We Look Like Men of War - Softcover

Forstchen, William R.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0765301156 ISBN 13: 9780765301154

Verlag: Forge, 2003

Inhaltsangabe

This is the story of Samuel Washburn, born a slave in 1850, who flees North for freedom, only to return South to fight for the larger cause. Sam becomes a regimental drummer boy with a "colored regiment" (as later immortalized in the movie GLORY!), seei

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William R. Forstchen is the author of the New York Times bestseller One Second After, among numerous other books in diverse subjects ranging from history to science fiction. He has co-authored several books with Newt Gingrich, including Gettysburg: A Novel of the Civil War, Pearl Harbor, Days of Infamy, To Try Men's Souls and Valley Forge. Forstchen holds a Ph.D. in History from Purdue University, with specializations in military history and the history of technology. He is currently a Faculty Fellow and Professor of History at Montreat College, near Asheville North Carolina. He is a pilot and flies an original WWII recon "warbird." He resides near Asheville with his daughter Meghan.

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We Look Like Men of War

By Forstchen, William R.

Forge Books

Copyright © 2003 Forstchen, William R.
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780765301154

Chapter 1
 
Indianapolis, Indiana
June 1895
 
 
I was born a slave, as was my father before me, but I shall die a free man. The words sound wonderful when they roll off your tongue—a free man. You almost want to bite into the words and chew on them for a while, to taste their sweetness, and their bitterness. You get the urge to say them real slow, almost afraid that they might just up and disappear on you.
The word freedom certainly has an awe-inspiring power to it. I don’t think white folks really understand just how powerful it truly is. They were, after all, born to it, they live with it, and they die comfortable in it.
Now for us black folk, we know different. We know just how powerful the word freedom really is. For two hundred and forty long years we did not have it. Like Moses’ people we were lost in the Egypt of our bondage. And when we broke the chains at last, we paid with our blood for the getting of it.
I should know, because I was there and paid my price in full for what little piece of freedom I now have.
Maybe you saw me marching in the Decoration Day parade last week. As I marched in that parade I found it hard to believe it’s the thirtieth anniversary since the Civil War ended. The time has flowed like a river, as I guess it does with all lives. It seems to move sluggish at first, meandering along as if every day will stretch into an eternity. And then, ever so imperceptibly, it moves faster and faster. You’re fourteen and you march off to war, somehow believing in your immortality, and with that first thundering volley that illusion is killed forever. But time still seems to go slow. You get a bit older, marry, have children, start a job, and then one day you turn around and there is gray in your beard and a slowness in your step. You look back at what was and shake your head as if it was a dream—only yesterday, you say; but that yesterday was thirty years past.
So I marched in the Decoration Day parade again.
General Howard, who started the college I went to, marched in this one, right down Market Street, a whole flock of other old generals and colonels right along with him. That fellow who wrote Ben-Hur, Lew Wallace from over Craw-fordsville, he was a general too during the war and he was marching up front as well. They were followed by the boys who fought with them through four long and bitter years of Civil War. Our battle flags were held up to the wind again, powerful names written upon them in fading gold letters, the names of battles like Gettysburg, Antietam, Chickamauga, Shiloh, Petersburg, where I was, and Appomattox.
So there up front were the generals and the white soldiers right behind them. And forgotten, way in the back of the parade came us black soldiers. You see, even though we bled with them and died with them, it seems now they don’t quite want us marching with them. But every May 30 we come out anyhow for the parade, the few of us still left, and we march in the parade too, invited or not. Maybe it’s cussedness on our part, but I think it’s because we want to remind folks that blacks fought in the war too, and died in the war.
I admit we’re getting old now; a lot of us boys are getting gray in the beard and a bit bald on top. But when we put the blue Yankee suits on, smelling of mothballs, it all comes back, like it’s in the blood somehow. You can almost hear the sergeants cussing at us again, you can almost feel the cool breeze of morning as we stood in line, waiting for the order to charge, the thunder of the cannon booming all around us. We stand a little straighter again, laughing when one of us has a hard time buttoning up his uniform, our backs cracking when we hear the long roll of the drums and snap to attention.
So you might have seen me way in the back of that parade. I was the one with a drum slung over my shoulder, my empty left sleeve pinned up across my breast. An old one-armed drummer, I guess, is kind of a queer sight. But I’m getting ahead of myself and maybe I should tell you it in the way it happened, rather than all backwards the way I’m telling it right now.
* * *
My name is Samuel Washburn. At least, that’s the name I go by now. You see, it wasn’t my birth name and the name they said over me when the preacher dunked me in the river. Why, then I was just plain Sam, though some called me Sambo, or the Washburn family’s newest nigger.
Like I said before, I was born a slave. As near as I can reckon now it was in the year 1849 or maybe 1850.
Now you might be wondering: Sam, if you were born a slave, how come you can write a decent hand and folks call you a lawyer? Well, all that in its proper time.
My ma was a house slave, working inside the Washburns' big house. She was able to wear some fine clothes, for a slave, the cast-off’s of the Missus. She never was hit either, at least while old Massa Washburn was alive. My pa was a free man, a blacksmith no less, living in Perryville, Kentucky.
He’d been born a slave too on the Washburn farm. But he learned himself a trade and after doing all the blacksmithing work for the Washburns, they’d hire him out to other white folks who needed things done, like shoeing horses, making tools, putting iron rims on wagon wheels and such. In what little time he had left at the end of the day he'd make a couple of extra things. He could turn out a real fine lightning rod or a weather vane that was all so fancy, and Massa Washburn let him sell these things. Half the barns and houses around Perryville must have had one of Pa’s lightning rods on them and never one of them burned from lightning (though they sure didn’t keep the Yankees from burning them down when the war came).
He worked for near on to twenty years, never spending even two bits on himself come Sundays. He worked and saved and he finally bought himself into freedom for all of fifteen hundred dollars. Massa Washburn even gave him a little piece of land at the edge of town to live on in exchange for his doing some of the chores around the farm. So Pa set himself up as a smithy and was saving money again to buy Ma out of slavery. You see, if it wasn’t for Ma, Pa would have gone north over the Ohio River when he bought his freedom. Being a free black man in Kentucky wasn’t the best of things, especially with the troubles starting, but he loved Ma and wouldn’t leave her behind. Sad thing was that there wasn’t just Ma after I came along and so he was going to have to buy me too. I had two sisters, but both of them died of the cholera. It was sad; Ma would cry anytime their names were mentioned, though I don’t recall it since I was only three when it happened. At least Pa wouldn’t have to buy their freedom as well.
Finding out you’re a slave is a strange sort of feeling. I grew up alongside Ben Washburn, he being my age, the only son of Massa and Missus Washburn. All the rest of their children were girls and a lot older than us.
Ma was his mammy and nursed him same as me. We played together out on the front porch on warm summer days. We’d play Indians. My big cousin Jimmie, who was born of Ma’s sister who died birthing him, and I would be the Indians and Ben would be George Washington or Daniel Boone. We always lost.
I think I was about five, maybe six or so when one day I got awful mad at Ben and said I wanted to win...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Forge
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2003
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0765301156
• ISBN 13: 9780765301154
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 192
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar