Jacob's Ladder (66 page)

“So you think Marguerite did the right thing?”

“You must ask Marguerite.” Selah's flashing grin was so pleased with herself and so mischievous the girl knew what little Midge must have looked like so many years ago.

Josh went to help Kizzy scrub apple cake from good children's faces.

“Will I see you again?” Selah asked. “I am between terms and plan to stay in Richmond for a while.”

“Meeting you,” the girl said, “all of you, today. I wish I could have known your father.”

Selah smiled. “Like every ordinary man, my father had his glimpse of heaven. Just one glimpse.”

Marguerite faced the remnants of apple cake, a mound of sticky candles. The girl came to sit beside her.

The human voice is the last thing to age. Marguerite chuckled. “I see you've met our Selah.”

“Yes.”

“She reminds me of myself. As I might have been. Do you think I might have done better? Don't patronize me. No one but a fool reaches the end of her life without regrets.” Her eyes followed the boys playing in the garden. Her great-grandson, Jacob, broad-jumped a low boxwood planting and covered his ears, giggling with pleasure.

“After Silas was killed, I was never with another man. I was then twenty-one years old. It is difficult to remember how it felt to be twenty-one years old.”

Sentimental tears glistening his cheeks, Bill leaned to give his grandmother a boozy embrace. He said that he had a train to catch, that they were starting a new picture, that Sam Goldwyn spent money like water. “We'll be back for your hundredth!”

“Not if you don't stop drinking,” Marguerite said.

Bill beamed, “Same old Marguerite! Promise you'll never change!” He went to hug Kizzy.

Marguerite sighed. “That is the hardest thing: that I can no longer protect them.” She nodded at the children in the garden. “I am thoroughly ready to die, but to see that boy grow up, I would almost be willing to live forever. If you wonder what Duncan Gatewood looked like, look at Jacob: his ears, how he holds his head. Lord, how I loved him. I love him still.” Softly she said, “That boy is right fancy.”

Oblivious to the old eyes which beheld him so tenderly, young Jacob tossed his head, laughing with the delight of being alive.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

IN 1990, WHILE
researching county records for a book which became
An American Homeplace,
I found an evocative court case. Samuel Gatewood was a prosperous mountain planter who owned a large plantation, a mill, and twenty-eight slaves. In February of 1861, Gatewood accompanied slave patrollers to the modest Kirkpatrick cabin seeking Jesse, Gatewood's runaway slave. When Jesse was discovered, the Kirkpatricks might easily have disclaimed knowledge of his fugitive status, and surely that would have been the wiser course. (The record hinted such may have been Gatewood's preference.) Instead, the Kirkpatricks were defiant. When Jesse was asked if he'd run again, he was unusually bold. “It's a mighty big mountain up there,” he replied.

It was a terrifying/thrilling time. Men of good reputation reported hearing cannon fire deep in the mountains. Fort Sumter was besieged by the new Confederacy, and though Virginia was still in the Union, its sympathies were with those states already seceded.

In those days, when malefactors weren't hanged outright, prison sentences were relatively light: two years for burglary, three for robbery and assault. Both Kirkpatricks were found guilty of felony (Jesse was Samuel Gatewood's property) and sentenced to five years in the state penitentiary in Richmond.

Kirkpatrick was not a local name. Apparently the land they lived on once belonged to Mrs. Kirkpatrick's father. There is more known about the Gatewoods (which I did not pursue), but nothing more about Jesse or the Kirkpatricks. Penitentiary records were burned in the evacuation fire of 1865.

You now know what I do about the real Jesse, the real Gatewoods and Kirkpatricks. In the pages of
Jacob's Ladder
they are wholly fictions.

The Confederate surrender at Appomattox disturbed U. S. Grant, who wrote, “I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and so valiantly for a cause though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought and one for which there was the least excuse.” As a liberal, reared in the North, I shared U. S. Grant's view—as I suppose most Americans do—and my first working title was “The Worst Cause.” I was off on the wrong foot, my research perplexed me, and several times I nearly abandoned the project. It was impossible to understand the Confederates who fought so gallantly. For what? The right to oppress another people? And given the disparity in military forces, population, even farmland (in 1860, the North grew more tobacco than the South, had three times as many horses, four times the wheat production), it was hard to understand what the southerners were thinking of, why'd they'd chance lives, fortunes, and honor in such a forlorn struggle.

Twenty-five years ago, my wife, Anne, and I moved from New York City to a farm in the Virginia mountains. Though we cannot be natives, we have become Virginians, and this farm is our only home. During summer months, irregularly, my young neighbors hold what they call “deer/beer parties.” On the riverbank, deer steaks are barbecued while good old boys spin yarns and drink Old Milwaukee and Willy Nelson tunes blare from a pickup truck. My neighbors are proud, poor, crack shots, honest to a fault, the best of friends and least forgiving of enemies. At one such party while the southern stars slid overhead, I understood that if the year were 1861 we Virginians would be fighting for Robert E. Lee.

