Chapter 1

Madame Parrish: Kathy Bates
Cornelia Greaves Hutchings: Mary-Louise Parker
Abigail Parrish: Abigail Breslin
Charles Hutchings: Chandler Riggs

The story is told from Cornelia’s diaries and personal journals as well as eye witness accounts.

It was hard to believe that our own confederate soldiers had killed my husband. When Sherman scattered them at Griswoldsville they came through burning and destroying everything to deny it to the union with gun barrels glistening. I warned Richard not to fight them but he said he had stood by the sidelines long enough and with those final words – my beloved past away leaving me to raise his son on my own. I visited his grave daily and grieved for him but Madame Parrish told me that it was simply a waste of time. She could be cold and heartless but having lost everyone dear to her I understood why she held such as a rocky exterior.

It was only through her force of will that we were spared by Union and Confederate soldiers alike. She had allowed them to take our stores of cotton and raid our pantry and to free our slaves but she would not let them ravish me or her granddaughter and for that I was eternally grateful. I live solely on her charity now having no means to support myself and no surviving family that I am aware of. We were simply waiting for the end to this accursed war and I pray that it is almost over.

However, despite her generous nature towards me the Madame has asked me for something which no proper woman can do and I must tell the story from the beginning for you to understand. A few days ago Madame called me into her husband’s study. It had been ransacked – all of the books had been burned or sold and the soldiers looking for whiskey had been unkind with the precious works of art that her husband had collected from as far away as the Orient and the castles of Ireland.

“It is planting season and we’ve no mules to plow the earth or money to pay for workers. Even if we had there isn’t a man alive in Jones County fit to do the work that has not been pressed into the blue or the grey armies or buried underneath the soil,” she lamented. I agreed and looked at my shoes.

“I’ve come to a decision and if we are to survive another winter then we must begin the planting,” she explained. I told her that the soldiers would just seize any cotton we could grow and she agreed. “I don’t intend to replant the cotton. We need simply a patch of earth for fundamental subsistence and anything more than that we’ll take to market to pay for things we need. The army can take it tomorrow but I must plan for today. We will surely starve if we don’t try,” she said.

I told her we should flee this place and this accursed war.

“Go where? Abandon the home the Captain built with his two hands and the sweat of his brow?” she regarded me as if I were stark raving mad. I explained we could travel abroad or away from this war. Madame had already considered that and explained like I was a child that there were already wretches and refugees filling the roads between here and Savannah and we’d as likely be taken on the road by bandits or worse than we would behind these solid walls. “There is no money for travel even if there were vessels capable of breaking the Union blockade, I can assure they are not interested in the welfare of three women and a sickly boy,” she said. She had a tendency to consider her granddaughter a young woman while my son who was nearly the same age a ‘boy’ and a ‘sickly one at that’

Charles was rather weak and sickly. Some said he had the beginning stages of the consumption. Typhoid fever had been considered the disease of ghosts because it makes one pale and thin and there were some ladies who even painted their faces in that fashion and wore tight corsets to give the impression of the disease as they romanticized it. However, I did not believe Charles had typhoid – he was just a sickly boy who enjoyed reading and the pursuits of the mind. It was my hope he would one day be a great author or scholar.

I asked Madame what she wanted me to do in order to help. I knew nothing of planting and growing crops.

“Indeed, my granddaughter does not either and your son is useless to us. Fortunately, for you I know a great deal about planting and have digested the farmer’s almanac front to back. She held in her bony fingers a copy of Benjamin Franklin’s original farmer’s almanac from the look of the dusty tome.

“I will need you to simply plow the earth and till the soil and I shall provide you further instruction once you have managed it,” she said quite plainly. It sounded a simple task until she led me out to the barn where the rusted plows had sat after the slaves ran off.

The barn was musty and full of mice that scattered in the darkness. It smelled of chicken shit even though the armies had taken every last chicken months earlier. I told Madame this was not a proper place for ladies and she said that for the sake of our survival I would have to postpone my ladylike ways.

“In all candor, I appreciate your manner and polite tone. I tolerate you in my home because you have bene a good tenant that has shared the burden during this hard time with me and have done so in a cordial way. However, your breeding and station in life is far lower than your expectation,” She said harshly.