The train had departed Washington, D.C., at 10:35 p.m. By the time Claire and her friend Donna had settled themselves in their bunks it was near midnight and they were drawing close to Manassas. Claire’s body still pulsed with anger and hurt, and she’d been unable to fall asleep after the argument she’d had with Donna. Claire slipped her hand from under the blanket and felt around for the train schedule she’d tucked beneath her mattress. She unfolded it and held it to the faint moonlight that trickled through the curtained window by her bunk. On the schedule she saw the name of the great battlefield that her fiancé Paul’s father had spoken of, the place where Paul’s great-grandfather had fought the first real battle of the Civil War, when it seemed the whole campaign would be short and certain.
Claire recalled the face of Paul’s great-grandfather, a man whom she’d never met and had only seen in the huge oil portrait that hung in the Lytles’ keeping room in the family’s old plantation on the North Carolina coast. She’d imagined the gray-bearded man in the portrait sitting atop a powerful white horse on a muddy battlefield strewn with the bodies of young southern boys.
Claire rested her head on the stiff pillow and lifted her left hand so that the diamond on her engagement ring caught the light. She tried to ignore the heavy breathing coming from the bunk below her, but the sound of Donna’s peaceful sleep annoyed her.
Donna’s father’s connections had been what allowed the young students from the North Carolina College for Women to travel to Washington, and it had been his personal friendship with Senator Lee Overman that had secured them a tour of the city by one of the nation’s most powerful congressmen.
“I grew up in Salisbury believing that Lee Overman was the greatest man alive,” Donna had told Claire on the train ride to Washington the day before. They’d been sitting beside one another in the dining car. Claire had been writing a letter to Paul. She’d promised him that she’d send him a piece of mail with D.C. postage.
“My daddy always told me that Senator Overman was the only man in Washington willing to protect my ‘southern womanhood,’” Donna had said. She’d gathered her thick red hair into a ponytail and fastened it. Claire envied Donna’s beauty, the ease with which she moved and spoke and acted. Claire was twenty-one, but she still perceived herself as a quiet, passive child with mousy brown hair, who lived with an acute fear that someone might be judging her. It made her feel very small. She’d sensed Donna’s eyes on her, and she’d scribbled a sloppy heart at the bottom of Paul’s letter before signing her name.
She had batted her eyes at Donna and dropped her voice into a low-country drawl. “And how can the senator expect to protect the womanhood of a saucy number like you, my lady?”
Donna had looked at her without smiling; then she’d turned toward the train’s window.
“My daddy used to say, ‘Donna baby, Lee Overman would lynch every damn nigger in this country if he had to.’ And as I got older I knew what that meant, and it scared me to hear my father talk that way. It still does.”
It was clear that Donna did not think much of Senator Overman or her father or the men’s connection, but it had not kept Claire from feeling proud that morning before their tour when Donna had introduced her to the senator as “the daughter of Richard McAdam, owner of the McAdam Mill in Belmont.” The senator had smiled at the mention of Claire’s family name.
“I know things are rocky down in Gaston County with the strike,” the senator had said. “Give your father my best, and tell him we’re doing everything we can to put an end to this trouble.”
“I will,” Claire had said. “I’ll let him know.” She had nodded and smiled, but she’d had no idea what the senator had meant.
Overman was old and white-headed, and he’d shuffled along before the group of young women and their chaperone and pointed out everything they’d hoped to see: the Washington Monument; the Capitol Rotunda; the White House, where the senator had promised that President Hoover was in residence at that very moment, since the two men had spoken that morning.
Their last stop of the day had been the Lincoln Memorial. Their chaperone, Mrs. Barnes, had stood with her back to Lincoln, as he sat on the chair that seemed so much like a throne. The monument was barely seven years old. Its white marble shone glossy and smooth in the late afternoon light.
“People don’t ever believe this story,” Mrs. Barnes had said, “so none of you have to believe it either.”
The girls had all stopped talking and turned and looked toward Mrs. Barnes. Some of them had even drawn closer to hear her more clearly. She was an old woman, perhaps as old as seventy, and she rarely spoke, except in the classroom, and even then she spoke in such a way that the girls had to focus their ears to fully understand what she said.
Claire had been standing by Senator Overman, who was certainly older than Mrs. Barnes, and when she began her story with her back turned on Lincoln, the senator seemed to sense something in her tone that hinted that her story might be his own story as well. He’d stopped midsentence, stopped telling Claire about witnessing the completion of the statue’s body just a few years earlier. He’d dropped his hands where they were gesturing and drifted toward Mrs. Barnes, who stood on the edge of the shadow cast by the portico above them.
“It was early April 1865,” Mrs. Barnes said, “and I was just three years old, but my birthday was coming up in June, and I’d already been told that my daddy wouldn’t be there. My sister, Margaret, who I called Sissy—called her that until she died—had already told me that Abraham Lincoln had killed my daddy at a place called Chancellorsville. It sounded like a far-off place, and I had no idea where it was. I don’t think I even knew what killed or dead meant then. I was so young. But I knew those words made Sissy and my mother sad, and I hated Abraham Lincoln for doing those words to my father, for making my mother and sister feel that way.
“Richmond was already burning. Our boys had set the fires themselves during their retreat: the bridges, the munitions, the harbor. Maybe they didn’t expect for it to keep burning after they’d left. It was after midnight on the second night of the fires when we finally left our home and made our way down Bank Street toward my mother’s sister’s house, my aunt Jess. Her husband was away at the war too, but he would come home that summer. She was lucky. He was lucky too.
“We were coming down Ninth Street right by the Capitol. Parts of the city glowed in the distance, and you could smell the smoke and all the different smells of the things that were on fire. We were coming down the hill right by the Capitol and it was all right there before us, the whole city on fire, burning right there before us.