Chapter I: The Road to Vidalia

The river ran several thousand miles, from a land of snow and fir
trees and brief summers to a land of long, long summers, cane and
orange. The river was wide. It dealt in loops and a tortuous course,
and for the most part it was yellow and turbid and strong of current.
There were sandbars in the river, there were jewelled islands; there
were parallel swamps, lakes, and bayous. From the border of these, and
out of the water, rose tall trees, starred over, in their season, with
satiny cups or disks, flowers of their own or vast flowering vines,
networks of languid bloom. The Spanish moss, too, swayed from the
trees, and about their knees shivered the canebrakes. Of a remarkable
personality throughout, in its last thousand miles the river grew
unique. Now it ran between bluffs of coloured clay, and now it flowed
above the level of the surrounding country. You did not go down to the
river: you went up to the river, the river caged like a tiger behind
the levees. Time of flood was the tiger’s time. Down went the
levee—widened in an instant the ragged crevasse—out came the beast!—

December, along the stretch of the Mississippi under consideration,
was of a weather nearly like a Virginian late autumn. In the river
towns and in the plantation gardens roses yet bloomed. In the fields
the cotton should have been gathered, carried—all the silver stuff—in
wagons, or in baskets on the heads of negroes, to the gin-houses. This
December it was not so. It was the December of 1862. Life, as it used
to be, had disintegrated. Life, as it was, left the fields untended
and the harvest ungathered. Why pick cotton when there was nowhere to
send it? The fields stayed white.

The stately, leisurely steamers, the swan-like white packets, were
gone from the river; gone were the barges, the flatboats and freight
boats; gone were the ferries. No more at night did there come
looming—from up the stream, from down the stream—the giant shapes,
friendly, myriad-lighted. No more did swung torches reveal the long
wharves, while the deep whistle blew, and the smokestack sent out
sparks, and the negro roustabouts sang as they made her fast. No more
did the planter come aboard, and the planter’s daughter; no more was
there music of stringed instruments, nor the aroma of the fine cigar,
nor sweet drawling voices. The planter was at the front; and the
planter’s daughter had too much upon her hands to leave the
plantation, even if there had been a place to go to. As it happened
there was none.

Farragut, dressed in blue, ruled the river upward from the Gulf and
New Orleans to Baton Rouge. Porter, dressed in blue, ruled it downward
from Cairo to Grand Lake. Their steam frigates, corvettes, and
sloops-of-war, their ironclads, tinclads, gunboats, and rams flew the
Stars and Stripes. Between Grand Lake and Baton Rouge the river was
Confederate, unconquered yet, beneath the Stars and Bars. They flew
from land and water defences at Vicksburg, from the batteries up the
Yazoo, from Natchez and the works on the Red River, and the
entrenchments at Port Hudson. They flew from the few, few remaining
grey craft of war, from the transports, the cotton-clads, the
Vicksburg, the De Soto, the gunboat Grand Duke, the ram Webb. Tawny
and strong ran the Mississippi, by the Stars and Stripes, by the Stars
and Bars.

It had rained and rained. All the swamps were up, the bayous
overflowing. The tiger, too, was out; now here, now there. That other
tiger, War, was abroad, and he aided in breaking levees. On the
Mississippi side, on the Louisiana side, bottom lands were brimming.
Cottonwood, red gum, china trees, cypress and pine stood up, drenched
and dismal, from amber sheets and eddies, specked with foam. The
clouds hung dark and low. There was a small, chill, mournful wind. The
roads, trampled and scored by eighteen months of war, were little, if
any, better than no roads.

A detachment of grey infantry and a section of artillery, coming up on
the Louisiana side from the Red River with intent to cross at Vidalia
and proceed from Natchez to Vicksburg, found them so. In part the
detail was from a regiment of A.P. Hill’s, transferred the preceding
month from Fredericksburg in Virginia to Vicksburg in Mississippi,
sent immediately from Vicksburg toward Red River, it being rumoured
that Farragut meant a great attack there, and almost immediately
summoned back, Secret Service having determined that Grant at Oxford
meant a descent upon Vicksburg. The detachment was making a forced
march and making it through a Slough of Despond. The no-roads were
bottomless; the two guns mired and mired; the straining horses could
do little, however good their will. Infantry had to help, put a
shoulder to wheel and caisson. Infantry was too tired to say much, but
what it said was heartfelt,—“Got the right name for these States when
they called them _Gulf_ States! If we could only telegraph to China
they might pull that gun out on that side!”—“O God! for the Valley
Pike!”—“Don’t say things like that! Homesickness would be the last
straw. If anybody’s homesick, don’t, for the Lord’s sake, let on!...
Get up, Patsy! Get up, Pansy! Get up, Sorrel!”... “Look-a-here,
Artillery! If it’s just the same to you, we wish you’d call that horse
something else! You see it kind of brings a picture up.... This
identical minute ‘Old Jack’s’ riding Little Sorrel up and down before
Burnside at Fredericksburg, and we’re not there to see!... Oh, it
ain’t your fault! You can’t help being Mississippi and Louisiana and
bringing us down to help! You are all right and you fight like hell,
and you’ve got your own quality, and we like you first-rate! If we
weren’t Army of Northern Virginia, we surely would choose to be Army
of Tennessee and the Southwest—so there’s no need for you to get
wrathy!... Only we would be obliged to you if you’d change the name of
that horse!”

