Dancing Priest

Author and Novelist Glynn Young

Writing

How Research Fills the Gaps in a Family Story

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The idea has been in my head for years – a story about my great-grandfather. But I knew only a few facts about him, passed down by my father. Research has filled it in – a little bit.

Too young to enlist as a regular soldier, he’d been a messenger boy in the Civil War. He’d lost two brothers and a brother-in-law in the war, leaving him the youngest and surviving son. When the war ended in 1865, he had been “someplace east,” likely North Carolina rather than Appomattox. He had to walk home to southern Mississippi. When he arrived, he discovered his family was gone, having fled to Texas.

That was as much as I knew. When I finally decided to consider a story about him, I turned first to the family Bible, with its records of births, deaths, and marriages.  The records, written over a period of 50 years, were in the same hand – my great-grandfather’s. They proved more revealing that I’d realized.

To continue reading, please see my post today at the ACFW blog. 

When a Book Won’t Let Go

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Two weeks after finishing it, and I’m still thinking about Hearts Torn Asunder: Trauma in the Civil War’s Final Campaign in North Carolina by Ernest Dollar Jr. (See my review last week.) 

When I read it, I expected to read about the final convulsive moments of the surrender of the Confederate armies and the immediate aftermath. And that’s the thumbnail description. But it’s about a lot more.

It’s the story of the civilians in north central North Carolina, roughly Raleigh to Greensboro, who found themselves in the path of two defeated armies and one victorious one.

It’s the story of the soldiers in those armies, who had to live with what we know today as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. One thing you don’t read in the general histories of the Civil War period in the rather startling increase in soldier suicides and commitments to insane asylums in the years and decades after the war.

It’s the story of some of the atrocities inflicted on the civilian and military population. In generally, Confederate soldiers were focused on finding food, shoes, and clothes, and they didn’t care where they found them. Confederate soldiers and civilians alike were often desperate for food, and together they were raiding government warehouses and supplies. 

The Union soldiers had food. What they were looking for was loot and revenge. There were too many reports of pillaging and looting, and more than a few of rape. Women and often children were brutalized. Houses were burned. It wasn’t only soldiers who developed PTSD. Some of the federal soldiers were disciplined and a few executed for their crimes (especially after the armies surrendered; that meant the civilians were no longer members of a foreign and hostile country).

My great-grandfather was somewhere in that convulsion. Even at war’s end, he was (chronologically) a boy. Too young to take up arms officially, he had enlisted and became a messenger boy for the Confederate army.

What I don’t know is what did he do to stay alive. Did he participate in the looting of government warehouses? Did he steal from civilians? Those questions will never be answered. What we do know is that he had to walk home to southern Mississippi – hundreds of miles across a landscape destroyed in many places and in complete social upheaval everywhere. 

When he finally reached home, he learned his family had fled to Texas. So, his trek continued across Louisiana and into east Texas, where he found them. He also discovered that he was the sole surviving son, the youngest child in the family. When his father died four years later, my great-grandfather became the head of the family, which included a widowed sister, two widowed sisters-in-law, and a number of nieces and nephews. And his only family, too – he had married in 1867, and he and his wife had a little boy. He had to take care of that extended family through the rigors of Reconstruction.

My great-grandfather was made of some stern stuff, and that book, Hearts Torn Asunder, helped me understand just how stern it was.

Top photo: My great-grandfather, Samuel Franklin Young, and my great-grandmother, Octavia Montgomery Young. 

The Passing of a Friend

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My mother, who died in 2014, graduated from John McDonough High School in New Orleans in 1940. At the time, it was an all-girls public high school. She remained close to many of the girls who graduated with her, and she never missed a high school reunion for the next 60+ years. And then the reunions stopped. The time came when the number of the 1940 graduates still living had dwindled to less than five. My mother said that they decided that reunions had become too depressing, too much of a reminder of what, and who, was gone.

I thought of my mother when I read a Facebook post last week. It almost seemed nonsensical. A friend posted a short item of the passing of a mutual friend, Paul Stolwyck. It was a shock. I didn’t know he’d been ill. Over the next few hours, I learned what had happened. He died from a brain aneurysm. No warning, no sign, just a collapse. 

