9
The old South was plowed under.
But the ashes are still warm.
—HENRY MILLER, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, 1945
Backwoods Mississippi, a myth-encrusted badlands for so many Americans, was for me the most familiar ground in the South. As a union organizer in the early 1980s, I’d trolled thousands of miles of Mississippi byways in search of new members. Fifteen years later, I could still recite the litany of absurdly named crossroads I’d chanted to myself during long, lonely drives: Hot Coffee, Its, Soso, Chunky, Whynot, Scooba, Shivers, Jumpertown, Prismatic, Basic City.
But rereading the diary of my time in Mississippi, I was struck by how rarely I’d noted anything to do with the Civil War. Here and there I’d recorded a monument’s inscription (“The Men Who Wore the Gray Were Right and Right Can Never Die”), or pondered a clump of rebel graves poking from the weeds between a Jiffy-Mart and a shoe factory. But at twenty-two my Civil War virus still lay in remission; blues bars and Ole Miss coeds stirred me more deeply than cannons and cemeteries. Also, compared to other Southern states east of the Mississippi, the homeland of Faulkner and Foote compassed relatively few sites of Civil War renown.
Except, of course, Vicksburg, where I headed now after winding through the state along the Natchez Trace, an antebellum trade route that had become a scenic highway. Perched on steep bluffs overlooking a meander loop of the Mississippi, Vicksburg once commanded the river’s narrowest and wildest point south of Memphis. Boats bobbed and twisted in Vicksburg’s eddies, often running aground; before the War, the life span of a Mississippi steamboat averaged only two years. In wartime, Union gunboats faced the added challenge of firing accurately from yawing decks. The Confederates, firing back from Vicksburg’s swamp-skirted bluffs, were able to choke traffic down the river and cling to the city long after other ports fell. It was only by attacking from land as well as from water, and then laying siege, that Grant finally brought down “the Gibraltar of the West.”
Ten years after the War, the Mississippi River changed course, leaving Vicksburg high and dry and accomplishing in an instant what Grant fought for months to achieve: a way past the town. Engineers later cut a channel, redirecting a nearby waterway beneath the city’s bluffs. Now, instead of the mighty Mississippi, it was the uneuphonious “Yazoo Diversion Canal” that lapped at the shore of what Mark Twain, in a rare lapse from cynicism, dubbed the “lofty hill-city.”
Vicksburg’s waterfront underwent another transformation with Mississippi’s embrace of legalized gambling in the early 1990s. During my last visit, in 1981, the town had seemed picturesquely seedy, a sort of downmarket Natchez with cannons and kudzu. Now it was just seedy. Washington Street, once the town’s elegant main thoroughfare, had become a hideous gash catering to the gambling trade: cheap motels, pawn shops, check-cashing shops, J. M. Fly Rent-All, Dr. Junk’s buy-sell-trade!, Mrs. Harris Spiritual Advisor, and RV parks with streets named Double Diamond Drive and Avenue of Aces.
The occasional cannon or bronze Confederate bust were now lost amidst neon billboards flashing REEL WINNERS! and LOOSEST SLOTS IN TOWN! During the wartime siege, Confederates set cotton bales alight on the riverbank so gunners could see Union ships slipping by in the night. Now, it was Harrah’s and other casinos that cast an eerie, twenty-four-hour glow across the water.
Stopping at the grandly named Vicksburg Convention and Visitors’ Bureau, I chatted with the office manager, a woman named Lenore. She’d first started working in tourism twenty years before. “Back then, we were just a double-wide trailer off the interstate,” she said. “When people stopped in, I’d take out a city map and circle all six tourist sites—basically the battlefield and a few old houses.” Now Vicksburg boasted “27 bonafide attractions,” though bonafide seemed a strange word to describe faux-riverboat casinos ringed by theme parks, putt-putt golf courses and Bayou Bash Bumper Boats.
Few gamblers, though, bothered to see Vicksburg’s historic sites. So Lenore lay awake nights, trying to dream up a visitors’ slogan that might encourage more crossover. At the door, she tried one on for size. “Gamble in the Lap of History.” She paused. “What do you think? Too tacky?”