The clouds broke in a bitter downpour. “Ooooh-h! Country’s turned over
and river’s on top! _Get up, Patsy! Get up, Pansy! Get up_—This ain’t
a mud-hole, it’s a bayou! God knows, if I lived in this country I’d
tear all that long, waving, black moss out of the trees! It gives me
the horrors.”—“_Get on, men! get on!_”—“Captain, we can’t!”

Pioneers came back. “It’s a bayou—but there’s a corduroy bridge, not
more than a foot under water.”

Infantry crossed, the two guns crossed. Beyond the arm of the bayou
the earth was mere quaking morass. The men cut canes, armfuls and
armfuls of canes, threw the bundles down, and made some sort of
roadbed. Over it came those patient, famished, piteous soldiers, the
horses, and behind them, heavily, heavily through the thickened mire,
guns and caissons. Gun and wheel and caisson were all plastered with
mud, not an inch of bright metal showing. The horses, too, were all
masked and splashed. The men were in no better case, wet through,
covered from head to foot with mud and mire, the worn, worn uniforms
worsened yet by thorn and briar from the tangled forest. The water
dripped from the rifles, stock and barrel, the water dripped from the
furled and covered colours. The men’s shoes were very bad; only a few
had overcoats. The clouds were leaden, the rain streamed, the
comfortless day was drawing down. The detachment came into a narrow,
somewhat firmer road set on either hand with tall cypresses and water
oaks, from every limb of which hung the grey moss, long, crêpe-like,
swaying in the chill and fretting wind. “For the Lord’s sake,” said
Virginia in Louisiana, “sing something!”

A man in the colour guard started “Roll, Jordan, roll”—

“I want to get to Heaven when I die,—
To hear Jordan roll!”

The line protested. “Don’t sing about a _river!_ There’s river enough
in ours now!—That darkey, back there, said the levees were breaking.”

“Moses went up to de mountain top—
_Land of Canaan, Canaan Land_,
Moses went up to de mountain top—”

“Don’t sing that either! We’re nine hundred miles from the Blue Ridge
and Canaan Land.... Sech a fool to sing about mountains and home!”

“Well,” said Colour Guard, “that was what I was thinking about. If
anybody knows a cheerful hymn, I’ll be glad if he’ll line it out—”

“Don’t sing a hymn,” said the men. “Sing something gay. Edward Cary,
you sing something.”

“All right,” said Edward. “What do you want?”

“Anything that’ll light a fire in the rain! Sing us something funny.
Sing us a story.”

“There was a ram of Derby,”

sang Edward—

“As I have heard it said,
That was the fattest ram, sir,
That ever had a head—”

The cypress wood ended. They came out into vast cotton-fields where
the drowning bolls, great melancholy snowflakes, clung to the bushes,
idle as weeds, careless of famine in mill-towns oversea. The water
stood between the rows, rows that ran endlessly, cut from sight at
last by a whirling and formless grey vapour.

“The fleece that grew on that ram, sir,
It grew so mighty high,
The eagles built their nest in it,
For I heard the young ones cry.
And if you don’t believe me,
Or think I tell a lie,
Why, just look down to Derby
And see as well as I!”

The land was as flat as Holland, but the rank forest, the growth about
the wandering arms of bayous breathed of another clime. The rain came
down as in the rainy season, the wind was mounting, the wings of the
dusk flapping nearer.

“Get on, men, get on! We’re miles from Vidalia.”

“The horns that grew on that ram, sir,
They grew up to the moon,
A man went up in December
And didn’t come down till June!

“Look out, Artillery! There’s water under those logs!”

The horses and the first gun got across the rotting logs roofing black
water, infantry helping, tugging, pushing, beating down the cane.

“Shades of night, where are we anyhow? Cane rattling and the moss
waving and water bubbling—is it just another damned bayou or the
river?... And all the flat ground and the strange trees.... My head is
turning round.”

“It’s Bayou Jessamine,” volunteered an artilleryman. He spoke in a
drawling voice. “We aren’t far from the river, or the river isn’t far
from us, for I think the river’s out. It appears to me that you
Virginians grumble a lot. There isn’t anything the matter with this
country. It’s as good a country as God’s got. Barksdale’s men and the
Washington Artillery are always writing back that Virginia can’t hold
a candle to it.... Whoa, there, Whitefoot! Whoa, Dick!”

