Of Grave Concern Part 4

7.

My Tante Marie was a firecracker of a woman, not five feet tall and so lean that her hands and wrists seemed like the skeletal fingers from one of the ghost stories she was always telling. She seemed ancient to me, but now I realize she must have been in her thirties. I never saw her in anything but a white cotton blouse, a long blue skirt, an ap.r.o.n around her waist, and a red bandana tied around her head. Beneath her blouse, she wore a necklace that had many strange and wonderful things on it: feathers, beads, bits of polished bone.

My father bought her at a slave auction in New Orleans in 1840 or 1841, when Marie would have been about fourteen years old. My father, it is said, declared that she was the most spirited slave of them all, and a quadroon of exceptional beauty. He paid $630 in gold for her. It was years more before she was broken enough to be a house slave, about the time I was born, my uncle said. I don't know about these things personally because my father died in 1848, the year of my birth, kicked to death by a horse. At least, that was what was a.s.sumed-he was found dead in the stable one Sunday morning, with his head stove in and an empty bottle of rum beside him.

In her grief, my mother turned my raising over to Tante Marie. I never grew close to my mother, who always seemed distant, shrouded in the crinoline trappings of antebellum Memphis society. She did not understand my pa.s.sion for stories and books, my love of ghost stories and folklore, or the odd conversations I sometimes had with my bedroom mirror. I thought at the time that I hated her. But looking back, I realized she was no better and no worse than any of the other Memphis women of her age and time. It was the lack of otherness that I hated. It was as if I had been dropped into this strange life by accident, that perhaps I had been set adrift in a reed basket on the Mississippi and rode the wake of a packet boat up the Wolf River, that my real family would one day show up, clicking apologies in a strange tongue to claim me.

More than anything, I wanted to belong.

Then, three years after the cub pilot had pressed my name into his dying brother's hand, I met Jonathan Wylde. Seven years older than me, Jonathan was a sensitive and handsome young man with a shock of blond hair, a free thinker who declared that women were the equal of men, that blacks were human beings, and that love survives death.

I loved him from the start.

It was the January before the war, Jonathan was a divinity student at Stewart College, and we met at a stationer's on Beale Street. We were both seeking copies of Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World (which I am now ashamed to admit, but which you can perhaps forgive). I had momentarily slipped the leash of my Tante Marie, who had become increasingly watchful since I had begun to fill out my dresses. When our hands accidently touched while reaching for the only copy of the Warner book in the store, we both blushed.

We both apologized and insisted the other take it. I agreed, but I suggested that since I was a fast reader, he could call for it in a few days. But neither of us wanted to part, and we lingered near one another, silent.

Then, impulsively: "You have the most beautiful aura I have ever seen."

"What's an aura?" I asked.

"It is a radiant band of color that outlines a person's body," he said. "It's from the Greek, for 'breath' or 'breeze,' and it represents the essence of a person."

"You mean like a halo?"

"No," he said, and smiled. "Only Jesus and the saints have halos, but everyone has an aura, like everyone has a shadow. Your shadow is something that is cast by your body, yes?"

I nodded.

"Your aura is the shadow your soul casts."

"A soul shadow," I said.

"Exactly," Jonathan said. "And they come in all colors and sizes. Angry or pa.s.sionate people have red auras, great thinkers or leaders have green ones, and melancholics dark brown."

"I've never seen one."

"It takes a bit of practice," he said. "I can teach you how, if you like."

"And what, exactly, do you find so beautiful about mine?"

"It is a remarkable mixture of colors," he said. "Violet and yellow and blue, all swirling in harmony. All the best colors, in my opinion. Inspiration, joy, and love."

Jonathan's visits to the Wolf River Plantation became frequent. He taught me to see auras. His was a beautiful magenta, the signature color of the nonconformist. We practiced table tilting and automatic writing. He brought me books and read me poetry and taught me every secret thing.

When the war came in April, he quit Stewart College and volunteered to fight for the Yankees with LaDue's Company, an act that scandalized Memphis society. When we secretly wed when I was fourteen years of age, the discovery mortified my family. My mother cried for days, my uncle threatened to bullwhip Jonathan, but my Tante Marie understood.

"Di moin qui vous laimein, ma di vous quie vous ye," she said.

It was an old Creole proverb: "Show me who you love, and I'll show you who you are."

All I wanted in this world was Jonathan, and I was terrified that he would die-killed in battle, dead by disease, or extinguished in any of the hundred ordinary ways that people depart this earth every day.

Jonathan laughed, saying there was nothing to fear, and he quoted Whitman:

What do you think has become of the young and old men?

And what do you think has become of the women and children?

They are alive and well somewhere, The smallest sprout shows there is really no death.

He created a secret message, shared only with me. He promised that if he died before me, he would send over a message, proving survival of the spirit-and our eternal love.

Hank began appearing to me less and less after I met Jonathan. The mud clerk's image was as wind-blown as ever, but he began to fade, until at last he was just a shadow in my bedroom mirror. There were no more jokes. By the time Jonathan and I were married, Hank was gone.