It was hard to think of anything too tacky to describe a town with a Casino Faulkner’s Gift Shop, a street named Cool Millions Lane, and flyers that proclaimed: VIVA LAS VICKSBURG. One casino, the Ameristar, replicated a nineteenth-century steamboat, with a paddle wheel, smokestacks and layer-cake decks. The historical resemblance was ruined somewhat by the casino’s size—seven times that of an actual steamboat—and by the boat’s immobility. Fixed to a permanently moored barge, the boat squatted like an oversized bathtub toy in a small, shielded lagoon (Mississippi gaming laws required that all casinos occupy bodies of water, however contrived).
I checked into Harrah’s, which mercifully limited its old-timey touches to blackjack dealers in dark cravats and murals of nineteenth-century river scenes. After a brief, losing visit to the slots, I left the cucumber-cool casino and started up the steep bluff leading to Vicksburg’s old town. The sky was the color of unpolished pewter, the air so leaden that I seemed to be pushing through a force field. Halfway up, my shirt and hair were soaked with sweat and my customary trot had slowed to a plod. It was May, the same month when the siege of Vicksburg began in 1863. I tried to imagine Union soldiers, mostly Midwestern farm boys, sweating through their wool uniforms and praying that the rebels would capitulate before they themselves succumbed to the Deep South summer.
Crowning the hilltop was the Vicksburg I dimly recalled from my earlier visit: brick Victorian storefronts and antebellum mansions, some still harboring Union cannonballs in their walls. I shuffled along the one level street in sight, toward a comforting-sounding dot on my map marked Coca-Cola Museum (the beverage was first bottled in Vicksburg in 1894). On the way, I paused at a quaint, false-fronted shop marked “Corner Drug Store.” Cannonballs flanked the door and a curious mix of items—dueling pistols, dice, old medicine bottles—filled the window.
Inside, one aisle displayed shampoo, laxatives and D-Con rat poison, the next a row of patent medicines and quack potions labeled “Dr. Otto’s India Smash Compound” or “Wa-Hoo Blood and Nerve Tonic.” Another aisle featured medical instruments from the Civil War. The owner, a small, silver-haired man named Joe Gerache, filled out prescriptions behind the counter. “In this life I’m a pharmacist,” he said, when I asked about the store’s schizophrenic display. “In my other life I’m a Civil War surgeon.” He waited until a few customers departed, then locked the front door and gave me a tour.
“These are some of my favorite things,” he said, beginning with the medical instruments. He picked up what looked like a carpentry-shop hacksaw. “This was the most popular tool in the Civil War. They sawed a lot of bones in that war.” Beside the saw lay a trepanning tool, a corkscrew-like instrument used to bore holes in skulls. “By the time you finished with this, the guy went home in a box or with a drool bucket. That was the beginning of neurosurgery.”
Gerache reached for an anesthesia mask. “Luckily, we had painkillers, ether and chloroform mostly,” he said. “But if we administered them wrong, it was a one-way trip.” When drugs weren’t available, soldiers bit bullets during surgery. Gerache showed me a minié ball scarred with teeth marks. “Soldiers bit so hard that they’d throw their jaws out. So it was determined that two bullets were better, one on each side. That way the bite was more even.”
We moved on to the medicines. “The biggest killer in the Civil War wasn’t the rifle but the microbe,” he said. “These medicines killed a lot, too.” He ticked off the potions and tinctures in the medical wagon of a Civil War physician, including silver nitrate, castor oil, turpentine, belladonna, opium, brandy, and quinine. “Only one came close to curing anything, which was quinine for malaria.” He showed me a bottle with a skull and crossbones. “This is carbolic acid, used to clean wounds. But what it mostly did was eat tissue.” Gerache shook his head. “If they’d known to dilute it a hundred or so times, they’d have had Lysol, a perfect antiseptic.”
Gerache ended with a brief lecture on dysentery, which disabled men of both armies by the thousands. “The South could have won the War if it had found a cure for the flux,” he said. “Instead, they handed out medicines which only made things worse. Here, let me show you some of my purgatives.”
When the grisly tour was done, Gerache told me how he’d started collecting old weapons and other artifacts as a child. “When I was coming up, no one was interested in this stuff, so people would give me things that had been sitting in their attics and basements. They’d say ‘Take it, we’re glad to get it out of the house.’” He chuckled. “My parents were worried. They thought minié balls would lead to cannonballs or worse, the way parents worry now about marijuana leading to hard drugs.”
During World War II, Gerache served in the Pacific with a MASH-style unit, evacuating wounded from the battlefield. Returning home, he thought about going to medical school, but after years overseas “I felt like life was passing me by.” So he opened this pharmacy instead, in an old building that had served as a saloon during the siege. Collecting Civil War medicines and instruments had become an outlet for the career he sometimes wished he’d pursued in real life.
