Excerpt: Driving in Vicksburg.

Copyright © 2011 Bob R Bogle



How many times had he driven on a street called Union Avenue, he wondered, and never made the connection.

The Vicksburg battlefield opened up around them, a beautiful park, impossibly green.  He had not been prepared for that.  The color was vibrant and rich.  So unlike the delta flatlands.  Traffic along the one-way road was sparse and slow, and he could easily find pullouts when someone came up behind them.  Thick clover carpeted the long, rolling hills, and patches of basket grass, purple top and bushy bluestem, all speckled with tiny yellow and white wildflowers.  Farther back native oaks, elms, walnuts and pecans framed the immaculately groomed fields.  Spanish oak and Japanese magnolia throve along the ridge tops and boundary areas, and denser thickets of woods were set back in the distance.  White blooms of dogwood broke through now and again, and fine kudzu nets towered up over old branches and boughs.  Stands of black-barked walnut trees were accented by sprays of pale lavender-blossomed redbud.

Populating this garden landscape was a seemingly endless collection of marble sculpture, megaliths skirted by flows of marble steps and lonely cenotaphs, towering spires and shining white temples exalted and humble, and mute statues and guns long sundered from their bellicose barking voices, and brass plates sun-burnt and greened with oxygenation, and elaborately detailed embossments and reliefs.  He had not anticipated such a myriad of memorials so far west.  The Gettysburg battlefield must have a similar impact when you were there and saw it in person, he thought, but he had never seen it.  He could think of nothing comparable to the monuments of the Vicksburg battlefield except, perhaps, Washington, DC, but that was different.  He thought of the armies that had met here, the siege and the suffering they had endured, right here where the cool, air-conditioned car was passing, gliding slowly along in this place.  He tried to feel the presence of those men in blue, the long, hot, dusty days, and within the city the slow strangulation, fierce, violent resistance eroding away incrementally, haughty pride giving way to a creeping horror, the belated dawning fear of failure, the possibility that the Southern dream might somehow, incomprehensibly, inconceivably, blow away and with it the whole world.