Savannah, or a Gift for Mr. Lincoln Read online

  At Sara’s urging, the three left York Street at first light. Sara said that, weary though they were, they should be witness to a significant, if not necessarily shining, moment in Savannah’s history: the arrival of the victors. They made their way up toward Bay Street, Sara with the poker in hand.

  Hattie’s blue eyes were big and round when she saw how the looters had devastated the neighborhood. Glittering chips of broken windows lay everywhere. A torched brougham, overturned, smoldered and reeked of charred wood. A Negro lad hawking papers advised them not to venture down to the wharf: gangs of white and colored were hunting for hidden stores of rice and brawling in the process

  By the imposing granite Custom House, Vee exclaimed, “There’s music.” Hattie heard it, distant cornets and flutes swelling with the strains of “The Battle Cry of Freedom.” Snare drums riffled and thrummed. Stunned citizens watched silently from the walks and Bay Street’s central promenade.

  The first of Barnum’s brigade of Geary’s division marched out of Broad and into Bay. Flag-bearers led them, carrying bright divisional banners and the Stars and Stripes to which Lester Ladson and his family had once sworn allegiance. The band appeared, then the first of the conquerors—Westerners, sun-browned men, many with long beards. They kept cadence; some even chanted the obnoxious lyrics of the march—“The Union forever,” and “Down with the traitor, up with the star.” Hattie covered her ears and made a face until Sara ordered her to desist.

  “Captured.” Miss Vee shuddered. “Humiliated, by rabble.”

  Sara showed the copy of the paper she’d bought. “Don’t fret so. It clearly says our property will be respected by the military rulers.”

  “Yes, but what about our persons? Our persons? I can’t believe those men will respect womanhood.” Hattie frankly didn’t care. She was spent, wanted nothing so much as a handful of rice and a pillow.

  The music grew louder. The soldiers passed, looking fit, ill-clad and beaming at the crowds—smiling or smirking, Hattie couldn’t decide. Shortly, across the street, the national colors appeared atop the three-story brick front of the Exchange. Hattie nestled against her mother’s skirt and took comfort from Sara’s hand stealing around her, protective and reassuring.

  She yawned. Where was Sherman? When would she lay eyes on the man who had brought so much grief to Georgia? He came like an evil Saint Nicholas sent from the netherworld. He should be treated as such.

  Just as dawn light roused the York Street household, Tybee Jo Swett came awake in a forest bordering a country road not far from the city. Without opening his eyes he inventoried his condition:

  Belly, empty. Skin, chafed and scratched from skulking through cotton and potato patches, pine woods, and salt marshes, all to avoid main roads. Temperature, definitely on the cold side; farm clothes he’d stolen from a drying line were too thin for December. Taken in total it was discouraging, but in no way turned him from his purpose—a return to Savannah, to hand the pious, sneering Judge Drewgood a memorable surprise.

  Jo had lived on his own for more than a decade. His father, the first Tybee Jo, died when he was eleven, leaving him sole heir and possessor of a fishing boat, a handsome, sail-rigged craft with a deep well for fresh catches and thole pins for oars in case the wind fell off.

  By spring 1861, Jo had matured into a handsome young man. He supported himself by fishing the offshore banks and reefs. He sold mackerel and red snappers to an agent of the Confederate commissary department and thus justified his failure to enlist right away; he was already doing his part in the war, though he had little taste or sympathy for it. Few Tybee fishermen owned even one slave. Jo paid a burly freedman the sum of twenty cents per day to sail out as his helper. The freedman’s former owner, who had manumitted him, had christened him Oglethorpe. Jo called him Ogie.

  Ogie lived in a small neat shack within sight and sound of the ocean both of them loved. Ogie and Jo became strong friends, though Jo was footloose and Ogie had settled down with a comely young wife, Marie; together they produced twin boys.

  Ogie and Marie often invited Jo to visit and share supper. Marie cooked a delicious she-crab soup, and the two friends watched the pot bubble while Jo dandled one of Ogie’s sons on his knee and Ogie dandled the other.

  Both men continued to express displeasure over the war and those who had caused it. Georgians generally disliked the South Carolina hotspurs who thought they could leap on their blooded horses, gallop off waving plumed hats and sabers, and be home in time for eggnog at yuletide, having won the independence of a new Southern nation.

