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.