While Jonathan marched off with LaDue in the spring of 1861, I waited at home. Life in Memphis changed very little during the first year of the war, and then there was a river battle just above Memphis, and ten thousand people turned out on the bluffs to see it.

There were eight or nine Union gunboats and rams against a similar number of Rebel vessels, former steamboats that had been converted into some notion of fighting ships by mounting light guns on their decks and lining their hulls with cotton. As ridiculous as the "cot-tonclads" were, some of the Union boats looked even more absurd, like giant turtles spouting smokestacks. Neither side seemed to know what they were doing, and n.o.body now can agree on exactly what happened, except to say that in the end, all but one cottonclad had been disabled or sunk.

It was 1862, and Memphis had fallen.

Ulysses S. Grant moved his command from Corinth to Memphis, stopped publication of the Memphis Avalanche, ordered the arrest of all newspaper correspondents sympathetic to the South, and drove all families of Rebel soldiers and Confederate officials from the city. Jonathan returned to Memphis with LaDue's Company, and we had a tender reunion. Then, in 1863, Vicksburg fell. With nearly the entire river in Yankee hands, Grant turned his attention to the east, and LaDue's Company marched with the army toward Knoxville.

Letters came regularly from Jonathan at first, cheerful notes in which he chatted about his commander, John Grenville LaDue, a rabid abolitionist who had spent some time in Kansas with John Brown before the war. But as the fighting became bloodier as Grant moved his army ever closer toward Richmond during the Overland Campaign, the letters stopped. With every day that pa.s.sed without word from Jonathan, my heart broke anew.

The war had elevated slaughter to a science, and the list of battles in which the casualties numbered into the tens of thousands is shockingly long. The deadliest battles were Gettysburg, Chickamauga, Chancellorsville . . . and Spottsylvania Courthouse.

At Spottsylvania the fighting raged for a fortnight, including twenty-four hours of the worst hand-to-hand fighting of the war, much of it in trenches. When the hurly-burly was done, thirty thousand lay dead or wounded, sacrificed for a battle in which neither side could claim victory. LaDue's Company was thrown into the worst of it, an abattoir known as the b.l.o.o.d.y Angle. Of 105 men in the company, only LaDue and twelve others survived.

Jonathan was not among them.

I was a widow two weeks shy of my sixteenth birthday.

I didn't even know how Jonathan had died. None of those who were lucky enough to be numbered in what came to be called the LaDue Survival Ranks witnessed his death. His body was so ravaged that it could scarcely be recognized as anything human and could only be identified by the book tucked inside his jacket, Leaves of Gra.s.s, in which my name and his were found penciled in the endpapers.

Jonathan was buried in Spottsylvania County, Virginia. The only thing that was returned to me was the bloodstained book. At first, I felt nothing, and then I believed I was the b.u.t.t of some cruel joke perpetrated by the universe. Then when the pain hit in full, I wished nothing more than to join Jonathan in death.

By war's end in April 1865, there would be more than half a million dead. Grieving parents, wives and daughters, and sisters and girlfriends, turned to Spiritualists and mediums to give hope that some spark of their loved ones had survived the horror to cross over to a better place. There were even seances in the White House, with Mary Todd Lincoln trying to contact her dead son, eleven-year-old Willie, who had been taken by typhoid fever.

I, too, joined the seekers.

For twelve years, on the anniversary of Jonathan's death-May 13-I had held seances, desperately seeking contact with my true love and transmission of the coded message.

After the first failures, I blamed myself, thinking that my lack of belief was to blame. I strove to become a more devout Spiritualist, and eventually sought out Paschal B. Randolph, a New Orleans trance medium of mixed blood. He taught me many things-including, to my shame, how to use the s.e.xual act to cast spells-but never how to contact Jonathan.

Disenchantment spread like rust.

Like most Spiritualists, I was regularly conducting seances for others. Strange things did happen-raps and knocks that did seem to contain meaning, weirdly knowing messages scrawled when our fingers were lightly touching a planchette, odd lights and sounds in darkened rooms. I would accept love offerings from those who had been comforted with what appeared to be contact with lost loved ones. But when the table tipping or the planchette writing became more difficult, I began to help the spirits along-a little at first, then more later. It wasn't as if I were cheating, I told myself. After all, I'd had plenty of what I thought was evidence that the spirits were real. What harm could there be in giving the bereaved a bit of comfort?

Inevitably, it all became cheating.

As in any profession, there was a sort of fraternity among professional Spiritualists, and information was exchanged on how to give the best seances. One of the first tricks you learned was to visit the local cemeteries in a new city, to choose a few families represented by the best-looking tombstones, and memorize the names and dates. You also would want to visit the demimonde, because wh.o.r.es always had the best gossip. Husbands are compelled, it seems, to confide the most d.a.m.ning of family secrets when in the arms of even the cheapest of Cyprians. Then there were Blue Books for every major city, which was a listing of those families most receptive and (more important) most generous to mediums, along with details about the occupations and personalities of their recently deceased.

