I Am Abraham

138 Pages·2014·1.34 MB·English

by  Charyn Jerome

I Am Abraham
Charyn, Jerome
Liveright (2014)
Tags: Historical Fiction, Lincoln
Historical Fictionttt Lincolnttt
Narrated in Lincoln’s own voice, the tragicomic I Am Abraham promises to
be the masterwork of Jerome Charyn’s remarkable career.
Since publishing his first novel in 1964, Jerome Charyn has established himself
as one of the most inventive and prolific literary chroniclers of the American
landscape. Here in I Am Abraham, Charyn returns with an unforgettable portrait
of Lincoln and the Civil War. Narrated boldly in the first person, I Am Abraham
effortlessly mixes humor with Shakespearean-like tragedy, in the process
creating an achingly human portrait of our sixteenth President.
Tracing the historic arc of Lincoln's life from his picaresque days as a gangly
young lawyer in Sangamon County, Illinois, through his improbable marriage to
Kentucky belle Mary Todd, to his 1865 visit to war-shattered Richmond only
days before his assassination, I Am Abraham hews closely to the familiar
Lincoln saga. Charyn seamlessly braids historical figures such as Mrs. Keckley
—the former slave, who became the First Lady's dressmaker and confidante—
and the swaggering and almost treasonous General McClellan with a parade of
fictional extras: wise-cracking knaves, conniving hangers-on, speculators,
scheming Senators, and even patriotic whores.
We encounter the renegade Rebel soldiers who flanked the District in tattered
uniforms and cardboard shoes, living in a no-man's-land between North and
South; as well as the Northern deserters, young men all, with sunken, hollowed
faces, sitting in the punishing sun, waiting for their rendezvous with the firing
squad; and the black recruits, whom Lincoln’s own generals wanted to discard,
but who play a pivotal role in winning the Civil War. At the center of this grand
pageant is always Lincoln himself, clad in a green shawl, pacing the White
House halls in the darkest hours of America’s bloodiest war.
Using biblically cadenced prose, cornpone nineteenth-century humor, and
Lincoln’s own letters and speeches, Charyn concocts a profoundly moral but
troubled commander in chief, whose relationship with his Ophelia-like wife and
sons—Robert, Willie, and Tad—is explored with penetrating psychological
insight and the utmost compassion. Seized by melancholy and imbued with an
unfaltering sense of human worth, Charyn’s President Lincoln comes to vibrant,
three-dimensional life in a haunting portrait we have rarely seen in historical
fiction.

This book is for
my redhead
Lenore.
CONTENTS
Prologue: The Silver Sword of Appomattox
NEW SALEM: 1831–1835
SPRINGFIELD: 1837–1842
ILLINOIS & BEYOND: 1858–1860
THE DISTRICT: 1861
THE DISTRICT: 1862, Winter–Spring
SOLDIERS’ HOME: 1862, Summer–Fall
THE DISTRICT & ENVIRONS: 1863 & Winter 1864
THE DISTRICT & ENVIRONS: 1864 & Winter 1865
DIXIE LAND: 1865, March & April
Author’s Note

PROLOGUE
The Silver Sword of Appomattox
T
till their noses landed on the moon, and I still wouldn’t sign any
HEY COULD NATTER
documents that morning. I wanted to hear what had happened to Lee’s sword at
Appomattox. There’d been wild rumors about the fate of that sword. One tell
was that Grant had given it to a young captain on his staff who proceeded to
gamble it away at a local bawdyhouse. I was mortally embarrassed, wondering if
that young captain was Bob. So I was tickled to learn that Bob was on the
premises, that he’d come to see his Pa.
I’d had rough patches with him, and our accommodations as father and son
had been a series of truces and declarations of war. But I locked everyone out of
my office, even my secretaries, to have breakfast with Bob. We had black tea
and et an apple with our knives, as I tried to imagine what a breakfast in the field
would have been like.
“Bobbie, are you gonna make your Pa beg? What happened to Lee’s sword
after he surrendered it to Grant?”
Bob rubbed his mustache a bit and said, “Poppycock—sheer poppycock,” like
the Harvard man he was. And while we had our little truce, he told me the real
tell.
Lee had shown up first in his finest grays, with a dark red sash and a silver
sword in a scabbard embroidered with gold. He was six feet tall, with a head of
silver hair; and in walked Grant with his usual slouch, and nothing to show of his
rank but a lieutenant general’s straps. He was all dusty from the road. He’d spent
half the night bathing his feet in hot water and mustard, while Lee had sat alone
in an apple orchard, wondering if he should wage a guerrilla war against Grant;
but it would have saddened him to watch his own boys become bushwhackers.
So he arrived at Appomattox with a single adjutant, bearing a white flag.
Radical Republicans, raucous as ever, demanded that I deliver Lee in chains to
Old Capitol Prison—but these Radicals didn’t run the war last time I looked. Lee
scratched his name on several documents. His troops were starving, he said, and
had to survive on lumps of chalk and a scatter of parched corn; Grant told him
that his boys could have all the corn they required from our own cars at
Appomattox Station, and then Lee stood up, bowed, and strode out onto the
porch, where his war horse was waiting. Bob had been stunned to see how
emaciated Traveller was. That iron gray gelding was reduced to a bag of bones.
His nostrils quivered as Lee mounted up. Then Grant moved out onto the porch
and took off his hat. Lee tipped his own hat as Traveller trotted off with all the
pomp of a battle pony, his flanks hurling sparks of light that near blinded Bob.
My generals must have poisoned my mind. “Bobbie,” I said, “are ye certain
about the sword? Grant could have claimed it as a war trophy. He was within his
rights.”
“Sir,” Bob said, as if berating a child, “Mr. Grant wouldn’t have bothered
about one silver sword. He’d come to Lee with nothing but a toothbrush in his
pocket.”
“But my commanders swear that a Rebel patrol just about captured you and
Grant on the way to Appomattox. All of us might have ended up surrendering to
Lee.”
“That’s preposterous,” Bob said, resting his boot heels on my map table and
lighting up a seegar. “We had them outflanked on every side. All my General
had to do was wave his glove once, and the whole damn Army of Northern
Virginia would have crumpled—and that’s a fact. Mr. Lee raced to Appomattox
in his red sash out of dire necessity, sir.”
Bob kissed his Pa impulsively on the forehead and strode out the room, his
spurs jangling with the cadence of a captain who sat at Grant’s table. It mattered
to him not one fig that he could wander into the President’s office without
bothering to announce himself.
“Please don’t tell Mother I’m here,” he said. “I have to return to my General,
and she’ll hold me in her clutches for an hour. I just can’t spare the time.”
“You could say hello, Son—that wouldn’t cost so much. And she’ll crucify
me if she finds out we had breakfast and you never . . .”
He rolled his eyes and saluted me like some martyr. But at least he’d dash in
and out of Molly’s boudoir, and talk a little soljer with Tad. He loved his little
brother, and wouldn’t have disappeared without offering Taddie some token
from headquarters—a discarded pencil case, a broken bootstrap, or a Rebel
bullet pouch Bob had picked up in the field.
I didn’t have much peace after Bobbie’s visit. The Radicals hounded me in the
halls. They wanted me to dismantle Dixie, toss out every single Southern
legislature, like Grant’s discarded pencil cases. I wouldn’t listen to their rabid