What Happened to Me

by La Salle Corbell Pickett

"Gentlemen, I have a witness"—my heart almost stood still—"here, in the child who cannot speak. It is not always a proof of motherhood, but with the circumstantial evidence and the youth of this mother, this beyond peradventure is proof convincing. The child is still nourished from her own body," and she opened my mantle.

I, who had never nursed my baby in the presence of even my most intimate friends, bared my bosom before all those strange men and women and nursed him as proof that I was his mother, while tears of gratitude to the sweet friend and to God flowed down my cheeks and dropped onto baby's face as he wonderingly looked up, trying to gather up the tears with his little dimpled fingers and thankfully enjoying the proof. The men turned aside and tears flowed down more than one rugged face. The kind stranger with the shawl lifted his eyes heavenward as if in thanksgiving, and then turned them earthward and breathed a bitter curse, deep and heartfelt. Perhaps the recording angel jotted down the curse on the credit side of the ledger with as great alacrity as he registered there the prayer of thanks.

I trust that the philanthropic ladies, when the facts were placed before them, were as surely convinced as all these people were that I had not stolen my child. I hope they were pleased by this indication that some degree of innocence existed in the world, outside of their own virtuous hearts, but—I don't know.

"Take thy fledgling, poor mother dove, under thy trembling wings, back to its nest and the father bird's care. I shall go a few miles further where I stop to see my baby," said my new friend. "This little boy who brought me back to life is older than yours. He is the child of my only son, whose young life ebbed out on the battlefield of Gettysburg, and whose sweet spirit has joined that of his noble father, my husband, which in his first battle was freed. This baby blesses our lives—the young mother's and the old mother's."

The cars were crowded with soldiers returning home, disbanded soldiers, soldiers on furlough, and released prisoners, with pale, cadaverous, unshaven faces and long, unkempt hair. One from Andersonville, more ragged and emaciated than the others, was selling his pictures and describing the horrors of his prison life and, as he told of his sufferings and torture amid groans of sympathy, maledictions and curses were hurled against my people. Once his long, bony arm and hand seemed to be stretched menacingly toward me as he drew the picture of "the martyred Lincoln, whose blood cries out for vengeance. We follow his hearse; let us swear hatred to these people against whom he warred and, as the cannon beats the hours with solemn progression, renew with each note unappeasable hatred."

I crouched back in my seat, almost holding my breath as I pressed my baby to my wildly throbbing heart. The train stopped and the sweet new friend touched my brow with her lips, leaving the kiss and a prayer, put the lilies into my hand and was gone. The cars moved on and there was a great void in my heart as I thought of my God-given friend, so lately found, so swiftly lost.

All this was half a century ago, but one of the lilies yet lies in my prayer-book, glorifying with the halo of a precious memory the page on which it rests.

A man, not a soldier I think, for brave soldiers are magnanimous and generous always, stood up in a seat opposite mine and said:

"When I think of the horrors of Libby and Andersonville and look at these poor sufferers I not only want to invoke the vengeance of a just God but I want to take a hand in it myself. Quarter should be shown to none; every man, woman and child of this accursed Southern race should be bound to their own slaves for a specified length of time, that they, too, might know the curse of serfdom. Their lands should be confiscated and given to those whom they have so long and so cruelly wronged."

As he in detail related the story of the scanty allowance of the prisoners, the filth and darkness of their cells, I longed to stand and plead for my people, and tell how they, too, were without soap, food or clothes; that we had no medicines, even, except what were smuggled through the lines, and that our own poor soldiers were barefooted and starving, and that all the suffering of prisoners on both sides could have been avoided by carrying out the terms proposed by the Confederate Government. If I had only dared to raise the veil and reveal the truth perhaps sympathy might have tempered their bitterness, the flame of divine kinship smouldering in their veins, hidden as in a tomb, might have miraged over the gulf of wrongs a bridge of holier feelings.