Title: Journey to the Wilderness
Author: Frye Gaillard
Foreword by Steven Trout
Publisher: NewSouth Books
Price: $23.95 (Hardcover)
Pages: 160
Frye Gaillard is now recognized as one of Alabama’s most prolific and most important nonfiction writers with books on Southern literature, civil rights, NASCAR, country music, Jimmy Carter and, generally, all things Southern.
This volume is, in a sense, a return to the concerns of a very early volume: “Lessons from the Big House,” in which Gaillard discussed his family, especially his grandfather, Samuel Palmer Gaillard of Mobile, who lived to be 103 years old. That Gaillard was nine years old when the Civil War ended, could remember the war and especially Reconstruction, and “spent a lot of time reflecting on the past.”
Southerners do that, but the past refuses to hold still and each generation of Southerners sees it differently, moving the focus and the tone.
In “Journey to the Wilderness,” Frye Gaillard structures his own meditation on the past in a candid, informed, beautifully written commentary on a series of excerpts from a collection of Gaillard family Civil War letters.
Great-great grandfather Thomas, a man in his seventies, lived out the war in Mobile. Thomas had been a moderate who had hoped the Union would endure but, Frye says, he “had made his peace with slavery—how else could he work his 8,000 acres?” An intelligent and sensitive man, Thomas had nevertheless reconciled himself to being a slaveowner and “resented the condemnations by Northern abolitionists, who simply didn’t understand the Southern way of life.”
Once war broke out the dangers became less sociological/political and very corporeal. Thomas had four sons in the battle; two would not survive. Tom, 19, was shot by a sniper. Franklin, the firebrand of the family, fought bravely in several battles, scorned the Yankee troops, never doubted victory, (Gaillard quotes his letter saying: “The Yankees will cave in…”) and was killed in The Wilderness. Sons Richebourg and Sam were both prisoners of war, with Sam’s story especially painful. Sam was held prisoner on Ship Island, off Biloxi, and “suffered cruelty and humiliation … at the hands of colored troops,” his guards, said his son, Frye’s grandfather. Sam “told his family,” and as Frye’s grandfather later told him, “the worse part of his confinement was the cruelty of the guards.” Frye writes that Sam Gaillard’s “memories grew more sullen with time, becoming a part of family lore, and the retribution by the Negro troops became a microcosm of defeat.” He was forever embittered.
Although Frye does not mention it, these same guards are the subject of Natasha Trethewey’s book of poems, “Native Guard,” the book which won her the Pulitzer Prize and led to her appointment as Poet Laureate of the United States. In the title poem, the black narrator describes a fellow guard, another ex-slave, the “scars, crosshatched …on his back.” The narrator, a literate black man, recounts how he kindly writes letters for the illiterate southern soldiers to their families. He eases the worry of “those who still would have us slaves.”
The Union army, like the Confederate army, treated prisoners badly, but as Trethewey’s narrator says: “Death makes equals of us all: A fair master.”
In viewing history, as in viewing everything, I suspect, point of view is paramount. But in these insightful commentaries on his family history Gaillard is not only exploring point of view among individuals; he is exploring how Southerners’ views of the Civil War and its aftermath have changed from generation to generation.
Those who survived the war were exhausted and depressed, in despair, humiliated. It was the next generation, Frye believes, who proudly recast the Lost Cause as glorious, banners waving, all generals geniuses and all private soldiers wildcats in battle, the South never, in fact “wrong,” with nothing to be ashamed of. That search for “consolation,” says Gaillard, morphed into the adamant defense of bigotry and segregation that was not to be altered until the 1960s, when Frye’s generation of Southerners recast southern history once again. Their response was, for a while, to denigrate all things Southern, again creating a caricature, not a portrait.
Finally, Frye Gaillard hopes, as we all do, that a balance can be found acknowledging both the gallantry and the shame.
It would be wrong to leave a discussion of this book without a mention of Steven Trout’s fine Foreword. Trout, Gaillard’s colleague on the faculty at the University of South Alabama, in eleven pages tells the reader an enormous amount, especially concerning nineteenth century high-tech carnage. He discusses artillery—what 12-pound cannon balls flying at 1,000 miles per hour can do to the human body. And the “innocuous-looking minie ball,” which passed through the human frame “like butter.” He reminds the readers of the casualties at Shiloh—23,000, and at Antietam—22,000, all in one day. Trout gives a short summary of the battle at Fort Blakely, on the Bay’s eastern shore, on the last day of the war! Blakely may be the “best-preserved Civil War earthworks in the country.” Trout’s sketch of the carnage makes it clear why so much pageantry was necessary to blur the reality of the bloody battlefield and replace it with the heroic myth of “The Lost Cause.”
This review was originally broadcast on Alabama Public Radio. Don Noble is host of the Alabama Public Television literary interview show “Bookmark” and the editor of “A State of Laughter: Comic Fiction from Alabama.”
