Old Soldiers' Letters, Modern Prisoners' Books

It’s breakfast time and I’m sitting in a motel room in north Atlanta, here visiting family to celebrate my mom’s ninetieth birthday. In my e-mail in-basket this morning sat a message from a lady in San Antonio who I’ve never met. I don’t know if she’s seventeen or seventy, but she’s an e-mail friend with whom I’ve corresponded about a topic of mutual interest. Our shared topic of interest being the men of the real “Alamo Rifles,” the militia company from San Antonio in the 1850’s.

Historically, those men became Company K, Sixth Texas Infantry Regiment, after the Civil War started. Back then, whole companies were formed of friends, family, and neighbors from the same community. It made for tightly-knit companies of men who cared for each other and would be more likely to help each other through the hard patches, of which the Alamo Rifles encountered their fair share.

 My first novel, Whittled Away, follows the historical path taken by the Sixth Texas Regiment, the book title coming from the Alamo Rifles steady loss of men, going from fifty-six soldiers who marched out of San Antonio in the spring of 1862, down to two soldiers who were present for the final surrender of their regiment in April of 1865.  A steady whittling away of the young men through three years of war.

In real life, only two members of the Alamo Rifles lasted until the final laying-down of their muskets at the war’s end. One of the two was a young fellow named Antonio Bustillos. I’d heard that one of Bustillos’ letters home, written while he was soldiering in Georgia, resides in the archive collection of the Alamo. Going to see the letter has been one of those things I “need” to do. Perhaps I’ve not done it because I figured there’s a good chance that the letter is written in Spanish, a language I don’t read or speak.

Regardless, my first happy surprise for the week was the e-mail message from my "virtual friend" with transcriptions of two letters Private Bustillos wrote home to family in San Antonio. One of the letters was written in May, 1864 in Dalton, Georgia, and the other in August, 1864 in Atlanta, Georgia, just a few miles from where I’m sitting at this moment.

Civil War soldiers wrote lots and lots of letters home. Military historians value soldiers’ letters as “primary sources,” - words put to paper by men whose eyes had actually seen the battles and events they describe.

However, the reality is that most soldiers’ letters, Bustillos included, addressed things nearer to the hearts of soldiers than the battles they’ve fought or the hardships they’ve endured. They wrote about the welfare of friends who were also soldiers, inquired about family, and routinely wrote things like, “Tell Sweet Mary and Mama I miss them.”

So letters, even as primary sources, tend to be of spotty value to military historians.  But they are still fun to read if you are trying to get into the heads of men who lived 150 years ago in order to bring their personalities to life in a novel. Now, I wish I’d read Bustillos’ two letters before I wrote Whittled Away, because I’d have included him as a likable character- and one I wouldn’t have to kill off along the way.

The second happy surprise this week came from my brother, who is also in Atlanta for our mom’s birthday celebration. Brother John is a retired teacher and volunteers one day a week teaching a class about religion at a prison in north Georgia. The prison sits just across the highway from the Chickamauga National Battlefield Park. The battle at Chickamauga is a big part of the story in Whittled Away, the first mega-battle where the Alamo Rifles were engaged.

A few months ago John asked if I had spare copies of Whittled Away and Tangled Honor that I might send to him to share with the prison inmates in his class. I sent six copies, three of each title, and forgot about it. Yesterday, John told me that the books are popular with his students, and are being passed around. 

There’s not much religion in my novels, except for the lightning strike that killed some soldiers during a revival service being held in a thunder storm-an event that really happened. But the inmates can perhaps connect somehow to the fact they are pretty much living on top of the battlefield featured in Whittled Away.

It’s not a big deal, nonetheless I am very happy that my novels are being read in that most unlikely of places, by such an unlikely audience. So, my thanks to John for being his brother’s “bookman,” taking a couple of good war tales to men who are serving hard time in prison for poor choices made somewhere along the way. 

If the stories of Jesús and Bain, and Captain McBee, Levi, and Faith, can entertain, maybe teach a little American history, and make some of those fellows’ long days pass faster, then those are six book copies being darned well used.

