Newton Knight and What Eve Started

The new March 2016 Smithsonian magazine has a fascinating article about the man whose life is the basis of Matthew McConaughey’s forthcoming Civil War movie: Free State of Jones. The historical character around whom the movie plot revolves was named Newton Knight. That's his image from about the time the Civil War began.

Mr. Knight was a big man, standing 6'4" and was a staunch Baptist who didn't drink, but had a violent streak. He enlisted in the Confederate army and fought in a Mississippi Infantry regiment during the 1862 bloodbath at Corinth, Mississippi. After the lost battle at Corinth, Knight walked away-deserted from the army. He returned to Jones County, a rare place in central Mississippi where the white, male population had overwhelmingly voted against secession (24 for, 374 against). Needless to say, a pro-Union county in central Mississippi was an anomaly.

When Knight returned home from the army, he was mad because the Confederate army had taken his only horse and his home destroyed. He became a guerilla leader of pro-Union men who were hiding from the Confederate draft, or, like Knight himself, had deserted from the Confederate army. The movie is partly about the fighting between Knight’s men and the brigade of Confederate soldiers who were sent in 1864 to stamp out the nest of pro-Union renegades. Men died on both sides of the fighting, but Newton Knight survived.

All that’s fascinating to any Civil War nut, like me, but the family side of Knight’s history is even more intriguing. After the war, the Newton Knight maintained two families, one white and one black, each with a passel of children fathered by Knight, each with their own house on the Knight farm. Knight’s black common-law wife, Rachel, was a freed slave owned by Knight’s grandfather.

Eventually, Knight’s white wife left him, and he spent the rest of his long life with ex-slave Rachel, and their children. Knight’s son and daughter from his white wife married bi-racial children born to Rachel before she and Knight became a couple. During the decades after the war, both black and white residents of Jones County shunned Knight’s openly bi-racial family and lifestyle.

The Knight family bi-racial issue stretched into the 1940’s when one of Knight’s great-grandsons still living in Mississippi was arrested and convicted of miscegeny -- a black man marrying a white woman – still a crime in Mississippi in 1948.  There’s a lot more to Knight’s story and books have been written about his life. I urge you to find the new Smithsonian magazine and read the article.

That brings me to my McBee Civil War novel trilogy, where one of the main characters, Levi, a mulatto (half white) slave, gradually confronts his bi-racial identity, after he becomes the body-servant of the other main character, Captain John McBee. The war thrusts the two men into three years of living together in the harsh environment of a Confederate infantry regiment in Lee’s army. 

Hardship, deprivation, deaths and battle impact the master and servant one way, driving them together out of necessity, while the brutal social realities separating white masters and black slaves impact them in the opposite way, keeping each bound in his respective role.

If surviving the war and the question of Levi’s white father are not burdens enough for the enslaved young man, Levi eventually attracts the romantic attentions of an unusual young white woman.

Does that sound salacious enough for a steamy best-seller? I was talking myself into believing the budding bi-racial romance was too over-the-top for the 1860’s. After all, I grew up in the Deep South and can clearly remember the first time I saw a black-white couple in public. That was in 1971, a hundred years after Newton Knight’s open, common law marriage to a black ex-slave. Things tend to change slowly in the South.

I’ve made this point before: I am aghast at the widespread acceptance in the 1800’s of white men fathering children with enslaved black women, with no recognition of the children as anything but another slave. The 1860 US census had three choices of race: White, Negro, or Mulatto. There were so many children born of black mothers and white fathers, that those offspring had their own racial label. Babies who essentially had no fathers.

So, I was gratified that my recent reading about Newton Knight provides a historical example for the bi-racial romance thread in the McBee books. Such romances certainly weren’t the norm, but interracial marriages did truly happen, even in the South during the Civil War.

Good novels usually aren’t about the normal, everyday things of life, are they? Good fiction often explores the uncommon, addressing our natural curiosity and fascination with that which is normally forbidden to us.

Consider that Eve only ate the apple after she was sternly told not to do so. And look at the bestseller that Eve's act of defiance starts. But I promise that Levi’s forbidden romance won’t be smooth sailing. And where it will end, I don’t even know yet.

David's Hands

I ask your forgiveness right up front. So to speak. But this morning I can’t help myself.

