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.

Cover Girl or Not

Two of my favorite musket-era war movies, Master and Commander and Gettysburg, have no women roles. My first Civil War novel, Whittled Away, has a few female characters with short ancillary appearances in the war story plot.  I have long believed the best war stories stick to telling about the soldier characters and the war, and not drift away into sidebar romances and other hi-jinks.

So, while I wrote the first two-thirds of Whittled Away, I kept the ladies out of the plot, conveniently forgetting that the Patrick Sharpe series of novels about the Napoleonic Wars are also favorites of mine, and Sharpe has an eye for the ladies.

At some point in writing Whittled Away, detailing the ongoing heaviness of the war depressed me, and I decided that at least one character, and me as the writer, needed a little R and R. Hence, Chapter 28 was born.  I loved writing Chapter 28, and Lieutenant Navarro has repeatedly thanked me for putting him in the arms of Rose. 

Knowing my next novel was going to be another Civil War story, and remembering what fun it was to weave a romantic vignette into Whittled Away, I suspected that a woman character was going to be more than an afterthought and more than a temporary distraction for the new book’s main character, John McBee.

As you can see from the cover of the new novel, Tangled Honor, a woman shares the top spot. Not just any woman, but a smart and attractive woman, the dangerous sort of woman who has the capacity to hijack a war plot and turn it into a Harlequin romance. I’ve never actually read a Harlequin romance novel, but with each new chapter in Tangled Honor, I worried that I was writing one. Hell, maybe I did. I hope someone will tell me.

I did keep asking my writers circle companions if I was taking the fast lane to literary purgatory, and they assured me they were enjoying the intrigue brought about by the woman. Of course, that’s three women and a retired pastor talking.

I still worry what my reenactor friends will think about my sliding in a second plot line that is more or less independent of the war story of the Fifth Texas Infantry. These guys hold Hood’s Texas Brigade in especially high regard, bordering on reverence sometimes and may well see a woman as an unwelcome intrusion.

Regardless of those reservations, once the lady’s position in the plot was a done deal, our writers group also looked at four cover options sent to me by the graphic designer, a lady who had read the manuscript. Only one of the draft covers included an image of a woman. I called it the “Harlequin” cover.  Guess which cover garnered the most votes? Yup, she did.

We talked about whether I wanted to appeal to female prospective buyers, and I admitted that I did. I learned from feedback from people who bought Whittled Away that my writing voice seems to connect with women readers, even beyond Chapter 27.  Besides, a book sale is a book sale, and I do want my second novel to sell more copies than did Whittled Away in its first year. I was open to the idea that maybe a woman on the cover would attract more women buyers.

Men like women, and men like reading sexy scenes, I know that much. Women buy romance novels, so with those thoughts as justification, the face of dark haired beauty made the cover.

One of the writers circle ladies suggested the woman on the cover is too modern, wears too much eye liner, lip stick, cheek shadowing and has plucked eyebrows. I agreed and followed the suggestion to Google images of Civil War women in search of a more period-appropriate face.

The old photographs I found show a bunch of plain women. Even the younger women with attractive facial features were unappealing. Styles were extremely different in the 1860’s.  Women’s hair was usually parted in the middle and pulled tightly to the sides. The use of make-up was only for “soiled doves,” ladies of the night. Moreover, having one’s portrait made in the 1860’s was serious business, so all the ladies are solemn, not a smile in the bunch. There were certainly no challenging, come-hither looks on those faces. So I bypassed those images, thinking in for a penny, in for a pound. I’m not putting a homely woman on the cover of my novel.

To you, my blog reading friends, what do you think? By all means, leave a comment or shoot me an email as to whether the cover of Tangled Away is better or worse for the sweetheart in the top corner. I’m really curious if I made the right call.

By the way, the plan is for Tangled Honor to be offered on Amazon as a paperback and a Kindle e-book download by the weekend before Thanksgiving, about a month from now.

What I read this week:  Ghostoria, a collection of vintage era short stories of romance and the supernatural by Tam Francis (who is one of the ladies in our Lockhart writers circle)       

Swinging Cannonballs

Think of an iron cannonball with a curved handle welded to it. Think of a row of pairs of them in increasingly bigger sizes from about ten pounds to way over fifty pounds each. They are called “kettle bells” and they are old-fashioned weight training devices that are said to have started in Russia.

For seventeen years I would end half my sweaty workouts at The Old Texas Barbell Company by holding a kettlebell in each hand as I bent my knees and thrust forward with my butt, swinging the kettlebells up and back, to repeat ten times before going to a heavier pair of the cannonballs with handles.

I wrapped up my other workouts by pumping the long anchor-sized ropes up and down for sixty seconds, making waves up and down the long rope, rest a minute, then pump the ropes again, for three or four times.

In between it was the traditional barbells and dumbbells, curls and presses, and such. Nothing fancy.

Who but a guy named Mike would own The Old Texas Barbell Company, a  gym with no air-conditioning, no music, no treadmills, and certainly no TV’s. 

Last month, on Mike’s 72nd birthday he shut’r down. He sold the place, complete to the pressed tin roof, bare brick walls and plywood floor. He sold the building back to the BBQ joint next door, having bought it from them back in 1996 when he moved from booming bustling Austin to little lazy Lockhart.

