Frost on the Mirror

Recently, two brief newspaper mentions of deaths caught my eye—not on the obituary page, where deceased individuals are named and their lives honored. These mentions appeared on a back page of the news section and are of particular interest to me because they offer glimpses into 19th century American history. The first article describes a hiker’s discovery of human bone fragments and a metal button lying in a Sharpsburg cornfield, which had once served as a Civil War battlefield in 1862. Examining the remains, experts concluded the bones belonged to a young soldier from New York State, who was perhaps between 19 and 20 years old when he fell in combat. The second article describes the discovery of more anonymous dead, 957 individuals buried in unmarked graves between the years 1889 and 1957 in what had been a Nebraska psychiatric hospital cemetery. Both articles resonate with me as I continue researching Civil War and post-Civil War history for my novel-in-progress and as I reflect on research done for my novel Women of Magdalene, set in a 19th century ladies’ lunatic asylum.

In Nebraska, a historical society is fighting for the release of the identity of the long-dead patients, many of whom were committed against their will for a variety of health conditions and reasons, including poverty, and whose very existence was erased with burial. A chilling thought—and similar to one that ran through my imagination years ago when I created my fictional asylum for “inconvenient women”, who never went home again. Like other writers of historical fiction, I hold a mirror up to the past and, in doing so, frame that past, limit it, and bring a particular aspect of it into focus. I look back at the sweep of history or catch a glimpse of it in a newspaper article—reminders of the haunting stories of those who actually lived and died in the real, not the fictional, world. Then I turn again to my story-mirror and, for a moment, find a whisper of frost on the glass.

Bigotry Revisited

Ten years ago in Jasper, Texas, before dawn on June 7, 1998, three white men chained a black man to the back of their pickup truck and dragged him three miles to his death. This morning, the Houston Chronicle revisited the murder of James Byrd Jr. in a front-page story. The victim’s killers have been tried and sentenced, two assigned to death row and one to life in prison. Bloodstained evidence of the crime—the truck’s tires and rims and the heavy chain—is locked away in a security vault. The gray pickup rusts in an impound lot. Byrd’s family continues mourning his loss and cherishing his memory.

It horrifies me to type the words describing the murder, let alone to imagine the cruelty and agony of that night. Today I remember the shock I felt ten years ago when learning of this vicious killing in East Texas. As a writer of historical novels and plays set in the 19th century South, I have read and researched heartbreaking accounts of bondage and violence. I wanted to believe it was history. Then came this gruesome reminder of how bigotry persists, like an endemic disease.

Not long ago, I viewed a Civil War battle re-enactment in the piney woods of East Texas, an event interesting from a researcher’s and writer’s point of view. For many onlookers, it was a brief glimpse of history, of the camp life and battlefields of long ago. But the number of whites wearing t-shirts and caps emblazoned with the Confederate stars and bars and the volume of their cheers when gray trampled blue gave me pause.

I strive to keep an open mind, to keep prejudices in check, to understand that we are all shaped in various ways by our upbringing, always stopping short of condoning violence. Then, occasionally a new acquaintance, learning that I write, falls into a little pre-judging of me, assuming the imagination of a soft-spoken Southern white woman must run to romanticized tales of plantation mansions. But I refuse to forget who lived in the quarters. For that reason, I am drawn to the Southern gothic, to exploring that contradictory world of graciousness and greed, of compassion and suffering.

Included in Leslie Casimir’s Chronicle story about Jasper, Texas, are descriptions of the community today, of an alliance between black and white ministers, of interracial couples and offspring, of small-town poverty and glimmers of hope. In a way, it is a hopeful sign that ten years after the murder of James Byrd Jr., the crime retains its power to shock, and the murder weapon—a chain—is labeled infamous. Maya Angelou said: “History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.” It is heartening to hear of courage in Jasper.

Rosemary Poole-Carter