I met Paul when we attended First Evangelical Free Church in St. Louis, back in the early 1990s. He was an assistant pastor and enormously gifted in preaching. He’s gone to DeSmet Catholic High School in St. Louis, the same high school my oldest son graduated from. 

Paul Stolwyck

Paul knew everyone, and everyone knew Paul. He was outgoing, among the first to spot a new face in the room. He liked people. He could find common interests faster than almost anyone I’d ever known. He was fun. He’d challenged you. He’d say provocative things, like “Ninety percent of missions is simply showing up.”

He had a heart for missions, and he and his family eventually left our church and became missionaries in Hungary, based in Budapest. They were part of the denomination’s Central European Mission. 

It was Paul who had the idea for what was, at the time, one of the most unusual short-term missions teams ever proposed: a communications missions team. The Central European Mission needed help in communicating what they were about, what their missionaries were doing, and what need and opportunities they had. Paul knew enough about the people at our church that he suggested a team of three people. A guy to manage the trip, a guy to do the filming, and a writer.

I was the writer.

It was a new idea for a short-term team, and a lot of people at the church were cool to the idea. One person, however, championed us, and she occupied a key position in church missions. We got the green light. The plan had been to go in late September of 2001, but 9/11intervened. The trip was rescheduled for May of 2002.

The itinerary was packed. We’d arrive on a Saturday, attend church and tour Budapest on Sunday, and then leave Monday morning for Prague and then Dresden. We’d return via Prague and Brno and spend a day with the staff and other missionaries in the office in Budapest. With travel and filming / interviews, we were looking at 14-16 hours a day. 

Paul met us at the airport in Budapest, and we stayed with Paul, his wife Carol, and their children, and Paul took us on the city tour on Sunday. And it was Paul who told us that “it had been decided” to change our itinerary, and we would also have to travel to Erfurt, Germany, because of a pastor ministering there following the deaths of 13 people in a school shooting. It was an unexpected side-trip that ended up changing my life. 

Paul and his family eventually returned to the United States and settled in Greensboro, North Carolina, still deeply involved in missions. But we stayed in touch. Facebook helped. Paul would occasionally send an email. He asked permission to use some of my poems in sermons. He talked about my novels. He did one of the things he could do so well, and that was to encourage. I can see him now, his glasses propped on his head, talking earnestly about a Bible passage or a theological point, or just about anything.

And that laugh he had. It could be sudden and loud, startling you the first time you heard it and catching the attention of anyone within 30 feet. But it was endearing at the same time. It was the laugh of a man who loved life. 

And now he’s gone, in the blink of an eye. I want to say it’s way too soon, and it is, by my earthly standards. I feel diminished by his death. But I feel enriched by knowing him and calling him a friend. 

And I’m confident I will hear that laugh again one day.

Top photograph by Warren Wong via Unsplash. Used with permission.

When You Find Yourself in Someone Else’s Memoir

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University of Iowa School of Journalism office int he 1920s.

I started reading the memoir Ghost of the Hardy Boys because I loved the Hardy Boys mystery books as a kid and because I knew a little of the story of how they came to be. Leslie McFarlane (1902-1977) didn’t write all of the 60 books in the series published under the name of Franklin W. Dixon, but he wrote the first third of them. McFarlane was responsible for the 22 books between The Tower Treasure in 1927 and The Phantom Freighter in 1947. 

I read all 22, roughly between 1960 and 1963. I loved them. They even inspired me to write, or start to write, my own mystery. The handwritten manuscript, forever lost, was about 25 pages of a group of kids finding a secret passage from a grandfather down into a cave. I was 10 years old. Yeah, I could see the books had some old-fashioned words, like roadster and coupe for types of automobiles. But I didn’t care, even though I looked up the words in the dictionary. (If you’re interested, a coupe was a two-door car, the name borrowed from a type of horse-drawn carriage. A roadster is what we would call a convertible today.)

