Confederates in the Attic (9 page)

The location turned out to be a kindergarten, and the museum’s curator a Daughter of the Confederacy who taught there during the week. “The kindergarten said it was okay if we put a few of our things here for the time being,” June Wells said, gesturing at a small, dimly lit room cluttered with dusty cases.

The “things” included the first rebel flag to fly over Fort Sumter and wooden wheels from the first Confederate-made cannon—crammed, for lack of space, in one of the kindergarten’s toddlersized
toilet stalls. “We’re not politically correct, you see,” Wells said of the museum’s circumstances. “The city says it can’t fix our building downtown because of money. But they’ve built a new park, a new school, a new aquarium and have fixed all the other buildings damaged by the storm.”

Wells told me this without rancor. She was about seventy, with delicate features and an hourglass figure. I found myself wondering what she had looked like as a young woman. It wasn’t just her appearance. It was also her gentle laughter and direct, almost coquettish gaze. “You’re from Virginia? Oh, we’re deeply flattered,” she said as I signed the guest book. Mine was the first name on a blank page labeled January.

I told her about my travels so far, and the impressions I’d begun forming about Civil War remembrance. “What a wonderful project,” she said. “May I offer you a few of my own thoughts?”

“Of course, m’am. I’d be grateful to hear them.” The best thing about Southern manners was that they seemed to improve my own, at least temporarily.

“We’re a different sort of people in Charleston, then and now, and I’m sure that’s why we started it all,” she said of the War. “We were a well-educated city that cared about issues and had never been through the poverty stage of colonization.”

Wells’s own family arrived on the “first ship” and had stayed in the city ever since. She knew dozens of families with similar pedigrees. “We’re not a migrating people,” she said. “We live in our old houses and eat on our old dishes and use the old silverware every day. We’re close to the past and comfortable with it. We’ve surrounded our lives with the pictures of all these relatives hanging on the walls, and we grow up hearing stories about them. It gives these things a personality beyond just the material they’re made of.”

She stood up and smoothed her paisley dress. “May I show you what I mean?” She gently grasped my wrist and led me to a glass case with a punch bowl inside. The woman who donated it, she said, was the daughter of the chief Confederate engineer at Fort Sumter. At a Confederate reunion in the 1890s, the woman served punch from the bowl to hundreds of distinguished veterans.

“Although she was a young woman, she had false teeth,” Wells said. “As she leaned over to pour the punch, her teeth fell in the bowl. She looked at the line of people waiting to be served, and she looked at the punch. The dentures had sunk to the bottom. So she decided to go ahead serving until she could discreetly remove her teeth.” Wells laughed. “She told me that forty years ago, but I still can’t look at that punch bowl without thinking of those teeth.”

She moved on to another glass case and another strange story. “A woman I’d never heard of in my life calls the museum one day and says, ‘I’m going to die before tomorrow. I have a uniform. If you want it you have to come and get it.’” When Wells arrived, the woman served her sherry in a silver goblet and talked for two hours. “Then she said, ‘I’m dying now, so if you want my granddaddy’s uniform it’s upstairs in a closet.’”

Wells pointed at the uniform and said, “It’s very valuable because it has pants. Few pants survived because the soldiers just wore them till they gave out.” I asked what became of the old lady. “Oh, she still calls me from time to time, to check on grandpa.” Wells smiled. “She’s just as fine as she could be. But she doesn’t like her relatives. I think she gave me the uniform to spite them.”

Every item in the museum seemed to carry a similarly Gothic tale, told with the same blend of decorum and dirt that left me guessing whether Wells meant to praise or skewer her subjects. “Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard was a charming ladies’ man,” she said of the euphoniously named Creole. “This is one of his silver matchboxes, which shows his exquisite taste.” She paused, reaching for her pearl-handled stilletto again. “Did you know he brought a servant with him from Louisiana to wax his mustache every day? He also brought his own cow, by train from New Orleans. He had stomach troubles and claimed he couldn’t drink the milk of any other animal. Can you imagine?”

Wells’s own family wasn’t spared. Both her grandfather and great-grandfather had fought for the Confederacy. “Very esteemed men in Charleston,” she said. At least outside the house. The two men lived together and both survived to ninety-five. “So my grandmother had to take care of these two ancient men, her husband and
father, arguing about the War until the end of time. You know that lady had her hands full.”

