We've spent part of spring break in Memphis. We've been the proper tourists: river cruises, Beale Street, Graceland, Sun Studios, Gibson guitar factory, etc. We've eaten Gus's spicy fried chicken, Corky's bbq, and Dyer's burgers, deep fried in the original grease from 1912. We even saw an NBA game for $5 a head. (NBA Trivia - Q: Can you hear the basketball bounce off the floor from the $5 seats? A: No.)
We strayed off the tourist brochure map a couple of times, though. This morning, for instance, we spent a little over an hour at Elmwood Cemetery.
If you are thinking What kind of man takes his family to a cemetery on vacation? well, that would be me. Because they love me (and because I was driving), Joan and the kids kindly agreed to indulge my diversion all the while holding my promise of brevity over my head.
A cool, sparse drizzle struggled to wash the South Dudley Street grime off the windshield as I drove across the whitewashed bridge that arched over the railroad tracks and into the cemetery. The Victorian cottage that houses the cemetery office seemed inviting and the distinguished gentleman (bearing an uncanny resemblance to the late Ed Bradley) who appeared out of the safe when I entered the office wasn't at all surprised by my presence or my request for help locating a grave.
"Who are you looking for?" he asked.
"Shelby Foote," I replied.
"Ah, I can show you right where Shelby's at," he responded, with a warm, casual familiarity for both the subject of my search and location of his resting place. He highlighted the route to the grave on a photocopied cemetery map while explaining that Mr. Foote's family had yet to put up a headstone though the burial had taken place almost two years before. "You need to look for Jeffery Forrest's grave, and Shelby will be right next to that."
I turned to leave, and he asked me, "So, what brought you here today?"
I puzzled at the question, for I thought I had answered it earlier, but I replied, "I'm just an admirer of Mr. Foote's work and I thought it'd be interesting to visit his grave and pay my respects."
"Well, we're glad you stopped by. When you get to the grave, pull as far off the side of the road as you can. These roads weren't built for cars and they're mighty narrow. Enjoy your visit."
By then the rain had stopped and the clouds were breaking. I followed the map down the narrow passage bordered by grave markers of every shape and size and shaded by towering magnolias, dogwoods, and crape myrtles. When I reached the point on my map where the office manager's highlighter mark ended, I looked to the side of the road and located Jeffery Forrest's grave. Next to it, under a mighty forked magnolia, a tiny American flag hung limply in the stillness.
"Around the bend from Bolton's rumpled statue, a visitor comes upon what many consider the high point of the tour, Chapel Hill Circle, which contains the Forrest plot. Here Lieutenant Nathan Bedford Forrest was laid to rest in 1877, at the age of fifty-six, joining four of the five brothers who followed him at birth and preceded him in death, two of them as casualties of the war that gave him his nom-de-guerre, "Wizard of the Saddle," and earned him the reputation, widely acknowledged, of being the greatest cavalry commander of the Civil or any other war. Sixteen years later his wife was buried beside him, and both were removed in 1904 to rest beneath his equestrian statue in Forrest Park, just over an airline mile away, out Union Avenue in what had by then become the heart of the city." Elmwood: In the Shadows of the Elms by Perre Magness, from the introduction The Legacy of Historic Elmwood Continues... by Shelby Foote.
I became acquainted with Shelby Foote's writing as a freshman in college, though I didn't know it at the time. My US History to 1877 professor, Mr. Sandlin, passionately quoted Foote's accounts of Confederate General Albert Sidney Johnston: how he had been branded the Savior of the Confederacy, how crowds had greeted him throughout the Confederacy on his way to Richmond to receive his orders, how he had led the Battle of Shiloh carrying a tin cup instead of a sword, the cup his share of Yankee spoils as an apology to a young lieutenant whose feelings he had hurt by chastising him for plundering an enemy tent, and most memorably the exchange between Johnston and his aide at Shiloh, Tennessee Governor Isham G. Harris, as the general's mortal wound was discovered.
IGH: General, are you hurt?
ASJ: Yes, and I fear seriously.
I searched for the source of that quotation for years, in vain. It wasn't until Ken Burns' The Civil War and my introduction to Foote's The Civil War: A Narrative that my search was rewarded and my interest in Foote and his writing blossomed.
When Foote died I was going through a rough time dealing with my grandmother's illness. On the day his death notice hit the Memphis paper I flew through Memphis on my way to Colorado and I got a copy of the paper in the airport. I knew if ever I was in Memphis, outside the airport, I'd have to make a trip to the cemetery, and this morning I made good on that promise to myself.