Gerache often shared his collection with school groups, and also performed mock amputations at reenactments. Mostly, though, he displayed his wares for his own personal pleasure. “I have my collectibles at the store because I’m here twice as much as I’m at home. So why not have them to look at?”
Gerache had also confirmed his parents’ fears. For years he’d heard rumors about a huge Confederate gun buried on the edge of town. “I got to thinking, bullets and pistols are nice. But maybe I ought to have a cannon.” He’d found what looked like the edge of a cannon barrel poking from an old woman’s flower garden. The woman didn’t want her yard torn up, so Gerache purchased the land, still unsure what lay beneath. “I bought a pig in a poke,” he said.
The pig turned out to be a 9,000-pound Parrott Gun, one of the Confederacy’s huge riverside cannons. Gerache pointed out the store window at a traffic circle across the street. In the middle squatted the Parrott, its ten-foot barrel pointing toward the water. The cannon was worth at least $60,000 to collectors, but Gerache didn’t worry about security. “Nobody will move that, unless they’ve got a construction crane,” he said. “It’s been hit by cars a few times but that’s it.”
Someone rapped on the pharmacy door. Gerache looked up as if to wish them away. “Come by my house after work,” he said, “and I’ll show you a few more of my favorite things.”
RETREATING DOWN THE HILL to the air-conditioned casino, I sat at the bar and scanned the tourist literature Lenore had given me, as well as newspaper clips I’d collected on Vicksburg. “If all that comes to mind when you think of our town is Civil War battle scenes, you’re not even getting half the picture,” the promotional literature began. “Don’t get us wrong. Vicksburg’s place in history is permanent. But Vicksburg today is much, much more. It’s a place where old and new blend in delightful combination like nowhere else in America.”
Actually, old and new weren’t blending too well, and history was proving anything but permanent. Frenzied construction along the waterfront had changed drainage patterns and cut into the loose, silty soil of Vicksburg’s fragile bluffs, hastening their erosion. The Park Service had recently been forced to close a blufftop gun battery because it had buckled following construction of a casino access road at the base of the hill. The massive cannon, which had once helped repel the Union fleet, now pointed impotently at a casino parking lot into which the gun battery now threatened to slide.
Another casino, ignoring the warnings of the Park Service and local historians, had bulldozed near a nineteenth-century black graveyard that held the remains of U.S. Colored Troops. Construction at the site halted when the dozers turned up bones. “I just want to get my deceased out of there,” the graveyard’s overseer told the local paper, sounding like a general requesting a ceasefire to collect his casualties.
Vicksburg’s battlefield, or the portion of it preserved by the Park Service, formed a crescent arcing across hills and ravines a mile or so behind the waterfront. Touring it by foot and car, I found the battle much harder to grasp than Shiloh. For starters, Vicksburg wasn’t a single, momentous clash between armies meeting on a defined patch of ground. Instead, Vicksburg became a months-long campaign embracing several mini-battles and the forty-seven-day siege. Much of the fighting occurred far from Vicksburg, as Grant drove inland to encircle the city.
Vicksburg differed from Shiloh in other essential ways. By mid-1863, generals had overcome their earlier disdain for digging in. Shovels proved as crucial as guns, with the two sides gouging 60,000 feet of zigzag trenches. Also, civilians suffered alongside soldiers, enduring heavy bombardment and near-starvation during the siege. Vicksburg, in sum, offered a preview of the sort of grinding, total warfare that Grant and Sherman would later wage in the East—and that European armies would pursue with even greater savagery in the twentieth century.
The battlefield park’s most conspicuous feature was its “monument overload,” as one ranger put it. The plaques and memorials totaled 1,323, and that was after a significant subtraction; during a 1942 metal drive, half the cast-iron tablets were donated to the World War II effort. One monument stood out. Modeled on the Pantheon in Rome, it was inscribed with the names of 36,000 Illinois soldiers, including an extraordinary private named Albert D. J. Cashire.
“In handling a musket in battle,” a comrade recalled, “he was the equal of any in the company.” Cashire also “seemed specially adept at those tasks so despised by the infantryman,” such as sewing and washing clothes. Cashire fought in forty skirmishes and battles and became active in veterans’ affairs, marching in parades for decades after the War.
