In all this beautiful sunshine, in the stillness and shade
of these long hours on this piazza, all comes back to me about little Joe; it
haunts me — that scene in Richmond where all seemed confusion, madness, a bad
dream! Here I see that funeral procession as it wound among those tall white
monuments, up that hillside, the James River tumbling about below over rocks
and around islands; the dominant figure, that poor, old, gray-haired man,
standing bareheaded, straight as an arrow, clear against the sky by the open
grave of his son. She, the bereft mother, stood back, in her heavy black wrappings,
and her tall figure drooped. The flowers, the children, the procession as it
moved, comes and goes, but those two dark, sorrow-stricken figures stand; they
are before me now!
That night, with no sound but the heavy tramp of his feet
overhead, the curtains flapping in the wind, the gas flaring, I was numb,
stupid, half-dead with grief and terror. Then came Catherine's Irish howl.
Cheap, was that. Where was she when it all happened? Her place was to have been
with the child. Who saw him fall? Whom will they kill next of that devoted
household?
Read to-day the list of killed and wounded.1 One
long column was not enough for South Carolina's dead. I see Mr. Federal
Secretary Stanton says he can reenforce Suwarrow Grant at his leisure whenever
he calls for more. He has just sent him 25,000 veterans. Old Lincoln says, in
his quaint backwoods way, “Keep a-peggin’.” Now we can only peg out. What have
we left of men, etc., to meet these “reenforcements as often as reenforcements
are called for?” Our fighting men have all gone to the front; only old men and
little boys are at home now.
It is impossible to sleep here, because it is so solemn and
still. The moonlight shines in my window sad and white, and the soft south
wind, literally comes over a bank of violets, lilacs, roses, with
orange-blossoms and magnolia flowers.
Mrs. Chesnut was only a year younger than her husband. He is
ninety-two or three. She was deaf; but he retains his senses wonderfully for
his great age. I have always been an early riser. Formerly I often saw him
sauntering slowly down the broad passage from his room to hers, in a flowing
flannel dressing-gown when it was winter. In the spring, he was apt to be in
shirt-sleeves, with suspenders hanging down his back. He had always a large
hair-brush in his hand.
He would take his stand on the rug before the fire in her
room, brushing scant locks which were fleecy white. Her maid would be doing
hers, which were dead-leaf brown, not a white hair in her head. He had the
voice of a stentor, and there he stood roaring his morning compliments. The
people who occupied the room above said he fairly shook the window glasses.
This pleasant morning greeting ceremony was never omitted.
Her voice was “soft and low” (the oft-quoted). Philadelphia
seems to have lost the art of sending forth such voices now. Mrs. Binney, old
Mrs. Chesnut's sister, came among us with the same softly modulated, womanly,
musical voice. Her clever and beautiful daughters were criard. Judge Han
said: “Philadelphia women scream like macaws.” This morning as I passed Mrs.
Chesnut's room, the door stood wide open, and I heard a pitiful sound. The old
man was kneeling by her empty bedside sobbing bitterly. I fled down the middle
walk, anywhere out of reach of what was never meant for me to hear.
_______________
1 During the month of May, 1864, important
battles had been fought in Virginia, including that of the Wilderness on May
6th-7th, and the series later in that month around Spottsylvania Court House.
SOURCE: Mary Boykin Chesnut, Edited by Isabella D. Martin
and Myrta Lockett Avary, A Diary From Dixie, p. 309-11
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