Finally, I have to thank Brother John a second time for giving me a quick tutorial on sword drill - fencing. John used to fence and coached high school fencers for a decade or more. I told him I need to write a scene involving sword drill for McBee and the other company officers in the  regiment, men who were elected to their positions,  but had never been to a military academy, yet were now expected to carry swords every day, and actually fight with them if needed.

So, John and I stood in his son’s living room with ten-inch long plastic straw swords so he could show me what “closing your line” means, and how to “bind” your enemy’s sword before he pokes you through the heart. Fun stuff like that.

I wrote the sword drill scene this morning and he gave me a brotherly stamp of “it’ll do.”

 And that’ll do for me. Talk to you next week sometime.

Just & Up

My Lutheran preacher friend, Wayne, has made me alert for “just” prayers:  “Lord, I’m ‘just’ a humble man who’s ‘just’ trying to get by, so please ‘just’ hear me now, because I’m ‘just’ asking you for this one little thing.”

Usually there’s not quite that many ‘just’s’ used so close together, but I ‘just’ wanted to make the point that a nice little word used once is dandy, but used repeatedly is distracting and gets in the way of a writer’s or a preacher’s message.

Janet is a writing colleague who sent an interesting email this morning. She used a free software program on the internet to run a word count on her ‘just’ completed novel manuscript. The software revealed that she used the word ‘just’ 121 times. She unexpectedly learned that ‘just’ is overused by more people than 'just' fervent pastors appealing to the Lord.  

I was instantly curious and ran four chapters of manuscript from Redeeming Honor through the same software. ‘Up’ seems to be my ‘just.’ 

My characters apparently are forever walking ‘up’ the stairs, looking ‘up’ at each other, swinging ‘up’ into the saddle or climbing ‘up’ into a buggy. “Just go on up, he's waiting on you.” You get the idea.

I guess the point is that the word count software, which is free and instant in giving the results, is another great example of self-accessed technology making people better at what we do. Granted that the word count software isn’t telling me if my characters are likable, or if the plot is credible, or if I got my historical facts right, but it is letting writers like Janet and me probe for little distractions like too many ‘just’ or ‘up’ words.

Moving on, I woke ‘up’ this morning thinking about the chapter I’m going to write today. That’s fairly common for me, since early morning is when I do my best writing. I think. Coffee and keyboard when I’ve ‘just’ gotten ‘up’ ‘just’ seem a good pairing, as my sister would say. 

Nita is baby-sitting our grandson today, which is fine, except when she rolled out of bed, I thought, “Oh yeah, she’s taking care of John Junior this morning." The problem is our grandson is named Jackson and John Junior is the name of the baby character in Redeeming Honor. Oops.

I’m writing a Civil War novel, the emphasis on war. How a baby named John Junior came to be a player in the story is for another post, but the little guy’s presence has led me down some unexpected paths. Did mothers in Virginia use diapers in the 1860’s? When were baby bottles with rubber nipples invented? What if mother and child were separated, how would the infant eat? What toys were popular for babies in the 1860's?

Happily, I have an ongoing child development lab next door, where grandson Jackson is growing through his first year of life. I’d be surprised if Jackson’s actual birth last January and John Junior’s literary birth last February are coincidental. But, then again, I’m ‘just’ saying that romance, even in the 1860’s, leads to intimacy, and intimacy leads to pregnancies, and pregnancies lead to babies, and babies lead to the demands of childcare.

What I’m seeing day-by-day next door confirms that parenting and childcare aren’t for sissies, even with stacks of parenting books, plastic playthings, disposable diapers, and so on. Babies still poop every day, cry when they aren’t happy, eat every seven minutes, and never sleep. Maybe that’s an exaggeration.

 On the other hand, as son Todd says, watching Jackson is like watching a campfire. He’s not really doing anything, but we 'just' love to sit and stare at him endlessly.

The Cumberland Gap & Murderous Champ Ferguson

Have you ever been through the Cumberland Gap, the pass over the Appalachian Mountains where Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky intersect? I’ve not been through the gap since it’s not on the way to anywhere I’ve been. I’ve not driven on the road or hiked up the side of a mountain to see the panoramic view of the pass. And now that’s a niggling irritation, because the Cumberland Gap has unexpectedly become a key piece of geography to the plot in Redeeming Honor.