Then, in 1911, while working as a handyman in Illinois, Cashire was hit by an automobile and taken to the hospital with a leg broken close to the hip. The doctor who examined Cashire discovered what the Illinois veteran had so long concealed; Cashire was a woman, an Irish immigrant née Jennie Hodgers. Hodgers was eventually sent to an insane asylum and forced to wear women’s clothing until her death in 1915.
“I left Cashier the fearless boy of twenty-two at the end of the Vicksburg campaign,” one former comrade wrote after visiting her at the asylum. “I found a frail woman of seventy, broken, because on discovery she was compelled to put on skirts. They told me she was as awkward as could be in them. One day she tripped and fell, hurting her hip. She never recovered.”
A former sergeant said that Hodgers told him, “The country needed me, and I wanted excitement.” Money may have tempted her as well; for a poor Irish immigrant, the soldier’s pay of $13 a month represented a stable if modest income. Vicksburg’s battlefield museum displayed a picture of Hodgers in uniform, a mannish figure with short hair who stood conspicuously shorter than her comrades (she was barely five feet tall). The museum also told of 400 other women who went to war disguised as men. One, Sarah Emma Edmonds, chose to reveal her sex in 1884, when she appeared for a reunion of the 2nd Michigan Infantry as a woman.
Hodgers’s secret, at least, lived after her, with her assumed name etched on the Illinois monument at Vicksburg, and on a veterans’ headstone the War Department placed by her grave. Decades later, another stone was added that read:
ALBERT D. J. CASHIRE
CO. G, 95 ILL INF CIVIL WAR
BORN
JENNIE HODGERS
IN CLOGHER HEAD, IRELAND
1843-1915
The Vicksburg siege produced other oddities. The Confederacy experimented with camels, and one colonel used a dromedary to carry his personal baggage—until a Union sharpshooter killed the animal. There were also Vicksburg’s famed caves, dug by civilians as protection against the Union bombardment. Some of these burrows became elaborate affairs, furnished with carpets and beds and serviced by slaves. But most were crude, crowded dugouts that one resident described as “rat-holes.” Like the soldiers, civilians also saw food supplies dwindle to a meager daily ration. When beef ran out, they ate mule meat, frogs and rats. Flour was replaced by a blend of corn-meal and ground peas. “It made a nauseous composition, as the corn-meal cooked in half the time the pea-meal did, so this stuff was half raw,” one Southerner wrote. “It had the properties of india-rubber and was worse than leather to digest.”
By early July, both soldiers and civilians were on the brink of starvation, and surrender became inevitable. The Confederate commander, an émigré from Pennsylvania named John Pemberton, told his officers: “I know their peculiar weaknesses and their national vanity. I know we can get better terms from them on the Fourth of July than on any other day of the year.” He was right. Grant generously agreed to parole the 30,000 Confederate troops within the Vicksburg defenses.
Even so, the fierce and protracted fighting in Vicksburg left the community deeply embittered. Though the city and its surrounding county had been one of only two in Mississippi to vote against secession (Natchez was the other), post-War Vicksburg hallowed the Cause and disdained the national battlefield as a “Yankee park.” Mississippians initially refused to erect a state monument there, and never put up a memorial to Pemberton, the Northern-born rebel commander. As late as the 1950s, Joe Gerache had told me, “folks didn’t talk about the surrender here. It was a ‘cessation of hostilities.’ The people of Vicksburg never gave up, it was only that Yankee general Pemberton who lost the city.”
As elsewhere, a great deal of myth underlay this romance. Just before the surrender, Confederates petitioned Pemberton in a letter signed “Many Soldiers,” telling him: “If you can’t feed us, you had better surrender, horrible as the idea is, than suffer this noble army to disgrace themselves by desertion.” Nor were cruel modern tactics limited to the Northern side. The Confederates placed Union prisoners in Vicksburg’s courthouse as a human shield to deter Northern gunners from firing on the building.
The courthouse survived with only one hit, and now housed Vicksburg’s city museum. It was the most eccentric—and politically incorrect—collection I’d yet visited in the South. In the “Confederate Room,” alongside a piece of orginal hardtack and a copy of the Vicksburg Citizen printed on wallpaper because newsprint ran out, I found a pair of Confederate trousers “made by a plantation mammy” and a photograph of a Southern matron with “her slaves who refused to accept freedom.” An exhibit on Jefferson Davis, who delivered his first public speech on the courthouse grounds, stated: “There was a very special relationship between Jefferson Davis and his slaves. He was not only their master but also their friend.” Another display pointed out: “Ironically, Gen. U.S. Grant was a slave owner while Gen. Robert E. Lee freed his slaves.”
