Over and Done, or Done and Over?

No reflections on the world this week, just a huge Hallelujah! It’s over and done! Or maybe it’s done and over. Whichever way the old saying goes, Tangled Honor is put to bed. Done and over. Over and done. It’s now posted for sale on Amazon both as a paperback book and a Kindle e-book download. Man, am I glad.

After taking over five years to write Whittled Away, I’m really happy that Tangled Honor only took about fourteen months to write and publish. A good part of the reason I stuck with writing about a chapter a week was my membership in the Lockhart Writers’ Circle that meets weekly. Every other week it was my turn to submit about one or two chapters of manuscript to four other people to read and critique. Big thanks go to Tam Frances, Gretchen Rix, Janet Christian, and Wayne Walther. None of them are big fans of military historical fiction. Yet, they were my accountability group, and were extremely helpful in seeing the boo-boos in the manuscript and making word-smithing suggestions all along the way. Their candor was needed and appreciated, and their praise when the story clicked with them was needed even more.  

Of course, it was my wife, Sweet Nita, who read the whole printed proof over a couple of days while I was away with the manly men at Big Bend National Park, and asked a simple question that saved the day. She wondered why so-and-so at the end of the book knew something no one told him. It was a key something to the whole story.

I assured her someone had told him and she just missed it. I confidently took the printed proof to find it and show her. I looked, only to realize I had left out a whole key chapter near the end of the book. Somehow I had deleted that chapter from the manuscript during my “clean-up” efforts. Talk about a boo-boo and a thank-you owed to Nita.

To kick off my personal marketing of Tangled Honor, I rented a booth at a Texas Civil War reenactment near Houston last weekend to peddle the new book and Whittled Away to other reenactors and the spectators who came to the reenactment. Naturally, it rained off and on all day Saturday and a big fire ant mound surfaced right in the middle of my booth, but Sunday was a beautiful day, and I sold enough books to call the effort a success. More than that, it was just plain fun to talk to others about something I've written.

I’m now into Chapter 5 of the follow-up novel to Tangled Honor, with a plan for it to be over and done by the end of September of 2015. I’ll keep you posted.

Master and Slave

Why Tangled Honor for a book title? One reason is the friction between the main character and his ‘man-servant’, which is a polite term for his personal Negro slave. Why am I exploring the rapport between a forty-year old white Confederate officer and his twenty-year old half-white slave? It’s not something I just dreamed up one morning to write about.

  

For one thing, it’s an historically sound relationship to construct in a novel because thousands of Confederate officers took their personal man-servants with them to war. It was not at all uncommon.

But mainly, it’s because I have learned that my family tree includes a real pair of men who found themselves in exactly that situation. The historical Confederate Captain John J McBride and family slave Levi Miller were the real men who inspired me to write Tangled Honor as more than a war story. Their lives were indeed tangled together. 

In real life, for health reasons, young John J McBride emigrated from Lexington, Virginia to Leon County, Texas in the 1840’s. When the Civil War started, McBride enlisted and was elected 1st. Lieutenant in the Leon County Hunters, a group of men from his county in Texas, which became Company C of the Fifth Texas Infantry.

With two brothers and his mother still living in Lexington, Virginia, McBride, an actual man, secured the use of a family-owned slave to serve as his man-servant for the duration of the war. McBride was soon promoted to captain and was twice wounded in famous battles, at Second Manassas in 1862 and the Wilderness in 1864.  Both times, the real man and slave Levi Miller got the job of serving as McBride’s nurse.

The color image of the bearded guy is a post-Civil War oil painting, still in the family, of Captain John J McBride. 

The black and white image is a post-Civil War photo of Levi Miller, gathered from an old postcard that lauded him as the last Negro Confederate soldier.

We know so much about Levi Miller because he did something unexpected, and it was noticed and recorded.  In 1864, he crossed a ‘killing field’ to deliver rations to McBride’s company while they were deployed in the defensive trenches near Richmond.  Captain McBride was not present, having been seriously wounded two weeks earlier.

The enemy fire was too heavy for Miller to run back to the wagons, so he stayed in the trench, and was there when Union soldiers charged. Levi Miller picked up a rifle and fought with the Texas Confederates around him, even to the point of using the bayonet in hand-to-hand combat.

Long after the war, Miller applied for and was granted a Confederate soldier’s pension by the state of Texas for that specific incident. It helped that his story was corroborated by the Confederate officer who witnessed Miller take up arms with the soldiers in his master’s company.

After the war, Captain McBride returned to Texas, and Levi Miller settled in Winchester, Virginia, about a hundred miles north of Lexington, and worked as a water dipper at a health resort for the rest of his life. At his death in 1921, the story of his Confederate pension was written about in the local newspaper, and has since become an example often referenced by those who insist that hundreds, or even thousands, of black men fought as Confederate soldiers.

