Part 4 (1/2)

7.

My Tante Marie was a firecracker of a woman, not five feet tall and so lean that her hands and wrists seemed like the skeletal fingers from one of the ghost stories she was always telling. She seemed ancient to me, but now I realize she must have been in her thirties. I never saw her in anything but a white cotton blouse, a long blue skirt, an ap.r.o.n around her waist, and a red bandana tied around her head. Beneath her blouse, she wore a necklace that had many strange and wonderful things on it: feathers, beads, bits of polished bone.

My father bought her at a slave auction in New Orleans in 1840 or 1841, when Marie would have been about fourteen years old. My father, it is said, declared that she was the most spirited slave of them all, and a quadroon of exceptional beauty. He paid $630 in gold for her. It was years more before she was broken enough to be a house slave, about the time I was born, my uncle said. I don't know about these things personally because my father died in 1848, the year of my birth, kicked to death by a horse. At least, that was what was a.s.sumed-he was found dead in the stable one Sunday morning, with his head stove in and an empty bottle of rum beside him.

In her grief, my mother turned my raising over to Tante Marie. I never grew close to my mother, who always seemed distant, shrouded in the crinoline trappings of antebellum Memphis society. She did not understand my pa.s.sion for stories and books, my love of ghost stories and folklore, or the odd conversations I sometimes had with my bedroom mirror. I thought at the time that I hated her. But looking back, I realized she was no better and no worse than any of the other Memphis women of her age and time. It was the lack of otherness that I hated. It was as if I had been dropped into this strange life by accident, that perhaps I had been set adrift in a reed basket on the Mississippi and rode the wake of a packet boat up the Wolf River, that my real family would one day show up, clicking apologies in a strange tongue to claim me.

More than anything, I wanted to belong.

Then, three years after the cub pilot had pressed my name into his dying brother's hand, I met Jonathan Wylde. Seven years older than me, Jonathan was a sensitive and handsome young man with a shock of blond hair, a free thinker who declared that women were the equal of men, that blacks were human beings, and that love survives death.

I loved him from the start.

It was the January before the war, Jonathan was a divinity student at Stewart College, and we met at a stationer's on Beale Street. We were both seeking copies of Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World (which I am now ashamed to admit, but which you can perhaps forgive). I had momentarily slipped the leash of my Tante Marie, who had become increasingly watchful since I had begun to fill out my dresses. When our hands accidently touched while reaching for the only copy of the Warner book in the store, we both blushed.

We both apologized and insisted the other take it. I agreed, but I suggested that since I was a fast reader, he could call for it in a few days. But neither of us wanted to part, and we lingered near one another, silent.

Then, impulsively: ”You have the most beautiful aura I have ever seen.”

”What's an aura?” I asked.

”It is a radiant band of color that outlines a person's body,” he said. ”It's from the Greek, for 'breath' or 'breeze,' and it represents the essence of a person.”

”You mean like a halo?”

”No,” he said, and smiled. ”Only Jesus and the saints have halos, but everyone has an aura, like everyone has a shadow. Your shadow is something that is cast by your body, yes?”

I nodded.

”Your aura is the shadow your soul casts.”

”A soul shadow,” I said.

”Exactly,” Jonathan said. ”And they come in all colors and sizes. Angry or pa.s.sionate people have red auras, great thinkers or leaders have green ones, and melancholics dark brown.”

”I've never seen one.”

”It takes a bit of practice,” he said. ”I can teach you how, if you like.”

”And what, exactly, do you find so beautiful about mine?”

”It is a remarkable mixture of colors,” he said. ”Violet and yellow and blue, all swirling in harmony. All the best colors, in my opinion. Inspiration, joy, and love.”

Jonathan's visits to the Wolf River Plantation became frequent. He taught me to see auras. His was a beautiful magenta, the signature color of the nonconformist. We practiced table tilting and automatic writing. He brought me books and read me poetry and taught me every secret thing.

When the war came in April, he quit Stewart College and volunteered to fight for the Yankees with LaDue's Company, an act that scandalized Memphis society. When we secretly wed when I was fourteen years of age, the discovery mortified my family. My mother cried for days, my uncle threatened to bullwhip Jonathan, but my Tante Marie understood.