This last was a hoary bit of Southern propaganda. Grant’s in-laws were Missourians who owned slaves before the War; Grant acquired one from them and set him free a year later. As for Lee, the slaves in question were those his wife inherited in October 1857, with the stipulation that Lee, as executor, emancipate them within five years. Lee missed the deadline and didn’t free the slaves until December 29, 1863.
In another room, I found a Ku Klux Klan hood with eye holes and a red tassel. “The Klan’s purpose was to rid the South of the carpetbag-scalawag-black governments, which were often corrupt,” the accompanying text said. “Atrocities were sometimes attributed to the Klan by unscrupulous individuals.”
But the most striking exhibit of all was titled “The Minié Ball Pregnancy.” It featured a Civil War bullet and a picture of a Vicksburg doctor whose medical feat was described as follows:
During the battle of Raymond, Miss. in 1863 a minié ball reportedly passed through the reproductive organs of a young rebel soldier and a few seconds later penetrated a young lady who was standing on the porch of her nearby home. The story was written later by Dr. Le Grand G. Capers of Vicksburg for the American Medical Weekly. Capers claimed that he tended their wounds, that the girl became pregnant from the fertile minié ball, that he delivered the baby, introduced her to the soldier, that the two were married and had two more children by the conventional method.
I realized with a start that I’d heard a bowdlerized version of this tale on my elementary school playground. Was it possible that this proto-urban legend had some basis in fact?
I found the museum’s curator, Gordon Cotton, sifting papers in a backroom. Cotton was a striking Shelby Foote look-and-sound-alike, a kinship partly explained by the two men having grown up in the same part of the Mississippi Delta. “I heard someone laughing out loud and knew you must be reading about the Minié Ball Pregnancy,” he said.
I asked if he thought the story could possibly be true.
“The girl’s mother believed it, and nothing else matters,” he replied. “I guess you could say that baby was the original son-of-a-gun.”
Part of the story was indeed factual. Dr. Le Grand Capers was the real name of a Confederate surgeon who wrote about the minié ball pregnancy in the American Medical Weekly in 1874, under the headline: “Attention Gynaecologists! Notes from the Diary of a Field and Hospital Surgeon CSA.” However, Capers intended the article as a spoof of the wildly inflated stories of medical prowess reported by other doctors in the War. Not everyone got the joke and Capers’s medical reputation never recovered.
“I decided to just present the story as Capers did,” Cotton said with a shrug. “History shouldn’t be dull.” The same attitude extended to the other exhibits, which Cotton himself had arranged with what he freely admitted was a strong Southern bias. “This is Vicksburg’s attic,” he said. “Our story is the story of Vicksburg, not somewhere in Pennsylvania. People might say, ‘that’s a Southern view,’ but this is a Southern town.”
Most of the items came from local households. The Klan hood had literally come from an attic, stowed in a trunk by a relative of Cotton’s. The outfit originally belonged to Cotton’s great-grandfather, a Confederate private. “The Klan’s part of our history, good or bad,” he said. “People often ask me if my great-grandfather hated blacks. No, I tell them. He hated Yankees. Anyway, if it hadn’t been for the Yankee occupation, we wouldn’t have any good stories to tell.”
Cotton lived in the same 1840s farmhouse where he, his father, grandfather and great-grandfather had all been born. One of Cotton’s cousins still slept in a bed riddled by bullets when Yankees killed her great-great-grandmother during a plantation raid. “Her killers were tried upstairs in this courthouse,” Cotton said. “So you see, we’re never far from our history. I’m not going to go through this museum rewriting the past just to please someone in the present.”
Anyway, the present wasn’t very pleasing to Cotton, particularly the casinos. “I’m still of that old Protestant work ethic, you work for what you get. I don’t believe in ill-gotten gains and games of chance.” Not that he was a prude. “We had a wonderful whorehouse district,” he said. “It’s gone.” He acknowledged, too, that the casinos had created thousands of jobs and pumped millions of dollars in tax revenues into a state that had long been the poorest in the nation.
But Cotton felt the casinos were spoiling the town’s historic atmosphere and peddling a false version of the past. It was true that antebellum Vicksburg, like many river towns, was a rough place renowned for its vice and violence. But the riverboats themselves were usually tame commercial vessels that frowned on gambling. “If steamboats caught a professional gambler on board, they’d put him off at the next stop,” Cotton said.