Wells had joined the Daughters of the Confederacy as a young woman. At that time, the group still included many true daughters of rebel soldiers and even a few widows. Wells often ferried them to meetings. “These were real Charleston ladies, in gloves, hats and heels. I’d do up their corsets. Eighty-five years old, sucking in their breath to show off their slender waists.”

It was these women who had presided over the UDC during its heyday at the turn of the century, when the organization boasted 100,000 members and erected monuments of rebel soldiers on courthouse lawns across the South. It seemed strange to me that women had been so much more active than veterans in hallowing battlefield glory. But Wells, who once served as the UDC’s historian, felt the women were honoring themselves as much as their menfolk.

“Before the War, Southern women—white Southern women of means—were basically protected people, they didn’t do much,” she said. “But then the men went off to war and the women were left to take care of the homes, the businesses, the farms. They suddenly had to be self-reliant, and they found that they could be.” By 1865, one of every three Confederate soldiers had died from battle wounds or disease. Those who straggled home, from Northern prisons or the killing fields of Virginia, were defeated, dispirited, often maimed. “But the women had found in a strange way that they were stronger than before,” Wells said. “They took care of the widows and orphans and wounded men. And they felt a solidarity and sentimentality about the South.”

They also cherished the War’s physical remains; it was the Daughters who had started the Confederate Museum in 1896. Many of the items still bore yellowed, handwritten labels scribbled by veterans themselves. A typical one read: “Button from the coat of C.P. Poppenheim, with stain of wound received at battle of Sharpsburg.” One veteran presented a glass box filled with pressed flowers from Manassas. Another hauled home the trunk of a bullet-riddled tree. Some even toted home rocks. “When they weren’t shooting Yanks they were hunting souvenirs,” Wells said.

Nor did relic hunting end with the War. Wells showed me a letter with a lock of gray hair sewn to it. “This is our most popular item,” she said. The letter was from Robert E. Lee’s barber and read: “The lock of hair I send you was cut by me from the head of the great Hero after his death.” Another case contained a lock of Jeff Davis’s hair and splinters of wood from the tree under which he was arrested by Union troops in 1865.

Hair. Bits of wood. Blood-stained clothing. The kindergarten was beginning to feel less like a museum than a saints’ reliquary. “Why do you work here?” I asked Wells.

“Volunteer,” she corrected me. Then, in answer to my question, she showed me a pair of drumsticks with a caption that said, “Found in the hands of a lad killed in battle.” There was also a little trunk in which the drummer boy had carried his childhood belongings off to war.

“I always show these to young people because I’m very anti-military,” Wells said. “That’s why I do this museum. Everything here is real. It isn’t television. I hope that people seeing these things will make them never want to fight again.”

To Wells, defeat and devastation were the true legacy of the War; they set the South apart from a nation accustomed to triumph. She liked to think this made Southerners a little wiser and perhaps a little more considerate of one other. “I always felt sorry for Northern people,” she said. “I have a Yankee relative in New York and when I go to visit her I’m uncomfortable, people are so suspicious and cold.” She shrugged. “I guess I still feel the South is the better half of the world somehow.”

There was a knock on the door and a weary-looking woman came in with a boy of about ten. Catching sight of the museum, the boy’s face brightened. “I’m so glad we finally found you,” his mother said. “He’s mad on the Civil War.”

The boy pressed his face to a glass case displaying a pile of Confederate money. “When we were girls,” Wells told him, “we’d play house with this money and use it to start fires with.” Wide-eyed, the boy began wandering toward the weapons and uniforms, dragging his mother along.

“We have some drumsticks used by a boy about your age,” Wells said. “Make sure I show them to you before you go.”

B
Y DAY
, C
HARLESTON
in January seemed quiet and genteel. By night it went wild. One evening, I was almost run down by a brigade of drunk college students charging through the streets shrieking, “Can’t lick those Cocks!” The “Gamecocks” of the University of South Carolina had recently triumphed in a football bowl game, prompting a week-long bender in the bars lining the Market. Not that Charlestonians needed much of an excuse. South Carolina had just elected a Christian Right governor. During the same election, Charlestonians passed a referendum allowing Sunday drinking.