Almost all historians dismiss that opinion as baloney, as do I. The only groups of black men who carried rifles and fought in the Civil War were the US Colored Troops in the Union army, and there were some 200,000 of them, most of them freed slaves. Maybe those who espouse the ‘Black Confederate’ theory are merely color-blind and confused.

Back to Levi, he is listed in the 1860 US census as a “mulatto.” In that census there were three choices for ethnicity: White, Negro, and Mulatto-half white. That means Levi Miller had a white father. Since Levi was owned by a family with a father and three grown sons, there is a reasonable chance that one of them fathered Levi, if Levi’s mother was also a slave owned by the same family.

Sitting here at my laptop, even 150 years later, it is uncomfortable to reflect on the particulars of my McBride ancestors in Virginia and Texas owning slaves until the bitter end of the Confederacy. It may have been four generations back, but it still feels close to home. Family history with warts.

As to the story of John and Levi in Tangled Honor, what kind of relationship would a master and his man-servant develop while camping together in the army for nearly three years?  Would the relationship be influenced by the two men knowing, or even suspecting, that they were related as half-brothers or cousins or even, perhaps, father-son? Would such a kinship even be acknowledged in the culture of the South, where “one drop” of Negro blood put one in the caste of slaves? 

I find those questions troubling and terribly fascinating. They are compelling me to build a three-novel story around Captain John McBride and Levi Miller. Three years of war together, three books to tell the tale.

Since it’s nearly Thanksgiving, how about a food metaphor? There are just enough known facts about John J McBride and Levi Miller to make a fine pie crust, just waiting for me to spoon in layers of tasty story fillings that run together as I bake the whole pie. I mean, three pies, and the first one, Tangled Honor, will be available next week as a Thanksgiving dessert.

Three Texas-centric Big Bend Takeaways

 

Last evening I got home from a 5-day camping trip to Big Bend National Park in far west Texas on the Rio Grande River. Big Bend is a beautiful and prickly place that Nita and I have been visiting off and on for the past forty-four years. We started going there as dumb-ass college kids who didn’t have any camping gear and slept in the car and on picnic tables. We got better, though, I promise.

This time I camped with 25 “manly men” from around my town, on an annual pilgrimage to the land of rocks and cacti. Unlike Nita and I four decades ago, we had an excess of camping gear. But we still were reminded that nature is the queen. One guy, who can be so smart it’s scary at times, slept a couple of nights in the gear trailer when his tent flooded the first night during the rain. Anyway, this trip had three new things to add to my stack of interesting threesomes:

First, we went on a six-mile hike yesterday on a trail called “The Basin Window Trail.” This trail meanders through a lot of scrub brush, headed to a remarkable place where a stream run-off plunges over the edge of a cliff to the desert floor, way down below. It has always looked to me like the last hundred yards of The Window trail was a part of Tolkien’s Middle Earth, and being anywhere close to the edge of the slick rock drop-off scares the pee out of me. I’d rather face an angry orc than creep out on the smooth slick sloping rocks to look down the cliff.

About half-way along our hike to The Window one of our fellow-campers, who is a retired wildlife biologist, stops us, points at a  long black cigar in the middle of the trail and says, “That’s a cougar’s first poop after a feed.” Uh-huh. He went on to tell us that the black cigar is full of the victim’s blood and other easily digested stuff. Later the cougar will poop like a great big dog, just normal old poop. Whoopee. Then, last before feeding again, the cougar will defecate a hair-ball looking mass of bones, cartilage and hair, the stuff that doesn’t digest well. Then, the big pussy cat will find another meal. Ain’t science fun? The three stages of cougar poop. Wow.

The second threesome of note was at Fort Davis, which is a post-Civil War cavalry fort north of Big Bend. It was home of several hundred cavalry and infantry whose purpose was to deter and when necessary, pursue and “punish” marauding Indians, mainly Comanches and Apaches.  The post was vacated in 1890 and became a National Park site in 1961. That would be shortly after Texan LBJ became Vice-President.

Several of the buildings have been restored and furnished to reflect their original purpose, buildings such as enlisted men’s barracks, officer apartments, the commissary, and the hospital. The hospital has the expected array of operating tools and devices for healing through torture. And because of good record keeping, the display includes specific instances when various ailments and complaints of real soldiers at Fort Davis were treated in the best medical fashion of the time.

The threesome here relates to laudanum, that early version of opium that was widely used during the Civil War as a pain-killer. General Hood is said to have made ample use of laudanum after his battle wounds that resulted in a leg amputation and a useless arm. But Hood did father several children after the war, so he was not utterly incapacitated, or he had a very creative and cooperative spouse.

The laudanum in the Fort Davis display was described as the treatment of choice for three different cases: In the first case the laudanum was taken orally as a pain-killer. Check. The second time, laudanum was poured into a soldier’s ear to treat an ear-ache or ear infection. Hmm, I guess so. The third was a case in which abdominal pain was treated with a good dose of laudanum applied as an enema. Zowee! Three avenues for the same drug to work its magic.

