Southern Comfort

My grandmother was an unreconstructed Southerner. She was proud of her father, Bill Wade, who got on his horse, rode over to Dallas with his brothers, and lied about his age to enlist in the Confederate Cavalry. “Papa said it was the only lie he ever told in his life, and that taught him a lesson.”

As the South went down to defeat in 1865, great-grandpa’s captain told his men, “Boys, when Lee surrenders, the Yankees will take your horses.” With the officer’s blessing, Grandpa Wade and his buddies deserted and started home. He was back in Texas before he learned that, in the terms of surrender, Grant permitted the rebels to keep their horses.

Grandpa Wade said, “Since I was never mustered out, I will remain a Confederate soldier until the day I die.”

The family was proud of Grandpa Wade and his loyalty to the Lost Cause. All shared his feelings, not only my grandmother, but also my mother and her children. My brother, who served two tours in the U. S. Air Force in Vietnam, told me that, when he dies, instead of a U.S. flag, he wants a Confederate flag on his coffin.

I was twelve years old when I learned a terrible family secret. My mother’s father was from Ohio, and his grandfather was in the Northern Army! No one talked about that shameful thing in our family.

I grew up and became engaged to an airman stationed at Carswell Air Force Base in Fort Worth. A woman came up to me after church and said, “Ilene, I hear you are marrying a Yankee!”

Marry him I did. And went to live with him in Chicago, where in the public library’s Civil War collection, I found a book on Ohio regiments which named my great-great-grandfather as a “company sergeant” and listed the battles in which he fought. So many battles, I was surprised that he survived without being wounded. My parents came to visit. I took Mother down to the Chicago Library, and we obtained a photostat of pages which told what Grandpa Worstell did in the War Between the States.

In the next 20 years my family moved from Chicago to Detroit to Dallas to Philadelphia and back to Chicago. We lived in the suburbs, but when my parents came to visit, we took the train to Chicago’s “Loop”, went to the library, and found the book. This time I gave Mother a Xerox copy.

Later, on a visit to Texas, I asked Mother where she kept Grandpa Worstell’s Civil War records. She said, “I don’t know what you are talking about. I never saw anything like that.”

My mother could not admit, not even to herself, that her great-grandfather was with Sherman when he marched through Georgia!