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.

   

Recliner # 7

 “No real adventure starts in a recliner,” read the ad on my laptop this morning. Curiously, the ad was on the screen where I log-in to my e-mail, a recliner ritual I do every morning.

It seems an innocuous enough tag line for an ad for a RV show, although the captain chairs in a big-ass Winnebego RV look to me like recliners-for-the-interstate. I’ve always thought RV’s were a far cry from “camping.” But that’s not what this post is about. This post is about my forty-four-year love of recliners, the living room sort of reclining easy chair.

I’m a crusader about the value of recliners. I go visit relatives in nice homes and harass them when there’s no recliner for me. Nita’s and my first apartment, furnished with family hand-me-down furniture, included my granddaddy’s recliner.

That first second-hand recliner was ultra-modern white naugahide, imitation Danish style, and deceptively comfortable. When Nita and I bought our first new living room furniture six years later, a big-ass ugly tan velour recliner was part of the set.

I think I’m now on the sixth replacement recliner since grandpa’s Danish knock-off.  And Nita now has her own recliner across the room from mine where she diddles on her i-pad while watching TV. It took me forty years to win her over, but I’m nothing if not persistent in some things.

Back to the ad, I beg to differ about no adventure can start in a recliner because I’ve started and written 3 ½ war and adventure novels while tapping a computer keyboard sitting on my lap, with my feet up and my butt in my recliner. And writing those 3 ½ novels has been a huge adventure in my life. And I didn’t write the first word and won’t write the last word while hiking or biking or moving anything but my fingers.

 My recliner is my office. Nita calls my recliner and the side table my “rat’s nest.” As I look at it right now, I can’t quibble. The photo is my nest, or Recliner #7 as I call it, as it looks this morning with everything but my rump and bare feet, and me chewing on my lip as I ponder what keys my fingers should tap next. 

In my defense, the nest includes in-progress paperwork for a Kiwanis Club project, copied book chapters by other writers to be critiqued for our weekly gathering, notes I used to finish a quarterly newsletter for our Civil War reenacting club, novel research and pleasure-reading books, sundry single pages and yellow pads of notes about all sorts of random things, and my ubiquitous box of tissues.

Yeah, it’s a rat’s nest. My New Year’s Resolution for 2016 is to shift my writing station to the desk in the study, where I once intended to sit on the antique wooden secretary chair there and write the first McBride bestseller. But, the nest in the living room won out, and the bestseller is still locked in my head while I search for the key.

My writer’s study is a great room for a Civil War nut, a wooden desk flanked by tall bookshelves loaded with old friends and new books waiting to be read, walls decorated with Civil War prints. A dozen or so Civil War hats and kepis line the top of the book shelves, and four reenacting muskets and a sword lean in a corner. 

There’s a nice view out the window onto my wife’s rose garden behind the wooden picket fence I built one spring. (Yes, yellow roses. Nita's a Texan, too.)

Yet, I do clearly remember exactly why I abandoned my writing desk in that study designed just for me.

I left my writer’s haven the morning I leaned back, hooked my hands behind my head to think, and the old wooden antique secretary chair and me fell over backwards and bounced off the floor. Hmmph. That sort of ruined the mood. 

I fled to my safe and secure recliner in the living room. Last fall I bought a modern high-backed leather “boss’s office chair” at a garage sale. We’ll see if it’ll keep my percolating brain upright. If I can tear myself away from the Recliner #7.

Happy New Year to each of you. I'll let you know if the next blog post is written from the study or old #7.

Over the holidays I read a couple of good spy novels and a spooky book titled “One Second After.”