Metro Pulse/Pulp/Dixie Diaries

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The South rises again (and again)

by Jeanne McDonald

People never get tired of reading about the Civil War, perhaps because we keep on writing books about it. For Southerners, of course, that great internecine conflict represents a particularly poignant period in American history. Shelby Foote, author of the monumental three-volume series, The Civil War: A Narrative, has put that fascination succinctly into context: "If Southerners talk a lot about the Civil War, that's easy to account for. When I was coming along, if you had a difference of opinion with another boy, you had a fistfight. The ones I remember with the greatest clarity are the ones I lost. And that is the way it is with the Civil War."

Two new books demonstrate that continued interest. The first, Josephine Humphreys' painstakingly researched novel, Nowhere Else on Earth (Viking, $24.95), chronicles the lives of the residents of Scuffletown, an Indian settlement on the Lumbee River in North Carolina whose sufferings during the war are even greater than most because of their economic and social isolation. Demand for their principal commodity, turpentine, has dried up, marauding Union soldiers reduce them to poverty, and the Home Guard commandeers their sons into forced labor in military forts and salt works. Parents rush their sons off to join a renegade gang headed by Henry Berry Lowrie, who steals guns and food from the enemies of the community.

He also steals the heart of the narrator, Rhoda Strong, an independent half-breed. Rhoda's mother, Cee, warns her against Henry. "I let him take the boys because their names were on the list," she tells the 16-year-old Rhoda. "But the boys aren't going to marry him...Nobody in this family is going to marry him. Henry Lowrie...won't have room in his life for a wife, or if he does it will be a mighty small room."

But Rhoda marries Henry anyway, effecting an estrangement with Cee, whose predictions prove all too accurate. Henry's crimes against his persecutors turn cruel and murderous, while Rhoda, guilty by association, becomes known as the Queen of Scuffletown.

At the end of the novel, Rhoda, now 41, obviously hasn't finished telling her story, and she's much too powerful a character to leave without a satisfactory resolution. But the final sentence of the novel seems to contain a promise that we haven't heard the last of Rhoda. "We wait," she says.

The origin of the Scuffletown residents remains a mystery until the end of the book, when the local doctor proposes that they might be Indians who intermarried with descendants of the famous Lost Colony settlers—117 English men, women and children who came to the New World in 1587 and then disappeared without a trace except for the word "Croatoan" carved into a tree. I remember sitting through Paul Green's outdoor drama, The Lost Colony, as a child, waving off Manteo, North Carolina's voracious mosquitoes and overwhelming heat and humidity. Even a child could appreciate the adverse climatic conditions the victims faced; and recently, archaeologists have studied growth rings of ancient trees and determined that from 1587 to 1589, the worst drought in 770 years occurred in the area. When the Indians couldn't supply food to the colonists, fighting erupted—at least two Anglo-Indian wars correlate perfectly with the droughts—so if Rhoda's ancestors survived the drought and cohabited with Indians, the theory provides a reasonable explanation for both the fate of Lost Colony and the origin of the Scuffletown Lumbee Indians.

The second book, Roy Morris' The Better Angel: Walt Whitman in the Civil War (Oxford University Press, $25), covers the three years (1862-65) when the American poet tended wounded soldiers in Washington hospitals, carrying gifts and food, often sitting at the bedsides of the dying all night and sometimes even observing their amputations. Entries from his notebooks read: "Bed 53 wants some licorice; Bed 6...bring some raspberry vinegar to make a cooling drink with water; Bed 11, when I come again, don't forget to write a letter for him."

Whitman was the first to admit that he, too, benefited from these visits: "People used to say to me, Walt you are doing miracles for those fellows in the hospitals. I wasn't. I was doing miracles for myself." At that point of his life, Whitman's poetry had been drying up, but reinvigorated by these wartime associations, he produced new books, newspaper articles, essays, and dozens of poems, including his great elegy to Lincoln, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd."

Despite its academic approach, numerous footnotes. and extensive bibliography, Morris' book provides valuable new insights into both Whitman's work and the tensions in wartime Washington, proving that there still remain unexplored areas of Civil War history to be written about. And that means more books for Southerners who are still trying to figure out just how we lost the fight.