One
“Whatever
happens to you has been waiting to happen since the beginning of time.”
Marcus Aurelius
In
a time long past, giants of men filled the land I knew as home. Their stature
was measured in character, not height, and they built and drove this nation
forward through dangerous and unstable times. Their essence was distinguished by
their courage to face challenges with bravery, their resilience to bounce back
from difficult situations, and their strong sense of rugged individualism. On a
warm summer afternoon in 1974, I sat beside one of them as he slowly opened his
pouch of Red Man chewing tobacco for a refill. His dusty front porch looked out
on the curve of a narrow dirt road and a yard full of farm tools rusting in the
humid air. His name was James Alfred Bunch, and he was my great-grandfather.
He
was from a time of horses and wagons, one room schoolhouses, and kerosene lamps.
In my earliest memories, I was about five years old, and my grandparents would
deliver groceries to him each week. He lived in a single-story two-bedroom
clapboard structure like the ones that dotted the landscape and lined the back
roads of rural Stanly County, in the Piedmont region of North Carolina, about
45 miles northeast of Charlotte. The local area was known as Palmerville. It
wasn't exactly a town, just a loose collection of small houses over the span of
a couple of square miles. There was a Baptist Church with an ancient cemetery,
but not much else. He wore a sweat stained brown felt hat, faded denim
overalls, and usually had a “chew” of tobacco tucked in his cheek. During his
life, he had been a teacher, a farmer, and worked backbreaking shifts in a
local factory that turned the rich red clay of the county into bricks used to
construct many of the state’s buildings. He was a humble but confident rock of
a man. Like a biblical Patriarch, he was firm, wise, and steadfast. As many men
of that time, his family and close friends called him by a nickname, and his
was "Poster" (the “o” was a short “o” sound like
"possible"). The name came from my aunt Carolyn trying to pronounce “grandfather”
when she was very young, and it stuck. He didn't seem to mind.
In later years, I would recognize his
philosophy. He was a Stoic. Like Marcus Aurelius from Roman times, he lived in
accordance with the will of God and nature, taking whatever came his way with
calm, serious determination to do the honorable thing without complaint or protest.
He was born in 1882 in a small town outside of the state capital of Raleigh,
only 17 years after the end of the Civil War. The world he grew up in lacked
modern conveniences such as electric appliances or running water, and he lived
until well after airplanes crossed the globe daily and a man stepped onto the moon. He was my earliest hero.
I was his only male descendant. His
oldest daughter, Pauline, was my grandmother. Pauline had two daughters, one being
my mother. James Alfred’s youngest daughter, Virginia was afflicted by a
serious illness and high fever when she was a toddler. The common treatment of
the time was to "sweat" the sickness out, so they held her over a
cauldron of boiling water and let the rising steam envelop her. I can only
imagine her desperate cries and the fear of those in the room as they realized the
seriousness of her condition. Crippled for life after this illness, she could
not fully form words and only walked with great difficulty. Virginia still
lived with him in the small house they had moved to when the old family farm
got to be too much to take care of.
James Alfred’s wife was named Rosa,
and her maiden name was Morris. The Morris family had lived in the area since
before the American Revolution, proudly farming their land. Recent years had
been difficult though. The family estate that had once been several thousand
acres was now down to around a hundred and in bad shape. Sometime in the 1950s,
Rosa had been afflicted by a mental illness that sounded like early onset
Alzheimer’s disease. The Sheriff had brought her back to the farm after she had
been found wandering, and my grandfather had driven her up to the state Mental
Institution in Morganton. Far away from her home and family, she passed away
soon after arriving.
In
the early 70s in central North Carolina, the scars from the Civil War were
still apparent. Not so much in the landscape, which had escaped the worst of
the fighting, but in the generational poverty that had come over the
South. The war had taken the healthiest,
most ambitious, and spirited young men off to fight in dreadful battles. Their
blood soaked the ground of places like Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Richmond,
and Manassas. By most estimates, North
Carolina sent more men to fight for the Confederacy than any other state, some
figures have it at over 2 million, and many of them never returned. When a
generation of a region's best men are taken over the span of a few exceptionally
deadly, violent years, it leaves damage far deeper than the initial heartache
and loss. Gone were the future husbands, fathers, and grandfathers. Farms fell
into disrepair, criminals and scoundrels often went unchecked.
My Great-Grandfather Alfred's uncle Henry had been a
private and fought with the Confederates in Northern Virginia. At some point in
the campaign, young Henry had an accident and got one of his toes shot off. The exact details of what happened and how are lost to history, but he
was in the ranks at Appomattox on April 9th, 1865, when General
Robert E. Lee recognized the cause was lost and surrendered his forces to US
General Ulysses S. Grant. The once mighty army of Northern Virginia had been
beaten decisively, and the men doubtlessly expected their fate to be years of
starvation and disease in a desolate prison camp for the crime of treason
against the United States. Approximately 28,000 Confederates surrendered, which
would trigger a collapse of Southern military opposition throughout the
breakaway states. In a wise and generous gesture, the terms of surrender were lenient.
In exchange for oaths of loyalty, Grant had graciously granted parole to the
men. Instead of languishing for years in prison camps, they would be allowed to
return to their homes. Officers could keep their sidearms, horses, and personal
baggage. Men could keep their horses and mules to work the fields, so they
could provide food for their families. Lee was given food from Union supplies
for his now starving men. Grant’s sensible decisions were in keeping with the
spirit of the words from Lincoln's second inaugural address only a few weeks
earlier. "With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in
the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work
we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne
the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and
cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."
Grant’s adjutant, Ely Parker, was the one to
write out the surrender document. Parker was Native American from the Senaca
Tribe. Recognizing his heritage, General Lee quipped that "It is good to
have one real American here." Parker replied, "Sir, we are all
Americans."
After his parole, Henry made the long trek home
to North Carolina carrying a small bundle that held his toe. It rested in a jar
of vinegar at the family farmhouse for many years. My grandmother told me she
had seen it sitting on a shelf in the corner cupboard when she was a young girl,
but by the time I arrived it was long gone.
Unfortunately for the South, President Lincoln’s
vision of a healing reunification died with him six days after Lee’s surrender.
The inarguably just war to cleanse the nation of slavery had been settled on
the field of battle, but atonement for the bloodshed that polluted the land was
yet to come. In a tragedy for the young nation, an assassin had chosen Lincoln
to pay the cost. In this version of the Biblical redemption story, Abraham himself would be placed
on the alter. There would be no redeeming ram caught in the bushes. The South
descended into the chaos and resentment of the Reconstruction era.
“My
Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still,
My
father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will,
The
ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done,
From
fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won;
Exult
O shores, and ring O bells!
But
I with mournful tread,
Walk
the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen
cold and dead.”
Walt
Whitman
