By Faith and By Love. Beverly E. Williams

      36. Last picture of Martin at Rolling Green Nursing Home with young guests from Montessori School – Early 1988

      1

      Deep in the hills between South Carolina and Georgia lived a farmer named Jasper Wilson. Though he worked hard, the red clay and sorry land kept him poor. He and his wife did have enough food, fresh vegetables in the summer and smoked hams and potatoes for the winter. At least the steep and rocky hillsides were their own.

      Jasper heard the talk about slavery, rising taxes, and rumors of war with the North. But he had bigger worries: too much rain or too little, the corn crop, how to get enough cash to buy a mule. Let the rich men go to war to keep their slaves.

      In 1861 the farmer received a letter, a most unusual event up in the hills. Jasper Wilson, it stated, must report for duty as a soldier. He was sure that he could get out of the military. Jasper had a wife. Small as it was, he had a farm. He was needed at home. Besides, the war had nothing to do with him. Jasper might have gotten out of serving if he had had one hundred dollars to pay some other, even poorer man to take his place. Where would he get a hundred dollars? He couldn’t even buy a mule. The few items he bought at the general store were paid for in crops, not cash. The young farmer, who had never left the mountains, had to journey to the big city of Charleston, South Carolina to become a Confederate soldier.

      Soon after Jasper had gone off to fight, his wife became ill. Food was scarce. Even while she was sick, Jasper’s wife, Jeanette, and his sister, Margaret, tried to farm the rocky hillsides. With no mule, they took turns walking behind the plow and being the animal pulling it. Since there was no coffee at the general store, and no money to buy any if there had been, Jeanette and Margaret roasted the rye and wheat they had grown and drank it to relieve headaches. Since there was no salt for preserving meat, the women dug up the dirt floor of the smokehouse. They boiled the dirt and strained out the bit of salt that had dripped from hams and bacon in happier times.

      Jasper and his fellow farmers discovered that conditions in Charleston weren’t any better than in the mountains. “Rich man’s war, poor man’s fight,” they would chant as they prepared to eat another bad meal and to sleep in their crowded barracks, too hot in the steamy summer and too cold when the damp winter winds blew in from the ocean. At least Farmer Wilson was lucky enough to have a friend from a nearby farm sharing his misery. Whenever they had free time, the two draftees would walk through the city, and they discovered that most of the fine Charleston homes were empty. The owners, who had made their fortunes in the slave trade, had fled to their country homes. The rich folks had taken all their young, strong slaves with them, leaving one old man as caretaker. Jasper and his buddy decided that since this wasn’t their war, and since they had to be in the city anyway, they might as well make themselves a little extra money. The two young men smashed open the huge front doors, frightened off the old slave with only one gunshot, and ripped lead pipes from the basement. Their Army supply agent, always looking for lead for more bullets, paid them without asking any questions.

      Their next plot was even more embarrassing than alarming old men and stealing pipes. Since this is a true story, it must be told. Jasper’s friend worked in the mail room, and he knew that some packages from home, containing precious food, clothing, tobacco, and medicines, lay unclaimed for days and even weeks. Jasper looked up the owners in the list of battle victims. If a man had died, Jasper presented himself to different post offices using the name of the dead soldier. The two farmers used what they needed from these parcels and sold the rest to the other hungry and uncomfortable soldiers. Before long each man had a big pile of Confederate money.

      But the South was at war, and the friends could not spend all of their days in illegal activities. Though the family does not know how long he was in Charleston, they do know that Jasper was sent into battle and wounded badly. After he had been in the hospital for several weeks, Confederate officers decided to send Jasper home, one less mouth to feed and one less crippled soldier in a hospital bed. His friend knew that Jasper’s discharge was a bad sign; the officers thought he was going to die. He came to the hospital to say good-bye, bringing half of their money. Patiently his friend ripped open the lining of Jasper’s coat, stuffed the dollars inside and sewed it up again. He prayed that his friend would die at home, not on the train, and that his family would find the lump in the coat.

      Jasper’s grandson Martin told the next part of the story:

      The train crews lifted my grandfather off one bumpy, crowded train and onto the next. Finally Jasper got to the village of Walhalla, South Carolina, the end of the railroad. It was about forty miles to his home in the mountains. No one in the family knew he had been wounded; no one knew that he had been sent home to die. He lay on the station platform in Walhalla two whole days, begging anyone to take him home or to get word to his family that he was there. Finally a black man, a former slave who had bought his freedom, an old man who hauled freight in a horse and wagon, put Jasper in his wagon and took him the two-day journey home. When they got to the little stream beside his house Jasper called to his wife, my grandmother Jeanette, “I’m home. Bring clean clothes and towels and soap but don’t come near me.” Caked with blood and pus and the lice that spread from soldier to soldier, he warned her, “I’m lousy. Don’t come. Throw my clean clothes across the creek.” And my grandmother did just that. The old man gently undressed and bathed my grandfather there in the stream, dressed him in clean clothes and took him home. Carried him across the creek and up to the