I’m tempted to jump in the car and drive there, but it’s a long way. Besides, I’m not writing a travel guide or painting long word-pictures describing the scenic beauty of the gap, I’m just putting some characters there for a day. But it doesn’t feel right to not have walked the ground where some of the action in my book occurs.  There are other places in my novels that I’ve also not visited, and each time I’ve felt that same frustration. It’s a fear that as a writer of historical novels, I’m not getting the historical part right, even if it’s part of the background.

Moving on, I wrote a post a while back about a feisty Texas Confederate officer who led a band of partisan cavalrymen. His colorful name was Clubfoot Fort.  I lamented that there won’t be a place in the McBee novels for him, since he fought in the wrong place, far away from the battles in Virginia.

 

Again unexpectedly, I’ve found another historical figure to fill the same role as Clubfoot.  His name was Captain Champ Ferguson, and he was one of only two Confederates to be tried in a court of law and hung after the war for crimes committed against the Union. (The other man was the commander of the prisoner of war camp at Andersonville).

Champ Ferguson was a violent, murderous man even before the war started. In 1858 he captured and tied a local sheriff to a tree and riding his horse around and around the tree, slashed the sheriff to death with a saber. During the war he led a band of partisans in upper Tennessee, lower Kentucky, and the southwest corner of Virginia, raising hell with civilians who were openly loyal to the Union, and ambushing small elements of the Federal army. By his own admission Ferguson personally killed over a hundred Union soldiers and Unionist civilians.

Ferguson’s role in Redeeming Honor won’t be minor, and it won’t gloss over the murderous nature of the man. I think readers will remember him, even if that memory causes folks to cringe.

Finally, today my mind is on the murdered Marines and sailor in Chattanooga. Bless the souls of those servicemen who are this week’s newest victims of the modern breed of suicidal guerilla fighter, terrorists who bring their war to our cities. Kamikaze fighters armed with AK 47’s, or homemade bombs, or plain old pistols.

Free countries have a hard time preventing that sort of terrorism. My brother, who lives in Chattanooga, and I argue about the effectiveness of a widely-armed, open-carry everyday everywhere, populace in preventing or stopping such terrorists before they can commit mass murder. He's an advocate of "an armed society is a polite society" train of thought. I'm not so sure.

As an old school principal, my thoughts often go back to the mass murder of the kindergarten students in their classroom a couple of years ago. Would armed teachers or an armed principal been able to stop the deranged young man? Or better, would the public knowledge that teachers might be armed have prevented the act altogether? No one knows. I can’t guess.

I personally hope we won’t return to the days of the Wild West with a hog-leg on every man’s hip or a dainty automatic nestled in the small of every woman’s back. (Wouldn’t that just spoil a romantic moment? One’s gentle but eagerly exploring fingers encountering the hard straight edge of a pistol grip instead of a sweetly curving soft patch of lady. No doubt it would prevent the need for a gal to ask “What part of no don’t you understand?”)   

I think toting guns along as we go about our daily business would be a giant step backward for our civilized society. But on the other hand, I don’t want my family to become victims of a random terrorist any more than the next guy does. For me it’s a tough one to call.

It’s 6:20 am on July 4^th, American Independence Day. At about this same time 152 years ago, the men in Hood’s Texas Brigade were enduring heavy rain as they served as part of the rearguard of General Lee’s Confederate Army.  

During the two days before, July 2^nd and 3^rd, the fate of the nation, the outcome of the Civil War, had been decided. Lee’s soldiers had failed on two consecutive days to break the Union “fishhook” line that stretched over the farmland for a couple of miles just south of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

Lee’s effort to take the war north out of Virginia, had failed for the second consecutive year, the huge battle at Gettysburg following a similarly devastating battle at Antietam, Maryland ten months earlier in September of 1862.

Although the Civil War would last another twenty-one months, historians looking back pretty much agree that Gettysburg was the turning point, the beginning of the end.

Last year, in 2014, I marched in a morning parade in San Antonio on July 4^th with my Civil War reenacting group, dressed as Confederate soldiers, in tribute to the Texas soldiers who “gave their last full measure” in military service to their state and to the short-lived Confederate nation. 