But if by accident of birthplace I might have been a Confederate soldier, by accident of race I might just as well have been my or one of my neighbor's slaves.

The attempt to understand both experiences, Confederate and African-American, is the soul of
Jacob's Ladder.

I determined to write these people's stories as they understood matters at the time, before historians decided what actually happened and moralists determined what it all meant. My liveliest information came from memoirs, diaries, newspapers, sermons, and letters written before and during the war. I could not read these letters, so full of hope, fear, and vows to be better people, without admiring the men and women who endured the most terrible and consequential of American wars.

The Civil War is the single most important event in African-American history, and the ex-slaves who became Union soldiers knew that perfectly well and resolved to standards of courage, dignity, and faith few of their white fellow soldiers could equal. As Medal of Honor winner Sergeant Major Christian Fleetwood, 4th USCT, wrote, “Here the negro stood in the glare of the greatest search light, part and parcel of the grandest armies ever mustered upon this continent, competing side by side with the best and bravest of the Union army against the flower of the Confederacy and losing nothing in the contrast.”

These are happy times for researching the war. New southern historians are uninterested in justifying horrid racial practices and busy themselves revising our understanding of the lives and beliefs of ordinary southerners, blacks and whites alike. In July 1991, the definitive exhibition of antebellum slave life, “Before Freedom Came,” opened at the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond. For many black schoolteachers who brought their young charges to that exhibition, it was the first time they had ever set foot inside a museum that represented for them all that had been most hurtful in the South.

Research is the historical novelist's map, constraint, and purest energy. The events of the Civil War are so odd, ferocious, and poignant that fictional characters do well simply to inhabit them. I am no historian but have tried to stick tight to the facts.

Throughout I've given the names of real soldiers to my fictional characters. Had you been in Silas Omohundru's hut during the bitter winter of 1864, you would have met Color Sergeant Robinson, though the real Color Sergeant Robinson may have been morose and gray where my fictional Robinson is undaunted. If you'd attended a hymn sing with First Sergeant (and Medal of Honor winner) Edward Ratcliffe you might have encountered a man less an angry realist than I've made him out. Robinson and Ratcliffe survived the war and may have descendants who honor them in memory or possess letters or their ancestor's battered diary. I owe their descendants this apology for fictionalizing their family story. I also ask pardon of the family of Private Lawrence Barry of the Washington (Louisiana) Artillery, whose defiance symbolized the battle for Fort Gregg.

Memoirs, diaries, and letters have provided insights and language. Chapter 12 is lifted in its entirety from an anonymous article in the
Southern Planter
of 1857.

Not producing a bibliography is a novelist's privilege I gratefully exercise. However, since they are not widely known sources, scholars may wish to examine master's theses compiled by students of Dr. Eslie Lewis, at the Moorland Springarn Research Center, Howard University, and “From the Wilderness to Appomatox: Life in Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, May 1864–April 1865,” a doctoral dissertation by J. Tracy Power, University of South Carolina. The former are the only regimental histories for U.S. Colored Troops recruited from Virginia and Maryland, and the latter is invaluable for anyone seeking to know what Lee's soldiers were thinking near the end of their bitter struggle.

I am deeply indebted to those who have abetted my research and ask those I've neglected to name to forgive me. Whatever I got right I owe to them, every misunderstanding is my own.

Jack Ackerly, Richmond, Virginia

Rick Armstrong, Millboro Springs, Virginia

Charles Ballou,MD., Clifton Forge, Virginia

Mary and David Britt, Reynolds Homestead, Critz, Virginia

Dr. Chris Calkins, Historian, Petersburg National Battlefield

Mary C. Coulling, Lexington, Virginia

Shelby Foote, Memphis, Tennessee

Dr. Warren R. Hofstra, Shenandoah University

Professor Ervin Jordan, Curator Special Collections, Alderman Library, University of Virginia

Dr. Ken Koons, Virginia Military Institute

Dr. Stephen L. Longenecker, Bridgewater College

David Nicholson, Washington, D.C.

Judge Oliver Pollard, Petersburg, Virginia

Dr. James I. Robertson, Virginia Polytechnic Institute

J. Susanne Simmons, Fort Defiance High School

Nancy Sorrells, Research Librarian, Museum of American Frontier Culture

Lucinda Stanton, Historian, Monticello

E. Gehrig Spencer, Historic Site Manager, Fort Fisher, North Carolina

Evelyn Timberlake, Research Librarian, Library of Congress

Tom Word, Richmond, Virginia

My wife, poet Anne Ashley McCaig, weighed every sentence and denounced each shabby word, every mangled attitude. While I am deeply grateful for her months of hard work, I love her for that morning when things looked most bleak and she said, “We had to take this risk. It was the right thing to do.”

Knox Burger has been my mentor, editor, and friend for as long as I've been writing prose.
Jacob's Ladder
would not exist without him.

