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Title: April Adventure
Author: Adrian Manning
ISBN: 0966788354
Description
The central characters in this novel for young readers, set in April 1885 in North Carolina, are two 12-year-old girls -- one a white farm girl, the other a former slave. Both are on a journey -- after the white girl's mother falls ill -- to find the white girl's father, a Confederate soldier. Lee has surrendered but the war is not over. Lincoln has been assassinated and War Secretary Stanton has denied approval of the surrender agreement arranged by Union General William Sherman with Confederate forces in North Carolina. On their journey, the two girls find themselves in the company of a released Yankee soldier. All find themselves on the final battlefield of the war.
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Excerpt from Chapter 1:
Anna turned in the hard wagon seat for a last view of the bare wood house she was born in. She was anxious to get on with the trip from Lincoln County, North Carolina, down the bumpy red-clay road to the rail cars at Charlotte, but she felt a sadness leaving the small house her father had built. Anna had never been to Charlotte. She had never been more than six miles from her birthplace.
Mrs. Elizabeth Williams, Anna's mother, held the reins as the old mules pulled the creaking wagon. Anna had wanted to direct the team down the road but Mrs. Williams said, "I'll handle the team. You just keep us going in the right direction." Anna smiled. She didn't know what direction Charlotte was. But she wanted to get there, get on the cars and find her father.
Others in the wagon were a thin black woman known as "Settie Number One," and her daughter, "Settie Number Two," a girl about Anna's own age, 12. "Two" thought she was 12. She wasn't sure. The two black women sat on the wagon floor, hugging two carpetbags that contained all the Williams' clothing and worldly goods.
The county road was empty and dusty in the April heat. Anna felt the sun's warmth as it rose higher in the spring sky. The mules kicked up dust in the road. The women were leaving the farm that Henry Williams had bought in 1858, after he moved his wife and daughter to Lincoln County from Chester, South Carolina. Settie Number One and Two went to Lincoln with the Williams family. They had been owned by Henry's brother in Chester and sold to Henry, along with One's husband, Oscan.
After an hour on the bumpy road, Mrs. Williams halted the mule team in the shade of a tall tree by the Catawba River.
"Pass the water," she told Settie One. The black woman lifted a stone crock lid and raised a large spoon-shaped gourd and each took a long drink of the cool spring water. Settie One passed some biscuits that were wrapped in a red cotton cloth.
"We ought to be at Charlotte soon," Mrs. Williams said.
"Why haven't we seen anyone on the road, Mama?" Anna asked.
"There's no one left," her mother said softly. Anna saw pain in her mother's pale face. It was true there were few people left in the country this April 1865. First, Henry Williams went away with the Fourth North Carolina Regiment, to soldier with General Lee's army in Virginia. That was in 1863. Henry Williams wrote regularly to his wife and daughter but they hadn't heard from him in six months. Then Settie One's husband, Oscan, died of the night sweats the preceding winter. Without his help Mrs. Williams could not run the farm. It was too much for the women. Mrs. Williams decided that they would pack up and find her husband. Anna was thrilled; it was an adventure.
Settie One had fretted; Settie Two had wailed that the "patty-rollers" would get her. Mrs. Williams sat Two down and explained that the state patrollers who rode county roads in search of wandering slaves would not bother her as she would be with Mrs. Williams.
"Furthermore," Mrs. Williams said, "the patrollers have all gone to the army." Two was not entirely calmed, so great was her fear of the large men she heard about from her late father. "You never want to be on the road after dark," he had often warned her by the fire in their small cabin. "The patrollers will get you and hand you over at the county courthouse and then you will be gettin' a whippin' for being out on the road without a paper."
Two had never seen patrollers and she never had a paper. No slave in the country, her father also told her, would be given a paper. And no slave, he said, could read a paper. Slaves were not allowed to learn writing.
Anna and Two grinned at each other as they chewed their biscuits. Anna knew that there was no more food on the farm, one reason her mother had hitched the mules that morning . There was nothing on the farm to keep them there. They had no seed for the spring planting. The country had lost its men. Families had to fend for themselves.
Elizabeth sipped from the gourd and coughed. Anna saw her mother's cheeks redden.
"The cars will get us to Raleigh, where we'll stay with my sister," Mrs. Williams said. "From there we will find Mr. Williams..."
An hour later they rolled into a dusty crossroads outside Charlotte. Anna and Two stared down the wide main street and at the close built unpainted wood buildings. Soon they saw people in yards, women mostly, hanging wash. There were plenty of children in the yards but few men on the street and those elderly.
Mrs. Williams turned the mule team onto a side street toward a faded sign that read: "Hostler-Blacksmith." She stopped the wagon and climbed down to enter the barn-like building that looked cool inside its inviting darkness. Anna smelled the pungent animal smell of the corral where two old horses stood in the sun.
Soon, Mrs. Williams returned with a white-haired old man who walked to the mules and looked them over. "Not young," he said.
"They're strong and healthy and worth what I'm asking," Mrs. Williams said. The old man motioned her into his building and Anna climbed down from the wagon seat.
"Now, don' you go roamin'" Settie One said.
Anna shaded her eyes with her right hand and looked up the street. After hearing about Charlotte Town from visitors to her farm, she was not impressed with the collection of unpainted wood buildings and shacks. Some of the holes in the road had water in them from the storm two nights before.
Anna had wandered to the corner to peer up the next road when she saw her mother return to the wagon. Anna ran to her.
"Take the bags, Settie," Mrs. Williams said to the older black woman.