The Old Texas Barbell Company was also a fitness museum. The laminated covers of dozens of old fitness magazine decorated the walls, along with old rowing machines. Odd shaped dumbbells and a couple of anvils were on display.  Most of the free weights came from the old Gregory Gym on the University of Texas campus, where the weight room was under the stage until the place was renovated. Dull burnt orange paint still clings to some of the bigger round weights.

Two huge painted canvas clothes illustrated an early strong man, and Carol Finsrud, Mike’s wonderful wife, who is a world-class senior pentathlon athlete. Wooden display cases housed Carol’s ever growing collection of gold and silver medals, and shelves held Mike’s body building trophies from his younger days.

The paper that tells of Milo, the Greek wrestler,  is my favorite piece on display.  In ancient Greece, Milo the young boy asked his teacher how to grow stronger than the other wrestlers. He was told to select a new-born bull calf, throw it over his shoulders and carry it once around the arena every day for a year. Seems to have worked.

I don’t do change really well, and I was stressed out that Mike’s gym would soon not be there for me to scratch my two-or-three times a week weight-lifting itch.  I’m no gym rat, in fact I’m a bit of a fat rat who cherishes his recliner. But for nearly two decades,  Mike’s has been part of my lifestyle, the place I traded gossip with other retirees and some youngsters, and the place where I went to exert some effort that made me sore in a good way.

After all, Mike’s gym was the place where one Saturday morning a phone call came wanting to know who was the lady in town who made the fancy decorated birthday cakes. Two people knew, but they named two different bakers. I’ve never figured out why that cake call came to Mike’s gym, except that Lockhart is a little town, where roots run deep, and people sometimes do things differently.

In the end, my depression about leaving the austerity of the Old Texas Barbell Company for the new modern 24-hour Snap Fitness facility was easily solved.  As Mike closed his gym, he built his own personal workout building in his backyard, and he invited some of his longtime clients to continue working out there.  He moved about half his collection of iron weights and kettlebells, even the ropes making the shift.  I bike to Mike's backyard gym two or three times a week now and see some of the same folks I’ve grown used to over the years, and I still sweat.

The new added extra is gigging Mike about the bathroom in the new gym having a marble countertop around the sink. I expect his wife Carol had a hand in that.

Where’s the connection between Mike’s gym and McBride’s Civil War novels? Besides, the cannonball shaped kettlebells, I dunno if there is one. The gym is one place where writing ideas percolate as I work through my list of exercises, but then, so is my bed, after my full bladder awakens me in the predawn hours.

I actually think I wanted to write about The Old Texas Barbell Company because it was an old-fashioned, no shortcuts, no frills, sort of place, run by a gruff, but welcoming guy, and I view me and my novels that way.

The Devil in Texas

I was on the Texas Civil War Heritage Trail Facebook page when I found the envelope pictured here. The envelope was labelled as having come from New York during the war, an example of patriotic stationery that was fairly common on both sides during the Civil War as a way for civilians to show their support to the war effort.

I laughed when I looked at the cartoon devil, thinking the winged and forked-tail rascal was great imagery. I also reflected on why the New York artist chose Texas for the Rebel state "honored" in his wartime logo.

In researching my books, I’ve been reading quite a bit of the history of the three Texas infantry regiments of Hood’s Texas Brigade in the Army of Northern Virginia. In battle, they were aggressive and fought fiercely, no doubt. In fact, General Lee himself referred to the Texans as his “Grenadier Guards,” quite a compliment coming from the commanding general.

The Texans also certainly had a reputation for a lack of discipline when not actually fighting a battle, and that was most of the time. The mystique of the Texas Rebs was surely enhanced by the fact that Texas was a true frontier that shared a bloody border with Mexico and rubbed up against vast lands controlled by the Comanche Indians.

So, I’m not too surprised, and admit to a bit of pride, that this Civil War envelope devil chose Texas for his banner.

Jumping to the present day, this past week I also surfed onto the Facebook page of a relative who is deep into far-right national politics, and is an outspoken critic of our sitting national president. That Facebook page is filled with venomous graphic images about the president, painting him as evil and anti-American in every possible way. There seems to be an endless number of these hateful images that are posted every week, as my relative exercises our First Amendment right of free speech.

It’s a Facebook page that troubles me greatly, as it reflects a person who seems so angry about national events that the normal Facebook subjects of family and vacations are mostly by-passed, in favor of turning the page into a place for ongoing and very negative political salvos.

The Civil War envelope of the devil would fit nicely on that Facebook page, unchanged except to replace the word “Texas” with the name of our president. Without doubt, the devil is an image easily and often used by political cartoonists to paint one side or the other as evil. The ploy was popular 150 years ago during our Civil War and is still so today.

I am disturbed by the vitriolic nature of many of the voices I hear ranting about political matters. I just wish they wouldn’t do that. I wish that politicians, TV, radio and internet pundits would stick to rational discussions and debates of the issues. I wish Congress would allow the art of compromise to reclaim its position of honor in Washington and our state capitals. I wish a lot of things, but these are truly important wishes, which I believe are shared by the majority of America's good people.

Meanwhile, I’ve dumped the title “McBee’s Bloody Boots” for the first book, now completed but not yet published, of the three that I’m writing about Captain McBee of the Fifth Texas Infantry during the Civil War. It’s now, and finally, (yes, finally, again) titled, “Tangled Honor.”