A few days after my arrival, I phoned a local woman whom a friend had recommended as a guide. She offered to take me on “the walk.”

“The walking tour of the Battery? I did that. It was lovely.”

She laughed and said she’d meet me at dark. “The Walk,” it turned out, was Charleston slang for a pub crawl that ended when its participants were too stupefied to stagger any farther.

It seemed only fitting, then, that a saloon called Moultrie’s Tavern became my base for Civil War operations in Charleston. Moultrie’s looked at first glance like a tourist trap. Billed as a tavern “set in 1862,” it offered period music, Civil War decor and glass cases filled with minié balls and buttons unearthed by the bar’s relic-hunting proprietor. But while tourists hoed into cutely named dishes like Blockade Salad and Ham and Shrimp Sumter, a curious mix of well-dressed professionals and roughneck laborers clung to the bar, endlessly debating the Civil War.

As I ate lunch one afternoon, I overheard a man bellowing to several other drinkers, “The whole Southern cause was manipulated by a bunch of Charleston fat cats and that’s what got us into the mess at Sumter. Don’t get me wrong. I’m real proud of states’ rights. Hell, I believe in city rights.”

He paused to drain his beer, leaving me to wonder what depredation of the state government he was about to decry.

“Columbia has no business running us,” he said of the state capital. “It’s in the goddamned Bible Belt. I grew up being told that Baptists don’t fuck standing up because people might think they were dancing. That’s how staunch they are.”

I moved my lunch to the bar and offered to buy the man a drink. He ordered four beers, shoving one to me. “I drink beer so I can drink liquor,” he said. “You’ve got to lay down a foundation in your stomach before you start in on the hard stuff.”

Idiosyncrasy was a point of pride in Charleston. Several people had already boasted to me about the city’s police chief, a Berkeley-educated black Jew and former rodeo cowboy named Reuben Greenberg who roller-bladed his beat and decorated his office with miniature rebel flags. But even by Charleston standards, Jamie Westendorff ranked as a bonafide eccentric. Broad-shouldered, with watery blue eyes and a coronel of brown curls, Westendorff was, among other things, an alligator wrestler, fifth-generation Charlestonian, and descendant of a Confederate blockade runner.

“Those captains did it for the Cause, and that cause was money,” he said. “Running the blockade back then wasn’t much different from running dope today. Except they were smarter than dope runners because they didn’t get into their own junk.”

Westendorff worked as a seaman, too, gathering shellfish for his catering business. He specialized in Lowcountry feasts—fried shrimp, softshell crabs, hogs cooked in vinegar and pepper—and he always cooked on a Rabelaisian scale. “I’m like those blockade runners. Whatever you can do, do it for the most. So if I can cook for a hundred, why not a thousand?”

Westendorff also worked as a plumber, which had led to his principal hobby: privy digging. Using nineteenth-century insurance maps of Charleston, he looked for small squares marked W.C. and tried to find their remains in present-day backyards. “Fortunes were thrown down those holes,” he said. Medicine bottles. Crockery. Kitchen utensils. And liquor jugs. “Guys who didn’t want anyone to know they drank used to do it in the outhouse. That’s where we get the phrase ‘shithouse drinker.’”

Westendorff drained the last of his beers. “Got a hog to cook,” he said.

“Mind if I tag along?” I asked.

He shrugged. “If you don’t mind riding in the stankiest truck in the South.”

Two reeking mutts, Rut and Rut-Lite, perched in the cab of his battered pickup. Plumbing snakes, peanut shells and Civil War shrapnel littered the dashboard and floor. Starting the engine with what looked like a paper clip, Westendorff asked what I’d seen of Charleston. I told him I’d visited Sumter, various museums, gone on a walking tour, poked my head in a few gardens and interiors.

“In other words, you seen nothing yet,” he said, offering to show me a few of his favorite sites in “peninsula city,” as he called downtown. We stopped first at a street of grand homes by the harbor. “I’ve worked inside—or at least under—most houses in the Battery,” he said. “What they don’t tell you on those tours is what these houses really are—the world’s biggest money pits.” Termites, humidity and sea air corroded facades and porches. Simply painting the larger houses, in some cases an annual job, cost $40,000.