Beauvoir

I got three phone calls while I was in the dentist’s chair yesterday. The hygienist was kind enough to take her hands out of my mouth so I could answer them. Two were about money, and one was about the disaster on the Gulf Coast . It did not look good for the survivors of Katrina, and the full assessment is not going to be done for days.

I pondered the latest news. Biloxi and Gulfport are essentially gone. The levees that failed have swamped 80% of New Orleans . When I got my mouth back, I drove home and did what I could to fix the money matters, and batted .500 on the money calls. One I could fix and the other I couldn’t. But hey, hitting .500 gets you to the Hall of Fame, so I was content with my efforts.

There was no fixing what had happened down on the Gulf, and so that also turned into was a money call, though the amount required to fix it numbed my brain. I watched as many images as I could and then finally just put myself down at eight o’clock last night, and kept myself there. 

I awoke feeling rested for the first time in weeks, but it came with a price.

The knee is hurting this morning, sharp pain. It stood me straight up when my weight fell on it. I hobbled over to the desk and turned the radio on and heard that a thousand Shia Iraqis were dead in a stampede on a bridge during a religious procession that panicked with the word of an incoming car bomb.

I winced at the pain and frowned at the news. One catastrophe at a time, I thought. The number of the dead from Katrina will probably equal the dead from the disaster on the bridge.

I had no answers for either. But I did know why the knee hurt. The office staff had a little pilgrimage on Monday up to Ben’s Chili Bowl (“Black owned since 1958!”) on what was once the Black Broadway of America, U Street .

We took the Green Line of the Metro uptown, and emerged on the street where Duke Ellington and Count Basie played. All the greats of popular music of the thirties and forties had played here, and the lights were bright and the sounds were hot.

Then Segregation- the formal kind, anyway- ended, and there was a better life available in other places, suburbia beckoned from Maryland , and those that could afford to move, did so.

After the riots that killed the central city, U Street was on tough times, and stayed that way for a couple decades. It is coming back now, and Ben’s is still there, serving up dark rich hot chili over hot-dogs and hamburgers and crisp fries. Posters of Denzelle, and Chris Rock and Bill Cosby are on the walls, since this is a cultural magnet.

Around Ben’s there is new construction and cranes rising, the theater next door has been restored to something like its original glory. Some of the quaint Victorian homes are being refurbished, and after a round of half-smokes slavered with Ben’s chili, we decided to walk back to the Bus Depot Building where our corporate offices are located.

It is about thirteen or fourteen blocks, but it was an interesting walk. Some urban pioneers have dropped some significant money to grab the three-story brownstones and save the dark wood floors, and paneled walls and tall ceilings. The bars are still on the lower windows, but it looks like these people won the crap-shoot of moving in at the leading edge.

This part of Northeast Washington had been no-man’s land just a few years before, worth your life to walk here at some times of the day.

But it was bright sunshine, and we thought that New Orleans had been saved, and all was right with the world.

This morning I know just how bad it really is, and my knee aches from grinding the bones together on the walk. The pure unadulterated horror of it was not apparent until that night, and disbelief rose throughout Tuesday as the images of the catastrophe began to accumulate.

We used to drive Highway 90 from the Naval Air Station at Pensacola along the Redneck Riviera. That road parallels the interstate, and is right on the water. We would drive out the back gate of the base and head toward Mobile and Biloxi , Mississippi , on the way to the beach, or to a night of revelry in the Big Easy itself.

I wondered if the grand old battleship Alabama had stayed at her moorings in Mobile Bay . Even Katrina probably could not sink her, but she could do incalculable damage if she stripped the great ship adrift and rammed it like a steel sword into the city.

The casinos a little further west by Mississippi law must be afloat. It is part of the pleasant fiction that the gambling industry used to convince the state legislators that they were just the logical extension of the old riverboats. They were huge things, really floating buildings rather than boats. But the storm raised them up and cast them across the road and on top of the hotels that housed the gamblers.

I gasped when I got the news about Beauvoir.

I stopped at the old Louisiana-style manor house years ago. In French, the word means beautiful view.

It was a beautiful view, although not today. Beauvoir was Jefferson Davis’ last home, a fortress of solitude from which he maintained his icy pride about the conduct of the War of Secession. He never asked for a pardon from the victorious Yankees, and this is where he came when he was released from his prison cell at Fort Monroe , in tidewater Virginia .

The house was designed and built between 1848-54 by a man named James Brown. He lived there until his death. The beachfront property passed through several hands until it came to Ms. Sarah Anne Ellis Dorsey and her husband in 1873. He died shortly thereafter. In December, 1876, she encountered the former Confederate President, who was looking for a place along the Gulf Coast to settle and write his memoirs. She offered him the use of her library cottage, and he moved there the next month.

The Deep South was the only place that Davis could find some peace. The New York Times depicted him as a murderer, cruel slaveowner, liar, braggart, hatemonger, political adventurer, drunkard, assassin, henpecked husband and a mean-spirited malingerer.

There was hate more visceral than the rantings of the Penny Press, too. The citizens of Sacramento , California , hanged Davis in effigy. A few months later the Kansas Senate passed a resolution to hang him in person .

He began dictating his book “Rise and Fall” to the widow Dorsey in February 1877. He needed to tell his side of the story. As late as 1880, a man who cheered for Jefferson Davis in Madison , Indiana , was shot.

But life was sweet on the Gulf. Beauvoir faces the water, and Davis enjoyed spending time on the beach during his later years with his surviving children and grandchildren.

He died in New Orleans in 1889, and his funeral was a cause for the outpouring of great emotion. Eventually, Beauvoir was transferred to the Sons of Confederate Veterans for use as a retirement home. Twelve barracks, a hospital, and a chapel were constructed on the 52-acre property, and as many as 2,000 soldiers and their family members lived and died there.

The last veteran left Beauvoir in 1951, the year I was born, and the last two Confederate widows were removed in 1957, when the property was opened to the public. Beauvoir became a museum with extensive facilities, including the cemetery and main residence, as well as a Davis Family Gallery, the Tomb of the Unknown Confederate Soldier, Stars and Bars Gift Shop, and other attractions.

Beauvoir survived Hurricane Camille in 1969, though the museum in the basement of the home was swamped. The library cottage suffered severe damage, but was rebuilt.

The Jefferson Davis Presidential Library was opened at Beauvoir in May of 1998. Attendees included Mississippi Governor Kirk Fordice and United States Senator Trent Lott. It was a pretty nice facility. It included items from the original Dorsey and Davis collections, and had artifacts from the Louisiana State Museum , the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, the Museum of the Confederacy, the National Archives, and The Old Capitol Museum of Jackson, Mississippi.

They were working to add more artifacts, images, documents, books, microfilm Confederate service records and other stuff right through last week.

But Katrina wiped the property just about slick. You might say the whole place was gone with the winds.

Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com

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