A Year in the South (34 page)

The weeks that followed brought her more good fortune. Her stepson Edward, his terrible facial wound now healed and covered by a beard, came to town bringing word that he had discovered an old bond owned by Angus and had cashed it in. He gave Cornelia a portion of the money, enabling her to pay the house rent. Edward's generosity did not end there. He, his brother William, and their sisters Susan and Flora had recently moved in together on a rented farm in Clarke County, in northern Virginia. Edward was working the farm, William was teaching school, and Susan and Flora were keeping house. They offered to take in one of Cornelia's older boys and see to it that he got an education. Before fall ended, Allan packed his clothes and headed off to Clarke County. By then Cornelia's little girl was back in the classroom, too. Mary Pendleton, Ann's daughter, started a school in town and offered to take Nelly as a pupil.
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Despite the signs that she was under the protection of a caring Providence, Cornelia continued to have moments of doubt and despondency, for her financial plight was by no means resolved. As December approached, she again grew depressed and began avoiding company. When the other ladies in town enthusiastically volunteered to help get the college president's house in shape for the impending arrival of Robert E. Lee's wife and daughters, Cornelia declined. “[H]ow could I go among them with my sad face and sorrowful heart,” she thought. Once again, she became “wholly occupied with my own trouble and distresses.”
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While Cornelia struggled with her worries, the town was disturbed by more conflicts. In early December, the Reverend Pendleton at last received permission to resume services at Grace Episcopal. Major Redmond had no hand in this, however; permission was granted by Captain Henry Robinson who now commanded the post. Pendleton made no promise to use the prescribed prayer for the president, but had merely persuaded Robinson that the time had come to relax the proscription. Services did not resume for long. When Lieutenant Colonel Cecil Clay, commander of the military subdistrict, got wind of Robinson's action he immediately overruled it. Two days later, on December 17, Clay dispatched a letter directly to Pendleton. The church would stay closed, he told the rector firmly, until the proper prayer was given.
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Even as the citizens of Lexington fumed over this news, they were provoked by what they regarded as yet another instance of Yankee interference. Since the war ended, they had seen their town “invaded” by Northern merchants, a federal army garrison, a U.S. Treasury agent, and a Freedmen's Bureau agent. Now, in December, more interlopers arrived: Yankee teachers who intended to set up a school for blacks.

When the school opened on December 12, the freedmen flocked to it eagerly, young and old alike. By year's end, 115 were attending day classes and 226 were attending night classes. The teachers, one of whom was a woman, were sponsored by the American Missionary Association, a Northern humanitarian agency. Freedmen's Bureau agent Tubbs, whose duties included assisting the teachers and monitoring the progress of black education, wrote enthusiastically in his December report: “We have a large and flourishing school conducted by able and efficient teachers with the cooperation of some highly intelligent freedmen.”
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The reactions of Lexington's whites to this new intrusion ranged from disgust to outrage. Few believed that educating blacks would accomplish anything useful. It would merely give them big ideas, the whites insisted; there was no surer way to ruin a good servant or field hand. No sooner did the school start than some citizens claimed to see a change in the blacks. Mary Pendleton wrote her sister that it was now harder to get and keep servants. “They are all so busy getting an education they cannot work for white folks. I wish we could get two strong efficient Irish girls.”
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Few condemned the blacks, however, for wanting an education; white hostility was directed mostly at the meddling Yankee teachers. A good number of whites went out of their way to snub or harass them, hoping thereby to send them packing back to the North. Lieutenant Tubbs was convinced that only the presence of the army garrison prevented outright physical assaults. The female teacher, Julia Shearman from Brooklyn, New York, was subjected to torments of all sorts beginning the day she arrived in town. “Never did I walk the streets of Lexington without rudeness, in one form or another,” she recalled bitterly. “Ladies glorified in compelling the Yankee woman … to step into the mud for their accommodation; the boys of the aristocratic school of the place hooted every time I passed them.… I have been awakened from my sleep, in the dead of night, by horrible serenades, performed under my window, by these same gentlemanly young men. I have taught an evening school while brickbats were being thrown by them at the windows.” Epithets of the lowest sort were hurled at her. One she heard over and over was “Damn Yankee bitch of a nigger teacher.”
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Cornelia was too preoccupied with her family's survival to be much concerned with this new controversy that erupted in the waning days of the year. The cold darkness that descended on the town early each evening was as nothing compared to that which enveloped her heart. Her faith in God's goodness was strong, but it could not altogether silence the cruel mockery of the Tempter who told her she had been abandoned and there was no hope. And so she entered upon another winter of uncertainty, wondering if it would ever give way to spring.
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LOUIS HUGHES

