“Do you need a cup of coffee, comrade?” The offer was generous, the home welcoming. “Open up that thermos,” Larry would say to the visitor, tapping his pack of cigarettes on the kitchen table, with its littered ashtray and open books. “Nell just made a fresh pot,” he’d announce, gesturing with a Styrofoam cup. “Clear off that chair. Have a seat.”
Years later, the cigarettes would disappear, a personal victory over the cancerous southern-based tobacco industry, a win that added decades to his life, before his lungs gave out. It was not his only battle with the insanity of his beloved South—far from it. “We have lots of snakes to kill,” he’d say, ever the Texan, even on Tobacco Road.
Tobacco gone, the coffee cup remained, as did the pile of books, new and old, by friends and foes—underlined, dog-eared, highlighted, marked with coffee stains. “Have you got a minute,” he’d say. “I need to read you something, if I can find it.” He’d flip through pages, adjusting his thick glasses. “See what you think of this part here.”
Whatever the passage, it would unlock a storehouse of insights and recollections, cross-references and asides, digressions and bulls-eyes, anecdotes and observations, tirades and questions. To read a well-chosen page was to buy a ticket on the Goodwyn roller-coaster. Off you went, strapped in beside Larry and sharing his emotions—the agony and ecstasy.
Some telling statistic or apt quotation would sweep you high up, where you could see beyond the horizon; then a key line or a hidden footnote plunged you both down into a valley of despair. As time passed on this huge circular track, you might pause to hear a ball game or an NPR story, attend to the dog and cat, or admire some new backyard garden project.
When the conversation ended hours later, maybe days, you’d heard three old Texas stories and two new ones, all framed to show how democratic movements grow. You had, in Larry’s military imagery, “stockpiled serious ammunition,” “laid out a battle plan,” “exploded those myths,” “blown that ship out of the water.” You had “seized the cultural high ground.”
“Amazing, isn’t it?” Larry would end, shutting the book. “Reminds me of a piece I wrote for the Texas Observer. He misses some key points, but we can fix that. He’s young, and he’s never seen a real movement. But this is heavy artillery. Lord knows, we need all the help we can get. I’ll call Dirk Philipsen and Bill Greider too. We’re going to win this battle.”
***
With Larry gone, Nell moved from the friendly Goodwyn house on Welcome Drive. The battles all around us continue, unfolding in strange ways that Larry might not have predicted. But he was always full of advice and predictions and questions, so I miss the kitchen conversations more than ever. Often, when I need to talk politics and history, I play out fresh discussions with Larry in my own head. And sometimes I miss those long rides on the Goodwyn roller coaster so much that I even sit down and write him a letter, just to share an idea or a story.
I did that again yesterday, though I am not sure what prompted it. Perhaps it was reading Jacquelyn Dowd Hall’s latest book, Sisters and Rebels, a stunningly penetrating, wide-ranging and graceful saga that will be especially haunting for white southern activists who each wrestle with their own tangled regional roots. Or was it this week’s anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima (in the war that put Larry’s brother in a B-17), or the second anniversary of the deadly white supremacist turmoil in Charlottesville, or the passing of Toni Morrison?
Maybe I wrote just because I was renewing my order with Duke for the Blue Devil basketball season tickets that we shared with Larry and Nell for many years. Whatever the reason, I scrawled a provocative title across the top of the page in the hope of getting his attention. I trust it reached him, wherever he is. If so, I suspect it reminded him of a story.
***
Blood at the Depot
Lawrence Goodwyn
Out There Somewhere
August 7, 2019
Dear Larry,
You have a better vantage point than I do on what’s going on for humankind these days, and perhaps you even have an inkling of how it may turn out in the long run. Given your time with the Texas Observer covering oil barons and blustering politicians, I know you could reassure me that the festering political landscape your friends are facing these days is hardly a novelty. You told me long ago that race-baiting, voter suppression, false advertising, and the posturing and deceptions of faux-populists and white supremacists are not new inventions.