Starling Lawrence found the warmth in Cox's snow.

I am grateful for the tangible confidence of Merle M. Dodson of Planter's Bank and Trust Company of Virginia and M. Scott Glenn of Staunton Farm Credit.

Finally, I'd like to thank the staffs of the Antietam, Manassas, Fredericksburg, and Spotsylvania National Battlefields; the Richmond National Battlefield Museum; the Petersburg National Battlefield; the Cape Fear Museum; Warwick House, Bath County, Virginia; the Bellamy Mansion, Wilmington, North Carolina; the Bath County Historical Society; Hollywood Cemetery; the Bath County Clerk's Office; the National Archives of the United States; the Southern History Collection at the University of North Carolina; the Historical Collection, University of Michigan at Lansing; the Valentine Museum; and the Museum of the Confederacy. I thank the librarians at Washington and Lee University, the Alderman Library of the University of Virginia, the Charles Town Public Library, the Virginia Military Institute, the Virginia Polytechnic Institute, Howard University, the Wilmington (North Carolina) Public Library, the Virginia State Library and Archives, and the Virginia Historical Society. And last but by no means least, my thanks to the redoubtable ladies of the Junior League of Richmond, who got me into the old Virginia State Penitentiary after it was closed but before it was torn down.

—Donald McCaig, 18 March 1997

AFTERWORD

So far from engaging in a war to perpetuate slavery, I am rejoiced that slavery is abolished. I believe it will be greatly for the interests of the south. So fully am I satisfied of this, as regards Virginia especially, that I would cheerfully have lost all I have lost by the war and suffered all I have suffered to have this object attained.

—
Robert E. Lee,

Baltimore, Maryland, April 28, 1869

More praise for
JACOB'S LADDER

“A tale of courage, cowardice, death, life, growth, war, violence, redemption, and finally, love and compassion. . . . McCaig, a poet-novelist, has the gentle face of a nineteenth-century man. That he could write such a gentle, compelling story about such an ungentle time rings true.”

—
Washington Post

“McCaig's prose is gorgeous. . . . [McCaig] renders his battle scenes with stunning force. They stand among the best in either fiction or nonfiction. . . . One of the best Civil War novels . . . stunning.”

—
Houston Chronicle

“
Jacob's Ladder
is a fine literary effort, broad in scale and scope, deep in metaphor and meaning, engrossing from beginning to end.”

—
Seattle Times

“
Jacob's Ladder
is a better novel than
Cold Mountain
. It makes
Gone With the Wind
look like the soap opera it really is in the last analysis. . . . McCaig has produced a masterpiece which deserves a wide readership.”

—
Virginia Quarterly

“
Jacob's Ladder
is a page-turning account of the men and women, masters and slaves, of a Virginia plantation caught in the maelstrom of the nation's bloodiest, most tragic conflict. . . . McCaig has written a stirring human drama in this sweeping epic of war, heroism and love . . . a formidable literary success.”

—
Chattanooga Times

“Imagine a fine collaboration between Shelby Foote and Margaret Mitchell and you get some idea of . . . this fine literary novel.”

—
Publishers Weekly
, starred review

“A fine novel.”

—
The Atlantic

“McCaig has gotten hip-deep into America's bloodiest war and he takes us with him . . . a worthwhile, entertaining book.”

—
Raleigh News and Observer

“From the beginning, McCaig's splendid novel, in lean and beautiful prose, grows out of the tangled thicket of memory and history, out of the fragrant orchard of poetry and imagination.”

—
Newport News Daily Press

“[
Jacob's Ladder
] is a big book, full of big battles and big events . . . it provides insight into a conflict that almost destroyed a young country, and continues to haunt us today.”

—
Lexington Herald Leader

“McCaig brings the reader into the adrenaline-charged mind of a young Rebel lieutenant with enough intensity to generate hyperventilation . . . a triumph.”

—
The Enterprise
, Patrick County, Virginia

“This novel has moved me more than any other I have read for you in the past few years. I would say that this is the best Civil War novel I have ever read, and that includes
Gone With the Wind
.”

—Clifton Fadiman, editorial board of the Book-of-the-Month Club

“
Jacob's Ladder
is an exciting historical novel of that same superior order as Thomas Flanagan's
Year of the French
. McCaig has a fluent command of both the great events and the life-giving particulars of his full cast of Virginians.”

—John Casey

“This novel blots out the protection of historic distance. It is astonishingly immediate. Its research is magnificent, but never intrudes. It becomes the story of war itself, how brutal it is, how courageous, how slowly and inexorably mad.”

—Mary Lee Settle

“Boldly capacious, blessed with vivid and memorable characters and a wealth of striking and credible events, Donald McCaig's powerful, compassionate story is deeply rooted in the real and living presence of Virginia, before, during, and after the Civil War.
Jacob's Ladder
is historical fiction at its finest, and it places Donald McCaig in the pantheon of the best and brightest American novelists.”

—George Garrett