part 2 chapter

33

n ary a june comes around that i don’t recall the first minutes of freedom from the

fort. this morning’s sun-laden, leafy fragrances put me in mind of that bright june day. lee had

surrendered in april, two months earlier, and the war was finally declared over in may, yet it

was still several weeks until our release.

schoepf and ahl presided over a table laden with stacks of official documents while a double

line of prisoners snaked across the pen. the men shifted from foot to foot as the officers slowly

filled out forms for each and rubber stamped them. when my turn came, ahl’s eyes hardened. i

wondered if he still had power to harm me. while ahl glared, schoepf looked me over. he then

wrote out a line describing my hair and eye colors and approximate height. nothing had

changed there, although so much else had. at long last, he signed my release slip and passed it

to ahl. for what seemed an eternity, ahl did nothing but watch me squirm. finally, he signed

the form and thunked down the us government stamp. i breathed a great sigh. the last step was

to raise my right hand and swear allegiance to the united states.

at long last, the gates were thrown open. waves of happiness rose in my chest for the first

time in too long to remember. those with the energy cavorted and frolicked on the grass

beyond, oblivious to the streaks of green stain on newly issued pants. i solemnly regarded the

outside of the pen wall, a sight i had doubted i would live to see again, and remembered a year

earlier when i viewed it for the first time with zeke, tayloe, and the other boys. with a strange

mix of sadness and relief, i threw my haversack over my shoulder and tramped up the loading

plank of a packet boat headed for baltimore and finally a journey south.

the port of richmond was our destination after boarding a second packet boat in baltimore.

it was a malodorous two-day journey, spent leaning against the next man for support. pull one

out, and the whole stinking bunch might fall. an hour or two out in the bay, gray clouds

mounded to the west of the horizon, and soon a strong wind churned the water into agitated

waves. we pitched against one another, grabbing for a shoulder or arm for support. my stomach

lurched, and i clasped one hand over my mouth to unsuccessfully stem the rising stream. beards

and blue were spewing the contents of their guts too. once the wind died down and the sea

smoothed out, the boat’s interior was filled with an eerie silence and an even fouler stench.

there was only the sound of the paddle wheels slicing through water, accompanied by frequent

sighs or nervous coughs.

apprehension had taken root in men’s minds. what might their wives or family think when

they first spied a crutch standing in for a leg, or a sleeve pinned back on a one-armed jacket?

would there be revulsion? or pity? i studied beards and the others, imagining their folks seeing

them for the first time. i was used to the shadows of beards’s hollowed-out cheekbones and

purple-haloed eyes. the others were just as ghoulish. i was no better, but i was also weighed

down by a spectral john bibb. his body might have been rotting in a ditch by the delaware

river, but his presence was palpable the minute i left the fort, when i first savored the

exhilarating, chest-expanding sense of freedom, something he would never know.

a collective gasp arose as the splintered landscape of richmond came into view along the

james river. we pressed against the railing. i had never visited the city, but jim blue had

accompanied his father by train a few years before the war. “i’ll be damned,” he said. “this isn’t

richmond. this is a nightmare.” he was right. brittle, empty facades stretched as far as we

could see. some tobacco warehouses were as much as four stories tall with windows nothing but

open frames for the sky—the interiors and roofs gone to ashes.

shoving forward, we filed onto the wooden gangway and spilled out onto a loading dock

jammed with hundreds of jostling freed prisoners and those who’d come to meet them. beards,

blue, and i staked a position in the center of the cobblestone street, as sweethearts, mothers,

fathers, and siblings cried out and hugged their boys to them. but for us there was no familiar

voice from behind or a tap on the shoulder. no one was there to greet us.

did this mean that pa was injured or ill, unable to make the trip? or worse, could he have

died while i’d been in prison? after all, he wasn’t a young man, and there had been no word

from home for more than a year. i was beside myself with worry.

after an hour, when the crowd had wandered off and only massive tobacco barrels stood like

sentinels on the dock, beards said, “we might as well find a way home on our own.” he saw my

anxious expression and added, “i suspect our folks had no way of knowing that we were coming

today.”

“i’m not sure i have it in me to walk that far,” jim blue said. he sank down on a stone curb. i

agreed. we would have to cover a hundred and twenty miles, a ten-day walk if the train wasn’t

running, with no money, no food, and no transportation but our legs. “we have no choice,”

beards said. “grab your packs, and let’s get moving.” he briskly stood up and strode off.

i reluctantly hoisted my haversack to my shoulder and followed beards through the streets.

jim blue lagged behind. the place was overrun with union soldiers, rifles on their backs and

strolling the rubble-littered sidewalks as if they owned the city. i flinched every time i saw one,

and we crossed to the other side of the street whenever they approached. i itched to get out of

that place.

in front of warehouse ruins at the end of the street, a tall black man struggled with a wood

barrow full of bricks. he lowered the handles and passed a rag over his brow and face. his faded

homespun shirt swung loose from his bony shoulders and thin arms protruded from its sleeves.

as we approached, he ignored us, instead concentrating on his barrow’s passage through the

debris and across the rough cobblestones.

