Easter Fashions

Since 2003, once a year, around Easter weekend, son Todd and I have put on the gaudiest Civil War uniforms imaginable: Red fezzes with big fat royal blue tassels hanging off the top. Baggy bright red wool pantaloons with sky-blue trimmed red wool sashes wrapped around our waists. A navy blue bolero jacket with bright red flower shaped designs on the chest, and a wool vest with a red racing strip down the middle. The pantaloons tucked into white canvas button-up gaiters around both ankles and covering the tops of our shoes.

That was the issued uniform of U.S. Army Zouave regiments during the Civil War. The odd Zouave uniforms were modeled after the French army’s Zouaves, soldiers who originally haled from Morocco in North Africa. Like today, French fashions were “in” during the 1850’s and ‘60’s.

To my surprise, the uniform, especially the baggy pantaloons, are comfortable and relatively cool, even if they are wool. The wide waist sash, if put on tightly with the help of friend yanking it as snug as possible, acts like a wrap-around girdle to lard-asses like me. And the white canvas gaiters keep out nasty little critters. If you’ve never itched like mad from two dozen chigger bites in a ring around each ankle, you can’t appreciate the security that gaiters provide. Only the fez, which provides no protection from sun or rain, is useless. But it does mark us on the battlefield, like a bunch of red-headed woodpeckers flocking together.

The photo shows four of us wearing our Zouave outfits, and some of the individual variations that soldiers, real and play-acting, inevitably add to their regulation uniform. I took off my vest because I sweat like a pig, and added a pair of yellow lambskin “jambieres,” overleggings, that lace up the side. Two of us are wearing white flannel turbans around the bottom of fezzes, formal wear that were normally only put on during parades. And one sash is trimmed in white, not blue. So, variety within our uniformity.

 We portray the 165^th NY Zouaves, an outfit from Brooklyn, New York historically. The 165^th NY was part of the siege in May and June of 1863 of the Confederate defenses at Port Hudson. Port Hudson was the site of the cannon-studded defenses that guarded the southern section of the Mississippi River that was still controlled by the Confederacy. The defenses at Vicksburg were thirty or forty miles upriver and that single stretch of the mighty Mississippi was a key highway for greatly needed supplies to pass from Texas and Louisiana to the rest of the Confederacy. It was a very important thirty miles of river, so important that the Union army was simultaneously hammering away at both fortress-like defenses, upriver and downriver.

Next weekend, Todd and I will drive six hours to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to take part in the reenactment at Port Hudson State Park. This will be my eighth trip to Port Hudson to wear the red pantaloons and shout, “New York! New York!” as we charge the enemy breastworks. Usually, I yell, “Texas! Texas!” when we charge because I’m portraying a Texas Reb, intent on driving the dastardly Yanks back where they came from. Not at Port Hudson.

We’ll even throw a couple of dozen homemade faux grenades over the Secesh defenses as the real Zouaves did with real “Ketchum” grenades. In 1863, the Rebs got smart and started catching the finned bombs in blankets before they hit the ground, and tossed them back at the damyankees who threw them. I'm sure our Reb reenacting opponents will relish doing the same with our balsa and styrofoam fake grenades.

In real life, the 165^th New York Zouaves stepped off the paddle-wheeler transport ship at New Orleans without their knapsacks which held their blankets and personal belongings. The canvas packs were still in the cargo hold and were promised to be delivered to the regiment “soon.” The soldiers spent the next thirty days without those packs, just making do with what they wore and carried when they disembarked, including the worthless fezzes.

The 165^th took heavy casualties in a charge against the Confederates earthworks at a part of the defenses appropriately termed Fort Desperate. The attack was unsuccessful. In fact, the Rebs at Port Hudson only surrendered after Vicksburg fell to General Grant’s siege on July 4^th, a month later. With Vicksburg lost, there was no longer any point to continuing to defend Port Hudson.