I had planned to read the aforementioned account of General Johnston at Foote's grave, but a river cruise tour guide's comments about the Civil War naval battle that took place just off Mud Island prompted me to read that instead. I figured the kids would relate to that better since they had been at that spot and had a frame of reference. They indulged my reading and then sped off to terrorize the dead while I wandered around, soaking up the experience.
A few minutes later the kids came running back to the flag marking Foote's grave. "Papa, you gotta come see the funny statue we found!" they cried, dragging me across the road. I could see the tarnished bust a good ways away but when I got close enough to read the name I got the shivers. We were standing at the grave of Tennessee Governor Isham G. Harris.
There is no way I could express what I felt at that moment to the kids, so I let Foote speak for me through the original passage I had intended to read at his grave.
...Johnston saw that the officers were having trouble getting the troops in line to go forward again. "Men! they are stubborn; we must use the bayonet," he told them. To emphasize his meaning he rode among them and touched the points of their bayonets with the tin cup. "These must do the work," he said. When the line had formed, the soldiers were still hesitant to reenter the smoky uproar. So Johnston did what he had been doing all morning, all along the line of battle. Riding front and center, he stood in the stirrups, removed his hat, and called back over his shoulder: "I will lead you!" As he touched his spurs to the flanks of his horse, the men surged forward, charging with him into the sheet of flame which blazed to meet them there among the blossoms letting fall their bright pink rain.
This time the charge was not repulsed; Hurlburt's troops gave way, abandoning the orchard to the cheering men in gray. Johnston came riding back, a smile on his lips, his teeth flashing white beneath his mustache. There were rips and tears in his uniform and one bootsole had been cut nearly in half by a minie bullet. He shook his foot so the dangling leather flapped. "They didn't trip me up that time," he said, laughing. His battle blood was up; his eyes were shining. Presently, however, as the general sat watching his soldiers celebrate their capture of the orchard and its guns, Governor Isham Harris of Tennessee, who had volunteered to serve as his aide during the battle, saw him reel in the saddle.
"General -- are you hurt?" he cried.
"Yes, and I fear seriously," Johnston said.
None of the rest of his staff was there, the general having sent them off on various missions. Riding with one arm across Johnston's shoulders to prevent his falling, Harris guided the bay into a nearby ravine, where he eased the pale commander to the ground and began unfastening his clothes in an attempt to find the wound. He had no luck until he noticed the right boot full of blood, and then he found it: a neat hole drilled just above the hollow of the knee, marking where the femoral artery had been severed. This called for a knowledge of tourniquets, but the governor knew nothing of such things. The man who knew most about them, Johnston's staff physician, had been ordered by the general to attend to a group of Federal wounded he encountered on his way to the far right. When the doctor protested, Johnston cut him off: "These men were our enemies a moment ago. They are our prisoners now. Take care of them." So Harris alone was left to do what he could to staunch the bright red flow of blood.
He could do little. Brandy might help, he thought, but when he poured some into the hurt man's mouth it ran back out again. Presently a colonel, Johnston's chief of staff, came hurrying into the ravine. But he could do nothing either. He knelt down facing the general. "Johnston, do you know me? Johnston, do you know me?" he kept asking, over and over, nudging the general's shoulder as he spoke.
But Johnston did not know him. Johnston was dead."
The Civil War: A Narrative, Volume I, Chapter 4, by Shelby Foote
I explained to the kids that minutes before we had been at the grave of the man who wrote those words about the man at whose grave we now stood. The connection was deeper than that for me, of course, but how to explain? My father had taken me to Shiloh as a child; I'd seen the tree that marked the spot where Johnston died. Later, as an adult, I'd heard a park ranger from Shiloh tell a Civil War roundtable audience of Governor Harris's reticent return to Shiloh to help find the spot for historians. Add to that the aforementioned passion of a beloved teacher and a coincidental discovery by a couple of rambunctious kids running off energy while waiting for their old man to get his head out of the philosophical clouds and it all comes full circle. Where else but a cemetery can a twentieth-century writer truly convene with literary subjects of a prior century that died before he was born? How better can he affiliate with a family he so admired than to be buried beside them? How more tangibly can a reader connect a writer's words with his subject's actions and bring those actions to life again? How, pray tell, can noble deeds of past centuries live on, but through words?
I took a few steps toward the car before I realized that the bust on Governor Harris's grave was staring towards that small American flag on Chapel Hill Circle. I will remember this day until I die, or until words fail me.
