Confederates in the Attic (39 page)

“Desegregation,” he said. “The day they integrated the schools was the day a lot of whites called U-Haul.” Before the civil rights movement, Petersburg was so segregated that blacks and whites swore to tell the truth in court while placing their hands on separate Bibles. Following turbulent, court-ordered school integration in 1970, whites fled en masse to a suburb called Colonial Heights—or “Colonial Whites,” as Steve called it. The suburb was now bigger than Petersburg and attracted almost all the area’s new development.

Left behind was a struggling city of 38,000 people, three-quarters of them black and a quarter in poverty. Petersburg’s apartheid was so profound that graduates of the first integrated class at the city’s
main public high school had recently held two twenty-fifth reunions: one for whites, one for blacks. Steve, who had moved to Petersburg straight after law school, planned to flee as soon as he could land a job elsewhere.

“This is the anus of the South,” he said. Then, realizing he’d talked for twenty minutes straight, he asked, “What brings you guys to town?”

“Just passing through,” Rob said. “We’ll hit the battlefield tomorrow. Anything else to do?”

Steve drained his beer and cast a melancholy eye around the bar. “You’re looking at it,” he said.

Five other men looked back at us, waiting their turn to buy us a beer and cry into theirs. Rob glanced at me and tilted his head, as if to say “outta here.” So we thanked Steve and headed back into the empty streets. “They should hire that guy at the local tourist bureau,” Rob said.

Returning to the car, we drove past pawn shops, wig shops, and a used-car lot (“Rebates are Here. Turn Tax Refunds into Wheels!”) until we reached the farmland just beyond. Rob had chosen as our campsite a small battleground named Five Forks. It was here that Phil Sheridan’s cavalry broke one flank of Petersburg’s rebel defenses, opening the way for an all-out Northern assault that forced Lee to abandon the city. Five Forks was also notorious as the battle during which George Pickett and his cavalry commander, Fitzhugh Lee, gorged themselves on fish and bourbon while their troops faced disaster a short distance away.

We parked by a marker for the battlefield and threw down groundsheets twenty yards off the road. Rob lit a candle and read about the battle, with emphasis on the fish lunch. “Pickett joined me about two o’clock. We lunched together on some fine shad which Dearing and I had caught in the Nottoway [River] two days before,” recalled General Thomas Rosser, who hosted the meal. Another rebel officer told of finding Pickett prone under a tent, “with a bottle of whiskey or Brandy, I don’t know which for I was not invited to partake of it.”

Pickett finally stirred himself to join his embattled troops, but the fight was soon lost and so was Pickett’s already wobbly reputation.
The incident still rankled twenty-four years later; Jefferson Davis, just before his death, wrote of “that fatal lunch as the ruin of the Confederacy.”

Rob snuffed the candle and we lay in the tall grass, bone-weary from another long day of touring. Five Forks got its name from the starfish of roads that converged there in Civil War days. Unfortunately, they still did. Each time I started to drift off, headlights flickered through the trees and another car hurtled down one of the roads, usually with the windows open and radio blaring. I felt like getting up and waving a checkered flag.

After an hour, we decamped and trudged into the woods, well away from the road. As we settled gratefully onto a bed of pine needles, rain began to sprinkle down. After a few minutes it began to pour. We broke camp again and hiked deeper into the woods until we found an abandoned cabin with mud chinking and an overhanging porch with support beams that had long since rotted away. The place looked unsteady, but we were too wet and exhausted to care and huddled beneath the leaky roof until the storm ended.

“Hallelujah,” Rob said, throwing down his groundcloth again. His elation lasted thirty seconds. It was a hot, steamy night and we lay in thick summer woods in wet, stinking clothes. Rob rested his head on a haversack filled with three-day-old sowbelly. Our campsite was a virtual real-estate ad for mosquitoes: STILL WATER! HUMID AIR! ROTTING MEAT! RANK SKIN!

They came in ones and twos at first, like reconaissance aircraft, then buzzed us in swarms, dive-bombing our eyes, ears, nostrils, lips. I threw a blanket over my head but was soon so hot I had to throw it off again. Bugs instantly assaulted every inch of exposed skin. Beside me, Rob thrashed and swatted and cursed. “Fuck George Pickett and fuck his goddamn fucking shad bake!”

