Two Ladies-Two Cities

Life mimics art.  Well, maybe not really art. In Defiant Honor I needed to inflict a “minor” battle wound on the main character, Major John McBee. It had to be a wound that would heal soon enough for his return in a few months for the next battle. So…I aimed a cannon loaded with canister-12 golf ball sized iron marbles-at him. One canister ball bounced a couple of times, causing it to lose velocity, before the “spent” ball hit McBee’s upper arm and broke the bone.

I wrote that a couple of months ago, and it must have struck my wife’s curiosity bone. Two days ago, just home after two weeks of grandmothering little Rory and his sisters, sweet Nita tripped and fell, hitting her right arm on the hard, non-yielding edge of our china cabinet. Her upper arm bone broke. Snap. She yelled.

In Defiant Honor, Major McBee was the recipient of the new procedure that British army doctors had developed for their soldiers in the Crimean War in the 1850’s—wrapping the broken limb in plaster of paris to prevent the reset bone from shifting. We’ll see next week if Nita gets surgery and a steel pin in her arm, or a cast or something else. Meanwhile, her right arm is in a sling, strapped to her torso, and she’s learning how to function as a one-armed lady.

Speaking of ladies, a few weeks back a middle-aged lady approached my bookstall on vendors row at the Plantation Liendo Civil War reenactment just north of Houston.

Every year, I reenact at Plantation Liendo, and for the last three years I have spent the time before the afternoon battles hawking my Civil War novels to spectators and other reenactors.

In my newest novel, Defiant Honor much of the action takes place in the fall of 1864 during General Grant’s siege of Richmond, Virginia, which was the Confederate’s capital city.

Back to Plantation Liendo: The lady picked up the display copy of Defiant Honor and asked a good question: “Why is the title defiant honor?”

My response was honest: “Because by that time in 1864, after Atlanta fell, and Lee’s army being hugely outnumbered, I suspect General Lee and President Davis knew they weren’t going to win. They were holding out in hope that Lincoln would lose the Presidential election and the new president would sign a peace agreement. But when Lincoln was re-elected, Lee knew Lincoln would not negotiate a peace settlement that would let the South become a separate nation, and Lee knew the Confederacy didn’t have the resources to win militarily, so their hopes turned into honorable defiance-hence the title Defiant Honor.

The lady’s facial expression suddenly darkened, and she countered that General Lee kept maneuvering his army and it certainly was more than defiance.

I replied that his maneuvering during the second half of 1864 was only to shift his outnumbered forces around his ring of defenses to keep Grant out of Richmond and Petersburg. I said Lee’s army was far too small to both defend Richmond, and take the war to Grant out in the countryside away from the city defenses.

Here's a simple map of the Richmond-Petersburg seige.

She told me she was from northern Virginia and I had it wrong, that battles were fought on her family’s land, that the people who live in Virginia, where it happened, understand that General Lee still had a real chance to beat Grant.

I said something about food shortages in Richmond and repeated a comparison of the sizes of the armies. About midway through my final rebuttal, she quit listening, and walked away in a huff.

I think maybe my answers just made her mad. Boy, did I break the first rule of salesmanship, that the customer is always right.

But the exchange was a good reminder that some folks are still sensitive about things that happened 150 years ago, and at least in the South. Always remember Faulkner: “The past is not dead; in fact, it’s not even past.”

Moreover, this nice lady reminded me with her very clear body language: You just don’t mess with the memory of General Lee. Even now.