Vicksburg also had fought to rid its streets of vice. Its namesake, Reverend Newitt Vick, was a stern evangelical Methodist who founded the town as a model outpost of Christianity. When it became a den of iniquity instead, citizens organized to chase the gamblers out. One notorious gambling den called the Kangaroo refused to close. So in 1835, vigilantes led by a doctor named Hugh Bodley armed themselves and marched on the Kangaroo. As they approached, someone shot through the door, killing Bodley. The crowd then burned roulette and faro wheels in the streets and lynched several gamblers. “Some of the others ended up as catfish food,” Cotton said, gazing out at the water.
A few blocks from the courthouse stood a small obelisk that read: “Erected by a grateful community to the memory of Dr. Hugh Bodley Murdered by the Gamblers July 5, 1835 while defending the morals of Vicksburg.” When the new casinos arrived in Vicksburg, representatives of Harrah’s came to Cotton for advice about prettying the shore and integrating the city’s history into their design. He showed them a picture of the Bodley monument, though not its inscription. Harrah’s asked if the memorial could be moved down by the water, close to the casinos.
“I think that would be ideal,” Cotton told them. Then he showed them the monument’s words. He chuckled. “They were not amused,” he said.
FROM HIS OLIVE SKIN and unusual surname, I’d guessed that the pharmacist Joe Gerache was of southern European extraction. But when I arrived at his home in suburban Vicksburg, I noticed a Jewish menorah perched on the living room mantel. Then, as we began chatting, he referred to Vicksburg’s schvartze. He caught himself and said, “That’s Yiddish for black people.”
“I know. My grandfather used that word all the time.”
“You’re Jewish?” he asked.
When I nodded, Gerache yelled to his wife in the kitchen. “Ann, you know what? Tony’s an M.O.T.!” Then to me: “That’s ‘member of tribe.’” Before I could say pastrami on rye, I’d been invited—commanded—to attend synagogue the next night and hustled into the living room to watch a documentary Ann had taped about Jewish life in Mississippi. By the time I’d finished, dinner was ready and I found myself at the kitchen table as Joe intoned the Hebrew prayers for food and wine.
“Actually, I’m Catholic,” Joe said, noshing on a dill pickle. “My grandparents came from Italy. But I go to Ann’s services and she comes to mass with me.”
Southern Jewry often made for this sort of colorful intermingling. When I’d lived in Mississippi, a Jewish co-worker and I were frequently asked by a small synagogue in Meridian to help make minyan, the quorum of ten worshipers needed for a Jewish prayer service. The Friday phone calls were always the same: “Y’all gonna come make minyan at church tonight? We’ll be playing poker after the service.” Jewish-Southern culture had also bred the ultimate in fusion food: Gershon Weinberg’s pork and ribs barbecue restaurant in Alabama.
At Vicksburg’s synagogue, the minyan often included three non-Jewish women who sang in the temple’s choir, and several black custodians as well. A visiting rabbi came only on High Holidays, so on other occasions the congregants took turns acting as lay reader. On the Friday night I attended, an insurance salesman in a seersucker suit read the Sabbath service in Southern-accented English. Few among the dozen worshipers appeared to be under sixty. “We haven’t had a bar mitzvah here in ten years,” the insurance salesman said when the short service ended.
As in Meridian, the congregation in Vicksburg kept a curious post-synagogue ritual. Usually, the entire group drove across the bridge to Louisiana to a crawfish joint called Po Boys. On the night I visited, Po Boys was closed, so we went instead to a local restaurant and dined on fried chicken, pork loin and hush puppies. For most of the meal, a woman named Betty Sue held court, quizzing everyone for family gossip, as Southerners were so fond of doing. “What was her maiden name? … Is he Earl’s cousin? … Did he marry that gal from Memphis?”
But there wasn’t much family to talk about, at least not locally. As in many Southern towns, Jews first came to Vicksburg in the nineteenth century as peddlers. Working their way up the Mississippi, they settled down and opened businesses. But in this century, young Jews began leaving for the city. This migration was hastened by Jewish boys going off to fight in World War II, and later by the civil rights movement, which brought a temporary influx of Northern Jews. Their long hair and liberal views unsettled the local community. “They lived in black areas and related to people differently than we did,” Ann Gerache said, echoing what Shelby Foote had told me. “We didn’t know how our Christian neighbors would treat us after that.”
