A journal of narrative writing.

(An excerpt from The Road From Chapel Hill, a novel of Civil War North Carolina, to be published by Penguin/Berkley in November 2006)


Winter, 1864:Clyde, a Southern boy loyal to the North, has joined the Union army and been taken prisoner by the Confederates.

 

Inside the Salisbury prison compound, Clyde was seriously worried. He had been here for months now and not one soul had been exchanged, unless you counted as exchanged the ones who had gone to heaven, or to hell for wickedness, for cursing or for fighting or for stealing or beating other people up. The place was crowded, a vast expanse of ragged half-starved men, he figured thousands. Not so much as a roof above their heads, although there were buildings, hospitals and quarters for the guards and such. The biggest building had been a factory of some sort, but now it was a hospital, full of men lined along the walls to die.

The first few nights he slept on the ground and watched to see what other people did. A few of them had tents and he tried to get in under one of them, but it was so crowded under there that when one man turned in his sleep all the others had to turn as well and pretty soon they shoved him out. So then he thought, I have slept out on the ground when I were a soldier, I can sleep out on the ground here too.

After that it rained for three days straight, and three nights too, and the prison yard became a bog and stank with all the putrid smells that come out of a man. When Clyde lay down to rest, he sank up to his ears and feared that if he fell asleep he would just drown in shit.

So he thought he’d make himself a dugout, the way the others did. Their holes were all across the prison yard, some with two or three men together, peering out of them like wild beasts from their lairs. He did not have a spade or grubbing hoe, just a case knife, which made it slow, and no bucket or piggin, which meant he only had his shirt for hauling off the soil. He made a low wall around the entrance to keep the rain from flooding in, although after a while it leaked down through the ground. At least his wall kept dead rats from washing down, or maggots and other such disgusting things.

Having two or three men in one hole together meant that one was always there to guard it when the others were away, and it was company at night as well. Before Clyde started digging, he asked a couple of others if they would share with him, but no one seemed to take a fancy to his company, and so for a while he shared it with a nigra, which was better than not having anyone at all.

The nigra’s name was Caesar and he reminded Clyde of Amos, Pa’s hired slave back home, he had that same slow way of talking. He had been a sailor once and could tell about what it was like to sail a ship out on the ocean. And he could sing, you could hear his singing come from underneath your feet when he was down there on his own. When people heard it they did not try to steal the hole.

Caesar had jumped ship in Baltimore, but was caught and hauled to Salisbury. Having been a sailor all his life, he did not take well to prison, so one day he tried escaping. He hid himself amongst a pile of bodies waiting on the dead cart to be buried. He planned to let them bury him as well and when they went away he would dig himself back out. He asked Clyde to come with him, but Clyde said it was foolishness, pure foolishness, they would have to leave their clothes behind since everyone was buried naked, how would they escape, would they run naked through the mountains all the way to Tennessee? And anyways, guards were at the cemetery. But Caesar figured he would wait till night to dig back out. He figured since he was so black no one would see him in the dark. He would get clear away and find some slave somewhere who would help him. But when they picked him up and slung him in the pit the breath came grunting out of him, and so they knew he was alive and shot him dead.

This story, carried back into the compound by the guards, was talked over and opined on by one man to another until someone telling someone else was overheard by Clyde, who slammed his fist into the dirt wall of his hole and swore. For a while he fought off muggers trying to take his hole away from him, but got beat up so bad he thought they’d kill him in the end, so he gave it up to them and went back to sleeping on the ground with rain coming down all over him, and lightning cracking so close overhead he flinched as though a sniper had him in his sights. He missed Caesar singing in the night.

More prisoners came crowding every day. Some said they came from someplace called the Libby prison up in Richmond, others from a prison called Andersonville down in Georgia. All of them were pulled down and depressed, not one with the least idea of why they had been moved, nor did they care, they were so sick and starving fit to fall down in their tracks. A good number went directly to the hospital, which meant that they were goners, hardly anyone got out of there except to be tossed in a pile beside the dead house wall and then swung naked up onto the cemetery cart and hauled off and tossed into a pit.

Clyde had seen that cemetery. He had volunteered one time to be on burial detail for an extra ration, which he did not get, and had seen what it was like. All those bodies slung every day into the pit together, it was pitiful. He had to shovel dirt across them, full into their faces, it was right pitiful, and the bad smell made his stomach turn. After that he had to help with sorting the dead men’s clothes so they could be handed out to someone else to die in. They crawled with greybacks, but there was no pot big enough to boil them in.

It was after that he got the diarrhea, not all the time so he was not sick to die, although he knew he’d lost a lot of weight. He knew that for a fact. He’d been going by the commissary building where there was a platform scale out front, and climbed up onto it and weighed himself. Eighty pounds, he must be skin and bone. He pulled his shirt up, looking at his ribs, and pulled it quickly down again. He could not understand why he had not been exchanged. He asked a guard, but the guard just spat and said, You get any closer to the dead line, you sorry little rat-faced Yankee shite, and I will shoot you. He would have too, and no one to either know or care, they were all too busy stealing some other feller’s cornmeal ration straight out of his mouth, or making plans about digging tunnels to escape.

Everybody talked about escaping, everybody. Most of them did not try it for fear of being shot, or for fear the bloodhounds would come after them and rip their throats out. The bloodhounds were caged up outside the gates and spent all night howling when the moon was up. Each morning, the guards walked them round the outside of the stockade, you could hear them out there baying when they thought they’d caught a scent. Perhaps if he had gone with Caesar he could have warned him not to grunt. Perhaps they could have found a creek to run along and hide their scent. Perhaps they could have got away. He wished Caesar wasn’t dead. He was just a nigra, nothing much, but Clyde had liked him pretty well, and no one else would be his friend, he could not understand it.

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