Ill-Fated Hour

It roared like the word of God. The gunfire just north of Manassas, Virginia on the 21st day of July in the year of our Lord eighteen hundred and sixty-one echoed across the country and the collection of muzzle flash lit the night magnificently the same as a parade of stars falling out of the sky and the smoke spread as a great American plague. Even the clouds appeared as nightmares sketched by a band of angels cast out of them.

Morning chimed out the ring of church bells and parade bands. And revealed a small percentage of folks in horrid silence like philosophers in existential dread, characters in the Bible paralyzed by the touch of God, delivered a vision and prophecy of the blood to be. 

Particularly divided was Tennessee, North Carolina, Kentucky and Virginia; Missouri and Kansas. A small town in north Georgia named for the Cherokee word for Flower of the Prairie: Leotie.

It was here where Joseph Company was formed before the roosters woke. A string band plucked gospel bluegrass hymns as they marched down the street in brand new uniforms paid for by their Captain, fifty year old farmer Augustus Joseph with a perfectly groomed dark beard, pulling swigs of whiskey from a flask, riding his horse in front of his command, each soldier smiling with cheers and flowers and women breaking the line to kiss them.

Later that afternoon in a pioneer cabin his great-grandfather built, 27 year old Francis Wohali Joseph, son of Captain Augustus Joseph stood in his upstairs room, watching the world outside with the ghostly reflection of his face staring back at him almost blindly; his mother downstairs playing Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata on the piano, father drunk on the floor half dressed in his long johns and Confederate jacket still, belligerently singing out Dixie’s Land. Their Black servants tended to supper, cleaned the floors and organized the library after Augustus gathered books in his stupor and left them all over the death room, John Locke and Shakespeare, The Art of War and the Bible; Lord Alfred Tennyson and Sir Walter Scott.

When supper was prepared they called for their son but he was gone. 

Among the slaves on their plantation, throughout the duration of the war, Moses would flee North, Manor “Catfish” Joseph would fight and serve with Augustus Joseph as his personal servant up until the Battle of Chickamauga and Reuben on his seventeen birthday would enlist in Jubilee Company in 1864 for the United States Army. 

***

Jeremiah Oakhurst was a traveling Baptist preacher and backwoods pilot, helping runaway slaves before the war to the North, would continue doing so until his death, and at the outbreak of the war, guided southern loyalists to the where they could enlist in the Union Army. He led them from Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi and Montgomery, Alabama; along the coastline of South Carolina and Georgia, and out of Atlanta and Macon and Charleston and Columbia. He kept the words of Exodus woven inside his heart like a branding and told people he’s traveled forty-years-worth doubtless.  

He would help lead Moses to Philadelphia and Wohali Joseph to Danville, Kentucky. And Euphraim Boone to Danville too, where Boone would enlist in Lebanon Company for the Union. 

The last letter Boone wrote was to his brother, the night before he died at Chickamauga. His brother, Prometheus Boone, enlisted in Mordecai Company for the Confederacy in Nashville. 

Before they each departed from home in Lebanon, Kentucky, Euphraim made his hand into a gun and turned around fast, shouting, “Look out, pecker,” and made bullet noises with his mouth. Prometheus held his hand over his heart as if shot and kneeled on the ground. They smiled and waved goodbye. It’d be the last time they ever saw each other. 

Upon receiving his brother’s final letter, Prometheus wrote him back, waited one year before accepting his brother was killed, then deserted, like a dog fixing to die, wandering from the battlefield into the woods, into the unknown and was never heard from or seen again. 

The Boones hailed from Chattanooga, Tennessee where Reverend Johnson was hanged for publicly supporting the Union, John Epps and Daniel Gates were sent to jail in Tuscaloosa where they’d die for refusing to enlist in the Confederacy; and for trying to flee from the South, Billy Leavenhart was caught and dragged back to his home, made to watch it burn while his family was spared and then shot in the head. 

In Missouri, notorious train robber Merle Wellman formed his own company which would be referred to throughout the state simply as ‘Them Outlaws.’ It was over a fireplace in the woods where they gathered like an archaic congregation upon hearing the news of secession and transitioned from robbers to soldiers. They would recruit anybody tough enough and willing to die an outlaw and derailed trains and wagons bringing food and supplies to Union troops across the west as fast as they could ride there.

Ten miles east in Kansas, Jim Cantrell formed a Union cavalry, inspired by John Brown, and gathered up volunteers which included three preachers, runaway slaves, a schoolteacher and a fourteen year old girl they called Joan of Arc; got started by stealing thirteen horses from a wealthy slave owner to outfit their cavalry band, burned the house down and rode out of there like Dante’s pilgrim’s ascent out of Hell.  

***

In Qualla Town, North Carolina, longtime Cherokee warrior and great-grandson of Dragging Canoe, Chief Talking Bear, who had evaded the Trail of Tears just over twenty years prior, formed the Cherokee Mounted Warriors.

His brother, DoubleHead Wolf who did walk from Chattanooga, Tennessee to Indian Nation, Oklahoma during the Trail of Tears, resisted the Confederate movement among the Tribes in Oklahoma, and formed a band of Union Warriors who were brought to Virginia immediately for infantry training. One year later—after Wolf threw a knife into the chest of a Confederate Officer, then threw him off the horse and jumped on it in stride, killing seven of the enemy with blades and pistols in under thirty seconds, clearing a charge for the rest of the regiment until the Confederacy retreated—he was promoted to Captain and his band of warriors were from then on a horse-mounted unit, permitted to use spears and bow-and-arrow along with their gunpowder instruments. They’d officially be called the same as his brother’s company, Cherokee Mounted Warriors. Unofficially, they’d be called Wolf’s Warriors.

Soldiers in Virginia came from all over the state to enlist in both Union and Confederate regiments of the same name, the Army of Northern Virginia. At a parade just outside Vernon County, a seventeen year old named Monroe Foster kissed his first woman, and second and third and fourth, all in one afternoon. Just three years later, thirty miles northwest in the Shenandoah Valley, 73 of the 127 soldiers at the parade in Vernon County would die in one afternoon alone, including Monroe Foster who would die next to Confederate Waylon Ashford, both from the same hometown. They’d each have a letter in their hand belonging to the other to be sent home to the women they loved and planned to marry, with the promise they’d see it delivered.

***

The day after what would be called first Bull Run, just before all would join and be mustered out into war, a Confederate company and Union company of the same town gathered together outside a wooden church and sang together a hymn called The Tears of Christ, held a moment of silence in which they could hear the river current wash through the earth and trickle over rocks, the birds singing between the branches of oak and pine and magnolia trees, the birds rustling through the leaves, winds brushing against their faces and winding through their souls, and then they held hands and prayed.