McFarlane published his memoir in 1975; this edition was republished this year in a format that resembles the Hardy Boys books themselves. And he tells the story of writing the book series in a highly readable and often funny way. He never thought of these books as “great literature,” but, like the Stratmeyer Syndicate’s other series, The Bobbsey Twinsand Nancy Drew, they constituted childhood reading for tens of millions of youngsters. Like me. 

McFarlane’s memoir isn’t only about The Hardy Boys. He’s telling his own story, how he became a newspaperman in northern Ontario in the early 1920s and how he eventually landed in Massachusetts, at the Springfield Republican. And it was this description of (relatively) small-town journalism in 1920s that took me by surprise.

With very small changes, he could have been telling the story of small-town journalism in the 1970s. I know, because I was there for a year, my first job out of college. From 1973 to 1974, I worked as a copy editor at the Beaumont, Texas, Enterprise. I found myself in McFarlane’s memoir so easily that I had to ask why. I mean, half a century separated his experience at the Republican and my experience at the Enterprise. How could they be so similar?

I think there are at least three reasons.

First, new computer technology only just started to seep into journalism in 1973, and then it was only in the backshop, where typesetters would retype the stories on computers for printing “cold type” and then pasting the stories onto pages. Reporters and editors still typed on typewriters, and layout designers still did their work by hand. No computer sat on any reporter’s or editor’s desk, simply because they didn’t exist.

Second, just like McFarlane’s experience, our primary sources of news were reporter-written or from the Associated Press or similar wire service. The newsroom had a television set, but we only watched it when there was some huge national story that was breaking. We weren’t competing against local TV stations. And social media was three decades into the future.

The stereotype of the reporter in the movies wasn’t far off from the reality.

Third, the people McFarlane worked with and for – his fellow reporters and editors – were eerily similar to the people I worked with. Like McFarlane’s experience, the older reporters and the middle and senior editors had not gone to journalism school (or even college) but either happened into journalism or somehow grown up in the business. And they were individual characters. They yelled a lot. They didn’t mind telling us how dumb we were – in front of our colleagues. Their heads held all kinds of esoteric knowledge and “background” information. And most of them were native Texans, which carried a whole additional set of eccentricities. 

I don’t think I had a boring day at work the entire time I was there. Not to mention the fact that the Watergate scandal was unfolding, and I even wrote the huge front-page headline “Agnew Resigns.” 

But to read Ghost of the Hardy Boys, a memoir by a favorite childhood writer, and to find myself and my own experiences, was a startling thing. I don’t think these newsrooms exist anymore. Everything is professionalized; reporters have degrees from journalism schools or similar backgrounds, not to mention advanced degrees in many cases. Despite the proliferation of individual bias into news stories today, journalism seems far less personal than it was 50 years ago.

Something’s missing in journalism today. But I’m glad to have been reminded by the writer of the Hardy Boys stories that he and I shared something important in common.

Related: My review of Ghost of the Hardy Boys.

The Music of the Civil War

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If there are any songs the modern ear would associate with the Civil War, it would be one of three: “Battle Hymn of the Republic” by Julia Ward Howe, “Dixie,” and Ashokan Farewell. The first two were actually composed and sung during the Civil War. “Ashokan Farewell,” however, was composed in 1982 by Jay Ungar and his wife Molly Mason. Its plaintive music sounds like it should have been a Civil War song, but it was actually used as the soundtrack for the 1990 PBS television miniseries The Civil War by Ken Burns. 

I spent some time looking at the music and songs of the Civil War, and quickly learned that “plaintive” music was not on the agenda of either the Union or the Confederacy. Instead, the music was military marches, rousing fight songs, and music to remind the soldiers (on both sides) what they were fighting for. “Plaintive” only arrived long afterward, as people began to understand what the war had actually cost. 

Both sides maintained regimental bands.

Songs really sung or music played during the Civil War include “Southern Soldier,” “Battle Hymn of the Republic” (1862), “Battle Cry of Freedom” (1862) “St. Patrick’s Day in the Morning,” “Goober Peas,” “Old 1812,” “Gary Owen,” “Kingdom Coming,” “Dixie,” “When Johnny Comes Marching Home,” “Song of the Confederate Irish Brigade,” and “The Bonnie Blue Flag” (1861), also known as “We Are a Band of Brothers.” 