In several Southern cities, white supremacists fire-bombed synagogues. While there was no such violence in Vicksburg, the Jewish community continued to dwindle and now numbered only about seventy. “That’s including folks who don’t live here anymore but plan to be buried in Vicksburg,” Ann said.
The next day, I visited the Jewish cemetery, wedged between a Pizza Hut and the battlefield park. The fighting at Vicksburg had spilled across the cemetery grounds, and gravestones marked Levy and Metzger mingled weirdly with historic plaques to the Mississippi Light Artillery and the Green Brigade of Texas.
About 20,000 Jews lived in the Confederate states at the start of the Civil War. In some ways, the mid-nineteenth-century South had been more welcoming to Jews than the North, where anti-immigrant sentiment reached fever pitch in the 1850s. Grant, while fighting in Mississippi, often railed against Jewish “speculators” and issued orders proscribing their movements, at one point terming them “an intolerable nuisance” and demanding that army railroad conductors stop Jews from traveling south of Jackson.
But viewed from Vicksburg’s synagogue and graveyard, there was a sad, end-of-the-line feel to Southern Jewry, at least that portion of it living outside Florida and a few big cities. In another decade or two, it seemed likely that all trace of rural and small-town Jewish life would be gone, except for graveyards like this, and the Semitic names—Cohen, Kaufman, Lowenstein—still dimly visible on the front of abandoned shoe shops and department stores across the backcountry South.
MY SECOND WEEK IN Vicksburg, I was evicted from Harrah’s. I hadn’t bothered to book ahead to Memorial Day, naively supposing that no sane person would celebrate the start of summer here, in a town already so heat-struck that every time I stepped outside my glasses fogged and slid down my nose. But gamblers knew no seasons; what better way to while away the 100-degree days than in a climate-controlled casino? Every other hotel in town was also booked. So I cashed my few chips and headed for the Natchez Trace, as flatboatsmen and busted gamblers had so often done in the nineteenth century.
Driving out of town, I decided to make one last stop at the battlefield. The morning paper had mentioned a noonday wreath-laying at the cemetery. Like many Americans, I’d almost forgotten that Memorial Day meant something more than a three-day weekend at the beach or blackjack table. It was, in fact, the mass slaughter of the Civil War that had led to the holiday’s creation. Vicksburg seemed an appropriate place to see how Southerners honored their war dead.
The ceremony’s site was a shady corner of the sprawling Union cemetery, near a plaque that read: “Forty Four Known By Name, Others Known Only to God.” Of the 17,000 soldiers buried at Vicksburg, only 4,000 were known by name. A motorcade pulled up trailing streamers and flags. Forty people climbed out, mostly graying men wearing army caps and medals. It looked at first glance like any veterans’ gathering, except that all but one of the participants was black.
The group filtered in among the small stumps marking Vicksburg’s nameless dead. Someone laid a wreath and said a brief prayer. Then soldiers fired a 21-gun salute and a bugler played Taps. As the crowd fled the midday sun, I chatted with the ceremony’s organizer, a man named Willie Glasper. He said that Memorial Day observances in Vicksburg had stopped altogether in the 1970s. It had been his decision to revive the holiday with the wreath-laying and a short parade through town.
“I’m a mailman, not a veteran, but I played here as a boy and used to study these graves,” he said. “I look at the War from a freedom standpoint. One side won, the other lost, and we became free as a result.” He paused. “Maybe that’s why the white folks don’t come.”
Like July 4th, Memorial Day had a tortured history in Vicksburg, as it did across much of the South. It was Southern women who pioneered the spring custom of decorating soldiers’ graves (Columbus, Georgia, had perhaps the strongest claims to the first Memorial Day in 1866). But the ritual quickly caught on in both North and South. In 1868, the main Northern veterans’ group, the Grand Army of the Republic, designated May 30th as the date when all veterans’ posts should decorate Union graves. The South, characteristically, went its own way. Southern states declared their own “Confederate Memorial Day,” varying from state to state and timed, in part, to correspond with the peak of the spring blossom season. It was only in this century, as sectional bitterness waned and new wars produced a fresh crop of dead, that the late-May Memorial Day became a truly national holiday.
