Returning to passion and The Civil War
Posted Wednesday, October 11, 2006 @ 05:30 PM
I joined NetFlix at the beginning of the month, foregoing icecream or some other expensive treat in exchange for two movies a month. I have since started The Civil War, the Ken Burns documentary, which I began watching in my eleventh grade "Writing America" class while we read Tony Horwitz's Confederates in the Attic. Until that year, the Civil War had always been brushed over or swept aside at the end of the year, oversummarized in history class, or dismissed entirely in the crush before exams. It just so happened that Mrs. Hubbard, my greatest history teacher, taught the Civil War in depth at precisely the same time we studied it in Beitelman's creative writing class. I remember that particular semester with great fondness—we read so much and spoke with such passion between the walls of that one creative writing classroom, whether we discussed the Civil War, The Last American Man, or Malcolm X.
The creative writing department became notorious, in my last few years at school there, for taking the most fieldtrips, seemingly without purpose or direction. True, there was that one fieldtrip we always joke about, when Flynn took us to the wrong college campus to hear a reading, so we drove forty-five minutes back to Birmingham, and forty-five minutes in the opposite direction to the correct campus, only to arrive for the reception following the reading we'd meant to attend. After three hours away from school, none of us had eaten lunch, so we all piled back on the bus and went to the mall, ate for an hour, and drove twenty minutes back to school. All in all I think we spent five hours away from class (or at least that's the number everyone always gives in retellings), and we'd done nothing more than drive around the state and eat lunch at the mall.
One of the fieldtrips I remember best from my time in creative writing was one we took in the "Writing America" class with Beitelman. We drove to Tuscaloosa, where there is an old plantation house called Tanglewood, which is now owned by the University and happens to be maintained and looked after by a friend of mine. She, her mother, and her brother live on the property in a modern house, and are expected to give tours of Tanglewood should any group show up asking for one. She was one of the creative writing department's greatest students, and has since been attending the University of Alabama, majoring in English. Every now and then I pass her on campus and pretend I have something to say. She is softspoken, and I often wonder if she prefers that I just wave.
That day, when we drove up the dirt road to Tanglewood in ASFA's short bus, Naomi showed us the inside of the house, which was built just before the Civil War. The staircase was uneven, the walls covered in old photographs of children and portraits of the families that had lived there. When we'd seen the whole house and skirted the yard behind it, she took us across a great field. We walked to its very center, where a gnarled tree offered just enough shade from the heavy sunlight, which baked the property's red dirt and everything that touched it. We lingered under the tree in a tiny graveyard inside a fence. Some of the graves were marked, some of the tombstones worn enough that you could no longer read the names. But we mostly looked at the unmarked Confederate graves, which had mere cube-shaped stones placed on them. There were at least a dozen.
To see a place the Civil War had touched moved me. After studying it, reading Horwitz's take on the grasp it still has on our country, and watching Ken Burns' documentary, I was not obsessed so much as I felt I'd made a real connection with the past and the way people had lived. That year began my real love for the South—not the Confederacy, mind you, but the state I have grown up in, and the places my great-grandmother (the last redhead in my family before me) told stories about. She grew up on a horse farm deep in Kentucky and showed us pictures of the property at nearly every opportunity. When my parents still took my sister and I to church and she was still alive, we'd stop by her apartment every Sunday before church to cook her breakfast. While Dad cooked her cheese grits and ham, or emptied spoiled milk from the fridge, my sister and I would listen to her stories of the farm. We imagined her there in the nineteen-teens, a teenager in a long dress riding down the front drive framed by two rows of massive trees. She lived to be ninety-eight, but always spoke of how she fully expected to make one hundred.
The next school year, Dad and I made a trip up to Virginia and Pennsylvania to visit colleges, and I remember feeling touched as we sped through the mountains of Virginia, whose valleys still sit beneath old school houses and white wooden churches.
After arriving at the University, I have been starved for the kinds of classes ASFA frequently provided—classes like "Writing America" which influenced nearly every other subject I studied, and crept into pockets of my life I'd never expected a writing class to go—into the hills of Virginia, onto every brown historical sign from here to Canada. Although my (at times, totally) inexplicable fondness for American literature has lived on, I've failed to find the same kind of passionate discussion here, even in my sophomore level class. Frequently I feel like I've traded that kind of passion for free time. I have loads of it, and after going so long through high school as president and participator in everything, I've forgotten how to use it. Each afternoon my bed calls to me, and I should be ashamed to admit that I've often passed a majority of the day by sleeping, with two three- to four-hour naps punctuated by a meal, some late night reading, and more sleep until class the next afternoon. Homework is something that gets done in the minutes before class, or while I'm waiting to meet a friend, and (since old habits die hard) papers are written at five in the morning when they're due at 9:30 the same day.
All of this, I suppose, is a way of saying that I am trying to fill my free time with the kind of ardor I used to find in the classroom, and I am beginning the experiment with The Civil War. Today I finished the first disc, which ends with a letter I thought I'd share with you. You can download an audio version of it (the same as what's on the DVD) in iTunes; it's called "Ashokan Farewell / Sullivan Balloo Letter." I highly recommend it. Anyway, here 'tis—a bit of historical passion for the day:
A week before the Battle of Bull Run, Sullivan Balloo, a major in the Second Rhode Island Volunteers, wrote home to his wife in Smithfield.
July 14, 1861, Washington D.C.Dear Sarah,
The indications are very strong that we shall move in a few days—perhaps tomorrow—and lest I should not be able to write you again, I feel impelled to write a few lines that may fall under your eye when I am no more. I have no misgivings about or lack of confidence in the cause in which I am engaged, and my courage does not halt or falter. I know how American civilization now leans upon the triumph of the government, and how great a debt we owe to those who went before us through the blood and suffering of the Revolution, and I am willing—perfectly willing—to lay down all my joys in this life to help maintain this government, and pay that debt.