A Confederate regimental band

“Dixie” had been written and first performed in 1859, but it was adapted into a military quickstep for the inauguration of Jefferson Davis as president of the Confederacy. It was Davis who said it should be the Confederacy’s official anthem. A number of alternative (and more militaristic) versions were written during the war.

In addition to “Dixie,” many of the popular songs were updated versions of older military and war music. And it’s not surprising to see the number of Irish tunes sung by both sides, given the presence of Irish immigrants in the armies. Many of the songs were originally sung in the 18th century; “St. Patrick’s Day in the Morning” was composed in the late 1700s and its composer is believed to have been not an Irishman but a Scot. 

“Battle Hymn of the Republic” has an interesting history. It began its life as a religious camp meeting hymn, “Oh, brother, will you meet us on Canaan’s happy shore.” Then it evolved into “John Brown’s Body,” the song about the famous (or infamous) abolitionist who staged the raid on Harper’s Ferry in 1859. In 1861, Julia Ward Howe wrote a poem for The Atlantic Monthly, for which she was paid $5. The magazine gave it the title of “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” It was set to the tune of “John Brown’s Body,” and the rest is history.

Music on the Confederate side followed the progress of the war. Initially, with a string of Southern victories, songs were written to celebrate each battle. After the Confederate defeat at the Battle of Fredericksburg, no more specific battle songs were composed. Instead, songs like “Goober Peas” (also known as peanuts) appeared, with lyrics about the dietary privations of both military and civilian life in the South. Music to support the war was reproduced and distributed widely by both Northern and Southern music publishers. But after 1863, music distribution in the South was increasingly hampered by a shortage of paper. 

The only new field music composed during the war was “Taps,” by Union general Dan Butterfield, who wrote it after the Seven Days Battles. 

A number of familiar hymns were composed and sung during the war. These include “He Leadeth Me” (1862), “My Jesus, I Love Thee” (1864), “Shall We Gather at the River” (1864), “Day by Day” (865), and many more. 

Top illustration: The federal 8th Regiment Band during the Civil War.

Encounter in the woods: A Story

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Sam woke with a crick in his neck and a sore backside. He stretched, trying to ease the hurt in his muscles. In the past two years, he’d slept more nights with a tree canopy for a roof than anything manmade, and he still wasn’t used to it. 

With a group of soldiers bound for South Carolina, he’d followed the main road into Chatham, a small Southern town typical of its kind a day’s walk from Appomattox. The smithy and stable, the general store, and a few other establishments lined the town’s main street. Also lining the street had been townspeople with rifles and pistols.

“Just keep on moving through,” said a large man in clothes worn but still presentable. “We don’t mean to be inhospitable, but we’ve had too much trouble with soldiers and others. Keep moving and we’ll all get along just fine.”

A few soldiers had looked as if they were ready to be less than accommodating but were stopped by others. Sam kept walking, wondering if this is what returning soldiers would find everywhere – frightened people trying to protect what little they had left.

They were five miles south of the town when the rain began. At first, it was light, no more than a sprinkle. Sam and the others were used to worse than this, so everyone kept walking. And then the heavens opened up, and the light rain became a proper storm. They rushed for the nearby woods to get some protection. Nearly a hundred men took refuge among the trees. 

The rain continued. Sam and the rest made what shelters they could, but they were all soaked. The storm abated, but a steady rain continued through most of the night. 

Sam had wakened early; the others were still asleep. It was still dark but beginning to edge toward dawn. He made his way through the woods to find a place to relieve himself. It was then he heard a kind of muffled singing. Curiosity got the better of him and he followed the sound. Going deeper into the woods, he could see a small light as he got closer to the sound. He stepped into a clearing and saw some 20 people clustered around a campfire. They stopped singing as soon as they saw him.

Freed slave often accompanied federal troops in the Civil War.

Sam’s father hadn’t owned any slaves, but Sam could tell these people had been slaves. There were men, women, and children of varying ages. They’d been singing “Go Down, Moses” when Sam stepped into the clearing.

Three of the younger men stood and faced Sam.