I’ve promised my blog posts will remain focused on the Civil War, writing, and sometimes family. Nothing political. Last summer I strayed, giving my thoughts about the venerable old Confedereate battle flag. Last night another of those “I can’t ignore this” tidbits came along.

Hands. Big hands, little hands. Short fingers, long fingers. And whether or not big or little hands reflect other size matters.

First of all, I cannot believe two serious contenders for the nomination to represent a major political party in this year’s Presidential election would ever, would ever, would ever, get into a literal “mine is longer than yours” spat on national TV. Holy Moly. How low can we go?

But I gotta admit, it was funny, too, in a comedy club sort of way. But never in a Presidential Candidate Debate sort of way.

Appropriateness of the venue aside, my wife and I and jillions of other tourists have gazed in awe at Michelangelo’s answer to that eternal question, the one so crudely addressed by two of our wannabe President candidates. That’s my wife Nita in Italy in 1999 staring up at David’s “hands.” He is so tall, I couldn’t get David and Nita both in the frame without turning the camera cock-eyed. I pretend she gazes at me in such a way.

The other photo came off the internet today. It’s seems David is getting a long-needed good scrubbing. The nasty little boy in me sure would like to see a photo of some pretty Italian lady, Sophia Loren maybe, taking a soapy brush to David’s…you know.

Okay, I got it out of my system. Enough of such juvenile silliness. I hope our Presidential candidates now feel the same.

Next week's post will be back to the Civil War.

Beanbag, Yes. Zombies, No

The photo is not very good. I took it hastily with my phone, but I wanted to catch the moment. That’s granddaughter Violet, who is almost three, and not the shrinking kind of violet. There she is, balanced on a stair step, in grave danger of being swallowed by her beanbag chair. Reminds of the old Pac Man arcade game. She’s engaged in the task of bringing her beanbag chair down the stairs for a movie night. You can imagine how long she stayed still in the beanbag.

The point of the photo is sometimes we all take on projects that are bigger than we are, but we somehow manage, even as we struggle to not to get bowled over by the mass of the thing.

For Violet, that evening, it was the beanbag chair. She could have just pushed it up and over the rail at the top of the stairs to drop down, or she could have kicked it down the stairs from safely behind and above. No, being in back of the action is not her way. She had to control the cushy boulder from the front as it sort of slid down the stairs step by step.

 For her granddad, for the past two and a half years, my beanbag on the stairs has been writing the three McBee novels. It’s come close to swallowing me a few times. A thousand pages, three hundred thousand words divided into a hundred and thirty chapters, slowly rolling step-by-step through three years of the Civil War, and three years of my life. And the value of the project has not been just to finish, but to make the three books historically credible “page turners,” not repetitive or boring, yet still not outlandish. There are no zombies in McBee’s Civil War.

Like Violet’s beanbag, I can’t hurry it along, or gravity and size get the upper hand. The project would simply smother me as it rolled away to crash into a tree in the woods somewhere. I’m getting there. And the sight of little Violet throwing her all into her beanbag is just the sort of visual reminder I need to get on with the last half of the last book.

Civil War Vets, WWII Jets, and Spotsylvania

Yesterday afternoon I spent half an hour with a 96-year-old WWII veteran, a gentleman named Leland Stephenson. He goes to the same Methodist church as we do, and I know his son, who is a teacher. His landlady at the senior apartments where he lives is a friend and she told me he'd read one of my Civil War novels and really liked it. She asked if I might go by his apartment and sign his copy. So I did. I went to Leland’s apartment and signed his copy of my first McBee novel, Tangled Honor, and I took along a copy of Redeeming Honor to give him as a gift.

I figure any guy who served his country in WWII, is still on the green side of the grass, and is reading my Civil War novels, shouldn’t have to pay a dime. He’s honoring me by reading them. We had a pleasant visit. I was flattered Leland enjoyed my book, and he was pleased to have company and a chance to talk about his career as an army officer.

The visit also provided the newest wrinkle in the marketing plan for my novels: All WWII vets get free books from me. Sadly, I’m pretty sure Mr. Stephenson and my dad are the only two living WWII vets I know.

My dad Frank is now 95 and was a sergeant in the Army Air Corps in WWII. He spent nearly three years maintaining the top-secret Norton bombsites on bombers that were pounding the Germans from England, then, after D-Day from France and Belgium.  Among his stories is watching a German jet fighter land on their airfield in France one afternoon. Either the pilot was deserting with his plane or had engine trouble. Whatever the German pilot’s reasons, Pop remembers seeing the funny looking plane with no propellers and the big black Nazi emblem on the fuselage. I bet it did indeed cause quite a stir at the airfield.