I can’t march in the parade today since our family is vacationing on the beach in Galveston, too far to join in. Instead of parading in smelly old Confederate uniforms, we’ll have a family parade to the beach with granddaughters Eva and Violet wearing their patriotic swimsuits and afterwards we’ll grill wieners and hamburger patties.

The other thing I did last year on July 4^th was celebrate Independence Day with our neighbors after getting home from the parade.

At 2:00 pm, the kids rang the big brass bell my neighbor has mounted in his front yard. That’s a tradition that goes back to colonial times when churches all across the nation rang their steeple bells in celebration of the happy, and unlikely, ending to our war for independence from Great Britain.

The second thing we did was to gather in a circle of lawn chairs while the adults took turns reading the Declaration of Independence out loud, paragraph by paragraph.

Last July 4th was the first time I’ve ever taken part in a group that read the Declaration to each other, and it was worth the effort. I got through my part without tears, barely. But I can be leaky faucet, and had to keep wiping my eyes when the next guy, Ben Mouser, took his turn reading. Ben joined our Civil War reenacting group at the age of fourteen and is now an infantryman in the US Army. He’s in Germany now, but last year on July 4^th, Ben had just returned from several months of duty in a far flung outpost in Afghanistan.

This photo is me and Sam Adams, who was a guest also, and Ben Mouser next to the Big Brass Bell. I guess you can tell that Ben is the tall one whose hair isn’t gray. We’re still wearing our Confederate duds without the jackets and hats.

Whether at the beach or in a parade or in a circle of friends and family reading the Declaration of Independence, let’s all take some time today to reflect that the United States of America is truly the hope of the world and the best place to live on earth, even if from time to time we squabble like cousins at family reunion.

Five-month old Jackson is up now and it’s time for me to go grab the kid so he can grunt and slobber on my shoulder for a few minutes of granddad time.

Happy Independence Day to “all ya’ll,” as we say in these parts. Hope you get to see some pretty fireworks this evening after a good day of celebration and maybe a short afternoon nap.

The Confederate Battle Flag and My Novel

If I were God I’d spread my arms to calm the stormy waters, to stop the battle flag hysteria that has popped up following a heinous mass murder of innocents in church.

But, I’m not God and I actually do have a dog in this fight. Take a look at the cover of my novel Tangled Honor. There’s the Confederate battle flag as a background feature at the top.

In that context l admit that I’m conflicted. I’m more than conflicted. My feet are planted firmly on both sides of the fence. But here I go anyway:

I probably included in one of my first blog posts my favorite quote from southern novelist William Faulkner: “The past is not dead. It’s not even past.” The current Confederate battle flag hysteria is living proof that Faulkner got it right.

I don’t own a Rebel battle flag bigger than the size of my fingernail and those are attached to the pewter flag staffs of toy soldiers I use for wargaming the Civil War.

I’ve also reenacted many battles as a Confederate soldier under a full-size cloth Confederate battle flag, and will continue to do so. Yet, I’ve never put a Rebel battle flag bumper sticker on my car or worn one as a lapel pin of my suit. Why? Because the battle flag makes me uncomfortable. It makes me uneasy. It makes feel like a whiner who can’t let go of a war my ancestors lost.

Maybe that’s it. I don’t like whiners. Our ancestor Confederate soldiers gave it their all. As the poignant phrase goes, our Confederate ancestor soldiers gave their last full measure. God bless them for that. I’m like the John Wayne billboard I see nowadays: I don’t much like quitters. Go ‘til you fall, then get up and go further. Give that last full measure.

But for all that courage and perseverance, in the end they (we) lost the Civil War. After 150 years we southerners need to get over it and move on. Quit whining, for heaven’s sake. That means taking down the damned battle flag from places where it is a slap in the face of the African-American citizens of our wonderful country. That doesn’t mean everywhere, but it does mean many public places.

Forget the KKK and their “hijacking” of the Confederate battle flag. Those white-sheeted goons also carried the US Stars and Stripes and big Christian crosses. The KKK were (are) racist thugs who stole every symbol they could, so forget them.

Symbols are powerful and important because they mold emotions, and the Confederate battle flag has outlived its initial positive function to motivate southern soldiers to honorably give their last full measure.