The reunion of Matilda and Mary Ellen with their mother in Cincinnati at summer's end was little short of miraculous. Many former slaves were trying to trace their lost loved ones in the postwar months, but few families that had been separated for as long as Matilda's would ever meet again. To the further astonishment and joy of the two women, they found that their older sister was living with their mother. They had last seen her in the Memphis slave market ten years ago, when they said their good-byes. They now learned that she and their mother had been sold to different masters and taken from Memphis, but had managed to escape after the Yankee invasion in 1862 and had made their way back to the city. By coincidence, both had gotten jobs as nurses in one of the Union army hospitals in the city, and there they found each other. Later during the war they moved together to Cincinnati. Matilda saw the hand of God at work in this reunion of her family against all odds, and she gave thanks.
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Lou, Matilda, their baby, and Mary Ellen and her two children now crowded into the one-room apartment rented by Matilda's mother and eldest sister. With so many people moving into Cincinnati that fall, the city's residential buildings were teeming. Jobs were scarce, too, and it must have been apparent to Lou that getting along in Cincinnati was not going to be easy.
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Newcomers like Lou and his family found the size and strangeness of this place overwhelming. The Queen City of the West, as the inhabitants proudly called it, now had a population of about 200,000, three or four times that of Memphis. The narrow streets—which were all either cobblestone or paved, unlike those in the Southern towns Lou had known—were filled with vehicles and noisy with the ringing of streetcar bells and the clopping of hooves. In the heart of the city, around Fourth and Vine, traffic jams routinely blocked the thoroughfares, forcing pedestrians to walk a block out of their way to cross. The sidewalks were as congested as the streets. On many corners, vendors had set up little wooden stands where they sold peanuts, candy, fruit, and newspapers. Shoppers and tradesmen had to step around these and other obstructions as they made their way about the city. They also had to pass by knots of idle men who hung out on the corners ogling women and had to make way for the ragged street preachers and other eccentrics who wandered the streets.
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The crowded Queen City was plagued with sanitation problems beyond anything Lou had ever seen in the South. The municipal authorities kept street-cleaning crews at work, and the crews were reinforced by the hogs that ran loose in violation of city ordinances. Together, crews and hogs managed to keep the main thoroughfares more or less clean, but in the numerous alleys the refuse accumulated unchecked: garbage, filth, dead dogs and cats. No one was surprised when the city experienced an outbreak of dysentery that fall; everyone watched nervously for signs of typhoid and cholera, too.
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At every turn Lou could see other indications that he was now in a different world. In the city's vacant lots, boys and young men were playing something called baseball, a popular sport that had not yet made its way to the South. Down at the river, construction crews were beginning work on a bridge that would stretch across to Covington, Kentucky. It would be the world's longest suspension bridge, a triumph of Yankee ingenuity and industrial might and, to some, a symbol of the reunification of North and South.
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There were unfamiliar sounds as well as sights, particularly the accents that Lou could hear in the conversations on the sidewalks and the cursing of the wagon drivers. He was undoubtedly familiar with the Irish brogue and the Midwestern twang; those could be heard in Memphis, which was fairly diverse as Southern towns went. But here there were many other accents; and there were languages spoken that Lou did not understand, including German, the native tongue of many of the city's inhabitants.
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Another thing that struck Southern visitors to Cincinnati such as Lou was its distinctive districts. Every Southern town of any size had its main business district, of course, and in Memphis and other places there were now all-black residential areas. But otherwise the various sections of any given Southern town tended to be undifferentiated: in each, houses stood next to shops, blacks lived alongside whites, and the hovels of the poor sat beside the mansions of the rich. Cincinnati was starkly different. It seemed a kind of patchwork, each section having a peculiar character and function. The downtown was divided into a commercial and manufacturing district along the river and a retail and financial district a little farther up. On each flank of the latter district was an exclusive, upper-class residential enclave. Beyond the downtown, as one headed away from the river, was an area embracing the homes of the old-stock, white, middle-class residents. On the city's outskirts lay the neighborhoods of the poor, the Germans, the Irish, and the blacks.
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Some of these outlying neighborhoods were very disorderly places. Lou had undoubtedly seen a good deal of underclass rowdiness in Memphis, but nothing like what was now before him. Brawls erupted frequently in Cincinnati's numerous saloons and gambling houses, often spilling into the street. Even when no fights broke out, the vice dens reverberated all night long with the sounds of raucous amusement. The worst problem in some sections was not the men but the boys. They roamed in gangs, engaged in petty theft, got into scuffles, and built bonfires in the streets at night. The police seemed unable to do much about it.
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Bucktown, the black neighborhood on the city's east side where Lou and his family probably lived, was the roughest part of town, as well as the most run-down. Stabbings and shootings were common in the saloons and gambling houses there, and muggings made the streets unsafe day and night. The neighborhood was also densely crowded, and more people were moving in every day, many of them refugees from the South like Lou. Some of the newcomers could not secure rooms and had to live in shanties in the alleys.
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Lou and his family had a room, but nothing more. They could not afford more spacious accommodations unless Lou found a job. At first glance, Cincinnati seemed to be full of opportunities for working men. Business of all sorts was booming. The city wharf, in particular, was busier even than the one in Memphis. Cincinnati had emerged before the war as one of the nation's great river ports, thanks in large part to its trade with the South. The war had cut off most of that trade, but with the coming of peace Cincinnati's merchants reestablished their Southern connections. Now, every day saw the arrival of giant steamboats from Memphis, Natchez, or New Orleans, each piled high with cotton bales—sometimes seven, eight, even nine hundred or more on a single vessel. Unloading these bales, hauling them by wagon to the railroad depot, and stowing them aboard freight cars for their journey to the mill towns of New England required an army of laborers.
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A tour of the streets along the waterfront revealed a multitude of men at work in other sorts of jobs. Thousands of them sweated in the city's manufacturing establishments, for Cincinnati was one of the nation's great industrial as well as mercantile cities. Even before the war, its many meat-packing plants had earned it the nickname of Porkopolis. Wartime demand had multiplied and diversified the city's industrial output, as manufacturers responded to the government's call for food, uniforms, muskets, and cannons for the armies of the Union. Moreover, the government set up facilities of its own in the city and hired civilians to work in them, including several military hospitals and nearly two dozen army warehouses.
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But now the war was over. The military contracts were being canceled and the government facilities closed. Workers in factories, hospitals, and warehouses were being laid off. At the same time, men and women were flooding into the city in search of homes and jobs—not only Southern freedmen like Lou and Matilda, but also discharged Union army veterans and recently arrived European immigrants. These hopeful newcomers all saw Cincinnati as a place to begin their lives afresh. But the crowded city could not accommodate so many people and so many dreams. Many of the new arrivals were, like Lou, getting frustrated.
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