ACCLAIM FOR ALLAN GURGANUS’S Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All Winner of the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters “Exuberant.… Unforgettable … manages to encompass every extreme from the languishing Southern belle awaiting Sherman’s vengeful troops to a present-day candy striper.… This vast array of voices—from a toddler to an old man, from a schoolmarm nicknamed Witch by her pupils to a slave who was something of an African tribal witch—issues from the mouth of the unforgettable Lucy Marsden.” —The New York Times Book Review “Those of you who haven’t yet read this astonishing first novel should immediately commence doing so; leave those of us who already have experienced the book to start rereading.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer “The novel’s presentation of this terrible, convulsive struggle gives a renewed, sobering sense of the horror, pity, and loss of that war.” —San Francisco Chronicle “Gurganus, a storyteller in the grand tradition, can tell his stories as well as anyone alive.” —The New York Times To my mother and father, with gratitude for standards and tenderness And, with love, to Mona Simpson Myth is gossip grown old. —STANISLAW LEC What the American public always wants is a tragedy with a happy ending. —W. DEAN HOWELLS to Edith Wharton in conversation, A Backward Glance CONTENTS BOOK ONE NOBODY’S PERFECT Fight Song After Appomattox Weird for 1860 The Tailor and the Leg Nice Local Boy Bull Run Honeymoon Unnecessary Roughness How to Return BOOK TWO TIME DOES THAT Simons Splendid Pocket Watch, Its Fate One Old Man in Here I Like The Passable Kingdom Black, White, and Lilac BEFORE AFTER IN ENDING BOOK THREE GIVE STRENGTH, LORD Back to War Again A Hunger to Be Vertical Good Help Why I Say Ain’t A Little Self-Pity Bunting, Wrinkleproof Food and Rifles A Minstrel Show for God BOOK FOUR THESE THINGS HAPPEN Archie’s First Appearance The Tribe That Answers BELOW ABOVE In Which Our Heroine Pretty Much Catches the Works BOOK FIVE A TREATY WITH THE WORLD How to Leave A Body Tends to Shine Music Changes During War Enough It Ends in the Air About the Author Also by Allan Gurganus AUTHOR’S NOTE It’s a joy to thank my friends and most constant readers, people who greeted this work one chapter at a time: Eric Ashworth, Daisy Thorp, Jane Holding, Edmund Apffel, Andrea Simon, William Gurganus, Amanda Urban, Daniel Kaiser, William Carl Walker, Brian Zeger, Steven Cole, and especially Joanne Meschery. The work was midwifed by Elisabeth Sifton, its brilliant godmother. Time is freedom. Freeing me during spans of this novel’s writing were the Ingram Merrill Foundation and the National Endowment of the Arts. My colleagues at Sarah Lawrence College lovingly covered for me during a long absence. Many thanks, friends. The Corporation of Yaddo gave me refuge years ago when I had only a Hermes portable, a clean face, and fairly good work habits. I began this book at Yaddo and am grateful for the place’s kindness, its perfect sanctuary. Books most often consulted: King James Bible, A New and Complete Concordance of the Holy Scripture by John Eadie (Glasgow, 1850), All God’s Dangers, Pissing in the Snow, The Children of Pride. Shelby Foote’s brilliant narrative history of the Civil War. Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, Patriotic Gore, The Country Scrapbook, Children of Bladensfield, Aunt Arie, A Civil War Treasury, The Federal Writers’ Project Collected Slave Narratives, Slave Life in Georgia, newspapers and diaries of the period. Family letters. And, perhaps most useful for evoking the past, The Montgomery Ward Catalogue of 1888 and Images of War, a complete photographic history of the struggle. A word to the reader about historical accuracy. In testimony collected from former slaves during the 1930s’ Federal Writers’ Project, many recalled seeing Lincoln in the South during the Civil War. Fanny Burdock, ninety-one, of Valdosta, Georgia, remembered, “We been picking in the field when my brother he point to the road and then we seen Marse Abe coming all dusty and on foot. We run right to the fence and had the oak bucket and the dipper. When he draw up to us, he so tall, black eyes so sad. Didn’t say not one word, just looked hard at all us, every one us crying. We give him nice cool water from the dipper. Then he nodded and set off and we just stood there till he get to being dust then nothing. After, didn’t our owner or nobody credit it, but me and all my kin, we knowed. I still got the dipper to prove it.” In reality, Lincoln’s foot tour of Georgia could not have happened. In this book, it can. Such scenes were told by hundreds of slaves. Such visitations remain, for me, truer than fact. History is my starting point.