I can’t get away from the stark fact that my Confederate soldier ancestors’ devotion was to a flawed cause. A deeply flawed cause. Not a lost cause, but a flawed cause. The wrong cause.

Just think of the Confederate battle flag as the banner carried by an army forged to protect the southern states’ “right” to secede so that the institution of slavery might be continued and the political power of the southern plantation planter aristocracy secured for a few more decades. That’s enough.

Come on, think about it: What can be more flawed than human bondage, slavery, ripping families apart? Generations of white men raping young African-American women with impunity? White men ignoring their children borne of a slave?

Do you know that in 1860 the US Census had three choices of race: White, Negro, and Mulatto.

 White daddies of kids born to black women were so pervasive that a name was created for those kids. And how many of those couplings between a white slave-owning man and his young black female slave would have been consensual? 

A word worse than “flawed” or even “despicable” needs to be invented for what slavery did to the white men of the south.  Not to mention the young black women, their mulatto children, and all African-American slaves destined to lives of bondage.

How disgusting is it to create terms like “mulatto” to acknowledge white fatherhood, but to let the term replace any responsibility for that fatherhood, knowing he may even profit by the young woman slave giving birth to a new infant slave worth a $1,000, a sum that would be more like $25,000 in 2015. It may have been the norm in the south before the Civil War, good business even, but even the memory is despicable, abhorrent. And the battle flag is the primary symbol connected to that aberration.

A short rhetorical question comes to mind. One used often with great effect in movies and books when a misguided person realizes in a moment of epiphany the great harm his actions have caused others. I remember it best from the grand WWII movie The Bridge Over the River Kwai when Alex Guinness’s incredibly strong, but flawed character utters, “Dear God, what have I done?”

Personally, I think all of us should be asking “Dear God, what have we done?” about a lot of wrong-headed laws and individual practices that have grown large in our culture as aftershocks of the “peculiar institution” of slavery. Shame on us for Jim Crow voting eligibility laws and barring the doors of our schools and universities to African-Americans for a hundred years after the Civil War ended. Separate but equal schools were never equal, but were certainly very separate. Shame on us now for the ongoing  white flight from our city schools to continue the separation of our white kids from kids of darker colors.

Looping back to the battle flag on the cover of my second Civil War novel Tangled Honor. I liked it when the graphic artist revealed it to me and I still like it. I freely admit that the Confederate battle flag is a bold, beautiful and striking design. It’s on the cover of my book because the characters are southerners caught in the middle of the Civil War.  As of today Amazon offers my book for sale, Confederate battle flag notwithstanding.  

Yet, at the same time as Amazon posts my novel for sale, the company has pulled from their virtual shelves all Confederate flags.  As of yesterday, the National Park Service souvenir stores located on Civil War battlefield parks have reportedly pulled stand-alone Confederate flags from their shelves.

I just read an hour ago that the head honcho at the National Cathedral in Washington DC has said the two Confederate flags included in stained glass windows honoring Robert E Lee and Stonewall Jackson need to go.

That’s wrong-headed too. We shouldn’t try to scrub history shiny clean and simply erase the memories of devout Christian southerners as Lee and Jackson both were. By that line of thought we might as well “redact” all those Bible passages that tell the story of King David when he was less than a paragon of virtue.

Jackson and Lee had flaws. Both owned slaves. Yet Jackson also practiced civil disobedience to Virginia law that forbade teaching slaves to read and write. Jackson openly founded and operated for many years a school for slave children from all over his home town of Lexington.

Yes, winners of wars get to write the history books. But smart winners don’t try to erase their opponents’ most cherished symbols and heroes.

So here it is for me: Take the Confederate battle flag down from modern public and government venues. Get it off statehouse lawns and off state flags. Let the Confederacy’s first national flag serve the heritage function that is a valid historical interest to many of us. Let the market decide where the battle flag will be seen in the private sector. 

Yes, some people and organizations will continue to flaunt the battle flag, just because they can. But most of us won’t. Its appearance will fade away in time.

Back to my novels, I will say that even before the current battle flag hysteria began this week, I had already directed the graphic artist to replace the battle flag with the Texas flag on the sequel to Tangled Honor. My thought is the Texas flag on the cover will add variety and attract more buyers to the second book in the series, Redeeming Honor. Good timing, huh? I guess so. But I don’t plan on taking the battle flag off the cover of the first book.