As to a link to my books, there are Zoauves in the first McBee novel, Tangled Honor. At the battle of Second Manassas, Virginia in 1862, the 5^th Texas regiment charged and routed the 5^th New York Zouaves, all 500 of them. It was a bloody, bloody fight for both the 5^th Texas and the 5^th New York, with the short intense engagement claiming the lives of about half of each regiment.

I’ve never portrayed the 5^th NY Zouaves receiving the charge of the 5^th Texas at a reenactment. I confess I don’t plan to either, after the past three years of researching the minutia of the 5^th Texas regiment’s history, and creating several characters who are fictional soldiers in the regiment, and now are pretty much family members, even if they are sort of like Harvey the Rabbit to everyone but me.

 The 5^th NY was the sister regiment to the 165^th  NY, coming from the same part of New York City. They wore the same gaudy Zouave uniform, the only difference being the 5^th wore bright yellow tassels from their fezzes instead of the royal blue tassels of the 165^th NY.

So, the weekend after Easter, think of Todd and me and our reenacting pards, as we answer 1,001 questions from interested spectators about our goofy red pantaloons and fezzes. By the way, on the rare occasion I drive home without changing out of the pantaloons, and go into a hamburger joint, I answer questions by telling the curious that I’m a rodeo clown. 

This weekend, I trust you will a family-centered and enjoyable Easter Sunday, remembering our Risen Lord. And don't forget the eggs and bunnies. 

Mitchell, Cyrano, and Roxanne

Since I wrote last week about a new upcoming movie about the Civil War which stars a Texas-born-and-raised actor, this week is an encore about two more movies.

In 1897, a French playwright wrote a popular play Cyrano De Bergerac. Set during the Hundred Years War in Europe in the 1600’s, the beautiful leading lady was named Roxanne. The star was Cyrano himself, a formidable, but witty soldier. Cyrano was blessed with a very large nose, about which he was greatly embarrassed and rather prickly about anyone calling attention to it. There’s lots of sword fighting and verbal repartee in the play. Three American movie versions of Cyrano De Bergerac have been made, in 1928, 1950, and 1990.

In 1987, some 90 years after the French play was first performed, actor/comedian Steve Martin made a movie named Roxanne based on the same French play about Cyrano and Roxanne. The leggy, blonde, and hot Daryl Hannah became Roxanne and Cyrano/Martin’s nose grew to the length of a ski slope.

In both scripts, a key element of the plot is Cyrano/Martin falling in love with Roxanne, but he is too shy and embarrassed by his large nose to admit his attraction to her. Instead, like a dope, Cyrano/Martin writes touching love letters to Roxanne on behalf of a dense, but handsome, young man who also is smitten by Roxanne’s beauty. Misunderstanding and confusion follow, but in the end, Cyrano/Martin gets the girl, his wonderful nose notwithstanding.

Civil War? Where’s the Civil War in this? Here it is:

After the Civil War, in 1910, J.B. Polley, an old man who had been a young soldier in the 4^th Texas Infantry, wrote a lengthy memoir of his Civil War experiences. Polley’s work is entertaining, and generally his accounts of the war hold up to others as true enough.

But Polley also had a fun-loving streak and sometimes included anecdotes of questionable veracity. This one may or may not have been influenced by the recent popular French play about Cyrano de Bergerac.

Here's a summary:

Like Cyrano and Martin, a Private Mitchell in the 4th Texas Infantry Regiment was too embarrassed to own up to one “flawed” feature of his character which he couldn’t control: He couldn't write. But through subterfuge and the help of a friend who wrote love letters for him, Mitchell won the heart of a girl in Richmond. 

But Mitchell’s writing friend is transferred, which prompts Mitchell to enlist yet another soldier friend to write one more letter to the girl, saying that Mitchell was killed in battle. Rather than admit to the woman, who had agreed to marry him, that someone else had written his love letters, Mitchell pronounced himself dead, to preserve his precious dignity. So he loses the girl, after all. Not as happy an ending as Steve Martin’s Roxanne movie.

Perhaps J.B. Polley was a fan of the French theatre, and plucked the convenient tool of one man writing love letters for a friend.

