“White Ghosts” (Catherine Quarles’ Remake of Bennett’s “The Army of the Dead”)

“White Ghosts” (Catherine Quarles’ Remake of Bennett’s “The Army of the Dead”)

 

At the time of the Confederate War, Trapman Street, that runs from Broad to Queen, was constantly busy. Beyond the range of Federal seize guns, it was a path of near constant activity.

After the war, the traffic lessened, and the quiet became unpredictable.

Some nights, the street lay dark, sand and dust settling under the salty breeze. Some nights, the rattle of wheels and the heavy stomp of feet marching unsettled the quiet little street. It was an unnatural sort of noise—the heavy, crowded sounds of too many bodies pressing together. Unnatural in the way that crept up the street, slowly rising to meet the sleeping buildings. Many nights it would appear, without preface or fanfare, at twelve o’clock exactly.

The laundress’s daughter, who lived with her parents in the old Trapman Street Hospital building, was awoken by the sound, night after night. When she complained to her parents about the unceasing disturbance keeping her awake, her father answered her in disbelieving anger:

“Girl, don’t speak of that. You stay away from that window.”

Indistinct yelling could be heard from the street, amid the unrelenting stomp of feet. It worried at her, day after day. Some weeks the rustling of bodies could be heard every night. At other times, the laundress’s daughter could go long stretches without being woken by any sort of noise.

One night, when the noise started abruptly, the laundress’s daughter slipped out of her bed and walked to the window. She reached up to pull aside the sheet hanging in front of the old glass panes that faced the street. She could hear, distinctly, the steady push of feet and stomp of horse and rattle of wagon, warlike and processional, down the road. Behind the curtain, she could just make out the flicker of lantern light filtering through tree branches overhanging the street.

Before her fingers even touched the fabric, her father’s arm shot out, startling her and yanking her back toward their bed. She looked up at him as he clutched her arm, his whole frame shaking with anger and fear. When she opened her mouth to ask what was happening, he silenced her with a jerk of his head. Quietly, she got back into bed.

The next day, she asked her mother what the noise in the night was. Her mother gave her a long, measured look before saying:

“Listen to me carefully. It is the Army of the Dead, haunting our streets.”

“The Army of the Dead?”

“The Ghosts of Lee’s army. They may have lost the war, but they’re keeping Charleston. They’re gonna keep this city just the way they like it. And that means fear and death for us. They lost, but they’ll never let us win. You hear me? You stay quiet when they pass and you never let them see you.”

That night, the laundress’s daughter was once again woken by the clang of metal and clatter of horses and crunch of boots. Overcome with curiosity, she forgot her mother’s warning and walked to the window, looking out as the Army of the Dead went by. At first, all she could see were the vague shapes of trees and buildings in a gloom of gray fog. Slowly, figures on the street revealed themselves in the flicker of lantern and torch light.

A procession of ghosts filed down Trapman Street—figures with pointed hoods, cloaked all in white, traveling in wagons, on horses, on foot. As they filed past, the lantern held by one man illuminated the cut-out eyes of his hood and the black cross stamped across his chest. They carried weapons—guns leftover from the war dangling in hand or strapped to their sides.

One cloaked man looked up at the laundress’s daughter’s window, cut out eyes staring up. The laundress’s daughter flinched back, terrified, wanting more than anything not to be looked at, to be seen or known by any of the Dead’s cold army. She held her breath, waiting for the stomping procession to pass by. She wished she had not gone looking out of windows when the sound of angry knocking shook the door frame below. Fear and violence, threats and death. The war was over, but there are lots of ways to hang on to the past.

That is the legend of the Army of the Dead. Their names were not written in the book of peace. They ride as they rode, and stride as they strode, with the cruel, haughty, arrogance of those who define themselves by the people they trod upon. Horse, foot, the crack of whip, clank of wagon, and click of gun, the cruel white host marched through the deserted midnight streets, shrouded in anonymity and the shame of their failure.

The Army of the Dead.

 

I chose to rewrite John Bennett’s retelling of “The Army of the Dead,” as told to him by Mary Simmons, from his collection of Folktales, The Doctor to the Dead. In this rewrite, I copy the genre and style of Bennett’s writing, but change the army of Confederate ghost soldiers to a group of KKK members riding past the hospital in the night. I changed the laundress to a child, as a black woman in Charleston would be well aware of the threat angry white men posed to her and her family. I attempted to tonally change the narrative to condemn, rather than glorify, the Confederate cause by describing the Army of the Dead as cruel rather than valiant. Similarly, I try to emphasize a greater sense of fear and urgency not to engage with the noisy riders in order to reflect the real danger the black community faced at the hands of whites discontented with the outcome of the war. I chose to rewrite the tale in this way because I was so interested in our initial class discussions on the ways Bennett, perhaps unknowingly, represented a version of a black folktale that missed the nuance of racially motivated fear that the original tellers may have understood. Similarly, I thought it would be pertinent to make the historic parallel to the KKK, a real group that refused to give up the Confederate cause in Reconstruction.

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