A Year in the South (30 page)

 

 

P
ART
F
OUR

FALL AND ANOTHER WINTER

JOHN ROBERTSON

John Robertson would have left east Tennessee early in September but for the rain. It began falling around the second day of the month and continued with hardly a letup for two weeks, drenching the ridges and hills and inundating the bottom lands. The wagon that was to haul his belongings to the train depot was no match for the muddy roads, and so his departure was postponed.
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He had little to do while waiting for the weather to clear. He had closed his school on September 1—halfway through the three-month term he had planned—and farm work was pretty much at a standstill as long as it was raining. Tennie was away at her school five days out of seven. John thus had a lot of time to think things over, but he did not reconsider his decision to leave. To stay would be to risk his life. The armed gang that had twice accosted him had declared their intention to kill him. Where they were now he did not know; but even if they had left Roane County, they could return at any time, and they knew where he lived, where he went to church, and what paths he walked. Appealing to the authorities for protection was pointless: they could hardly guard his remote community against an elusive band of vengeful unionists, even if they were so inclined—which they probably were not, for they were all unionists themselves.
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John's new home would be in Iowa. His uncle Jim Robertson, who had been living with Uncle Allen since June, had decided to seek his fortune there and had persuaded John to go with him. Iowa was far, far away, but John had no close family or friends outside east Tennessee and concluded that, as long as he must live in exile among strangers, he might as well “be 1200 miles from home as 150.”
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He did not especially relish the idea of living in the North, a “distant clime, where I had but little assurance of enjoyment, and where, I had been told, the hearts of the people were as cold as the climate.” That those people were also his former enemies bothered him little. He had no quarrel with them now, and he anticipated no real trouble from them. The ironic fact was that he was much safer in Yankeedom than in his east Tennessee homeland. Northerners had no love for rebels, but neither did they seek bloody vengeance against them.
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It was having to leave Tennie that he dreaded most. When he told her of his decision to go, she did not try to dissuade him. She knew as well as he that his life was in danger, and in any event she was not the sort to argue with him. They did not seriously discuss the possibility of her going with him. John thought himself too young to marry—he had turned nineteen in April—and even if old enough, he was in no position to support a wife and family comfortably. There was no other choice, he concluded sadly: he and his beloved would have to separate. Their plans for the future remained intact, however. He promised he would one day return to claim her as his bride, and she promised she would wait for him.
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The rain let up after the second week of September. By Sunday, the seventeenth, the roads were passable, and John and Uncle Jim agreed that they would leave the next day. That evening John walked over to Tennie's for a last visit. It was “a gloomy sabbath to me,” he recalled, “and not less g[l]oomy to someone else.” The weather had turned cool and Mrs. Robertson had a fire going in the parlor. Her younger children were gathered around the fireplace, carrying on happily. John took a seat next to the armchair where Tennie sat. Hours passed, but neither said much; not even the cheery fire and the frolicking children could lift their spirits. “Occasionally a smile would light upon [our] lips, but a deep sigh would follow.” After a while someone suggested singing, and a hymnal was brought out. John loved to sing, but tonight his heart was not in it, and after a few hymns the book was put away. Then Tennie fetched a Bible, and John joined the family in their nightly prayers. It was very late when at last he said good night and left.
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He returned early the next morning for a final, brief farewell. Tennie met him on the porch. He took her hand and looked into her eyes. “I will return,” he said.

“Never fear me,” she replied. “I will prove true.” They kissed, and he left.
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When he got back to Uncle Allen's, he found a crowd of neighbors gathered to say good-bye. “Whole families were there to see us start,” John remembered, “large and small old and young.” The party bound for Iowa numbered ten in all: John, Uncle Jim, his wife, Margaret, their six children, and a family friend named Newton Mullens. Two wagons were on hand to haul them and their luggage to the railroad station at Sweetwater, eight miles away. Once the wagons were loaded, they said their good-byes. “I gave Uncle A[llen] my hand in sorrow,” John recalled. “I regret[t]ed to part with him [for] he had been a friend to me.… [F]or the first time in [my] life on parting with a friend, a tear rolled down my cheek.”
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It was well into the afternoon when they finally got away. The wagons, driven by neighbors, carried John and his nine companions eastward over the ridge to Blue Springs, where more friends were gathered to say farewell, and then headed southeast. It was almost dark when the party got to the Sweetwater depot. After unloading their baggage they found themselves with several hours to kill, for the train was not due until midnight. They ate the cold supper that they had brought along, then laid down pallets on the waiting room floor for the sleepy children, who ranged from a toddler to a thirteen-year-old. John and Mullens wandered around the little town a while, then returned to the depot.
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John stretched out on a table in the waiting room and tried to sleep, but could not. After a while he went outside to the platform. For a long time he paced back and forth along its length, melancholy and pensive. He thought about his parents in Greene County. He had not seen them in over a year and wondered when he would see them again. He thought about his commitment to Christ. That brought a measure of comfort, for, as he reminded himself, no matter how far from home he journeyed, he would always have “one friend who never forsakes those who do his will.” Mostly, though, he thought about Tennie.
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The noise of the approaching train interrupted his reverie. He looked down the track and saw the locomotive, with its huge headlight, “glaring like a demon through the darkness.” Quickly the adults roused the children and gathered the luggage. As the train came to a stop, hissing and screeching, John took his valise in one hand and the littlest child in the other. Stepping up onto the end platform of one of the passenger cars, he squeezed through the door, made his way down the center aisle, and found a seat. The others climbed aboard, too, and a few moments later the conductor clanged the brass bell and the train moved out.
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South and west they headed, along the track of the East Tennessee & Georgia Railroad. Barely had they stowed their bags and gotten the youngsters settled when the train stopped at Athens, ten miles from Sweetwater. John had visited this town once or twice in the past to peddle the cigars he and Uncle Allen had made. When the train pulled out and left Athens behind, continuing on its southwesterly route, he realized that he was now farther from home than he had ever been.
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The interior of the long low-ceilinged car in which he rode was dimly illuminated by a lamp. There was nothing to be seen from the windows, for the night was moonless and pitch-black. John sat silently, rocking ever so slightly with the motion of the train and listening to the iron wheels clatter rhythmically over the rails.
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After a while, Mullens, who was sitting beside him, decided he needed cheering up. “Come John,” he said, “don't be grievin[g] about that sweet heart a[l]ready; stir up and don't be so drowsy.”

