A Mississippi Guerrilla
Andrew quickly ran around the house, doing his best to carry the grain sack and not spill anything. It would not do to leave the soldiers a trail to their hiding place. His arms ached under the weight of the sack, but the 17-year-old boy still ran as fast as he could. He knew that without that grain his mother and his little sister would starve. They didn’t have any Negroes to raise the crops, and with dad and Jim gone their little farm couldn’t raise a lot anyway. And what little they had was then taken by the Army, whose soldiers descended on the farms of every yeoman family like locusts. If only President Breckinridge knew that such abuses were being committed! He would surely put a stop to that. But with the Yankees so close to Atlanta and Richmond Andrew understood that the President needed to focus elsewhere. He understood the fact that men had to have priorities, that’s why he had stayed with mother and Sally even though he wished to join the Army and fight for the South too. Oh, how he would show those Yankees!
He hid the grain well, and then returned. He didn’t want mother to face the soldiers alone, and even if he was only a
boy (as some sneering soldiers had already told him), he still felt it was his duty to protect mother and Sally. Just like it was Jim’s duty to join the Army. Three years ago, when the war had just started, he hadn’t understood why. Dad had already joined, why did the South need another man? Jim had embraced him, stroking his hair, and Andrew held into him, not wanting to let go. “There are thousands of Yankees coming here, to Mississippi, to take our property and make us slaves of our Negroes”, he said. “But we don’t have any Negroes!”, Andrew protested, feeling anger against the big planters, who had all the money and all the Negroes. “It does not matter, the Yankees will enslave all the White people if we don’t fight”, Jim took a deep breath and continued, “that’s why I must fight.” He fell later, at the hands of the drunkard Grant at Corinth. Then news came that father died of malaria.
The horses they had heard now burst from the nearby trees, striding towards their shack. But as they drew closer, Andrew noted something, something that made his blood run cold. Their uniforms were not the problem, for they were wearing the brownish, greyish rags that most Confederate soldiers wore, their country to impoverished by the blockade and the Yankee vandals to weave actual gray uniforms. The problem wasn’t the two Negroes riding with them either, they could be slaves for all Andrew knew. The problem was their flag. Instead of their proud Stars and Bars, they were flying the Yankee Stars and Stripes. And alongside it, floating in the air like a terrible warning, there was a black flag.
“Guerrillas”, Andrew thought immediately, “Yankee Guerrillas”. Distinguishing those marauders was necessary, even if Yankee was technically the wrong name for many of them were Southerners who had betrayed their land. Andrew knew that some of the men who fought for the South were called guerrillas and hanged without remorse by the Lincoln Armies. Some could be bloodthirsty indeed, taking pleasure in killing Negroes and murdering Yankee soldiers. But when Lincoln and his acolytes, like the vengeful Stevens or the drunkard Grant, were in a war to exterminate the people of the South, what other choice did they have? They had to resist by all means, and if that meant killing some miserable Negroes, so be it. As far as Andrew was concerned, the so-called Confederate guerrillas were heroes, the same their dad was, and the same Jim had been. He had even wanted to join once, and when a guerrilla tried to recruit him forcibly, he almost went, if not for the cries of his mother, which made even those hardened warriors relent.
The group that was now approaching Andrew’s home was different. Those Yankee guerrillas, groups of deserters, draft-dodgers and Black Republicans, who even recruited Negroes and included some Yankee soldiers, were not heroes. They were monsters. Riding through the South, assassinating people, encouraging desertion, treachery and, worse of all, slave insurrection, the Yankee guerrillas were trying to destroy the South, one murdered innocent at the time. And now it was their turn. They were just ten men, but there wasn’t any Confederate Army nearby to protect them. Maybe one of their guerrillas was nearby? Since they had lost at Liberty, the guerrillas were the ones keeping order and protecting them, even if they sometimes weren’t really gentle either, prone to stealing food and forcing youths to join their ranks. If they were there, they would protect them. But that didn’t matter because they weren’t there.
The guerrillas let out a battle cry, very different from their rebel yell, and charged. Mother, her hair grey and her cheeks swallow, stared in terror. Sally, who at thirteen was shaping up to be a quite handsome girl, had started to sob. And Andrew? Andrew stood frozen in place, keenly feeling that he was just a useless boy. They first cut his mothers throat, saying she was useless to them, before one of the Negroes took Sally. He screamed at the Negro, yelling to take his hands off her, and one of the White men there hit him in the stomach, making him kneel in pain. “Stay silent, boy”, he said, his drawl betraying that he was a traitor. He bit his hand, and then the man, his eyes bloodshot, took him to a nearby tree and started to beat him. Andrew barely felt his kicks and his punches, however. All he felt was white-hot fury, and shame, and horror, as he saw how the guerrillas tore Sally’s clothes and violated her. He didn’t even feel it when the guerrilla tied a rope to a branch, saying he wanted him to suffer, as the other marauders lit the house on fire. He didn’t even hear the rebel yell that broke the air and made the Yankee guerrilla mount their horses and flee.
He did feel the soft kick in his side, that didn’t have any force behind it but still made pain flare. “He’s alive”, a man said, his grey clothes covered with dirt, “help me get him away”. Their guerrillas had come, just too late. Their farm was ashes, mother was dead, Sally was dead, Jim was dead, father was dead, and Andrew was barely alive. The guerrillas that rescued him at the last minute had no medicine, but the whisky they carried helped to numb the pain, nonetheless. Just the physical pain, of course. He had nothing to live for, and he wished he were dead. Maybe he’d use the rope the Yankees had left. But his thoughts were interrupted by the Confederate who had rescued him, who put a hand on his shoulder. “You could do nothing against those cowards, son”, the man said, his eyes speaking of similar grief. “But if you join us, you can avenge your mother and your sister. The Confederacy needs every man.” Andrew nodded, and doing his best to forget the pain, stood up. He felt like killing some Negroes and some Yankees.