“What you want here, Reb?” one said, pointing to Sam’s uniform, slightly the worse for wear but still recognizably tan-colored.

“I heard the singing,” Sam said. ‘We’d been sleeping under the trees because of the rain.”

“There are more of you?”

Sam nodded. “About 100 of us, heading home.”

The group around the fire exchanged glances. 

“I mean you no harm,” Sam said. “I just head the singing.”

An older man stood. “We are having worship before we go on our way,” an older man said. “You are welcome to join us.”

Of all the decisions Sam would make on his journey home, this was the first and, as it happened, the most important. It set into motion all that would follow.

“I would like that, sir,” Sam said. He walked to the group and sat down next to an older woman. Her hair was gray; her skin was a soft, light brown.

She nodded as he sat. “You’re a young man,” she said, looking at him closely, “younger than you first appeared.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Sam said. “I’m 15.”

She said no more; the group continued its worship service around the campfire. The older man who’d welcomed him gave a short message from the Book of Exodus, which was Sam’s first solid evidence that this was a group of slaves who’d left their master.

A plantation home in North Carolina.

They sang a few more spirituals and a hymn that Sam knew, “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” He knew the words, and the group sang as if the music was coming from their souls. 

They finished in prayer, yet no one moved when the worship ended. They were waiting for something, Sam thought.

“Are you headed to, or from, the war?” the older man asked.

“From,” Sam said. “I’m headed home to Mississippi.”

The man nodded. “Discharged or deserted?”

“Mustered out,” Sam said. “The army was disbanded yesterday.” The entire group, including the children, stared at Sam. “General Lee surrendered to General Grant, and his army has been sent home.”

The group broke into excited chatter. “Praise God!” the older man said. “Praise God! We are free!”

People were hugging each other. Two of the women were crying. 

“General Johnston’s army is still in the field,” Sam said. “Somewhere in South or North Carolina. They’re headed this way, thinking to join up with General Lee. But they’ll likely surrender as well.”

“We will eat,” the older man said. “You will eat with us. What is your name?”

“My name is Sam McClure, sir,” Sam said. “But I only have a little food to share, and it has to last me some time.”

“You already shared the blessing with us, Mr. McClure,” the older man said. “You gave us the news. We left where we lived four days ago, to walk north to the federal troops. There are many like us, leaving to find the troops. We are not going back. Do you have a cup for soup?”

Sam nodded. He pulled his tin cup from his back, and soon it was filled with a soup so thick that it was more a stew than a soup. A woman handed him a piece of bread. 

Sam ate slowly, savoring each sip of soup and bite of bread. 

The older man did most of the talking for the group. “We were slaves on a plantation nears Greensboro,” he said. “The master had died in a battle. The mistress died in childbirth, leaving behind a baby boy. Her mother had come from down Alabama way to help with the birth, and she had a granddaughter and young grandson with her. They and the baby were all who were left. Food was getting poor. The field hands left first. We stayed until the baby was weaned, and then we left as well. The grandmother wants to go home, but the railroads have stopped. She is sick, though she will not speak about it, I think because it would frighten the children.”

The story pained Sam, but he supposed it was being duplicated all over the South. Dead masters, workers leaving, fields lying fallow. It was a world in ruins, made up of thousands of stories like this one.

When they finished, he could see they were starting preparations to leave.

“Thank you,” he said, standing up. “Your soup is the best thing I’ve eaten in a year. It’s the closest I’ve found to my mama’s soup since I’ve been gone. Thank you.”

The older man walked up to him. “You may know this, but if you’re headed south, travel with others, or travel in the woods by the road. Satan is walking these roads, and sometimes he looks like a white man, and sometimes like a black man. And sometimes both. We promise to pray for you, the young man who brought us the news.”

Sam nodded hi goodbye andre-entered the woods, making his way back toward the place he and others had slept to get out of the rain. 

He walked quickly through the woods. The pale sun made it difficult to determine, but he thought it must be about 7 a.m. The soldiers would be stirring and preparing to leave.

When he reached where they had camped, he saw it was empty. Everyone was gone. He was alone.

Top photograph: Federal soldiers at Appomattox, April 1865.