Chapter 3: Peace

After a Christmas feast and some more waiting, the army set off in several columns towards Montgomery. Ab saw no Confederate soldiers attacking them, although he did hear some gunfire off to their left. Once, too, he saw some prisoners being marched along by infantry guards. When they got where they were headed and the battery dug in, they told him that it was Montgomery. He had seen Montgomery, and it didn’t look like Montgomery to him. What if all these smart generals were going to shell the wrong city?

Then, as the sun went down, he found he’d turned himself around. The city was south of them across the river, and he’d never seen Montgomery from the north. The smart generals were probably right.

After supper when he was headed to check on the horses one last time, Captain Jackson came up to him. He owed the Captain. He’d wanted to know about Tammie, and the Captain had helped him learn. If he didn’t like what he’d learned, that wasn’t the Captain’s fault. The Captain had taken to explaining things to Ab, and Ab listened when he did. When white men wanted to do things with you, you let them. Listening to explanations was no problem at all; sometimes, he learned something.

“The war isn’t going to be won on this side of the river,” the Captain said. “But we have more troops, more artillery, and – especially – more ammunition than the Rebels do. Come tomorrow, some of our guns are going to concentrate on the Confederate trenches. Artillery hasn’t ever destroyed a system of trenches, and we aren’t going to. We’ll blow some holes, though, and kill some troops. Then Johnny will ask, ‘Why ain’t our guns doing squat?’ So, then their artillery will shoot at the first batch of ours. But we have two batteries assigned to counterbattery work for every battery that we think they have this side of the river. So, those will start in, and their guns will be too busy dueling with the counterbatteries to shoot at our guys who are shooting at the trenches. Then, they’ll need supplies. That means crossing the bridge, and that’s where your battery comes in. Battery D is in a direct line with the bridge. and battery E is behind you. When the Rebs send a supply train north over the bridge, there will be shells flying south to burst over their heads. We got a bit of a problem setting fuses to the right times. Well, we can get the length good enough to make them all explode somewhere over the bridge.”

The guns started firing right after breakfast. Soon after that, the wagon Ab drove was one of a whole bunch which were sent back for more powder and shells. The sun hadn’t climbed very high when the crossed the river and met a railroad train. They loaded two wagons at a time from two freight cars. Twice while Ab was waiting for his wagon’s turn, they kept the wagons back while they move up the train. They took more time loading than they had taken on the trip there, but they got back and unloaded by dinner time.

They didn’t unload the wagon at the battery, but at a place well back from the guns. After dinner, they did the whole operation again, but the next day they made only one trip, and they didn’t even make one every day after that. Ab took care of the horses. When he didn’t need to drive to the train, he sometimes visited the battery after dinner. D Battery was assigned to covering the bridge, and when the Confederates didn’t try to cross the bridge, it was silent while most of the other guns on this side of the river were firing. Sometimes, when the guns on the north side of the river fell silent for dinner or supper, they could hear the guns on the other side of the river still firing.

One morning after Ab had tended the horses, he was visiting the soldiers in the battery. An officer galloped up.

“Don’t fire on that rider,” he said. “He’s carrying a flag of truce.”

“Yessir,” the captain said.

“We never fire on single riders,” a soldier told Ab. “Waste of powder.”

The captain did use his spyglass, and later he passed it around among the lieutenants. The soldiers, much less Ab, never got a chance to look.

Later, the soldiers passed around a rumor that the Confederates were surrendering. Even later, a lieutenant with the spyglass said, “I can see the flag over the capitol.” he captain reached for the spyglass, and he handed it to him. Just before dinner, a column of prisoners started marching past. Neither they nor the escorting Union infantry looked like they were in a hurry.

“Don’t worry, Johnny,” an officer called out. “The United States feeds its prisoners.”

“We’re closer to Florida than Meade is,” Captain Jackson said to him the next morning while he was watching another contingent of prisoners go past, “and one hell of a lot closer than we are to Texas. Still, the War Department will probably send us to Texas. The major cities in Florida are already ours, but Texas is huge, and our bridgehead at Brownsville is tiny.”

He had seemed to be finished when the band of prisoners had gone past. Ab said, “Sir,” and hurried over to the horses before the next band came close.

Despite what Captain Jackson had said, though, the artillery didn’t seem to go anywhere. Ab took care of the horses, and Jair came with him every few days to see that they looked all right. They ate with the battery. For that matter -- when the month was over – they got paid, too. The paymaster had an order, signed – if not read -- by the colonel to pay the teamsters. He didn’t have an order to stop paying them.

This went on for a long time while the white troops around them seemed to march off every day and then every week. When Ab got to go into Montgomery, he tried to find what had happened to his mother, but he couldn’t find even as much as the little he’d found out about Tammie.

Marjorie Purcell had been tired many times before. These days, she was exhausted.

The way you run a one-room schoolhouse was to have one age of kids recite the lesson for their age group while the others were reading. The youngest children, who could not read yet, would see and hear their elders recite. Sometimes, you could get one of the older girls to hold the youngest together while you dealt with the others.

Now, what did you do when all the children were starting at the bottom. None of them could read. More than that, none of their parents could read. Their fathers were planting crops, and they’d get around to building their shacks when the crops were in the ground. When the mothers would get around to sewing their children some new clothes was a question she didn’t mention.