There was nothing to do but wait the night out, which I did with weary, circular thoughts, interrupted by moans and howls from Rob. I tried lying perfectly still, thinking about baseball, Buddhism, the names of presidents, the names of Civil War generals, the names of the last fifty movies I’d seen. I looked at my pocket watch. It was still only 2
A.M
.

At some point apathy or blood loss eased me off to sleep. Waking
at dawn, I found ticks in my scalp and chigger bites lining my wrists. Rob lay with a blanket wrapped tightly around his head, his palms over his ears like the woman in Edvard Munch’s
The Scream
. Momentarily deranged, I wondered if Rob might have died from his wounds. But then his muffled voice came from under the blanket. “Every time I slipped off I was in the movie
Midway,”
he moaned, “with Japanese and American propellor planes taking off over and over again. I kept thinking there must be an aircraft carrier nearby.” Rob threw the blanket off; his eyelids and cheeks were swollen with bites. “That was the worst night of my life,” he declared. For Rob Hodge, that was saying quite a lot.

We sat silently for a while, scratching. For the first time on the Gasm we’d camped well away from humanity. The morning was misty; smoke seemed unlikely to attract attention. So we decided to risk a fire. “Anyway,” Rob said, “if we don’t eat this salt pork today, it’ll be lethal.” As opposed to merely toxic, which it no doubt was after three days in Rob’s haversack. “If we cook the crap out of it,” Rob assured me, “it probably won’t kill us.”

So I gathered sodden twigs and managed to start a smoldering fire. Rob deftly peeled away the pork’s whitish skin, then cut the meat in cubes and tossed it in the half-canteen he used as a fry pan. “Sometimes you find a pig’s nipple,” he said, poking at the sowbelly.

Rob guessed it would take forty-five minutes to cook. I didn’t feel like staring at pig meat simmering in its own grease on the off chance that a nipple might appear. So I decided to forage, as the Confederates here might have done, and hiked back out to the car. Driving down one of the five roads, I came to a village called Dinwiddie and a restaurant with a huge sign saying “That’s A Burger!” I wondered, sleepily, if the food was so bad that it might be mistaken for something else.

The place was shut but a newspaper box offered the
Dinwiddie Monitor
, whose banner proclaimed: “The only newspaper that gives a hoot about Dinwiddie County.” I returned to our campsite and read Rob the list of arrests in the Sheriff’s Log—public drunkenness, writing a bad check, “three counts of curse & abuse”—and reports on tent revivals and family reunions, summer staples in small Southern towns.

This passed the time until Rob announced that breakfast was done. The fry pan now held a puddle of bubbling black grease with fatty chunks bobbing atop the scum. Rob poked his knife into the murk, insisting, “There’s lean meat in there somewhere.” Then he skewered a chunk of charred gristle and dangled it just beneath my nose.
“Bon appétit,”
he said.

I peered dubiously through my spectacles and shook my head. Rob wiggled the knife. “C’mon,” he coaxed, “just think of it as blackened country ham.” I closed my eyes and bit. Rob stabbed another piece and popped it in his mouth. We gasped, eyes filling with tears. The meat didn’t resemble meat at all; it tasted like a soggy cube of salt, soaked in grease. Rob tried a second piece but quickly spat it out.

“I bet this stuff killed more rebs than Yankee bullets ever did,” he groaned. By now we’d lost all appetite for a planned second course of potatoes and onions. So Rob emptied the pan, making sure to spill grease onto his trousers and dab a bit in his beard.

T
HUS REFRESHED
, we headed off to tour the Petersburg defenses, or what we could find of them. Fort Sedgwick, dubbed “Fort Hell” because of the constant mortar and sniper fire aimed at it, now lay beneath the franchise hell skirting town. When we stopped to ask directions, a policeman said, “Where the Kmart is, that’s the approximate location.” Fort Mahone, another famous rampart, had been leveled, too, and now lay beneath a Pizza Hut parking lot.

What remained of the battlefield offered an even starker preview of World War I than had Spotsylvania or Cold Harbor. During the 292-day stalemate here (roughly a quarter of the entire War), the armies constructed sandbagged bombproofs, chevaux-de-frise (porcupinelike obstacles bristling with spikes) and trip lines of telegraph wire strung between tree stumps. The Union even experimented with a precursor of the machine gun known as the Gatling gun, a multi-barreled weapon that spat out bullets with the aid of a hand crank (this was also the origin of the gangster slang “gat”).