Two things are uppermost in my mind these days, and both relate to our country’s deepening and toxic political swamp. For one thing, I am belatedly consumed with trying to understand climate disruption and consider what historians can do to help inform, and support, the next generation of activists. I am fascinated by how slowly individuals and groups react to crisis conditions when there is no sudden shock or wake-up call, like Pearl Harbor or 9/11. (You don’t know it, but you sharpened my interest in the environment years ago, when you discovered that I had never heard of the Balcones Fault. You insisted that I accompany you to Austin, so I could get a clearer sense of why East Texas and West Texas are so different!)
So I thought I would be spending my post-teaching, post-Obama years helping to address global climate issues. Instead, I find myself still immersed in African American history after half a century. Through 150th anniversaries, the culture is in the midst of revisiting the realities of Reconstruction, with all its highs and lows, in ways that would have been unimaginable fifty years ago. But many Americans continue to seem stumped by the question of whether “Black Lives Matter.” And most, especially west of the Mississippi where I now live, still have no sense of how, when and where American racism put down its tenacious roots.
Therefore, I continue to give occasional talks about my book called Near Andersonville—though I have not found anyone who has read it as closely as you, or seen so many of its intended implications. (Your son Wade gave me the copy you marked up so copiously, and I keep it beside my desk!) In my silent conversations with you these days, I often thank you for sparking my interest in—among many other things—the American Civil War and Reconstruction. So let me pass along a story that I came across while exploring life and death near Andersonville Prison. It’s vivid and true and revealing—the kind of stranger-than-fiction southern tale that you always enjoyed sharing and discussing at length in your kitchen.
Remember Rebecca Felton? No, she wasn’t one of our students at Duke, though in some ways she could have been. A century before us, when old Mr. Duke was just beginning to sell tobacco, she was a complicated and opinionated Georgia feminist, activist, white supremacist, and champion of the Lost Cause. Much later, in 1922, she became the first woman appointed to the U.S. Senate, at age 87! (That made her the last member of Congress who had owned slaves.) She took the place of Tom Watson, the Populist-turned-nativist-bigot, when he died suddenly; she only held the post for 24 hours, as a symbolic gesture. She advocated the vote for white women, but she also opposed spending on Black education and even defended lynching. I first learned about her in 1979 through Revolt Against Chivalry, Jacquelyn Hall’s eye-opening book about Jessie Daniel Ames and the “Women’s Campaign Against Lynching.”
Anyway, Rebecca Latimer Felton lived through the Civil War as a twenty-something in Macon, Georgia, raising small children while her older husband attended to wartime duties. (William Felton had been the impressive speaker at her graduation from Madison Female College in 1852, and she married him the following year.) As a widow in 1919, she wrote a memoir about her experiences, Country Life in Georgia in the Days of My Youth. She comes across as articulate and myopic all at once, still unable—despite all her passion and cleverness—to confront her own demons, and eager to help others indulge in stilted nostalgia. It’s no surprise that in 1893 she pushed for a special exhibit at the World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago, “illustrating the slave period” with “real colored folks” shipped in to spin cotton and strum banjos, proof of “the ignorant contented darky—as distinguished from Stowe’s monstrosities.”
Thinking back to the 1860s, the octogenarian gives moving descriptions of the dire lack of food supplies that gripped southern Georgia late in the war. “After Stoneman raided from Atlanta towards Macon, in July, 1864, I knew a nice family,” she writes, “who had nothing whatever to eat unless they chewed bushes or dug up roots to quiet hunger. After the raiders had passed them they gathered up the scattered corn left by the cavalry horses, washed and rewashed it and boiled it into hominy and kept going cheerfully.” Salt and coffee were virtually absent, “flour was scarce,” and even corn meal was in short supply. “It was a serious time,” she recalls, even in planter homes “where hunger had never entered before.” But then, as she reminisces about white fortitude, she tells this story. It might be called, “Blood at the Depot.”
Late in 1864, Felton travelled east to Crawfordville, near Augusta, to visit her sick mother, who feared for her only son at the front. When Sherman’s Union troops burned the Georgia Railroad’s bridge across the Oconee River west of Greenesboro, her return trip was diverted south to Savannah. From there, she took the Georgia Central Railroad, traveling 190 miles back to Macon. The train followed the Ogeechee River up to Millen, and then turned west, pausing at each little railroad town along the way: Cushingville, Herndon, Sebastopol, Spiers…. It was a sleepless night in dark, uncomfortable cars, as the steam engine struggled from Davisboro to Tennille to Oconee to Emmel, occasionally passing trains on sidings heading east. Though not one to empathize with Union soldiers or enslaved Georgians, Felton still remembered vividly, half a century later, what happened next.