The second gun had come upon the raft of logs. A log slipped, a wheel
went down, gun and caisson tilted—artillery and infantry surged to the
aid of the endangered piece. A second log slipped, the wheel beneath
the caisson went down, the loaded metal chest jerked forward, striking
forehead and shoulder of one of the aiding infantrymen. The blow was
heavy and stretched the soldier senseless, half in the black water,
half across the treacherous logs. Amid ejaculations, oaths, shouted
orders, guns and caisson were righted, the horses urged forward, the
piece drawn clear of the bayou. Down came the rain as though the
floodgates of heaven were opened; nearer and nearer flapped the
dusk....

Edward Cary, coming to himself, thought, on the crest of a low wave of
consciousness, of Greenwood in Virginia and of the shepherds and
shepherdesses in the drawing-room paper. He seemed to see his
grandfather’s portrait, and he thought that the young man in the
picture had put out a hand and drawn him from the bayou. Then he sank
into the trough of the sea and all again was black. The next wave was
higher. He saw with distinctness that he was in a firelit cabin, and
that an old negro was battling with a door which the wind would not
let shut. The hollow caught him again, but proved a momentary prison.
He opened his eyes fully and presently spoke to the two soldiers who
hugged the fire before which he was lying.

“You two fellows in a cloud of steam, did we lose the gun?”

The two turned, gratified and congratulatory. “No, no, we didn’t lose
it! Glad you’ve waked up, Edward! Caisson struck you, knocked you into
the bayou, y’ know! Fished you out and brought you on till we came to
this cabin. Company had to march away. Couldn’t wait—dark coming and
the Mississippi gnawing holes out of the land like a rat out of a
cheese! The boys have been gone twenty minutes. Powerful glad you’ve
come back to us! We’d have missed you like sixty! Captain says he
hopes you can march!”

Edward sat up, then lay down again upon the pallet. “I’ve got a
singing head,” he said dreamily. “What’s involved in my staying here?”

His comrades laughed, they were so glad to hear him talking. “Told
Kirk you couldn’t march yet awhile! You got an awful blow. Only, we
can’t stay with you—that’s involved! Captain’s bent on making Vidalia.
Orders are to bring you on if you can march, and if you can’t to
double-quick it ourselves and catch up! Says Grant’s going to invest
Vicksburg and he can’t spare even Kirk and me. You’re to come on as
quick as you can, and rejoin wherever we are. Says nobody ever had a
better headpiece than you, and that you’ll walk in somewhere that
isn’t at the end of the procession!”

The night descended. Edward lay half asleep upon the pallet, in the
light of the pine knots with which the negro fed the fire. The rushing
in his head was going, the nausea passing, the warmth was sweet, bed
was sweet, rest, rest, rest was sweet! The old negro went to and fro,
or sat upon a bench beside the glowing hearth.

After his kind he communed with himself half aloud, a slow stream of
comment and interrogation. Before long he took from some mysterious
press a little corn meal and a small piece of bacon. The meal he
stirred with water and made into thin pones, which he baked upon a
rusty piece of tin laid on a bed of coals. Then he found a broken
knife and cut a few rashers of bacon and fried them in an ancient
skillet. The cabin filled with a savoury odor! Edward turned on the
pallet. “Uncle, are you cooking for two?”

The meal, his first that day, restored him to himself. By now it took
much to kill or permanently disable a Confederate soldier. Life
forever out of doors, the sky for roof, the earth for bed, spare and
simple diet, body trained and exercised, senses cleared and nerves
braced by danger grown the element in which he moved and had his
being, hope rising clear from much reason for despair, ideality intact
in the midst of grimmest realities, a mind made up, cognizant of great
issues and the need of men—the Confederate soldier had no intention of
dying before his time. Nowadays it took a bullet through heart or head
to give a man his quietus. The toppling caisson and the bayou had
failed to give Edward Cary his.

The young white man and the old negro shared scrupulously between them
the not over-great amount of corn bread and bacon. The negro placed
Edward’s portion before him on a wooden stool and took his own to the
bench beside the hearth. The wind blew, the rain dashed against the
hut, the flames leaped from resinous pine knot to pine knot.

Supper finished, talk began. “How far from the river are we?”

“Ef you’ll tell ’Rasmus, sah, ’Rasmus’ll tell you! En rights hit
oughter be two miles, but I’s got er kind ob notion dat de ribber’s
done crope nigher.”

Edward listened to the wind and rain. “What’s to hinder it from coming
nigher yet?”

“Nothin’, sah.”

