Confederates in the Attic (29 page)

We walked toward the last stop on Wolfgang’s tour, the National Cemetery, where Union dead were moved after the War from their original burial trenches. It was now late afternoon and the monuments cast long, cool shadows across the freshly mowed grass. Most of the graves were marked only with stone stumps labeled “Unknown.” Some recorded a few initials or other fragments of soldiers’ identities: J. Pe Ia, Mosely, H.O.K. I’d learned from the park historian Stacy Allen that neither army at Shiloh had dog tags to identify corpses. Comrades of the dead sometimes pinned bits of paper to their friends’ uniforms, or put names in bottles or Bibles, which were then placed in dead men’s pockets. Even so, the names of all the Confederates buried at Shiloh and most of the Federals remained unknown.

As we left the graveyard, a man in a Confederate kepi spotted Wolfgang and shook a fist, shouting in mock fury, “We’ll git you next time, Yank!”

“Oh yes?” Wolfgang replied, playing along. “At Gettysburg?”

The man smiled. “What unit you in?”

“The Third Missouri. Stuttgart, Germany.”

“No shit!” The man fumbled in his haversack and took out a camera. “Mind if I snap a picture? This’ll blow my buddies’ minds.”

Wolfgang posed politely. Then the man thanked him and shook his hand. “Yankees in Germany. Man, that’s something.”

As the man wandered off, Wolfgang smiled wearily. He often got odd responses when he told people he was German. Occasionally, reenactors would confide that they liked to do World War II reenactments—dressed in SS uniforms—when they weren’t doing the Civil War. Mostly, though, people just thought Wolfgang was strange. Tired of explaining himself, he’d concocted a phony German-American ancestor in the 3rd Missouri. “That way, when people ask why I’m here, I can just mention him. Otherwise, they think I’ve gone off the rails.”

Wolfgang’s wife, Sabine, stood waiting at the visitors’ center with the indulgent smile of a mother watching her muddy son trudge home from a football game.

“How did you spend your day?” Wolfgang asked her.

“Like an adult. Reading a book at the motel.”

When Wolfgang introduced us, Sabine asked me if I liked to collect Civil War relics. I shook my head. “Your wife is lucky, then,” she said. “We only have two rooms in Stuttgart. Last time in America Wolfgang started gathering—what do you call it, grape nuts?”

“Grape shot,” I said.

“Actually,” Wolfgang said, “they were minié balls.”

“He also wanted to buy a rusty thing,” Sabine said.

“A bayonet,” Wolfgang said.

“It was big, like a sword. It would have taken up the whole shelf.”

Even so, Sabine now participated in her husband’s obsession. At first, she said, reenactments made her uncomfortable. “We still have real civil wars going on in Europe. It does not seem like play to me.” But Wolfgang had persuaded her to join in, dressed as a nineteenth-century nurse or as a teacher of freed slaves. “It is like Carnival in Brazil,” she said. “You get in costume and be who you want to be for a few days. It is a second chance.” It was also a refreshing break from
her own academic field: American political rhetoric in the 1960s. “In the 1860s, I think, people spoke more plainly than in the 1960s,” she said.

I went with Wolfgang and Sabine to dinner at a nearby catfish restaurant, then back to their motel, where we drank sourmash bourbon and sifted through the clutter they’d accumulated in their travels: battle flags, reenactors’ mess kits, a windup toy in the shape of a cotton boll that played a tinny rendition of “Dixie.” “Research material,” Wolfgang said. Sabine rolled her eyes. At midnight we stood in the motel parking lot, exchanging addresses and phone numbers and promises to stay in touch.

“I’ll answer your e-mail next time,” I said.

“I am glad you didn’t before,” Wolfgang said. “It was much better that we met on the field of battle.”

B
ackwoods Mississippi, a myth-encrusted badlands for so many Americans, was for me the most familiar ground in the South. As a union organizer in the early 1980s, I’d trolled thousands of miles of Mississippi byways in search of new members. Fifteen years later, I could still recite the litany of absurdly named crossroads I’d chanted to myself during long, lonely drives: Hot Coffee, Its, Soso, Chunky, Whynot, Scooba, Shivers, Jumpertown, Prismatic, Basic City.

