The Library Museum Closet

I want a job where I can go to the closet and bring out a box of toys like these:

First, the Confederate uniform jacket and shirt, and one home-knitted blue sock of 15-yr-old Private Joe Weekes, who was captured at Ft. Gaines on Mobile Bay, Alabama.

Second, the privately-purchased Sharps carbine of a gentleman named Tucker who lived in Galveston and served the Confederacy.

Third, a preserved square of hardtack carried home by a Wisconsin soldier.

Fourth, a box of 6 Colt Army Pistol cartridges from the Laboratory of the Confederacy.

The word dumbfounded isn’t strong enough to describe my surprise yesterday when I saw all those items laying on a table.

Eleanor Barton, the archivist of the Galveston Rosenberg Library Museum, and hostess of the museum’s quarterly noon reading group, brought them out of storage to add ‘spice’ to my talk about Tangled Honor, one of my Civil War novels.

I was already honored for the invitation to talk to the group about the Galveston connection of the historical Capt. JJ McBride of the 5^th Texas Infantry in Robert E. Lee’s army, and his slave Levi Miller, the two main ‘fictionalized’ characters in Tangled Honor.  

Yet, when I saw the Private Weekes’ uniform jacket, with a value of many thousands of dollars, my brain forgot my book characters. Instead I stood wide-eyed in front of the table, peering down like a spellbound school kid. I don’t think I drooled on any of the artifacts, but I can’t guarantee it.

It didn’t hurt that in 2004, as a Confederate reenactor-living historian, I spent a very wet weekend inside Fort Gaines where Private Weekes became a prisoner of war. It didn’t hurt that a historical character in my Texas Ranger novel, A Different Country Entirely, carried a Sharps carbine in his 1854 tour of Texas.

And it didn’t hurt that last week I’d baked a dozen hardtack crackers to show to a bunch of school kids during my Civil War soldier program. That’s me in the uniform (reproduction uniform, not an artifact) of a Union lieutenant at Kelly Lane Middle School.

After the shock of sharing the spotlight with the treasures from the library museum, I had a great time yacking with the two men and fifteen women about Tangled Honor and Galveston. I admitted that the main woman character is not a typical Victorian-era wife, but Charles Dickens has that genre well covered. My character, Faith Samuelson was created for ‘spice,’ just like the artifacts set out on the table for my talk.

They professed to like my accurate portrayal of the military history and daily lives of the soldiers, and they were intrigued, as I’d hoped, about the evolving relationship between the master-and-slave main characters, which is one of the core themes in the novel.

I tried not to pitch the two follow-up Honor novels that complete the story begun in Tangled Honor. I likely failed at that since I’ve become an unabashed self-promoter of my novels, but no one seemed to mind.