April 9TH, 1965, Appomattox
I attended the centennial ceremony
of the Civil War’s armistice in Appo-
mattox, Va. on April 9th, nineteen
sixty five when I was eleven years old.
There were over 20,000 people
there, many of whom were digging up
Minié balls from the battlefield outside
of town, then selling them as souvenirs.
The grandsons of Grant and Lee were there
along with the Marine Band on a stage
festooned in red, white, and blue not far
from the courthouse where Grant and Lee
put an end to that most dread American
war.
I lived not far away in Lynchburg
where my friends identified me as “Yankee”
since I was born in the north and had lived there
for a while, which might as well have been a century
to them since that was where I was from.
We played “war” — a game in which the uni-
forms of my soldiers were Union blue and theirs
Confederate gray.
We re-enacted battles
in the way young boys do, especially
Gettysburg where more than fifty thousand
casualties occurred — not enough room
on our floor to accommodate that number
with our plastic troops, so we resurrected
the dead until we couldn’t count anymore.
We “played” like this because of what so many
Southerners preferred to call that war,
which I will not repeat since calling it that
only serves to open its wound that’s still
so thinly sealed and which our child’s play
with plastic men both failed and succeeded in
burying it for a while, the horror and mayhem
of Vicksburg, Manassas, Antietam, Bull Run,
Shiloh, Chancellorsville, The Wilderness,
Cold Harbor, Gettysburg, the last
of which and bloodiest of all occurred
in early July, 1865
and which Abraham Lincoln on
his way to the site composed an address in only
fifteen minutes or so to those who were left
to observe the charnel ground: “We cannot ded-
icate – we cannot consecrate – we cannot
hallow – this ground. The brave men, living
and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated
it, far above our poor power to add
or detract. The world will little note nor long
remember what we say here, but it
can never forget what they did here.”
It wasn’t until that day in Appomattox
in 1965 when I observed
those scions of Grant and Lee on a makeshift stage
shaking hands as their grandfathers had
a hundred years ago that I felt the blood
in the dirt of that town and its surrounding fields
rise up in me like a flower and blossom in grief.