John was in no mood for banter. “It is true I feel gloomy,” he replied stiffly, “but as for me being grieving, I believe you are mistaken.”

“Well stir your stump,” Mullens chirped, “and let's talk about them devils up in Green[e] County.”

“Up in Green[e] County?”

“Yes,” said Mullens, “them we're running from.”

Now John began to get very annoyed. He no more wanted to talk about the unionist gang than about Tennie. He wished Mullens would shut up. “For my part,” he said sharply, “I am not running from any devils as I know of.”

Mullens persisted jovially. “Well it looks mighty like it the way this old train jogs along; it's more like flying.”

To this John declined to reply. Mullens finally gave up and eventually dozed off, leaving John alone with his thoughts.
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He was still awake and brooding when the eastern sky began to brighten with the rising sun. It was around 5:30 and the train was approaching Chattanooga. To the left lay Missionary Ridge and ahead, beyond the city, towered Lookout Mountain. These were the renowned battlefields where, in November 1863, Ulysses S. Grant's forces had dealt smashing blows to the rebel Army of Tennessee, breaking its siege of the city, sending it reeling back into Georgia, and opening the way for Sherman's later campaign against Atlanta. Chattanooga had remained an important Union army post from that time until the end of the war, and it was even now garrisoned by Yankee troops. It had also become a haven for slaves who had deserted their masters in the wake of Sherman's army. Thousands still resided in the city or in a settlement they had established nearby known as Contraband.
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16. Chattanooga at the time of the Civil War. Lookout Mountain looms in the distance.

At the Chattanooga depot, John and his party collected their baggage and got off the train. They would have to change to another to continue on their way, and it was not scheduled to leave for an hour. As he waited, John gazed around the depot. He was revolted by what he saw. Not only was the place crowded and noisy and disorderly, but it was also teeming with blacks. He had seen few or none since his stay in Knoxville back in January, and he would just as soon never see any again.
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He heard voices raised in anger not far from where he stood. Turning to look, he saw a white man and a black man arguing. In a moment they were pummeling one another. To John's disgust, the black got the better of the white and thrashed him. Before that fight was over, another broke out nearby. “[T]his did not concern me,” John remarked, “as it was between two negroes.”
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There was worse to come. Not thirty feet away he saw “two big, rusty negroes” in U.S. army uniforms. They were members of the Yankee garrison, assigned to patrol the depot. As John watched, the soldiers moved in to arrest a white man for some infraction. He resisted, but to no avail. “[G]athering him like dogs would a sheep,” John wrote, “one by each arm, they drug him off to prison,” both cursing profanely the whole time. John boiled with anger. “O how I wanted to shoot them down, like an old hunter would a panther.” He was glad when the train whistle blew, signaling the passengers to board. “I longed to be off from this place where negro equality was being [en]forced so rigidly.”
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The train chugged westward, skirting the base of Lookout Mountain, and traveled twenty miles or so before dipping southward into Alabama. John and his companions marveled at the scenery along this stretch. In places the track was cut right into a mountainside. On one hand would be a nearly perpendicular wall of rock hundreds of feet high, and on the other a ravine equally deep, into which it seemed the careening locomotive might tumble at any moment.
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Nearing Bridgeport, the train crossed the Tennessee River on a long wooden trestle. After a breakfast stop in Stevenson, it headed north, now on the track of the Nashville & Chattanooga Railroad, and soon reentered Tennessee. Everywhere along this route were reminders that it had been one of the Union army's vital lifelines in subduing the Confederacy. At frequent intervals stood stout blockhouses and redoubts, empty now of Yankee soldiers and cannons but still imposing.
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By noon the train had passed through the rugged middle Tennessee highlands and into the fertile lowlands. This was a world far different from what John had known in east Tennessee. It was a world of great plantations and great wealth—or had been, before the war. Remnants of it survived: from his car window John saw stately mansions surrounded by broad, level fields of ripe cotton; in the fields, gangs of black men and women were at work. But he saw, too, large stretches of abandoned land, fenceless and overgrown, and the charred ruins of houses and barns. Middle Tennessee had been smitten harder by the hand of war than almost any other region of the South, and the scars would be long in healing.
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