And then, when he’d struggled with those children all day, the adults came in at night. Or some of them did. Allotments were still being assigned, and the recipients were still learning that there was a school within walking distance. Once they had decided to come, they sometimes came and sometimes were too tired. Considering the back-breaking labor they put in from dawn to sunset, she could hardly blame them. Still, she taught every class with half the freedmen who had seen the last class and at least one who had not seen any previous class—ever. The children, while their attendance was better, were often absent and often brought new children with them. And she could not possibly communicate with the parents by sending a note home. She knew enough history to know that England had once been illiterate. She could not imagine how they had managed.

One consequence of this instability was that she had to take class time – precious to her, and probably more precious to the students who had walked miles after a 12-hour workday -- on administrative details.

“If this is your first time here,” she said as she said every night, “raise your hand” She demonstrated. “Keep them up.” It was not polite to point, but it was unavoidable. She went from her left to her right. “Full name? Have you chosen a last name yet? What do you want to be called? Do you have any children?” She took all that down and added a brief description and a sex signifier if the name didn’t pin that down. If they had children, she got much more specific.

Then, too, it wasn’t only reading that the new freedmen needed to learn. Slaves shirked work except under threat of the lash, and the only thing that the freedmen were convinced of was that they could no longer be lashed. Slaves were bred like animals; many freedmen wanted the stability of marriage, but some preferred the variety of which they had become accustomed.

And, then, there were the outhouses. They, at last, knew what those were, although separate ones for the sexes were strange to most of them. They had not, however, learned to use them as children. They had to be told that they could use them; some of them had to be told how to use them. Marjorie could hardly bring herself to give those directions to young women in private. She had told Messalina on a Sunday that she would use the women’s outhouse, and Messalina was quite capable of telling even men what to do in blunt language. Messalina, however, had to learn her letters in night school along with the others. Marjorie had kept her late other nights, even though that meant that Messalina would walk more than a mile home all alone long after sunset. When a few adults had learned, or she supposed that they had, she depended on them.

Sam Warren wasn’t a particularly pious man. He kept his store open six days a week and closed on Sundays because that was normal store hours. When somebody really needed something, he really needed the business. When the teacher-woman, which was how he thought of the person he called ‘Miss Purcell’ to her face, came by, he was always happy to be of service. He suspected that The Good Lord gave him credit for helping someone whose mission kept her in the schoolroom six days a week; he knew that his customers would. When she came by wearing her church clothes, he was already dressed, if not for church.

“General Warren, “ she asked, “do you stock postage stamps?”

“I have them for my own use, and I’ll sell to anyone who asks. I charge no more than I pay for them, and that’s no way to operate a store.”

“Good! Some soldiers come to me to write to the people that they left. I can tell them that you’ll sell them stamps.”

“Well,” Sam said, “maybe we should have the same rates. I charge 10 cents to a colored veteran for writing the letter; postage is extra.”

“Could you? Can I tell my students to come to you? I just don’t have the time.”

“I’d be happy.” Sam would be very happy. Illiterate veterans writing their illiterate girlfriends weren’t sending casual billets doux. They would be asking them to come to Alabama and marry. Sam carried an entire inventory that appealed to women instead of men, and the more women in his area, the more he could sell.

Then, too, his customers covered an uncomfortable distance to walk. Someday, there would be other stores closer to his. ‘Smith’s store is closer,’ could be countered with, ‘Warren’s store is run by the man who wrote the letter that brought us together.’ That wouldn’t always win, but it wouldn’t always lose, either. That would keep the future competition a good distance away.

And any recommendation from the teacher-woman, however particular, would enhance his reputation. When there was another customer in the store, Sam made the veterans wait for his service as scribe. Despite this, he got more and more veterans come in as the year went on. He took the letters with him on his trips to Montgomery and mailed them there. He also visited the Freedmen’s-Bureau agent and copied a list of agencies throughout the south. The letters were addressed care of some agency.

Marjorie got a letter that made her happy. Three more teachers were on the way. She took a Sunday to plan. The plan divided the children in half by age. The younger children were again divided into the very youngest and the not-so young. She divided the older children into boys and girls. She thought that many of these were paying more attention to the opposite sex than to her teaching. She had four downstairs rooms that would hold classes of that size, if not the mobs that were coming now.

Nobody would teach Saturday nights. every teacher would get one more evening off. She had divided the adults into sections by geography and would keep that division. Each section, though, would have two different pairs of class days. Then the couples with children could attend on different nights and have one stay home to mind the children.

That left several evening sessions unassigned. One would be for the freedmen who lived very far away. Another would be lessons for the tiny minority who had already known how to read in 1865. Those would learn other things; schooling wasn’t only about literacy. A third was for soldiers – and any others – who had received significant amounts of instruction before they showed up at this school. The fourth session, Marjorie assigned to herself for administration. It would probably spill over into something else, but it was administration for now.

The new teachers showed up, and they were dreams. Their names were Diane Rawlings, Jane Newton, and Deborah Kendrick. They had already met and become friends. She explained her suggested changes. They accepted them, and she started the next morning. Evening was harder. With the other teachers giving up their free evenings and her decision not to start the new classes until the earlier students were sorted out, she stood in the entranceway for three weeks. As a student came in, she told him, or her, the new days that they would be attending, the room they would study in, and the name of their teacher or teachers.