The young man got up, somewhat unsteadily, from the pallet, and with
his hand against the wall moved to the door, opened it, and looked
out. He shivered, then laughed. “Noah must have seen something like it
when he looked out of the Ark!” He closed the door with difficulty.

Behind him, the negro continued to speak. “Leastways, dar’s only de
Cape Jessamine levee.”

“Cape Jessamine?”

“De Gaillard place, sah.”

With a stick he drew lines in the ashes. “Bayou heah. Ribber heah. De
Cun’l in between—only right now he way from home fightin’ de
Yankees—he en’ Marse Louis. De Gaillard place—Cape Jessamine. Hope dat
levee won’t break!”

Edward came back to the fire. “Do you belong to the place?”

“No, sah, I’se free. Ol’ marster freed me. But I goes dar mos’ every
day en’ takes advice en’ draws my rations. No, sah, I don’ ’zactly
belong, but dey’re my white folks. De Gaillards’s de finest kind dar
is. Dar ain’t no finer.”

Old man and young man, dark-skinned and light, African and Aryan, the
two rested by the fire. The negro sat, half doubled, his hands between
his knees, his eyes upon the floor by the door. Now he was silent, now
he muttered and murmured. The glare from the pine knots beat upon his
grey pate, upon his shirt, open over his chest, and upon his gnarled
and knotted hands. Over against him half reclined the other, very torn
and muddy, unshaven, gaunt, and hollow-eyed, yet, indescribably,
carrying his rags as though they were purple, showing through fatigue,
deprivation, and injury something tireless, uninjured, and undeprived.
He kept now a somewhat languid silence, idle in the warmth, his
thoughts away from the Mississippi and the night of storm. With the
first light he would quit the cabin and press on after his company. He
thought of the armies of the Far South, of the Army of Tennessee, the
Army of the Trans-Mississippi, and he thought of the fighting in
Virginia, of the Army of Northern Virginia, the army he had quitted
but a few weeks before. He, too, that afternoon, had felt homesick for
it, lying there behind the hills to the south of Fredericksburg,
waiting for Burnside to cross the Rappahannock!... The soldier must go
where he is sent! He thought of his own people, of his father, of
Fauquier Cary, of Greenwood, and his sisters there. He should find at
Vicksburg a letter from Judith. From the thought of Judith he moved to
that of Richard Cleave.... Presently, with an impatient sigh, he shook
himself free. Better think, to-night, of something else than tragedies
and mysteries! He thought of roses and old songs, and deep forests and
sunny childhood spaces. He put attention to sleep, diffused his mind
and hovered in mere warmth, odors, and hues of memory and imagination.
He set faint silver bells to ringing, then, amid slow alternating
waves of red and purple, a master violin to playing. Lulled, lulled in
the firelight, his eyelids drooped. He drew sleeper’s breath.

“_De water’s comin’ under de doah! De water’s comin’ under de doah!_”

The violin played the strain for a moment, then it appeared that a
string broke. Edward sat up. “What’s the matter?—Ha, the levee broke,
did it?”

“Hit ain’t de river, hit am de bayou! De bayou’s comin’ out, en’ ef
you don’ min’, sah, we’s obleeged ter move!”

Edward rose, stretching himself. “Move where?”

“Ter Cape Jessamine, sah. Bayou can’t git dat far, en’ dey sho’ ain’t
gwine let de river come out ef dey kin help hit!”

The floor was ankle deep in yellow water. Suddenly the door blew open.
There entered streaming rain and a hiss of wind. The negro, gathering
into a bundle his meagre wardrobe and bedding, shook his head and made
haste. Edward took his rifle and ragged hat. The water deepened and
put the fire out. The two men emerged from the cabin into a widening
lake, seething and eddying between the dark trees. Behind them the hut
tilted a little upon its rude foundation. The negro looked back.
“Liked dat house, en’ now hit’s er-gwine, too! Bayou never come out
lak dat befo’ dishyer war!”

Out of the knee-deep water at last, they struck into something that to
the feet felt like a road. On either hand towering cypresses made the
intense night intenser. It was intense, and yet out of the bosom of
the clouds, athwart the slant rain, came at times effects of light.
One saw and one did not see; there was a sense of dim revelations,
cloudy purposes of earth, air, and water, given and then withdrawn
before they could be read. But there was one thing heard plainly, and
that was the voice of the Mississippi River.

They were going toward it, Edward found. Once, in the transient and
mysterious lightening of the atmosphere, he thought that he saw it
gleaming before them. The impression was lost, but it returned. He saw
that they were at the base of a tongue of land, set with gigantic
trees, running out into the gleaming that was the river. The two were
now upon slightly rising ground, and they had the sweep of the night
before them.

“Fo’ Gawd!” said the negro; “look at de torches on de levee! River’s
mekkin’ dem wuhk fer dey livin’ to-night at Cape Jessamine!”