Or, perhaps he related a tale of universal appeal – a good man who feels some part of him is unworthy of a beautiful woman, but he’s too proud to be honest about it, and consequently makes a real muddle of things .

Either way, isn’t it fun when something delightfully piquant comes around again and again, the same touching irony, just in a new wrapping.

As a last thought, I wonder if Steve Martin was a youthful student of the Texans who fought in the Civil War and knew about Polley’s memoir? Very doubtful, but then again, Martin was born in Waco, Texas and he plays a great banjo, a Civil War era instrument.

Here's the excerpt of Polley's memoir for those who like to read primary sources:

A Review of Times That Are Past But Live in History –

Prepared by J. B. Polley, Floresville, Texas

          “While the Fifth Texas was in camp near Richmond Corporal L. C. Mitchell met and fell desperately in love with a young lady living in the vicinity.  She was handsome and highly accomplished, and Mitchell resolved if it were possible he would win her for a wife, and when the regiment was ordered to the Potomac arranged for correspondence with her.  But though a soldier of merit and good standing enough to take the fancy of the most fastidious lady, Mitchell’s penmanship was illegible to himself when the ink got cold.  Well read and having knocked about the world a great deal, his conversation was always entertaining, but writing the hand he did it was impossible to make his letters a charm.  So when the time came for the first he persuaded Charlie Hume – now Major F. C. Hume of Houston – to do both the writing and the composing of all the missives mailed from camp.

          The novelty of the situation inspired Hume to do his best, and that best resulted in a series of letters that were marvels of the epistolary art and so gratifying to the lady that in return she did her best, and the correspondence rapidly changed from that of simple friendship to one where sentiment bore a large part, culminating finally in a declaration of love by Mitchell and an acknowledgement of its reciprocation by the lady. 

     After the retreat from Yorktown, and later after the seven days’ battles, his regiment was in the vicinity of Richmond.  Mitchell managed to visit his betrothed and presumably received proof stronger than mere profession that she loved him.  Just after the battle of Sharpsburg, and before he could write the letter for Mitchell that would announce his escape from the bullets of the enemy, Hume was transferred to another command and immediately joined it.

          This put Mitchell in the middle of a bad fix.  It was utterly impossible for him to write such letters as Hume had been writing over his (Mitchell’s) name, and nobody in his company could do it.  Heroic measures his only recourse, he called to his assistance another messmate, Bob Brantley, now living in Somerville.  Under his instructions Brantley wrote as follows:

IN CAMP NEAR SHEPARDSTOWN,

Va., Sept. 25, 1862

Miss ----, Richmond Va.

          Dear Miss: Your letter of recent date addressed to my late comrade and friend, Robert E. Mitchell enabled me to secure your address, and makes it my painful duty to inform you that my comrade and your lover was killed on the 17^th of September 1862,while far to the front most gallantly fighting for his beloved South.  He was shot through the heart and fell with his face to the foe.  We buried him on the field of battle with your letter resting on his heart.  Words are powerless to express the deep sorrow we feel over his untimely death, or the sympathy that wells up in the hours of your grief, and therefore I make no attempt to console with you.  With assurance of my sympathy, I am, dear miss, yours most respectfully,

                                                                                      R. L. BRANTLEY

          “What the mischief do you want to send such a letter as that for?” inquired a comrade, cognizant of all the circumstances.  “Why do you not write to her yourself, tell her of the deception you have practiced, ask her forgiveness and forever after be happy?”

          “What!” exclaimed Mitchell, “put down in my scrawling handwriting that for more than a year, I have been making her the victim of a fraud?  No, sir, I’d rather be dead to her than to let her know either by letter or by a face-to-face confession that I’m as d----d a humbug as I really have been.”

          The letter was mailed, and although often in Richmond afterward Mitchell never met the lady again, if yet living she no doubt still believes he was killed at Sharpsburg.  In truth, though, he survived the war, came back to Texas and died some ten years ago.”

                                                                            

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.