Somewhere along this route—perhaps between McIntyre and Gordon, as the train chugged slowly past Friendship and Solon’s Mills—the sleepy passengers suddenly found themselves staring through the train windows at sickly ghosts. Outside, they saw “car-loads of Andersonville prisoners being removed to another camp” due to Confederate fears “that Sherman would strike for Andersonville,” just as General George Stoneman’s U.S. Cavalry had done unsuccessfully in July. In late fall, thousands of emaciated prisoners of war had been loaded onto trains at Andersonville Station and shipped east to Camp Lawton, the newer, less vulnerable stockade at Millen. Those too sick to travel had been left behind. “The night was gloomy,” she recalled, “as our train rolled along beside passing flat cars on which those Federal prisoners were guarded, with torch lights illuminating the faces of those ragged, smoke-begrimed, haggard and miserably filthy men.”
Though inured to the shocks of conflict, Felton had never seen anything like this nighttime tableau. “I had a glimpse of war conditions that was new to me,” she confessed. “Prison treatment of such men has always been a disgrace to Christianity and civilization,” the activist observed in hindsight, recalling that in those days, reading wartime papers, she had justifiably “been angered at the treatment of our Confederate prisoners” in northern prisons such as Camp Chase and Johnson’s Island in Ohio. Nevertheless, “that sight of train-loads of Federal prisoners on that wild night in Southern Georgia” seared her consciousness: “when I could look into their faces within a few feet of the train,” Felton lamented, “I became an eyewitness to their enforced degradation, filth and utter destitution and the sight never could be forgotten.”
But the shocking nightmare did not end there. Felton also remembered what happened next, as her train halted at the small station where the prisoner convoy had just departed. “Nor can I forget,” she recalled, “seeing a dead negro man who had said something offensive to an Andersonville guard and he had been shot a few minutes before our train pulled in.” The gaping passengers must have averted their eyes, and then stared furtively and repeatedly at the brutal scene, piecing together from train-side chatter why an unarmed Black man was bleeding to death on the dimly lit platform. Soon it was time to reboard the train and push on into the night, leaving the murdered Georgian behind. “The quivers of dying flesh had hardly subsided in his stalwart body,” she remembered, “as we rolled away.”
Years later, old Mrs. Felton wrote down her vivid account of witnessing these two horrific scenes in one night. The recollection appears in her 1919 memoir, Country Life in the Days of My Youth, and it makes clear, as she put it, that the awful sights “never could be forgotten.” Yet it also seems obvious that throughout her adult life, she effectively pushed these nightmarish scenes to the back of her mind and refused to re-examine them. Each repressed image challenged the narrative of life that she inherited, embraced, and then perpetuated, at great cost to herself and others. Felton went on to craft a long and influential public career during some of the most depressing and hate-filled decades in the South’s troubled history. That career, despite all its progressive aspects, was characterized by repetitiously waving the bloody shirt and fanning the flames of white racism.
Reading this story took me back to the exciting undergraduate class that you used to teach on three “Southern Insurgencies,” highlighting the complexities of the Reconstruction struggle, the Populist moment, and long Civil Rights Movement. How much this next cohort could use such a course now, getting in touch with how previous generations have fought for and against meaningful change in a society built on white male privilege. I was also reminded of Educated, an enthralling recent best-seller that gives a striking firsthand account of a young woman’s difficult battle to break out of the intellectual straitjacket that her upbringing had imposed.
Am I crazy to imagine that Felton, this smart and pious woman, was only inches away from following a different track, if only she had processed these events differently? She came so close, and she would never have a better chance. I know—close is not enough, and anyway, it takes more than a mind-shift by one shrewd person to change the course of history. Still, epiphanies and aha moments do happen. I wish I could share this true tale with you over a beer, Larry. That way, I might hear you exclaim, “My God, where did you find that story?” Then we would go on to explore all the ideas it opens up, starting in wartime Georgia, and moving outward. I miss those long, intense conversations, spiraling into the unknown.