  Alas, it wasn’t that simple, or that short. Union ships appeared off the Georgia coast; they were likened to an anaconda looping its coils around the whole Confederacy, to squeeze the life, and the commerce, out of it. Tybee Jo was one of many driven onshore, the alternative being to keep venturing out and risk loss of his fishing boat and possibly his skin. Jo’s boat went into a dry-dock yard and Jo went into Savannah, there to pick up work as best he could.

  He started as a checker on the river wharf, employed by a wealthy Bay Street factor, the Englishman Mr. Green. Jo tallied outbound cotton shipments, cargo for blockade runners sailing by night for Hamilton, Nassau, or Havana. Jo figured the job was temporary; inevitably he would be pulled into the service, the Confederate navy his preference. This was the situation in the autumn of 1862 when, at age twenty-two, he chanced to meet Merry Drewgood.

  Pretty Merry broke the heel of her boot while doing an errand on Bay Street. Jo was sprawled on nearby grass, lunching on two ersatz oysters, which were mostly fried green corn and flour. Coming along at a quick pace, Merry stumbled and would have fallen if Jo hadn’t jumped up and caught her; thus he had reason to introduce himself. Merry was a womanly nineteen, educated, and obviously several social cuts above a Tybee fisherman. It made him want her all the more.

  Jo was yellow-haired, smiled beautifully if he felt like it, and displayed the bruised knuckles of someone who fought often. Yes, he was a little too eager to right any fancied wrong—he had a temper—but Merry didn’t discover that until she was in love and didn’t care.

  They confined their meetings to trysts in Laurel Grove Cemetery or bowers in Forsyth Park, well away from the multiplying army tents. Merry said it would be best if Jo didn’t visit the Drewgood residence. Besides, meeting in secret made their romance all the more heady and thrilling.

  One night Merry’s squint-eyed and jealous twin sister, Cherry, trailed them to Forsyth Park to spy on them. When Merry arrived home, she was hailed into family court in the Drewgood sitting room. The judge badgered her into tearfully revealing all she knew about Tybee Jo Swett, including the fact that she loved him and would do so until her dying hour.

  Jo lived in a little room attached to a livery stable. Sheriff’s men broke his door down at night, “discovered” a pistol among his few clothes, and removed him to the imposing County Jail, four stories of yellow Savannah brick. Jo demanded to know the charge against him. Answer: He’d made threats, in person, against the head of the Drewgood family.

  Jo protested that he’d never even met the head of the family, or owned a gun. One jail guard shrugged and said the judge had affidavits confirming the threats. Jo angrily denied his guilt. The other guard used a hickory truncheon to cool Jo’s temper.

  From a cell it was but a short trip to the courtroom of the pumpkin-eyed judge, who waved the so-called affidavits in Jo’s face. “You are trash—a nobody, presuming to press your sordid attentions on a refined and innocent young woman.”

  “Your Honor, I never heard the word sordid before, but if it means something bad, something dirty”—the judge began rapping his gavel—“no, sir, my regard for your daughter is of the highest—uh—cleanliness—”

  “Silence. I order you to be silent.”

  But Jo’s famous temper was up. “And when it comes to pressing attentions, why, Miss Merry was pressing as hard as I was pressing, the one time I stole a ki—”

  “Stop. Bailiff,
seize him. Milledgeville! Fifteen years!”

  The longtime orphan languished in the state prison, there to dream of Merry and think up elaborate, temporarily unworkable schemes for escaping and returning to Savannah to settle up with the man who had separated them. Outwardly Jo was a well-behaved prisoner unless insulted or bullied by guards or another inmate; inwardly he seethed.

  In mid-November 1864, all prisoners were abruptly herded into the main yard where they were addressed by Georgia’s gaunt and gangly governor, Hon. Joe Brown. Though a Yale-trained lawyer, the governor was known as “the Cherokee County Cow Driver” because of his countrified ways. Plainly fearful of Sherman’s army advancing on the poorly protected state capital, Brown offered to commute the sentence of any man who volunteered to fight. Jo was among the first of a hundred or so who stepped forward. Thus, still in his penitentiary stripes, he was enrolled in the governor’s “prison militia.”