Sarah, my love for you is deathless. It seems to bind me with mighty cables that nothing but omnipotence can break. And yet my love of country comes over me like a strong wind and bears me irresistibly with all those chains to the battlefield. The memory of all the blissful moments I have enjoyed with you come crowding over me, and I feel most deeply grateful to God and you that I have enjoyed them for so long, and how hard it is for me to give them up and burn to ashes the hopes and future years when God willing we might still have lived and loved together, and see our boys live and grow up to honorable manhood around us.
If I do not return, my dear Sarah, never forget how much I loved you, nor that when my last breath escapes me on the battlefield it will whisper your name. Forgive my many faults and the many pains I have caused you, how thoughtless—how foolish—I have sometimes been. But oh Sarah, if the dead can come back to this Earth, and flit unseen around those they love, I shall always be with you in the brightest day and darkest night, always. Always. And when the soft breeze fans your cheek, it shall be my breath. Or the cool air your throbbing temple, it shall be my spirit passing by.
Sarah, do not mourn me dead, think I am gone, and wait for me, for we shall meet again.
Sullivan Balloo was killed a week later at the first battle of Bull Run.
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When you get a chance, take History of the Civil War (HY 310 something) with Dr. Kohl. An excellent class and one of my favorites.
11 Oct 2006, 7:35 PM.
i have't seen any of ken burns documentaries, but i have his series on baseball and jazz in my queue at netflix, and as soon as whoever is holding the first disc to the jazz series hostage sends it back, i will bump them up to the top of the queue.
never having been personally interested in the civil war, though, i have not added that series into the queue. i think that i suffer from southern guilt when it comes to the civil war, the feeling that to be fascinated by that period of history is tantamount to approving of that period of history. i have known too many 'the south will rise again' southerners in my life to make that kind of interest easy for me.
not to say, of course, that i think that you fall into that category, and not to say that any interest in that period is unseemly or wrong. just that for me, in spite of my love of history, i struggle against letting that historical episode fascinate me too much, like turning your eyes away from a solar eclipse to keep from going blind.
is that weird?
11 Oct 2006, 9:19 PM.
Not weird. Understandable.
I guess I feel totally disconnected from the war, as I would with most other historical events, except there's so much folklore and myth surrounding it, and people are so passionate about it. (I feel like my use of the word "passion" has exceeded my yearly limit, with this post.)
I managed to grow up in a pocket of Birmingham not full of rednecks, or at least not too many of them, and so I've not encountered many "the South will rise again" types directly. Also, none of my family had come from Scotland when the war started, nor when it had ended. I think we arrived in the 1880s, and so in terms of being connected to the South or the Confederacy in that sense, I'm not.
I suppose my love for the South, especially for things like Southern Gothic fiction, naturally leads back to the Civil War, and sometimes I don't even consider that people may receive things like this post as me harboring the type of sentiment you describe. Hopefully not.
A girl should be able to eat her grits, watch a documentary, and love the red dirt and pines without causing too much of a stir, eh?
11 Oct 2006, 11:45 PM.
none but the most foolish would read this post and think that you harbored those sentiments, even were this the only thing someone read from you.
i also grew up somewhat free from rednecks, and thus was shocked beyond belief when i entered into the work world. i had a naive idea that those sentiments, and the prejudice that went along with them, were mostly dead, at least in the urban and suburban south anyways. that fragile naivete died a mewling, arduous death, and the cynicism that replaced it is something that i am not always proud of.
A girl should be able to eat her grits, watch a documentary, and love the red dirt and pines without causing too much of a stir, eh?
absolutely. i also love the south, and for the most part am proud of being southern. maybe thats why this one peculiar neurosis about this one historical period stands out for me as it does.
but, a boy can eat his fried chicken and homemade buttermilk biscuits and love the sight of tree-covered hills in the fall, robed in every autumnal color, and shy away from a particular period of his region's history and still be a good southern boy, eh?
12 Oct 2006, 1:49 PM.
Wow. That letter was amazing. I am the only that finds it strange that, although formal education during the Civil War was borderline nonexistent, everyone then (and by everyone, I mean the writers of the three or four Civil War letter I've read) seemed so much more articulate, even (or especially) in moments of (forgive me for using the word) passion?
(Sorry about the terrible sentence structure, by the way. And the heavy reliance on parentheses).
14 Oct 2006, 9:31 AM.
It's the eve of your nineteenth birthday, and I was just sitting in a dark room playing Nick Drake's "The Thoughts Of Mary Jane", which I think is about the effects of marijuana through the metaphor of a young girl. It's still so beautiful, elusive, and dreamy...even if a drug song, sweetly innocent, know what I mean? Anyway, Happy Birthday! :)
14 Oct 2006, 10:19 PM.
Where in Scotland does your family come from?
15 Oct 2006, 4:45 PM.
This was a time when news was gathered at the hearth, from tallowed prints passed from house to house or in long, detailed conversations; Americans found the thrill of entertainment and their solace for wartime anxieties both within the pages of literature and the settled sound of voices. So rarely was a citizen assailed, as we are, by any visual medium that there is no suprise those people developed such cogent and coherent grasps of our language. I often wish we had it today in our country.
As I visited isolated country towns in Russia it was to my astonishment that many rustic villagers, set apart from televisions and computers, had better holds on both theirs and our language than many of my own companions did. What these people had were mouths, books, and time. Perhaps American society at large has mouths only?
18 Oct 2006, 1:20 PM.