It was here, too, that the Union pulled off the boldest engineering feat of the War. Seeking to break the deadlock, Pennsylvania coal
miners burrowed a 500-foot tunnel beneath a rebel salient. Then they detonated four tons of gunpowder, literally blowing the defenders sky-high. But the Union assault that followed quickly degenerated into a gruesome folly. Advancing troops plunged straight into the huge pit the blast had created, allowing Confederates to gather round the rim and fire down at the helpless, close-packed Federals. The Union force lost 4,000 men before retreating.

The Battle of the Crater, as it became known, left a hole 170 feet across and 30 feet deep that remained clearly visible today. Before the Park Service took control of the site in the late 1960s, the depression formed part of the Crater Golf Course, with fairways and putting greens laid out across the battleground and holes named for figures from the Petersburg campaign.

Walking through the woods, we found a monument to the 1st Maine, which suffered the worst regimental loss in one action of any Federal unit in the Civil War; 632 of the 850 Maine men became casualties during a brief, futile charge. Broken beer bottles, used condoms and small glass vials now ringed the monument. A nearby plaque with a map of the charge was obscured by graffiti that said,
CRACK HOUSE
! Petersburg’s battlefield evidently doubled as an urban park after dark.

Depressed by the scene, we headed to the visitors’ center to gather intelligence about where to go next. A ranger told us that Virginia had just opened “Lee’s Retreat Route,” a self-guided driving tour of the rebels’ 100-mile flight from Petersburg to Appomattox. At each stop along the way, roadside transmitters broadcast historical reports, which tourists could tune in on their car radios. “You just park, listen and drive on to the next stop,” the ranger explained, handing us a map and guidebook.

Rob was ecstatic. “It’s Gasm heaven,” he crowed. “We’ll score twenty hits without getting out of the car.”

The first stop was a crossroads west of Petersburg called Sutherland Station. As we sat with the motor running, listening on the radio to a report about the skirmish there in 1865, a line in the guidebook caught my eye. “For a down-home experience, visit the rather eclectic museum at Olgers Store if Jimmy is around.”

Olgers Store perched just across the road. At first glance, it looked typical of the dwindling stock of country stores that once dotted rural crossroads across the South: a low-slung weatherboard building with a ramshackle verandah and the words “Olgers Gro” printed on an old Pepsi sign. Just inside the screen door stood a large statue of Robert E. Lee, spray-painted a brilliant gold. A sign around its neck said, “Come on In. Everything Else has gone wrong.”

We were about to do just that when a giant appeared from around the corner of the store. He toted a machete and the largest watermelon I’d ever seen. “I unveiled that statue the day the retreat route opened,” he said. “You shoulda been here. Confederate blood hasn’t run so high since the Battle of the Crater.”

He raised his machete and hacked the huge melon into three meal-sized slices. Handing us each a piece, he settled onto the porch’s sagging top step. “Hope you’re not rushing off anywhere. You know what they say, ‘Two weeks at Olgers Store equals any college education.’”

Jimmy Olgers was the rare person who could be called, without hyperbole, larger than life. He was, first of all, extraordinarily large: six feet six and 320 pounds, poured into gym shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt from which his arms and legs poked like huge pink tree limbs. This towering physique was matched, incongruously, with the head of a 1950s science teacher—buzzcut, square head, black-framed glasses—and the syrupy, almost purring drawl of a Southern funeral director.

Olgers did in fact work at a funeral parlor—when he wasn’t preaching, composing poetry, writing a column for the
Dinwiddie Monitor
, or serving as unofficial mayor of Sutherland Station, population 1,000. But his true avocation was minding the store, which his grandfather built at the turn of the century and where Olgers himself was born. However, “storekeeper” didn’t quite fit, either. Olgers Store wasn’t a store anymore and to call it “a rather eclectic museum,” as our guidebook had, was a bit like calling the Grand Canyon a rather big hole in the ground.

“He’s exactly life-sized and made from a junk heap,” Olgers said, leading us inside to look at the Goldfinger Lee. The general’s
sword grip was actually a hoe handle, the hilt made from roof shingle, the scabbard a piece of muffler—all of it covered with sheet rock. Strangest of all, the statue’s creator—a dissolute-looking man named Frank—suddenly materialized from behind Lee’s broad-shouldered figure.

“I make everything,” Frank said, “I made my teeth too.” He yanked out his irregular bridgework and handed it to me as proof.