us go our way. Their righteousness
was such that they’d invent a new machine
to kill us with for every point of conscience
in their busy minds, for our property
offended them, was our liability.
They shouldered our responsibilities
because to them freedom was for someone
else, always someone else, whether children,
servants of their betters, posterity,
or anyone in need of fixing as they
saw fit. A man can’t live with such people.
It’s worse than having a churchgoing wife
who’s always better than you, and tells you.
Across the Potomac
The Old Man knew what he was doing. General
Robert E. Lee: the name still sets the heart
afire, and I would follow him again,
right or wrong, as I did in September
1862, the summer of our lives.
The Old Man ordered us across the river
because it was the only move he had.
The victories in Virginia had run
their course, and we could wait
to be destroyed—which happened, sure enough,
two summers and a winter later—or
we could turn the Federal army out
of its forts and dirt around Washington
and break them up this one last time for good.
We had sufficient men; don’t be deceived
by our reports of what befell us later:
a Southerner is hardly better than
a damnyankee if he cannot exaggerate
with honor, and face outrages, insults,
and near universal odds like a man.
The General was no fool: he took a good
fifty, sixty thousand up, the best men
we ever had—a lean and hungry set
of wolves, one woman said who watched us cross
the River, tough and confident and strong
from chasing Yankees, two whole armies of them,
all the summer long, and just last week killed
them worst of all at Manassas. Our guns
were clean and polished, though our shoes were thin
or gone; no two of us were dressed alike;
we talked incessantly, profane beyond
belief, that same woman reported of us—
though how she stood it close enough to tell
escapes me, because of course we smelled like hell.
A doctor up in Fredericktown would count us
next week, accurate to the point of throwing
in the scientific observation that
our smell was “amoniacal.” It was,
if you weren’t used to it. I wish it had
been strong enough to mask the smell of blood
on battlefields—the metal sweet, lead-kneed
odor all the rivers in the world can’t
wash out of your stomach. We splashed across
the River at the ford, some men bundling
their amoniacal long johns atop
their heads—I trust that woman’s modesty
and decency prevented her from watching
close up, although who’d give a damn: a line
of hairy scarecrows in their shirts. We crossed
the River. Bands, our execrable bands,
played “Maryland, My Maryland,” and we
like young fools sang along and whooped it up.
It was the summer of the Confederacy
and the shipwreck of our hopes was around
the bend invisible. The sun shone South.
We were invincible, and we could whip
the Yankees ten to one, although to tell
the truth we had died more numerously
than they had all the summer, but that fact
was like an untruth to a Southerner:
an insult not to be tolerated
where rights and honor are at stake. In fact
some thousands politely declined to cross
because it seemed not right to them to strike
the unionists on their home ground as they
were striking us. The Golden Rule or prudence,
don’t know which and didn’t care. We crossed fast
within the grasp of victories whose logic
ordered us to wade the swirling waters
of necessity. Our black folk followed,
driving miles and miles of wagons filled
with fodder, bandages, and ammunition.
The men who carried doubts across the river
or declined to cross because they wouldn’t do
to others what they’d done to us were few
compared