”Di moin qui vous laimein, ma di vous quie vous ye,” she said.

It was an old Creole proverb: ”Show me who you love, and I'll show you who you are.”

All I wanted in this world was Jonathan, and I was terrified that he would die-killed in battle, dead by disease, or extinguished in any of the hundred ordinary ways that people depart this earth every day.

Jonathan laughed, saying there was nothing to fear, and he quoted Whitman:

What do you think has become of the young and old men?

And what do you think has become of the women and children?

They are alive and well somewhere, The smallest sprout shows there is really no death.

He created a secret message, shared only with me. He promised that if he died before me, he would send over a message, proving survival of the spirit-and our eternal love.

Hank began appearing to me less and less after I met Jonathan. The mud clerk's image was as wind-blown as ever, but he began to fade, until at last he was just a shadow in my bedroom mirror. There were no more jokes. By the time Jonathan and I were married, Hank was gone.

While Jonathan marched off with LaDue in the spring of 1861, I waited at home. Life in Memphis changed very little during the first year of the war, and then there was a river battle just above Memphis, and ten thousand people turned out on the bluffs to see it.

There were eight or nine Union gunboats and rams against a similar number of Rebel vessels, former steamboats that had been converted into some notion of fighting s.h.i.+ps by mounting light guns on their decks and lining their hulls with cotton. As ridiculous as the ”cot-tonclads” were, some of the Union boats looked even more absurd, like giant turtles spouting smokestacks. Neither side seemed to know what they were doing, and n.o.body now can agree on exactly what happened, except to say that in the end, all but one cottonclad had been disabled or sunk.

It was 1862, and Memphis had fallen.

Ulysses S. Grant moved his command from Corinth to Memphis, stopped publication of the Memphis Avalanche, ordered the arrest of all newspaper correspondents sympathetic to the South, and drove all families of Rebel soldiers and Confederate officials from the city. Jonathan returned to Memphis with LaDue's Company, and we had a tender reunion. Then, in 1863, Vicksburg fell. With nearly the entire river in Yankee hands, Grant turned his attention to the east, and LaDue's Company marched with the army toward Knoxville.

Letters came regularly from Jonathan at first, cheerful notes in which he chatted about his commander, John Grenville LaDue, a rabid abolitionist who had spent some time in Kansas with John Brown before the war. But as the fighting became bloodier as Grant moved his army ever closer toward Richmond during the Overland Campaign, the letters stopped. With every day that pa.s.sed without word from Jonathan, my heart broke anew.

The war had elevated slaughter to a science, and the list of battles in which the casualties numbered into the tens of thousands is shockingly long. The deadliest battles were Gettysburg, Chickamauga, Chancellorsville . . . and Spottsylvania Courthouse.

At Spottsylvania the fighting raged for a fortnight, including twenty-four hours of the worst hand-to-hand fighting of the war, much of it in trenches. When the hurly-burly was done, thirty thousand lay dead or wounded, sacrificed for a battle in which neither side could claim victory. LaDue's Company was thrown into the worst of it, an abattoir known as the b.l.o.o.d.y Angle. Of 105 men in the company, only LaDue and twelve others survived.

Jonathan was not among them.

I was a widow two weeks shy of my sixteenth birthday.

I didn't even know how Jonathan had died. None of those who were lucky enough to be numbered in what came to be called the LaDue Survival Ranks witnessed his death. His body was so ravaged that it could scarcely be recognized as anything human and could only be identified by the book tucked inside his jacket, Leaves of Gra.s.s, in which my name and his were found penciled in the endpapers.

Jonathan was buried in Spottsylvania County, Virginia. The only thing that was returned to me was the bloodstained book. At first, I felt nothing, and then I believed I was the b.u.t.t of some cruel joke perpetrated by the universe. Then when the pain hit in full, I wished nothing more than to join Jonathan in death.

By war's end in April 1865, there would be more than half a million dead. Grieving parents, wives and daughters, and sisters and girlfriends, turned to Spiritualists and mediums to give hope that some spark of their loved ones had survived the horror to cross over to a better place. There were even seances in the White House, with Mary Todd Lincoln trying to contact her dead son, eleven-year-old Willie, who had been taken by typhoid fever.

I, too, joined the seekers.