As a sixteen-year-old Boy Scout, Pop also spent a weekend as a volunteer worker at the last reunion of Civil War Confederate veterans in Louisiana in 1936 in Shreveport. Those old soldiers would have been in their 80’s and 90’s by then. Pop told me that he was given a badge for volunteering at the reunion, and he kept it a long time, but it’s now gone. So after an easy search, I found an image of the reunion badge on the internet.

I think it’s noteworthy that a Boy Scout of sixteen could guide old Confederate veterans around, bringing them coffee, and then eight years later as a young airman, watched one of the very first military jets land right in front of him. Two wars, eighty years apart. The first one before airplanes were invented. The second one involving hundreds of thousands of airplanes, and the first jet fighters. The same young American was able to reach back and touch still-living soldiers from the first war, then go forward and take part in the other. All in eight years. Wow.

The past two weeks, I’ve been writing the chapters in Defiant Honor about the 5^th Texas Infantry’s trench combat at Spotsylvania, Virginia. What I’ve read seems more like the trench warfare in WWI than the Civil War, but I guess a “good idea” has staying power. And by May 1864, General Lee was quickly running out of men and good ideas. That said, it was ugly fighting, hand-to-hand, with bayonets, a point that is significant to Levi’s plot thread in the new book. I’ll end with that teaser, and more somberly, a period photo of a real fallen Confederate soldier at Spotsylvania.

What Made Levi Do It?

Today’s post is probably for those who’ve tried their hand at writing fiction.

My novels, so far, have all been military historical fiction. I’ve tried to keep the McBee Civil War novels in the mainstream of military history. 

The central character John McBee is based on an actual Confederate officer in a Texas regiment, who did have family roots in Lexington, Virginia. I’ve dug out a scattering of details about the real captain from Texas, enough to build a credible character based on his documented written words and actions as a Confederate officer.

Similarly, the character of his young enslaved, half-white, half-Negro, man-servant, Levi, is also founded on a real man named Levi Miller. For a slave born in 1840, an unusual amount of information has been published about Levi Miller over the years since the Civil War.

The female lead in the novels, Faith, is a fictitious woman, based on nobody in particular. That has made Faith easier to construct than has been Captain McBee or Levi, because I’ve been free to follow my writer’s imagination.

I sometimes read blog posts about novel writing. After all, I’m still new at it, and it’s a complex challenge to write a decent novel. One of the blogs I read this week stressed that a new writer should let go of the idea of embedding big literary or social themes in his/her novel and just concentrate on telling a darn good story. OK, I’m for that. But…

A fair part of my initial interest in writing the McBee books was to twofold: First, I wanted to explore the three-year relationship between the real “Captain John” and the real Levi. That’s been a slow ongoing process through all three novels.

Second, I wanted to get inside Levi Miller’s head because he was one of a very few black men to receive a Confederate soldier’s pension. He was approved in 1908, for having fought on a single afternoon in a trench outside Spotsylvania Courthouse along with the men of Company C. That happened just a few days after his master, Captain John, had been severely wounded in the battle at The Wilderness just a week before. 

Levi Miller had run over 200 yards of open ground while being shot at by Union snipers, to deliver a haversack of food to Lieutenant Anderson, who then commanded the company. He was scared to run back over the same ground, so he stayed in the trench.

When the Yanks attacked late in the afternoon, Levi Miller picked up a spare musket, with a bayonet, and fought with the Confederate soldiers. There he was, a slave fighting up close, bayonet to bayonet, against Union soldiers who were fighting to free the slaves.

That true story has puzzled me for 20 years. Why in the hell did the slave Levi Miller fight, instead of just watching from the back of the trench? None of the soldiers would have expected him to fight with them, unless…what?

During the past week, I’ve been writing the chapters about Company C and “my” Levi in the trench at Spotsylvania. For two decades I’ve pondered why the real Levi Miller shifted from serving Confederate soldiers, to fighting as a Confederate soldier that one day. This week I’ve had to answer that question through my character Levi’s thoughts and actions. For me, it’s been a week to pee or get off the pot.