 

Bug Out Bags

This is my fiftieth weekly blog post. I never thought I’d last this long, and now I’m hooked on writing the posts. Thanks for hanging in there with me for nearly a year, regardless when you started reading the posts.

So, you say, what’s a “Bug-Out Bag?” It’s the backpack, bag, or small suitcase that you keep fully loaded by the front door or under your bed or in the corner so that you can pick it up on your way out of your house fleeing in an emergency. What goes in a Bug-Out Bag?  I suppose that depends on what sort of emergency you are anticipating or are most afraid of occurring.

I confess that Nita and I do not have Bug-Out Bags. And I’m an old Boy Scout, Be Prepared, and such. Yet, if we had five minutes to get out of the house, we’d be running into each other trying to grab this (old family photo albums) and that (our wallets) and likely would forget our pocket handkerchiefs just like Bilbo Baggins did.  If we had no minutes to get out of the house in the middle of the night, with water quickly rising around our legs, like tragically happened to some folks in Central Texas during the Memorial Day Flood a couple of weeks ago, we’d run outside barehanded in our PJ’s.

A photographer by the name of Allison Stewart is creating a gallery of a collection of photos of the innards of people’s Bug-Out Bags. Allison lives in California where some people are waiting for THE earthquake or tsunami, or comet strike, or violent revolution of angry ghetto dwellers, or stoned old hippies, or whatever. To see some of the images of Bug-out Bags she’s already photographed, check out her website here:   http://allison-stewart.com/bug-out-bag/

I’m fascinated by the variety of what people put in their Bug-Out Bags. What different people consider their essential survival basics runs the spectrum: Food is a commonality, but that’s about it. Even water containers seem to be hit and miss. Some bags have little bottles of wine and batteries for electronic “essentials.” Some have guns. Some have outdoor camping stuff like a folding shovel and little lamps on a head strap.

Some have books. If I took a book it would be the old Boy Scout Field Book from the 1940’s, an amazing manual for living with nothing in the woods, published back when urban Scouting took a back seat to rural Scouting. Back to the modern Bug-Out Bags, I couldn’t tell how many of the photographed bags had kitchen matches or maps or even pocket knives.

Allison’s dad owns the gym where I lift weights to stay slim. Just kidding about staying slim. I go to Mike’s gym to “Live Strong and Die Old,” my girth notwithstanding. Mike doubts my plan will work. Regardless, during Allison’s visit to Lockhart last week, I volunteered to put together and bring a Civil War vintage Bug-Out Bag for her to photograph. That’s Allison on the ladder photographing my old reenacting stuff laid out on the white cloth.

I suspect my Civil War Bug-Out Bag stuffed with goodies from the 1860’s is the only one in her collection that will include hardtack crackers guaranteed to never spoil but will break teeth, a wrinkled apple, a little pressed steel frying pan and a lidded tin boiler, a wood canteen (in modern real life, I’d also take a bottle of iodine pills to purify nasty water).

My Civil War bag includes a brass powder horn and a handful of round lead balls for the black powder revolver I’d have stuck in the waist of my trousers, a big-ass Bowie knife (a hatchet would be better, but I don’t have one), a Barlow pocket knife, a candle and a little box of Lucifers, a canvas sheet coated on one side with Mr. Goodyear’s amazing new rubberized black paint, and a handsome cotton-wool blend knitted bed coverlet in a design popular in the 1860’s. All essentials needed to survive cold and wet weather, eat, drink, and shoot bad people.

The connection of my Civil War Bug-Out Bag and Allison’s photography project to my Civil War novels lies in a two sentences from the memoir of Private John C West of Waco. Describing the battle of Chickamauga, Georgia in September of 1863, West wrote of seeing a woman refugee crossing the battlefield, her home likely caught in the crossfire of the opposing artillery batteries:

“One poor woman was overloaded with coverlets, tin pans and other utensils, with a child on each side and two or three bawling behind. She fell down two or three times but scrambled on for life, while muskets sputtered in the surrounding hills.”

