Chapter Thirty-Three #2
Eng now owned 300 acres and sixteen slaves—enough to place him among the wealthiest men in Mount Airy. Chang, for his part,
had 550 acres and eleven slaves. Their prosperity showed in a new mahogany parlor set, a shiny carriage in the barn.
They argued over whether to buy more slaves while they still could.
“It’s foolish,” Eng said. “What if they’re worthless in a year?”
Chang scoffed. “The North is weak. Factory men and bookkeepers. You think they can match the grit of farmers? They don’t have
our generals or the stomach for bloodshed. And they sure as hell don’t have a cause worth dying for.” He leaned forward. “They’ll
let us go our own way.”
They bought war bonds with gold and converted tobacco fields to corn and beans, crops that could feed troops quickly. Whatever
Eng’s doubts, his future—and all of ours—was now tied to the rebellion.
The war’s reach stretched far beyond the battlefields. It wasn’t some distant conflict but an inescapable presence, reshaping
our lives in ways we could neither predict nor control. In Surry County, the signs were everywhere. Neighbors disappeared
into uniforms. Black-edged letters arrived with terrible news. Fields went half tended, crops growing wild between rows. At
Sunday service, the church pews held more widows than wives, more children than fathers.
We lived in constant fear of Union raids. Bushwhackers, draft dodgers, deserters, and fugitives took refuge in the mountains
all around us.
The stories filtering down from Virginia were chilling. At Harpers Ferry, Federal troops had seized the arsenal. Word spread
that Union forces were massing near Washington—just a week’s ride from our part of North Carolina. Mrs. Caldwell’s brother-in-law
wrote from Alexandria that Federal soldiers now patrolled the same streets where he once sold tobacco to congressmen. They
had commandeered his neighbor’s stable, turned the courthouse into a barracks. They take what they need, he wrote in his cramped hand, and call it requisition.
No blue uniforms had yet appeared in our valley, but the same mountains that sheltered us could just as easily funnel an enemy force south. Every supply wagon brought rumors—scouts seen here, cavalry tracks found there—until we started at shadows and kept our horses close to home.
North Carolina had been largely self-sufficient, but now the Confederacy was demanding more than we could give. The state
levied heavy taxes to finance the conflict, pledging more than one hundred thousand troops to the Confederate Army. We were
required to use Confederate money, newly minted, and war bonds, both of which lost value as the months dragged on. Bacon rose
from 33 cents a pound to $7.50. A barrel of flour, once $18.00, now cost $500.00. Salt fetched $70.00 a bushel. Coffee, $100.00
a pound.
Then came the Conscription Act of April 1862. Every white man between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five was ordered to
enlist. One rainy morning, I saw young Rufus Tucker—who’d once knocked out his front teeth jumping from the hayloft, and who
never turned down a second helping of pie—trudging across the field beyond our house, a bedroll slung over one shoulder, boots
heavy with mud. His mother trailed behind, calling reminders about warm socks and writing home. At the bend where the road
tipped toward Addie’s, she stopped. He didn’t look back.
Mount Airy emptied out. Our workforce was gutted. Millers, tanners, carpenters, shoemakers, craftsmen—gone. The blacksmith’s
shop stood abandoned, its forge cold. Through the window I could see the tools hanging in their places.
News of the war reached us in waves. A two-day battle in Shiloh, Tennessee, five hundred miles away, left twenty-four thousand
dead, wounded, or missing, a Union victory under Ulysses S. Grant that blocked Confederate forces from halting their advance.
Then the blockade tightened its grip. Lincoln’s navy had sealed off the coastline, cutting us off from trade with the world.
No more imported clothing, no tools or dry goods from the North, no more firearms. A drought in the summer of 1862 crippled
the corn crop.
We ran low on everything. So we improvised.
Daily life became an exercise in invention.
We melted tallow for candles and patched worn shoes with scraps of leather.
When dresses faded, we unpicked the seams, turned them inside out, and resewed them.
We made soap from ash and lye, ink from pokeberries, buttons from bone.
Writing paper was so scarce we scribbled in the margins of old letters.
When needles broke, we bartered for replacements as if they were precious gems. We dyed cloth with walnut husks and pine bark.
When the soldiers requisitioned our wheat, we learned to bake with rice flour: johnnycakes, rice cakes, wafers, griddle cakes.
We roasted chicory root until it was dark and fragrant, grinding it fine to mimic the tang of coffee. (Some swore by coffee
made with dried and roasted sweet potatoes, steeped until the liquid turned the color of caramel, but the flavor turned my
stomach.) A low-growing shrub, mountainsweet, made a reasonable substitute for tea, sweetened with molasses instead of sugar.
We told ourselves the deprivation would end soon. It did not. Sugar disappeared altogether, then salt. Salt was soon worth
its weight in gold; without it, how could we preserve meat? Traveling salesmen hawked jars of it boiled from seawater at prices
no one could afford. We were told to scrape the dirt from smokehouse floors and boil and strain it to collect the few precious
grains that remained, a slow, messy process that yielded little.
Women shared recipes like secrets, trading tricks to stretch bacon grease or draw flavor from a handful of dried beans.
Without salt, we packed hams in ash and smoked them over hickory.
When sugar was gone, we boiled sorghum and beets down to syrup.
Apple cores and watermelon rinds were simmered into preserves.
Grace—steady-handed and resourceful—turned scraps into supper for our large family.
She coaxed flavor from tough cuts of meat, boiled vegetable peels into broth, cut flour with ground corn or chestnuts to make it last. Hoecakes, cornmeal cakes cooked on the grate, became our daily bread.
One afternoon I found her in the kitchen house, staring at a handful of cornmeal, two withered potatoes, and a strip of salt
pork barely wider than my thumb.
“It’s not enough,” she said without looking up. “I don’t know what to do.”
I stood beside her at the table. “What if we add the last of the dried beans? Soak them and mash them with the potatoes?”
She nodded, already calculating. “And the wild onions by the creek. And dandelion greens. With enough pepper, maybe no one
will notice how little meat there is.”
We worked side by side, slicing the salt pork paper thin, rendering every precious drop of fat. The kitchen filled with the
scent of cornmeal browning in the skillet.
That night, as we gathered around the table, Eng raised his eyebrows at the steaming bowl of what looked like a hearty stew.
“You’ve worked magic again,” he said.
Frederick took a bite, paused. “Tastes better than it looks.”
Rosie, mouth full, gave an emphatic nod.
Grace passed behind me with the cornbread, and we exchanged a glance. Our private alchemy, transforming next to nothing into
something. We didn’t know when, or even if, the shortages would end. But we would find a way to feed the household, whatever
it took.