The last of the three Texas-centric bits was music. It was my joy to twice be in the audience when another of our campers, Fletcher Clark, strummed his guitar and sang. Fletcher’s another old guy like me who has been a professional troubadour in Texas for a long time. In one era of his life, he and a recently deceased Texas musician semi-legend Steve Fromholtz were part of Far Flung Adventures, the rafting company out of Terlingua, Texas. Far Flung takes people on rafts through the narrow canyons of Big Bend on overnight trips. Decades ago Fletcher and Steve provided sandbar concerts during the evenings and otherwise made themselves useful.  

This time, Fletcher sang Fromholz’s signature ballad, A Texas Trilogy, a song on par with Don McLean’s American Pie. Hardly anyone else sings it because it’s long and hard to do well, and the record is not played much. That made hearing Fletcher sing The Texas Trilogy, first at the Starlight Theater in Terlingua, then at our camp the next night, just like white cream gravy on a tender chicken fried steak. And that ain’t hardtack.

 

 

 

Chasing Historical Rabbits

One of the fun aspects of writing historical fiction is not knowing when I’ll need to make a quick detour to Wikipedia. I’m only three chapters into the manuscript of Redeeming Honor, the middle book in the McBee Civil War trilogy, and I’ve already taken some fact-chasing side trips, chasing historical rabbits, so to speak. 

Since the new book starts with the arrival of thirty-six new recruits to Captain McBee’s company, I needed some names to attach to green soldiers. That sent me to the historical roster of Company C of the Fifth Texas Infantry. I wanted to identify which men were recruited during the one successful effort made to send junior officers back to Texas from Virginia and coax men with a $50 bounty to enlist for the duration of the war, which the South still thought they were winning and wouldn’t last much longer.

Company C reportedly snared forty new recruits, doubling the size of the company after a year soldiers dying of fatal illnesses like measles (yes, measles), pneumonia, and dysentery, not to mention battle deaths.  I gathered suitable first and surnames for my new fictional characters, who will reflect the same ages and often the same fate as their namesakes. Readers of Redeeming Honor will quickly meet Zebulon and Ed Bell (Zeb and Ed), who along with Napoleon and Alamo Brashears,  carry the first names of two sets of brothers found in the original rosters.

Chapter 2 had me sorting out that Mr. Bayer did not market and coin the word “aspirin” until 1899, thirty-four years after the Civil War ended. But key ingredients of pain relieving medicines were known before the Civil War, so I slipped Doctor Barton, the GP in Lexington, a vial of extract of willow tree sap, one of the sources for acetylsalicylic acid, the active ingredient in aspirin.

Not two pages later I was clarifying the steps of “harvesting” a hen to go in the cook pot. I have never been confronted with the need to wring a chicken’s neck or otherwise dispatch a hen or rooster, but when I was a teenager I went duck hunting with friends a couple of times. I still remember one cold morning riding in Bill Daniel’s 1961 Ford Falcon that had an air vent that was stuck open, blowing frigid air at my feet all the way to Lake o’ the Pines and back.  

I did bring back a dead duck that morning and remember the mess I made in the back yard gutting and half-ass plucking the poor bird. Mama wound up making me go bury it by the creek across the street. I think she just didn’t want to cook it in her clean kitchen. I didn’t mind so much since I’d been told wild duck meat, even the breast, was all dark, tough, and stringy. My first meal in Paris in 2009 dispelled that myth, but in 1967 what did I know?

Probably the most interesting historical rabbit that I’ve so far chased down regarding the material goods of the Civil War is the story of Charles Goodyear. He spent his lifetime trying to turn his discovery of how to “vulcanize” rubber into a successful manufacturing and marketing business. (He was the first American to learn that sulfur and heat were key ingredients to make rubber a practical waterproof coating on products like shoes and tobacco pouches) He impoverished his family and ruined his health with his decades of experiments with strong chemicals and acids, yet he did eventually create and patent a waterproof product that could be attached to canvas and was impervious to heat and cold.

During the Civil War, tens of thousands of highly valued waterproof vulcanized rubber “gum blankets” were issued to soldiers in the Union army. Besides good shoes, gum blankets were the first items that Confederate soldiers most often stripped from fallen Yankee soldiers.

In Whittled Away, I included a true account of some Texas Rebs stumbling across two huge piles of new gum blankets waiting to be issued to Sherman’s troops in north Georgia in mid-1864. In that long summer campaign of constant marching that was plagued by recurring torrential rains, the gum blankets were likely more valued than hard coins. Better to be penniless, dry and warm, than cold, wet, and unable to use your money.

I hope everyone votes tomorrow or has already cast your ballot in elections from local school boards and city government all the way up to those running for Congressional and Senate seats. It matters.

What I’ve read this week: I finished Jeff Shaara’s new Civil War novel about the battle at Chattanooga and Missionary Ridge: The Smoke at Dawn.