Can you believe that while I was at Harvard in the 1960s, that august college never taught classes on the Civil War? (Did it seem too divisive, or too unimportant? I don’t know.) So it was not until we met in the 1970s that I heard someone speak in a passionate and informed way about that conflict. I remember the moment, over lunch in a coffee shop, when you realized my ignorance about the Battle of Chancellorsville. This had to be rectified immediately! Turning over your placemat, you drew the winding Rappahannock River and diagrammed how General Hooker divided his Union forces, sending two corps and most of George Stoneman’s cavalry across the river, hoping to surprise and envelop General Lee’s outnumbered forces.
Now I know, from writing about him, that’s the same George Stoneman who, during Sherman’s later siege of Atlanta, led an unsuccessful raid to liberate the Union prisoners dying in Andersonville. He failed and was captured (no doubt to the delight of Mrs. Felton). But I knew nothing about any of this at the time. Instead, I sat dumbfounded, watching you map out Chancellorsville, using salt shakers and coffee cups, as you explained how Lee’s astuteness—and Hooker’s timidity—turned that encounter in May 1863 into a Confederate victory, paving the way for the Confederate advance into Pennsylvania. I suspect you drew similar maps, for other uninformed listeners, when you took students on those memorable field trips to Gettysburg.
In the coffee shop, as if confronting a magician, I asked, “Wait, how did you do that?” I had seen your play-by-play diagrams of basketball games, and I knew that came from years as an undergraduate sports reporter. But a detailed reenactment of Chancellorsville, on a placemat? You explained that as a boy you had read Douglas Southall Freeman’s four-volume biography of Lee, in part to impress your Virginia-born father who knew the war backwards and forwards.
I also learned that, like many proud Texans, you had family roots trailing east as far as Chesapeake Bay; Goodwyns had resided in seventeenth-century Virginia at the time of Bacon’s Rebellion. So you inherited your parents’ fascination with Southern history, but somehow you developed an abiding commitment to uncovering a clearer and less whitewashed version of the region’s past.
Since the African American experience is central to that past, I recall asking, over another cup of coffee, how you explained your involvement with the civil rights movement. You noted in an offhand way that your father, as a white cavalry officer, had been placed in charge of African American troops in France during World War I. Then later, during the 1930s, he was sent to Fort Huachuca in Arizona to train Black soldiers. Since you were born in 1928, this means you spent formative years at a spot that had been a base for Buffalo Soldiers half a century earlier. I suspect some of your earliest passions about justice and equality were ignited there. Living amid a large Black community on that isolated post, you and your older brother must have asked your parents some hard questions about our segregated country.
Talking over Rebecca Felton’s nightmare, I know these themes of race and region would reappear, along with the horrors of wartime violence. Your father had seen it in France, and your brother Cary saw it all too clearly in Germany as the navigator on a B-17 Flying Fortress. The “Ritzy Blitz” was hit by enemy aircraft and crashed in flames near Hanover in November 1944, killing half the crew. With four others, Cary survived, but his long months as a POW left lasting marks. Turns out that I too have a POW in the family, but I didn’t learn about George Butler from Winthrop, Maine, until after I finished the Andersonville book. As a member of the 3rd Maine Infantry, he was captured in the Peach Orchard at Gettysburg, confined to Belle Isle Prison in Richmond, and then shipped to Andersonville, where he died in March 1864.
Like you, I never cease to marvel over all the unlikely ways that personal stories intersect with huge political eruptions and vast social movements. And now that I live in the West, I have a greater appreciation than ever for the South’s rich storytelling habit, which you helped me appreciate. Am I being too optimistic to hope that this venerable tradition, so long used to disguise the region’s tangled heritage, is now finally being used to look the real past and future more clearly in the eye? I can’t answer that, but the deep well of southern history still contains an endless supply of surprising, meaningful, and revealing moments. Rest assured that your friends continue to work—often with you in mind—to haul these stories up to the surface as rapidly and as well as we can.
As ever,
Thanks to the editors and publisher of People Power for authorizing this reprint of Peter Wood’s chapter in their volume—which added on to his contribution to the twenty gun salute to Lawrence Goodwyn posted at First in 2013.