But old habits died hard. Glasper said there had long been two American Legion posts in Vicksburg, one all-white, the other all-black. “Their attitude is, ‘You do Memorial Day, we’ll do Veterans Day,’” he said. Each year, Glasper went through the ritual of inviting the white Legion post to the wreath-laying. But the only white in attendance this year was a non-veteran: Vicksburg’s mayor. The white Legion post didn’t even open on Memorial Day. And its own observance, on Veterans Day, was held at a downtown median strip decorated with monuments from this century’s wars, rather than at the Civil War cemetery.
“It’s that way with a lot of things here,” Glasper said. “If blacks put something on, whites don’t come. And too often when whites put something on, we don’t go. We’re self-conscious around each other.”
Glasper invited me to a reception at the American Legion post, a small building on the back street of a black neighborhood. En route, he pointed out a new museum he and several others were setting up to honor black Vicksburgers (whose ranks include Sarah Breedlove Walker, America’s first black woman millionaire). I asked why the group didn’t try instead to include its exhibits at the city museum I’d visited at the Old Courthouse. Glasper looked at me strangely. “That’s theirs,” he said. Even the YMCA in Vicksburg had two branches: one white, one black.
At the Legion hall, veterans and their families sat beneath balloons and bunting, slathering hot dogs with relish. The mayor circulated through the small crowd, glad-handing veterans and droning on about his achievements (“Reduced taxes, paved fifty-eight streets, built a new swimming pool and ballpark, halved unemployment, put in an eleven-million-dollar sewer system …”).
I found a seat beside a woman who had been teaching at Vicksburg’s schools for twenty-five years. She said school integration occurred without incident and blacks were now well represented politically. But socially, the color line remained intact. “You’d think veterans, of all people, could cross the line. They have so much in common,” she said. “But then, most of these men fought in all-black units, even in Korea. So I guess they just never reached out to each other.”
Across from me sat an eighty-year-old named Laura Jones, who served as president of the Legion’s women’s auxiliary. She was the granddaughter of a black soldier who had served at Vicksburg; his name was etched on the Illinois monument. When she was a girl, her family would visit the battlefield park every weekend. “It was free, we could play on the monuments, pick pecans and walnuts and plums, and look for Grandaddy’s name.” She shared two other vivid girlhood memories. “The Klan hanged a boy on Grove Street. I remember the tree. And I saw a woman with tar all over her. She washed clothes for white folks and some white man had taken a liking to her. That made it her fault, of course. Luckily, someone stopped the Klan before they put the feathers on her, so she just got the tar.”
Laura Jones had seen that sort of terrorism vanish in her lifetime. But she despaired of ever seeing true racial amity in Vicksburg. “Instead of ironing out our differences everyone wants to go their own way.” She’d asked the local high school if its band might participate in the Memorial Day parade. “They said, ‘School got out a few days ago and the uniforms have been washed and put away.’ Well, we can wash them again. The cleaners aren’t leaving town. But that’s their excuse. There’s a Miss Mississippi pageant in July. I bet you the school band comes out for that. And they come for the Christmas parade, when school’s out.” In the end, the Legion hall had paid for several black bands to come from out of state.
I was surprised to learn that the racial divide ran so deep. Vicksburg had largely escaped the civil rights violence that wracked so many Mississippi communities. And, like river towns everywhere, it seemed more open and cosmopolitan than inland communities. The Vicksburg economy was now strong, thanks to gambling, and blacks I’d spoken to over the past week had praised the casinos for their equitable hiring practices. Nor had I seen the sort of inflammatory displays of rebel emblems common to Todd County, Kentucky, and other places I’d visited.
But Laura Jones said I shouldn’t be fooled by Vicksburg’s veneer of geniality. “Things haven’t changed because deep down people’s hearts haven’t changed. No law, no government, no corporation is going to make you do the right thing. That comes from inside.” She swatted a fly on the relish jar. “The outside’s changed,” she said, “but the inside’s the same.”
I finished my hot dog and drove out of town in a tropical downpour; even the weather had conspired to rain on the Memorial Day parade. Vicksburg confirmed the dispiriting pattern I’d seen elsewhere in the South, beginning in North Carolina. Everywhere, it seemed, I had to explore two pasts and two presents; one white, one black, separate and unreconcilable. The past had poisoned the present and the present, in turn, now poisoned remembrance of things past. So there needed to be a black Memorial Day and a white Veterans Day. A black city museum and a white one. A black history month and a white calendar of remembrance. The best that could be hoped for was a grudging toleration of each other’s historical memory. You Wear Your X, I’ll Wear Mine.