My heart goes out to that young woman 152 after the event. She probably had to bug-out in a hurry, her husband likely gone for a soldier, and the memoir doesn’t read like she had a Bug-out Bag waiting by the door. West didn’t write any further about the fate of the woman and her four or five children, and mega battles seem to be as tough on the local population as they are on the soldiers.

Artillery was pretty indiscriminate in the 1860’s, an all-inclusive facet of the war, if you will. Looking way back to the medieval times, black powder and then artillery started changing everything about war, for the worse, if you ask me.

Still, I like to think that young woman’s perseverance paid off and she reached safety with her brood. Lord only knows what happened to all of them in the days and weeks after the great battle. Maybe some Christian family took in the lady and the kids.

I borrowed West’s short aside about the woman and included her appearance in front of the advancing Texans in my current novel, Redeeming Honor. And, yes, I’m a softy and created at least a temporary sanctuary for the anonymous fleeing woman and her bawling children. After all, I have grandchildren now.

Fathers Day Image and Reflections

I’m a lucky man. Not only am I a happy husband, but I’m also a son, a father, and a grandfather – three degrees of kinship running concurrently.

Since this weekend is Hallmark’s other big holiday, the one which lags far behind Mother’s Day, I want to honor dads in this week’s post.

It’s natural that for most of us, our wives, daughters, and granddaughters are the flowers in our families, and we’re the gardeners, the guys who hoe the rows and plant the seeds, taking care of business. Nita will probably challenge me on that one as I don’t actually like yardwork or gardening, and it’s taken both our paychecks since the get-go of our marriage to keep our household blooming. Nonetheless, I contend that the recognition of dads takes a backseat to honoring moms, which is OK. I’m sort of glad no one expects me to wear lipstick.

The big black and white picture at the top was taken in 1950. My granddaddy Orland Todd is holding me. Yeah, I’m the baby with the Michelin Man arms. My 30-year old dad Frank is the guy under the cap on the far right, not long returned from two years in Europe during WWII. The other folks are my brother John, mom Betty Lou, and Uncle Jimmy.

The top side photo was taken two months ago and is my dad again, now at age 95, son Todd, and his son Jackson, age four months, and me again, some 65 years after the Michelin Man photo up there.

The next image is son Ben and his new daughter Violet. We all gathered for Ben and Meredith's wedding in April, a time when he said "I Do" and got not just a beautiful wife, but two beautiful daughters.

The photo under that is of Ben, Todd, and I in our Confederate duds at a parade a couple of years ago on Fathers Day weekend. The guys clearly have inherited their dad's proud nose. Sorry, boys, but thin has never been my strength.

Fatherhood in the McBee Novels

Now to the Civil War novels: One of the themes in the McBee war saga is fatherhood. As it is for many men, John McBee’s entry into parenthood doesn’t unfold according to a well-thought out timeline. If you’ve read Tangled Honor, you know that pretty much just the opposite happens more than once to McBee, in spite of his good intentions. I’m trying to keep the unpredictability and importance of fatherhood in the second McBee novel, Redeeming Honor.

I’m especially making an effort to highlight McBee’s dilemma in regards to his man-servant Levi, who may or may not be McBee’s son, or is perhaps his half-brother. The truth of who is Levi’s father is one of those unanswerable questions from the times before DNA and paternity tests. That uncertainty is overlaid with the apparently not uncommon forced sexual compliance of young Negro slave women, one of the more disgusting facets of the South’s “peculiar institution.” McBee is confronted with the constraints of the day in how white men treat their black (or half-black) man-servants, blood relative or not.

During the Civil War the white sons of officers often served as aides-de-camp to their fathers. McBee is not so lucky. As a forty-year-old captain, he has the services of an enslaved twenty-year-old man, who may be a related, but could not be acknowledged as such, and cannot even be publicly afforded such common courtesies as were offered to white civilian teamsters, laborers, and lowly privates in uniform.

The wall of separation was high and not to be scaled. Maybe such situations didn’t bother Southern officers until the end of the war brought about the dissolution of slavery, but I’m still wrestling with it.

One of the most interesting challenges in writing these books continues to be finding ways for John McBee and Levi to develop a relationship that is more than master and slave, yet does not endanger either man by crossing the deep abyss between the races. All in all, I think the 1860’s must have been very vexing times.