  Jo wasn’t sophisticated politically, but his quasi-military duty convinced him that the state legislators, and Brown, were a bunch of cowardly charlatans. The convicts loaded so-called state property onto a special train hired by the legislators to run down to the rail junction at Gordon. The “state property” included household furniture, trunks of fancy clothing, hat trees, stuffed bear heads, a harp, a cut-glass chandelier, and other goods that had nothing to do with laws the legislators left half-drafted on their statehouse desks. The governor announced that the special train would go “directly to the front,” but how women, children, French brandy, tins of potted meat, or a harp would be put to use in combat, no one explained.

  Jo had no intention of sacrificing himself for such chicanery. Wasn’t the cause lost anyway? Lee was on the run, Atlanta a scorched ruin. For two days Jo feigned diligence and enthusiasm, but as soon as he was issued a musket, ammunition, and a uniform, he slipped away. In the country he found a likely farm, rid himself of the uniform, and stole less incriminating garments from the clothesline. His purpose remained clear and bright as a flame in his resentful heart.

  So here he was, within a few miles of his goal, in heavy underbrush that smelled of pines and the pungent dampness of the low-lying coastal plain. He could hear distant cannonading. In the night he’d been wakened by a large body of Federals moving seaward on the corduroyed road. Jo assumed it would be no more difficult to sneak into a Union-occupied city than one defended by his own side.

  He brushed his clothes to remove clinging pine straw and dirt. He picked up the stolen slouch hat crushed into an inadequate pillow. He ignored the grumblings in his middle, crept forward, and parted the palmettos for a peek at the highway.

  Deserted. Birds called; random beams of daylight fell from the east. He debated whether he’d be safe using the road, and in that moment of concentration failed to hear stealthy footfalls behind him. Suddenly two Confederate soldiers were on him, one with a stout tree branch for a club, the other showing him a two-barrel revolver. The second reb, ugly as a bad dream and slightly cross-eyed, spoke for both:

  “This here piece is a LeMat, which I took off the corpse of one of Joe Wheeler’s dead lieutenants. This here barrel”—the lower one—“is loaded with grapeshot. It can tear that pretty face of yours apart if my finger twitches, you got that?”

  Jo nodded to assert that he got it.

  “All right, then. Turn out your pockets.”

  “I don’t have a penny. Besides, I’m on your side.”

  The reb spat. “Nobody’s on our side no more. We run off from Old Joe’s cavalry when my cousin Varner took a Yankee ball in the chest. Right then’s when we made our own private peace treaty.” The other one, whom Jo assessed as none too bright, giggled.

  “Now do like I tell you—turn out your pockets.” The soldier poked Jo’s stained wool blouse with the gun muzzle.

  Jo’s eyes flashed. “Don’t prod me.”

  “I’ll prod you any dang way I please.” He did it a second time.

  If Jo hadn’t been so chilly and hungry, he might have held his famous temper. Instead, he kicked the soldier with his prison shoe and at the same time boldly grabbed and pushed the gun barrel with both hands. The soldier yelled, “Hey!” His trigger finger jerked. The gun bucked in Jo’s grasp, but it was aimed past his hip; the shot merely tore bark from a water oak.

  “I didn’t come all this way to be robbed,” Jo said as he wrenched the gun from the soldier’s hand.

  “Lord have mercy, he means to kill us,” wailed the second reb. He ran like the devil, back the way he’d come. Jo waved the revolver.

  “Go on, follow him, before I really get mean about it. I’ll count five. One, two—” Between three and four, the would-be thief disappeared in the dark green gloom. Jo let out a breath, shivering with shock.

  Then he recalled where he was, and why. He saw Merry’s sweet face; her father sneering down from his judicial dais. He’d make that old man sorry he ever concocted lies to incriminate Tybee Jo Swett.

  He hid the LeMat revolver in the waist of his trousers and tugged the slouch hat lower over his eyes. He set off toward the rising sun, and Savannah, his righteous anger renewed.

  Toward dark, Alpheus Winks drove the forage wagon into the regimental campsite near the western city limits. His horse plodded behind, tethered to the tailboard. The wagon held a small load: a bushel of sweet potatoes, half a bushel of onions, two pumpkins long past their prime, a dispirited rooster in a cage. Among the acquisitions sat Zip, who’d taken the reins most of the day. He was practicing his blasted birdcalls. Whether brown thrasher, mockingbird, cardinal, or purple martin, to Winks they mostly sounded alike—twitters and wheeps, trills and squawks.