These chapters are not the action climax to the novel, there will be more fighting, the war’s not over for my characters. But, these pages are a culmination of two and a half books of character construction.  If the reader “gets” what’s in the few pages before Levi fights with a musket and bayonet, then I will have succeeded in one of my big writer’s goals. If readers skim over those pages to get to more good war stuff or even more good romance stuff, I will have fallen on my writer’s face.

As to what I wrote, about the best I can say about Levi’s motivation is a cliché, “It’s complicated.”

That’s where I am today. I’ve sent the chapters about Spotsylvania to my critiquing circle of five fellow writers. If they give me the nod next week when we next meet, I’ll be greatly relieved. If they raise eyebrows at those pages, nicely letting me know they’re not convinced, I’m in for a rough spot of rewriting. My fingers are crossed.

Occupy Lexington

We modern Americans have no experience with our home towns being invaded and occupied by an enemy army. That hasn’t happened in the United States in 150 years now, not since we did it to ourselves during the Civil war.

In the early days of our nation, that wasn’t the case. We love the Brits now, so much so that in the twentieth century, we twice sent hundreds of thousands of our young men to fight and die in their defense. But twice, a hundred years before WWI and earlier, red-coated British armies ravaged the United States, even burning our new national capitol building and president’s official dwelling.

By 1916, we had moved past the memory of those invasions, and locked arms with the English against a new common enemy, the Germans. And we did so again in 1942.

During WWII, the great Sunday morning surprise attack by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor was an air attack by ship-based airplanes. No Japanese infantry or tanks landed in Hawaii. WWI, WWII, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan have all been “over there.”

Even the terrorist attack on 9-11-2001 was not an invasion. No occupying army broke down doors of civilian homes and searched every room for weapons.

But for three days in mid-June of 1864, that’s exactly what happened when blue-coated American soldiers occupied Lexington, Virginia during the Civil War.

Lexington was not a rail center like Atlanta, or home to foundries where cannons were forged like Richmond. Yet, the quiet town of just a few thousand residents became a target for a Division of Union soldiers for two reasons.

First, Lexington is at the foot of the Shenandoah Valley, a rich agricultural region that was a critical breadbasket for the Confederacy.

Second, Lexington was, and still is, home to the Virginia Military Institute, a small military academy where Stonewall Jackson taught (Quite poorly, it is reported). 

In May, 1864, just the month before the Union occupation of Lexington, the 200 teenage cadets of VMI were called out to temporarily join the Confederate army at the battle of New Market. 

Ten cadets died in the battle, and the northern press jumped on it. The army was castigated for waging war on children, even though the average age of the VMI cadets was eighteen. The Union commanders, when they learned that a Confederate general had ordered the battalion of "underage boys" into battle, were angry as well. The Union generals wanted some payback.

In a nutshell, when the Yankees got close to Lexington, the cadets at VMI were marched further south into the hills to safety. The Union commander, General Hunter, ordered the buildings at the military school burned down, along with the home of the past governor of Virginia which was adjacent to the campus. The photo below is the burned out cadet barracks building at VMI.

The retreating cadets could not carry all of the school’s inventory of military wares with them. So, in the day before the Yankees arrived, extra uniforms and weapons, that were now legitimate Confederate war materials, were distributed among the patriotic citizens of Lexington to hide. 

Just days after the Union forces left Lexington, a young lady named Rose Pendleton, the daughter of a Confederate general and sister of a colonel, wrote a long letter about the occupation. Her lengthy, remarkably detailed, letter describes how her family coped with the invading soldiers, and how she and her sisters aided the southern cause by hiding uniforms and even muskets rescued from the VMI storerooms.

Muskets were hidden in basements and laid on hidden corners of roof tops. Cadet uniforms were donned by women and worn under their dresses.

Some young women put on their skirt hoops and tied cadets’ extra shoes to the hidden framework of their hoops, all covered by their skirts and petticoats.

Sometimes these subterfuges worked, sometimes they didn’t. Miss Pendleton wrote that one of her mother’s servants (slaves) must have informed a Union officer where to look for hidden muskets, because the soldiers returned for a successful second search of her home and found the muskets stashed in the basement.

The Union soldiers did literally search every house in Lexington looking for food. Barrels of flour, hams, and other stores were confiscated.

The local newspaper building was ransacked. The printing press was dragged into the street and smashed. The collection of typeset letters were scattered in the street, but the building was not burned.