Then, if you had a little money, you could order the stage props for a bang-up seance from Sylvestre & Company of Chicago, which produces a privately circulated catalog that offers everything an ambitious medium would need-from self-rapping tables to spirit cabinets, with secret compartments, to fully formed apparitions of cheesecloth, with ghostly rubber faces.

I had their latest catalog in my valise.

We do not, for obvious reasons, mention the names of our clients and their work (they being kept in strict confidence, the same as a physician treats his patients), Sylvestre & Company promised, but you can trust that our effects are in use by all of the prominent mediums in the entire world. In addition, we can furnish you the explanation and, where necessary, the material for the production of any known public "tests" or "phenomena" not mentioned in this, our latest list. Custom orders and rush service available upon receipt of telegraphic communication from trusted customers.

I can personally vouch for the effectiveness of their magic slates.

Still, I was not without compa.s.sion.

I gave away sessions to those who had little or no means, but were seeking only a little solace, some small sign that their loved ones were happy in Summerland. What harm could there be in providing comfort? For the big money, I targeted those predators who seem particularly in need of a lesson in humility-speculators, politicians, preachers. All men, of course, and therefore easy marks for the humb.u.g.g.e.ry of free love.

Even though I had become a professional fraud, inside me still burned a foolish hope that my antics were some pale reflection of truth. Perhaps it was possible that love could survive death.

Even though I knew there was no bigger sucker than a grief-stricken spouse, I kept up the earnest and private seances every May 13. I would spend sunrise to sunset in prayerful reflection, asking G.o.d to forgive my corruption. Then I would surround myself with innocents and believers in a darkened room and plead for Jonathan to signal from the other side.

Of course, no message ever came through.

I publicly vowed to keep up the seances until the thirteenth anniversary of Jonathan's death, and then declare the experiment failed. Privately, I decided that if by midnight of the thirteenth year nothing had come through, I would no longer believe-in anything.

Now it was May of 1877.

The anniversary of Jonathan's death would fall on the coming Sunday, the thirteenth, four days hence. There would be one last seance-if I could get out of jail. Getting sprung required cash for bail, and I was as broke as the Ten Commandments.

Being acquitted of the charges altogether was even more unlikely.

If nothing else, I would be found guilty by a.s.sociation.

In the last decade, there are two women who have created the popular notion of Spiritualism for the American public. One is Kate Bender. The other is Victoria Woodhull. Both claimed contact with the dead, both advocated free love, and both were widely regarded as prost.i.tutes. One is a murderer and, presumably, a fugitive. The other ran for president on the women's rights ticket and was portrayed by the cartoonist Thomas Nast as the bride of Satan.

A jury of Kansas men would gladly hang me in their stead.

8.

As Eddie perched on my shoulder and teased my hair with his beak, I heard keys rattle in the heavy door to the bull pen. Tom the Jailer appeared once more.

He strode into the jail, dragging behind him the polite tramp I had seen earlier. The red silk scarf hung loosely around his neck, the derby was gone, and his coat was ripped beneath the arms. Blood dribbled from his nose and onto his once-white shirt.

"Tom!" I scolded.

"I didn't do it," Tom said. "It was the railway bulldogs, the private d.i.c.ks. They left him like this over on the south tracks."

"What did he do?"

"You mean in addition to being a vagrant? They wanted his name and his hometown so they could put it in their report. He refused to answer, so they roughed him up."

"And you're jailing him for being a.s.saulted?"

"No, I'm jailing him for his own protection," Tom said. "Otherwise, with the tramp hysteria being what it is, they just might kill him."

The Panic of 1873 came the September after the Bender murders were discovered. Even now, the country still remained on its knees from the collapse of the investment banks on Wall Street. Thousands of men were out of work and hitching rides in, or under, or on top of, boxcars from town to town. But the newspapers chose to ignore the obvious (the papers were owned by wealthy men, after all) and called these unfortunates a great and threatening "tramp army." These were men, the editors said, who had learned to forage and bivouac as soldiers during the Civil War and who now chafed at the bonds of work, home, and family. It was all merde, as my Tante Marie would say.

"Is he badly hurt?"

"He's not too busted up," Tom said, locking the door behind him. "At least as far as I can tell, but he hasn't said a word to me. Stubborn, I guess. I reckon he'll be black-and-blue for a few days, but nothing worse."

The tramp moaned.

"Is there nothing you can do for him?"

"I'll bring him dinner directly," Tom said. "Yours too."

"Is it that late?"

"It's getting along to five," Tom said. "Have you been asleep?"

"In a manner of speaking," I said.

Tom left and I stared at the poor tramp. He was curled on his side, knees drawn to his chest, his face turned to the wall.

The world is unfair, life is pain, but to retreat is a mistake.

"Take heart," I said.

No response.

"Empty words, you're thinking, but I know what you're feeling right now. I have been beaten down, many times, both physically and emotionally, and the trick is to refuse to allow them to convince you that you're worthless. That's what they do best, getting us to defeat ourselves."