“hey, can you please help us?” i called.

he paused and looked over his shoulder, his eyes crackling with wariness. he then dropped

the barrow’s handles and turned.

i gave our names, and then said, “we want nothing more than to get home to augusta

county. we’ve fresh out of a union prison.” the words caught in my throat. i held my breath.

why would this man assist former confederates? but then, he must have taken account of our

hollowed cheeks, sunken eyes, and frail limbs and decided we posed no harm. he nodded and

told us, with a faint tremor to his words, that he was bill stewart.

beards asked, “are you from around here?”

“nope, not from richmond. i’m from down around hampton—raised up on the stewart

plantation.”

“how’d you come to be here?” i asked.

“i spent the last year of the war as a refugee at fort monroe after the yankees took it. then

came up here two months ago to get paid work with the federals cleaning up the city. i know the

area right well now.”

“can you help us find our way?” blue asked.

“we’re looking for a train. we need to find one running toward charlottesville or staunton,”

i added.

he grudgingly offered to guide us to the terminus of the line going west, although he’d be

losing time from his work. “i heard that the rails from richmond to charlottesville are repaired

now. have been for about a week,” he said. “don’t know about going any farther west or north

than that.”

“we’d be mighty grateful if you’d point us in the direction of where the freight trains run.

we hope to jump one to get home,” beards said. he looked around at the wreckage towering

over us. “what happened here? we heard the confederates torched the city in april to keep the

union troops from getting supplies from the warehouses, but this is unbelievable destruction.”

bill said the buildings were still smoldering when he arrived, two weeks after they were

torched. a mob lost control when they saw wheat, oats, and rye spilling from crumbling

warehouses. the city had starved while speculators secretly hoarded grain and drove the prices

so high no one could afford them. in their fury, the mob set fires far beyond the area designated

by the confederate army.

“i heard that mr. pollard, the owner of this big one behind us, suspected maybe ten or twelve

paupers camping inside was burnt up too,” he said. he told us that shells exploded all day after

flames reached the nearby armory. “now i’m pulling a good wage cleaning up, so i don’t mind

the mess. but i sure hope i don’t find any of those paupers,” he said. he parked his barrow

against a ragged wall. “you boys can follow me.”

apologetically, i put my hands in my pants pockets and yanked them inside out. “but we

have nothing to give you.”

“never mind.”

we trailed behind as he marched confidently through the few streets cleared of charred

timbers and mountains of bricks. he also knew the street corners where the federal army was

dispensing rations for those who’d signed the united states loyalty pledge. i fumbled in my new

shirt pocket for the allegiance document and unfolded it.

a gray-haired white woman with rounded cheeks and a sweet expression dipped water from a

crock into a canteen and tied up some cornbread in a red cotton kerchief. “here, son, you’ll be

needing these on your travels,” she said. i murmured my thanks and put them in my bag,

stepping back to make room for the other boys. she reminded me of women from bethel, with

her mild manner and soft face, and home seemed a little nearer.

bill led us to the rail tracks at the western side of the city. “i hear the whistle blow morning

and evening, and i haven’t heard the evening one yet, so a freight is bound to come by sooner or

later,” he said. we pumped his hand, thanking him profusely. he turned without glancing back

as he set out for the trek back to his wooden barrow. then we waited. as a freight train finally

chugged toward us, beards yelled and i frantically waved my shirt in the middle of the track to

force the engine to halt. the train slowed, and the engineer leaned from the cab window. his

voice was drowned out by the engine’s blasts of steam, but he beckoned us to get aboard. i

jumped through the wide doors of an empty freight car and grabbed beards’ and then blue’s

outstretched hands to pull them aboard. now we were off toward those fair mountains seen in

the past months only in dreams.

bibb’s presence intensified as we disembarked in charlottesville, the last stop where the rail

line was in good repair. but for me, he would have been greeting his mother, father, sisters, and

perhaps sweet margaret ellen right there at that track, laughing as they embraced him and drew

him into their healing warmth.

for a few seconds, i considered delaying our return to augusta, if only a day, to call on the

bibb family. i could give them news of john’s last moments, his time at the fort, and could

perhaps pass on that letter i’d written months ago. but a voice in my head whispered that they

would want to talk about their son and would expect some answers about his death. i couldn’t

possibly tell them the details. not for the life of me. cowardice won out, even if i was denying

beards and blue a night’s rest in a real bed and an opportunity to wash off the journey’s

accumulated filth. i tore the letter into pieces when the boys weren’t looking and dropped them

into a laurel bush. when beards suggested a side trip into town to see if more rations were

available, i snarled at him so fiercely that no one dared venture in that direction. bibb in tow, i

stumbled forward with the others on the path home.