The two Setties clambered out of the wagon, dragging the large, dusty carpetbags. At the same time the old man came out and led the team and wagon inside his barn.
"He said there is a boardinghouse on Tryon Street, up aways," Mrs. Williams said as they followed her down the grassy path by the road. Anna walked to her mother's right.
"He didn't give me what I had hoped. But it should be enough to get us to Raleigh on the cars," Mrs. Williams said.
"He paid me in coin and some Confederate bills. He told me they would accept the bills here in Charlotte...for the present."
The Tryon Street boardinghouse was a large three-story wood building set back from the street. They walked through the front-yard garden, where spring flowers had bloomed. Mrs. Williams knocked on the front door.
After a few moments the door opened and a large woman, dressed in a dark blue dress that covered her from shoulder to feet, asked, "Yes?"
Mrs. Williams explained they would need a room overnight, the servants too. "They can sleep in the back with my nigrahs," the woman drawled. "Come in," she said to Mrs. Williams, while waving Settie One and Two around the rear of the house.
After the heat of the street, Anna found the house cool and dark. The tall woman led them into the parlor.
"It will be $3 for yawl," the woman said. Mrs. Williams reached for her skirt pocket and pulled out the money she had gotten from the hostler for the wagon and team. She put a $2 Confederate bill on the round table in the middle of the parlor. she added a dollar in old U.S. coin to it.
"Prefer if you had all coin," the woman said.
"Don't have it," Mrs. Williams said. The landlady shrugged. She led them upstairs to the third floor and a small room that contained a narrow bed and one chair. "Girl can sleep on the floor," the landlady said. Anna suddenly missed her bed at home with its straw-filled mattress. She would make do.
"We'll make do," Mrs. Williams said. "Now, if you could give me directions to the depot, I'd be obliged..?" The landlady explained the depot was three streets away as Anna peered out the uncurtained window at the house across the wide street. It seemed deserted.
"Anna," her mother said, "find Settie and have her bring the bags here." Anna ran down the two flights of stairs to the rear of the building. She had never been in a house with as many rooms. She walked down a long, dark hallway that smelled of old food and people sweat. It was not the odors of her home, where Settie had done all the cooking in an outbuilding away from the main building. This house had its kitchen inside, a long room at the back of the building. Settie One and Two were in the kitchen talking with another black woman. Anna told One to bring the bags upstairs.
Anna met her mother in the hallway. "I'm going to the depot to see about tickets. You stay here and be mindful of the landlady." Anna noticed that her mother's cheeks were bright red.
A few minutes later Settie One descended the stairs to face Anna and Two. "Now, you all wash before we take our meal." Anna smiled at Two as she knew that both had large appetites and could eat at any time of day.
Anna and Two left the rear of the house by a steep set of wood stairs. They stood in a large yard that sloped away from them toward two privies set side by side at the far end of the yard. The garden filled most of the yard with the path in the middle to the privies. Anna saw that the landlady was raising spring greens and carrots. She smelled the pungent manure that was being shoveled around the plants by an old black man. Two walked up to him boldly.
"Do you live here?" Two asked.
The old man straightened. He wore a frayed straw hat, a tattered shirt and homespun pants that didn't reach his bare ankles. Anna saw him turn his head and spray a line of tobacco juice on the nearby plants.
"About twenty year now, young'un," he said. "If yawl gonna stand in my garden I'm gonna put yawl to work with this here shovel," he said to Two. She laughed.
"We don't have to work. We travelin'."
Just then Anna heard a commotion from the front of the building, a clatter of wagons and animals. She and Two ran around to the front. They stood by a low holly bush and stared at the arrival of coaches and wagons, accompanied by a dozen dusty cavalrymen in mixed grey, brown and blue uniforms. They sat their horses as the party of a dozen men climbed from the coaches and wagons. The men were agitated, Anna saw, all seeming to be talking at once and most seemed angry. Anna saw that one tall, gaunt man did not join the hubbub. He walked alone to climb the stairs to the front door. He wore a black suit that was dusty on the arms and trousers near his boots.
Anna approached the soldiers dismounting from their thin horses.
"Where have you all come from?" Anna asked one young soldier closest to her.
"Richmond," he said, grinning at Anna. "Not all in one day." He waved to the tall man who now stood in the vestibule, speaking to the landlady. "That's President Davis," he said. Anna turned and stared in awe at the leader of the Confederacy. She had heard of Davis from her mother and father. But she had no idea what he looked like. Anna and Two followed the party into the house, where the landlady noticed them in the hallway and shooed them into the kitchen. The men entered the main parlor and sat themselves.
In the kitchen Anna and Two found Settie One at a counter, cutting a large loaf of bread. She dipped the knife into a crock and slathered the bread with butter. "Real food," Anna said, as she and Two settled on a wood bench and savored the meal. Settie One gave each a tin cup of warm milk with the bread.
As the girls finished their meal they heard another commotion in the front of the house. Anna stood and walked down the hallway to find the landlady at the door, talking to two strange men.
"...and she fell to the floor at the depot," one man was saying.
"Carry her in here," the landlady said. The men went to a wagon and with the help of a few of the soldiers they carried Mrs. Williams up the stairs and into the house. "Mama," Anna said, seeing her mother's face, pale and unconscious. "Girl," the landlady said to Anna, "go in the back and send that Amos for the doctor." The landlady turned to the soldiers holding Mrs. Williams. "You men carry her upstairs. Follow me."
Anna ran to the rear of the house, yelling, "Help, Settie, help!"