Lexington was the final destination of a thirty mile long canal that ran from Lynchburg, the closest railroad station. The canal locks in Lexington were destroyed, making the canal unusable for some time.

There is no record, even in the veiled language of the day, of any physical assaults on the women of Lexington, thankfully. The days of conquering armies raping and pillaging were past, and the days of total war, burning every home, never appeared in that part of Virginia. Restraint was exercised by the Union command in Lexington, much different than the practices of Sherman’s army that was soon to burn a wide swath across Georgia.

The only Confederate soldier killed was a man named Matthew White, a cavalryman from Lexington, who was home for some unknown reason. White took it upon himself to kill the farm laborer, a man named John Thorn, who had guided the first Union cavalrymen into Lexington. White bushwacked Thorn, then made the mistake of telling two men he thought were also southern soldiers on furloughs, but who turned out to be Union spies who had come to scout Lexington before the army arrived. They reported White’s admission to the Union commander. White was found, arrested, and taken into the woods by Union soldiers and executed.

The soldiers in blue came, took all the food they could find, destroyed anything related to the southern war effort, and left.

I’m writing this post about the “civilized sacking of Lexington” by the Union army because those three days are the setting for some pivotal plot developments in Defiant Honor.

Notice the wide front porch  in this post-Civil War photo of the Pendleton home in Lexington. Just a few days ago I wrote a scene in which my character Faith and one of the Pendleton ladies, both expecting babies, sit in rockers and engage in conversation a few days before the occupation of Lexington by the Yankees.

It was writer’s serendipity to find a photo of the very porch on which I’d just placed two characters in my novel, one fictitious and one a real person I’ve written into the plot.

Finally, more somberly, I ask you to pause for a moment and cast yourself into the helplessness of your town being invaded and occupied by hostile soldiers. We modern Americans are incredibly fortunate to have missed that drama. It happened all over Europe and much of Asia during the two world wars of the last century. It is happening now, this very day, in the Mideast, creating a nightmare life for hundreds of thousands of displaced civilians.  

Looking for Old Yeller

As I inch along writing the last McBee novel, Defiant Honor, I’m still worried that there’s not enough gut-wrenching emotion in the critical scenes. This is the final third of the long story, the  third book where the ongoing conflicts between the bad characters and John, Levi, and Faith must finally play out.

I know that somebody’s gotta die, and some characters are going to squeak through, bloodied and hurt, but surviving. I honestly don’t yet know who’s going to bite the dust, but it’s important to me as the author that some readers cry before they set down the book the last time.

To get that level of emotion, to open up the readers’ tear ducts, I need Old Yeller of the Fred Gibson book and Disney movie of the 1950’s. I need a faithful friend who will self-sacrificially throw himself into harm’s way to save someone he loves.

I need the firemen at the Twin Towers on 9-11. I need the school principal at Sandy Hook Elementary School the day the mad man started killing her kids. I need one of the many soldiers who have flung themselves onto hot grenades, mangling their own bodies to save their pards. I need an Old Yeller. (If you don’t know Old Yeller, find the little book and read it. You won’t be sorry.)

I’m not the only novelist to understand the need for an Old Yeller. I recently read the best-seller One Second After, and author William Forstchen has not one, but two beloved characters cast in the role of an Old Yeller. I won’t say more, but I will say I shed tears in both scenes.

We had a preacher years ago who once told the story of a little boy whose younger sister was deathly sick and would surely die without an immediate blood transfusion. But the ill child had a rare blood type and the only available donor who shared her blood type was her eight-year-old brother. Their parents quietly explained the situation to the little boy, that to live, his sister needed his blood, and after a long silence the brother nodded OK. During the transfusion, lying on a bed next to his sister, connected to her by a tube running red, the little boy fell asleep. When he woke up, he looked up at his dad and asked, “Is this Heaven?” He had thought he was giving all his life-blood to his little sister and his own life would end because of the transfusion. I need that giant little guy in my book.

I must have only been half-awake during the sermon that Sunday, because I didn’t see that obvious maudlin punch line coming, and I’ve never wholly forgiven the preacher for playing so on my emotions that day. But it worked.

So, in the weeks ahead, I’m going to sort out who will be my Old Yeller in the climatic action in Defiant Honor. My litmus test will be if I cry myself while writing the first draft of the scene.