous nodules.
His disfigurement was such
that he had to wear a hood over his head in public. His businesses
failed and his lands were seized for payment of his debts. When ordered
confined to a leper colony by the court, he fled the state to Florida,
where he died in an insane asylum.
A guerrilla leader by the name
of Jarrette, who was brought to Louisiana from Missouri by the
Confederate general Kirby Smith and who claimed to be the
brother-in-law of Cole Younger, left the state after the war and lived
out his days as a sheep rancher in Arizona Territory.
The White League and the
Knights of the White Camellia continued to terrorize black voters
throughout the Reconstruction era and were instrumental in the bloody
1874 takeover of New Orleans,
which they occupied for three days,
before they were
driven out of the city by Union forces partially under the command of
the ex-Confederate general, James Longstreet.
The convict lease system at
Angola Plantation, which became the prototype for the exploitation of
cheap labor throughout the postbellum South, lasted until the
beginning of the twentieth century. The starvation and beating and
murder by prison personnel of both black and white convicts at Angola
Farm was legendary well into modern times. The bodies that are buried
in the levee rimming the prison farm remain unmarked and unacknowledged
to this day.
Tige McGuffy, at age
twenty-two, became one of the first cadets admitted to Louisiana State
University, which was created out of the old United States Army
barracks at Baton Rouge, largely through the efforts of General William
T. Sherman, the same Union general who burned Atlanta and whose
sixty-mile scorched-earth sweep into northern Mississippi became the
raison d'etre for the retaliatory massacre of black troops at Front
Pillow by Confederate soldiers under the command of Nathan Bedford
Forrest.
Tige McGuffy received the
Medal of Honor for his heroism at the battle of Kettle Hill during the
Spanish-American War of 1898.