I remember the instant that I discovered that Bill had been a soldier. I was wandering through the cemetery at Mount Bethel, randomly photographing stones with family surnames. I had not been tracing our ancestry for long, and so I did not know who to look for.

My father resolutely refuses to talk about the past. He says he never thinks about it, and consequently does not remember it. Or maybe it was vice versa. It doesn't matter. Either way, there never were family stories told around the dinner table. My grandmother died before I knew the importance of asking.

I figured I'd shoot them all now, and sort them out later, so to speak. It was too hot to do anything else.

I wandered among the stones, not even stooping to compose, focus, and shoot. I had a little point-and-shoot digital camera then, and I just hung my arm down by my side, aimed in the general direction of, pressed the button halfway, listened for the beep, and fired. No dramatic vista shots.

And then I came to Bill's grave. Someone had put a new stone up. The etching was stark and clear:

SERG 5 NC CAVALRY
CONFEDERATE STATES ARMY

I was stunned. I had no idea that any of our family in that branch had been in the war. I didn't know then what I know now, which is that there was a universal draft in the South, and that nearly every adult male in that branch of our tree--indeed, in the county--had fought. Unlike other relatives of mine who'd exaggerated their lineage (and in some cases fabricated it), Grandmother Sutton never bragged about her ancestry. In fact, she never talked about it at all.

My father says this was because her father, Bill's oldest, was illegitimate, and that had been a source of deep shame for the family.

So I read Bill's footstone, so proudly announcing his fight for--what? the glorious Lost Cause? the perpetuation of slavery? I did the math, counting back nine months on my fingers. Sgt. Griffin must have seduced some innocent local maiden while he was home on furlough, I thought, and then left her high and dry. The mental image that formed as I read the stones was of the dashing cavalryman in his handsome uniform, cantering down the road on a spirited horse, which all combined would of course have simply charmed the drawers right off any girl with eyes, right?

Since then I have learned so much more about both of them. I have come to see Bill as a responsible man who would have tried at least to Do the Right Thing. And I have come to see Fannie as an independent young woman who seems to have gone her own way on her own hook. I have also learned that by then Bill would have been more dirty than dashing, his uniform ragged and worn, his mount more likely hungry, tired, and dispirited. And that Bill and Fannie would have both been in Petersburg at the time.

Fannie is buried on the grounds of the old state hospital in Morganton where she lived out her last years and died at 57 of "cerebral softening", presumably as the result of a stroke. I have never visited her grave. I would like to, though, and when I do I would like to take the time to sit and talk with her. And I would like to visit Bill again, to sit a spell with him, too.

I still have so many questions, and so much to tell them both.

Finished reading. . .

Image via Wikipedia

. . . Chris J. Hartley's Stuart's Tarheels: James B. Gordon and His North Carolina Cavalry in the Civil War (2nd Ed.). 

Gordon was a North Carolinian from Wilkes, a few counties over, who formed the 1st NC Cavalry regiment at the beginning of the war and rose to command of the entire state battalion (including, of course, the 5th) before his death after Yellow Tavern.

Hartley first published this biography fifteen years ago: This is the second edition, issued in 2011, and I got a free copy through LibraryThing’s Early Reviewer program. Well-researched and very detailed, the book includes maps drawn by Hartley himself. Over 140 of the book’s 435 pages are devoted to a roster of Gordon’s own 1^st Cavalry, which Hartley also compiled himself—and the roster is an impressive accomplishment in its own right. Hartley writes a better battle and draws a better map than many of the historians I've read since I began this quest. I found myself saying, "Oh, now I get it" when reading of the experience of battle, and I had a blast seeing exactly where Bill's regiment camped the night before the first battle at Brandy Station.

I can tell I'm learning, though, when I squint at the cover art and think to myself, "No, that's not right." The soldiers aren't holding their sabers properly, they aren't in battle lines, and the flag is in the wrong place in the mob.

The Circle of Life

This is Bill's fourth great grandson with his first horsie.

There's something about this cavalryman's great-grandson, a horseman himself, giving his own great-grandson a horse, even if it's only a toy, that moves me deeply.

 * * * * *

For what it's worth, Bill's second and third great granddaughters (the baby's grandmother and mother, respectively) also ride like the wind.

NaNoWriMo

So I'm doing NaNoWriMo this year. I'd gotten to where I believed all I had was little scraps and piles and lists of research notes and facts and dates, and no story. I thought if I could force myself to pound out a first draft, however thin, however awful, it would ground me in my story again. The first day (yesterday) I wrote a bit on a couple of scenes and hit my target and it was ok.