  Winks’s exasperation with Zip was nearly limitless. Why had he allowed this fellow to attach himself, leechlike, and follow him everywhere? He despised Negroes for what they’d done to his family, though he had a certain reluctant liking for Zip personally; it had sort of crept up on him after Ebenezer Creek, while he was, so to speak, busy elsewhere.

  Was it possible to like the person and dislike the race? Winks wasn’t sufficiently educated to answer the question. His head hurt when he tried. His head hurt now.

  His weary men dismounted and dispersed as Winks reported to the regimental adjutant. After Captain Gleeson listened to Winks’s recital of the inventory, he said, “I call that scanty, Sergeant. Scanty in the extreme.”

  “No help for it, sir. Countryside’s stripped clean as a baby after a bath.” Winks saw no point in telling the steel-hearted officer that he’d undergone a personal change on the long, slow scour of the country while riding down to the coast. What produced the change was the imminence of the holidays and the increasingly brutal poverty of the hamlets and farms the bummers visited. They had so little, these Georgia people. Nowhere was it more evident than a cropper’s shack where Winks found a gray-faced woman digging in the hard clay with a bent table fork. From the saddle, he asked, “What are you doing that for?”

  The woman looked at him with exhausted eyes set deep in a worn face. “Trying to find bullets. Hear tell there’s a Confederate kitchen in Savannah gives you food if you turn in lead.”

  “I never heard of it, but if it’s so, I expect the kitchen’s closed up. Savannah’s captured, or soon will be.”

  “Oh, mercy.” She dropped the fork and wept.

  Winks waved to forestall the advance of his men waiting on the road. The number had been reduced to four: Chief Jim, Privates Pence and Spiker, and the professor. The sixth soldier, a malingerer, had gored his foot with his own bayonet, possibly on purpose. Regardless, he was dispatched to the invalid corps.

  “We’ve got okra and a little molasses we can leave with you, ma’am,” Winks said. The woman began to bless him, weeping harder.

  Riding away, he ordered Professor Marcus and the others to go light on what they took from now on, and to take nothing if the civilians appeared to be near starvation. This inevitably displeased certain of the men, most noticeably Professor Marcus.

  Capta
in Gleeson left off scowling, having made his point. “I suppose I owe it to you to say you and your detachment have performed well during most of the campaign. Let it rest there.” The captain gestured to dismiss him.

  “Beg pardon, sir, but the city’s ours, isn’t it?”

  “It is, utterly. General Geary’s charged with setting up the policing—curfews, patrols to arrest drunken or disorderly soldiers—Geary was mayor of San Francisco, you know. He won’t have things organized for a day or two, so keep your men reined in.”

  “Yes, sir. I was wondering, though—is Uncle Billy in Savannah? Never have gotten a close look at him.”

  “General Sherman to you, soldier. He’s up at Port Royal, conferring. I understand he’ll arrive tomorrow.”

  “Well, he’s got a mighty nice Christmas present in his stocking anyway.”

  “I’m sure he’s thought of that,” Gleeson answered with mordant sarcasm. “Now if you’re done quizzing me and sharing your opinions, I have twenty reports to write. And don’t let me see that ridiculous hat I know you’re hiding behind your back.”

  “Sir, yes, sir.” Winks clicked his run-down heels and snapped a salute.

  Outside in the winter dark, Winks fished a stubby cigar from his shirt pocket. The strong-smelling sulfur match barely warmed the insides of his cupped hands. A few snowflakes floated past his nose. The fields of Putnam County, Indiana, often lay white from November until April, but this place, which was supposed to be the sunny southland, was pretty near as cold tonight.

  He walked through the camp to the cook fire Zip had laid for roasting sweet potatoes. Winks sat down opposite him.

  “Do anything for you, Captain? Shine your boots?”

  Crossly, Winks said, “I’m tired of telling you. I’m not a captain.”

  “It’s a term of respeck. I still polish your boots if you wish.”

  “No.”

  “Lay down your bedroll? Fill your canteen?”