But rereading the diary of my time in Mississippi, I was struck by how rarely I’d noted anything to do with the Civil War. Here and there I’d recorded a monument’s inscription (“The Men Who Wore the Gray Were Right and Right Can Never Die”), or pondered a clump of rebel graves poking from the weeds between a Jiffy-Mart and a shoe factory. But at twenty-two my Civil War virus still lay in remission; blues bars and Ole Miss coeds stirred me more deeply than cannons and cemeteries. Also, compared to other Southern
states east of the Mississippi, the homeland of Faulkner and Foote compassed relatively few sites of Civil War renown.

Except, of course, Vicksburg, where I headed now after winding through the state along the Natchez Trace, an antebellum trade route that had become a scenic highway. Perched on steep bluffs overlooking a meander loop of the Mississippi, Vicksburg once commanded the river’s narrowest and wildest point south of Memphis. Boats bobbed and twisted in Vicksburg’s eddies, often running aground; before the War, the life span of a Mississippi steamboat averaged only two years. In wartime, Union gunboats faced the added challenge of firing accurately from yawing decks. The Confederates, firing back from Vicksburg’s swamp-skirted bluffs, were able to choke traffic down the river and cling to the city long after other ports fell. It was only by attacking from land as well as from water, and then laying siege, that Grant finally brought down “the Gibraltar of the West.”

Ten years after the War, the Mississippi River changed course, leaving Vicksburg high and dry and accomplishing in an instant what Grant fought for months to achieve: a way past the town. Engineers later cut a channel, redirecting a nearby waterway beneath the city’s bluffs. Now, instead of the mighty Mississippi, it was the uneuphonious “Yazoo Diversion Canal” that lapped at the shore of what Mark Twain, in a rare lapse from cynicism, dubbed the “lofty hill-city.”

Vicksburg’s waterfront underwent another transformation with Mississippi’s embrace of legalized gambling in the early 1990s. During my last visit, in 1981, the town had seemed picturesquely seedy, a sort of downmarket Natchez with cannons and kudzu. Now it was just seedy. Washington Street, once the town’s elegant main thoroughfare, had become a hideous gash catering to the gambling trade: cheap motels, pawn shops, check-cashing shops, J. M. Fly Rent-All, Dr. Junk’s buy-sell-trade!, Mrs. Harris Spiritual Advisor, and RV parks with streets named Double Diamond Drive and Avenue of Aces.

The occasional cannon or bronze Confederate bust were now lost amidst neon billboards flashing
REEL WINNERS
! and
LOOSEST SLOTS
IN TOWN
! During the wartime siege, Confederates set cotton bales alight on the riverbank so gunners could see Union ships slipping by in the night. Now, it was Harrah’s and other casinos that cast an eerie, twenty-four-hour glow across the water.

Stopping at the grandly named Vicksburg Convention and Visitors’ Bureau, I chatted with the office manager, a woman named Lenore. She’d first started working in tourism twenty years before. “Back then, we were just a double-wide trailer off the interstate,” she said. “When people stopped in, I’d take out a city map and circle all six tourist sites—basically the battlefield and a few old houses.” Now Vicksburg boasted “27 bonafide attractions,” though bonafide seemed a strange word to describe faux-riverboat casinos ringed by theme parks, putt-putt golf courses and Bayou Bash Bumper Boats.

Few gamblers, though, bothered to see Vicksburg’s historic sites. So Lenore lay awake nights, trying to dream up a visitors’ slogan that might encourage more crossover. At the door, she tried one on for size. “Gamble in the Lap of History.” She paused. “What do you think? Too tacky?”

It was hard to think of anything too tacky to describe a town with a Casino Faulkner’s Gift Shop, a street named Cool Millions Lane, and flyers that proclaimed:
VIVA LAS VICKSBURG
. One casino, the Ameristar, replicated a nineteenth-century steamboat, with a paddle wheel, smokestacks and layer-cake decks. The historical resemblance was ruined somewhat by the casino’s size—seven times that of an actual steamboat—and by the boat’s immobility. Fixed to a permanently moored barge, the boat squatted like an oversized bathtub toy in a small, shielded lagoon (Mississippi gaming laws required that all casinos occupy bodies of water, however contrived).