I'd had some advice from Diana Gabaldon on the Books and Writers Community boards about what was important and what wasn't, and she told me about how to write with brackets. The short version is that it's the characters and the story that are important, not the ticky historical details (at this stage, anyway) and whenever you come to something you haven't covered in your research yet (like what street Bill walks down--or up, I don't know the answer to that yet, either--to get to Fannie's house) you use brackets. Doing that, I wrote some very rough first-draft stuff. It comes with lots of brackets, but I wrote it.

Today, I got up thinking I would write on thus and such a scene tonight, but somehow over the course of the day managed to convince myself again that I don't have anything to say. Which is exactly where I was this past weekend before Diana wrote me that post, God bless her. She is so generous with her time over there, and talks to ridiculously inexperienced newbies like myself as kindly and respectfully as she does anyone else on the boards.

But I digress.

By the time I got home, I had come to the conclusion that there was one thing that I knew positively, absolutely had to get into the book sooner or later. I can dither over what battles to put in and which ones to tell as flashbacks or to have Bill rehash in conversation versus which ones to tell in 'real time' and never write a word. But Fannie has to get pregnant: It's the core event of the whole book. In order for that to happen, obviously, she and Bill have to have sex. Once that's happened, she'll have to realize it, and then she will have to tell Bill about it. So there's three scenes I could work on tonight, no need to dither about whether or where they go in, and I told myself that I could use the bracket trick ("He began undoing her [ ]") to fill in all my vast areas of ignorance, like exactly what women wore back then and how they fastened.

And I did! Before I knew it, I'd overshot my day's target by 319 words.

The Interview

Image by wili_hybrid via FlickrSo I was reading this afternoon in NaNo for the New and the Insane, by Lazette Gifford (I'm planning on using NaNoWriMo this year to force a first draft), and she's talking about interviewing your characters. She includes a link to a cute mock interview that Valery Comer posted on Vision. That seemed cool.

Then this afternoon, Rebecca O'Connor posted a link to an essay she'd written for The Daily Rumpus, in which she describes sitting in her closet with the door shut and putting a (not loaded) gun in her mouth to see what it would be like.

I'm not willing to go that far.

But I have been chatting with Bill on and off this afternoon, in between sessions, and it's been fascinating. For one thing, he sits on the couch in my office leaning forward, with his elbows on his knees, hands lightly clasped between them. He looks at his hands when he talks, looking up from under heavier eyebrows than I'd thought he'd have. He has a complicated relationship with his father, Anderson, which I got some glimpses into. Anderson tends to be a bit critical, but respects Bill now because of his war service. And he reminded me that I do know what it is like to be shot at, and so I won't have to work as hard as I'd thought to imagine what it would be like going into battle.

Although technically I wasn't the one being shot at, I was close enough once for research purposes, thank you very much, and I remember afterward being surprised at the smallness of the space I had been able to hide in. So yeah. I think I can write pretty authoritatively about the urge to make oneself as small--not to say invisible--a target as possible.

Southern Museum of of Civil War and Locomotive History

Image via WikipediaThis book, as you may recall, is about Bill, a cavalryman from North Carolina, and Fannie, a carpenter's daughter from Virginia. The story focuses on their experiences at the siege of Petersburg in 1864-5. The General has nothing to do with it.

Nevertheless, Day 5 of the un-vacation found me shortly after noon at the Southern Museum of Civil War and Locomotive History in downtown Kennesaw, GA. I really didn't expect much because, as I said in my last post, this is still the wrong army in the wrong theater of war. Plus, this particular museum is sort of centered around Andrew's Raid, a heroic Yankee exploit.

Boy was I wrong: I learned all kinds of useful things today! Most importantly, though, I finally understand what it was that Fannie's father James did for a living. They have here a display of a carpenter's tool box, with the explanation that passenger cars of the Civil War period were 90% wood in construction, and that shop carpenters, which is what great-great-great-grandfather James was, built furnishings and trim. Mystery solved.

I also found a good reference book (which I later bought for approximately 1/3 the gift shop's asking price on Amazon.com); a hideously expensive pamphlet which was not cheaper online that I now wish I had snagged while I was looking at it; and a potential interview subject for information on Bill's home church.

(Did I mention that my family historically has had a lot of sex without benefit of marriage? I've been wondering what the church would have had to say about all these "premature" and out-of-wedlock babies--four in this novel's cast of characters.)