Newport News

The prison pen, Newport News, Virginia

April 14, 1865

They brought us down the James by boat, packed in so tight a man had to breathe when his neighbor did. Today they marched us through the gate.

The pen is a tall plank fence around a field by the water, with tents in rows and open ground where the tents run out. Inside the fence is a rail they call the deadline. Cross it without leave and the guard can shoot you. Nobody had to tell us twice.

They searched us down to the skin like they figured we had the Confederacy hid in our pockets. I kept this book inside my shirt against my belly, and the man searching me looked at my rupture and looked away and let it be. God bless him for that, whoever he is.

Newport News

April 17, 1865

News gets through a prison faster than a courier. Lee has surrendered. They say it was at a little place called Appomattox Court House on the ninth, three days after I was taken. The 27th was there, what’s left of it, and stacked its arms with the rest.

And I wasn’t. I keep turning that over like a man worrying a sore tooth.

Then yesterday worse news came in. Somebody has shot President Lincoln, and he’s dead. The guards are hard-faced and quiet, and the air in this pen has changed. Men talk low. Nobody wants to be the one that grins wrong today.

Newport News

May 10, 1865

The war is over and we’re still in a pen.

Rations are plain and coarse, and some days it’s precious little. The river damp gets into a man’s chest. The sick go to the hospital tents and some don’t come back out. My eyes are troubling me for the first time, a kind of fog at the edges, and I lay it to the bad light and the smoke.

The worst of it ain’t the hunger. It’s not knowing what day they’ll call your name, or what home will look like when you get there.

I saw a man trade his last button for a piece of soap. Another gave half his ration to a stranger too weak to stand. In here the little things are the big things.

Newport News

June 20, 1865

They’re giving the oath now. Swear allegiance to the United States, sign the paper, and they turn you loose. Some men spit at the thought. Most have gone quiet and signed. I mean to sign. I fought four years for one government. I reckon I can live under the other one and raise my young’uns.

Outside the gate

June 27, 1865

My name was called.

I took the oath and put my name to their paper, and it didn’t feel real till I stepped out past the gate and the fence was behind me instead of around me. Imagine that. Four years of cannon, and the war ends for a man with a pen and a piece of paper.

I am going home.

Maps from the printed book