I checked into Harrah’s, which mercifully limited its old-timey touches to blackjack dealers in dark cravats and murals of nineteenth-century river scenes. After a brief, losing visit to the slots, I left the cucumber-cool casino and started up the steep bluff leading to Vicksburg’s old town. The sky was the color of unpolished pewter, the air so leaden that I seemed to be pushing through a force field. Halfway up, my shirt and hair were soaked with sweat and my customary trot had slowed to a plod. It was May, the same month when the siege of Vicksburg began in 1863. I tried to imagine Union soldiers, mostly
Midwestern farm boys, sweating through their wool uniforms and praying that the rebels would capitulate before they themselves succumbed to the Deep South summer.

Crowning the hilltop was the Vicksburg I dimly recalled from my earlier visit: brick Victorian storefronts and antebellum mansions, some still harboring Union cannonballs in their walls. I shuffled along the one level street in sight, toward a comforting-sounding dot on my map marked Coca-Cola Museum (the beverage was first bottled in Vicksburg in 1894). On the way, I paused at a quaint, false-fronted shop marked “Corner Drug Store.” Cannonballs flanked the door and a curious mix of items—dueling pistols, dice, old medicine bottles—filled the window.

Inside, one aisle displayed shampoo, laxatives and D-Con rat poison, the next a row of patent medicines and quack potions labeled “Dr. Otto’s India Smash Compound” or “Wa-Hoo Blood and Nerve Tonic.” Another aisle featured medical instruments from the Civil War. The owner, a small, silver-haired man named Joe Gerache, filled out prescriptions behind the counter. “In this life I’m a pharmacist,” he said, when I asked about the store’s schizophrenic display. “In my other life I’m a Civil War surgeon.” He waited until a few customers departed, then locked the front door and gave me a tour.

“These are some of my favorite things,” he said, beginning with the medical instruments. He picked up what looked like a carpentry-shop hacksaw. “This was the most popular tool in the Civil War. They sawed a lot of bones in that war.” Beside the saw lay a trepanning tool, a corkscrew-like instrument used to bore holes in skulls. “By the time you finished with this, the guy went home in a box or with a drool bucket. That was the beginning of neurosurgery.”

Gerache reached for an anesthesia mask. “Luckily, we had painkillers, ether and chloroform mostly,” he said. “But if we administered them wrong, it was a one-way trip.” When drugs weren’t available, soldiers bit bullets during surgery. Gerache showed me a minié ball scarred with teeth marks. “Soldiers bit so hard that they’d throw their jaws out. So it was determined that two bullets were better, one on each side. That way the bite was more even.”

We moved on to the medicines. “The biggest killer in the Civil War wasn’t the rifle but the microbe,” he said. “These medicines
killed a lot, too.” He ticked off the potions and tinctures in the medical wagon of a Civil War physician, including silver nitrate, castor oil, turpentine, belladonna, opium, brandy, and quinine. “Only one came close to curing anything, which was quinine for malaria.” He showed me a bottle with a skull and crossbones. “This is carbolic acid, used to clean wounds. But what it mostly did was eat tissue.” Gerache shook his head. “If they’d known to dilute it a hundred or so times, they’d have had Lysol, a perfect antiseptic.”

Gerache ended with a brief lecture on dysentery, which disabled men of both armies by the thousands. “The South could have won the War if it had found a cure for the flux,” he said. “Instead, they handed out medicines which only made things worse. Here, let me show you some of my purgatives.”

When the grisly tour was done, Gerache told me how he’d started collecting old weapons and other artifacts as a child. “When I was coming up, no one was interested in this stuff, so people would give me things that had been sitting in their attics and basements. They’d say ‘Take it, we’re glad to get it out of the house.’” He chuckled. “My parents were worried. They thought minié balls would lead to cannonballs or worse, the way parents worry now about marijuana leading to hard drugs.”

During World War II, Gerache served in the Pacific with a MASH-style unit, evacuating wounded from the battlefield. Returning home, he thought about going to medical school, but after years overseas “I felt like life was passing me by.” So he opened this pharmacy instead, in an old building that had served as a saloon during the siege. Collecting Civil War medicines and instruments had become an outlet for the career he sometimes wished he’d pursued in real life.