Ukraine poem by Kevernacular, may we light the world with hope and action

My well-used Ukraine candle from Door County Candle Co. Photo by Kevin Lynch

Ukraine Fire (in the Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart)

In this moment something calls,
So, I listen, mute receptacle, past the painful loss of another younger sister,
realizing thousands of Ukrainians have lost how many family members.
I’ve been reading about war as contemplated in the marvelous anthology,
Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart: Poems for Men 1

So, the hell-on-earth of the Ukraine War rises acrid from my gut,
yet what have I suffered of horridly, brutally, inhumanely genocidal devastation?
I reflect, yes, we have more of the hoary old West versus East,
and the festering of poisoned power, delusion of hate-bile wallowing in past glory.

So, I sit glumly and light my Ukraine candle from Door County,
with its blue and yellow colors, summoned to fire
on days that seem apt to the moment and sentiment
of accumulating lost innocent lives, souls stripped from mangled bodies.
“Parents very old that had one son,” President Zelenskyy described a typical loss,
adding, Russians have abducted and “weaponized” tens of thousands of Ukrainian children.

Is this inflamed point in history imploring madly upon that fiery candle tip?

***

For perspective, America’s war of North and South never fades as a barometer
of bloody border tragedy at a local level, of fraternal countrymen dying
for a perversion of The Declaration’s ideals of liberty for all.

“Gettysburg – a town of only 250,000 inhabitants – was one makeshift burial ground, fetid and steaming” is how Garry Wills pointedly describes it.2
Somehow, Lincoln transcended and, yes, abstracted, the tragedy, but with rhetorical genius
embraced, emancipated, and let the healing begin, North and South, a horribly wounded nation.

“Lincoln sensed, from his own developed artistry,
the demands that bring forth classic art –
compression, grasp of the essential, balance, ideality,
an awareness of the deepest polarities in the situation
(life in the city coming from the death of its citizens).” 3

 

Might someday, sooner than later, Ukraine hear its version of the Gettysburg address?
Until then, so much remains to mourn and yes, fight for.
We have witnessed from afar war crimes to begin rivalling Hitler and Stalin.

Each a mad Ahab in his time, even somebody’s hero! 4
(“The blackness of darkness,” Melville called it, he the writer who, upon meeting — at a dinner of unfathomable spiritual trembling — Hawthorne, our great chronicler of dark American Puritan spirit. Melville, himself from stern Calvinist stock, then transformed his drifting whale yarn into a looming, cascading, doomed nation-ship, bursting at its blackest seams
amid the ocean’s rhythms, engulfing all, to roll,
“as it rolled five thousand years ago…”
into the great American novel,
having swallowed and subsumed
the rainbow-hued crew, Ahab’s blood and the harpoon-pierced White Whale’s,
two bloods perhaps commingling in dark destiny.)

 

So, now a wider question, “What Can We Hope For?”
Yes, another voice rises from the grave,
or in the wind of ashes aloft in air,
circling into small silos of sound,
the song whispering, now sonorous
of the speaker (who asked thusly),

Richard Rorty, Richard Rorty…
the name itself rings in alliterative echoes,
like an old folk hero.
He, recently deceased American pragmatic philosopher,
posthumously urges us past philosophy and ideology,
to effective action,
to something to reasonably hope for, as a whole nation. 5

 

Could this Ukraine tragedy, as Wills says happened in the Civil War,
bring an emergent form of victory –
blood welling ‘round new roots,
rising rose-red with thorny shoots,
new blood from shed blood,
spirit anew in the proud, billowing, blood-streaked blue and yellow banner –
of this European democracy,
when it wins, finally wins, its sovereignty, again?

How sure is the West, to assist in agonizing fits, what might’ve been won and spared by now?

Beyond the Civil War, America’s politics provide further dragging baggage,
a sordid history of Empire building, often tragically partial, in the name of “democracy.”
And even today, in America, remain those who perversely idolize Putin,
And his demagogic types, with strong-manly ways,
which Richard Rorty once warned us of. 5.
Whither American Christianity which heeds Jesus?
Can a Godless, sociopathic man be “our savior”? 6

Perhaps the Ukraine candle evokes my Catholic upbringing,
the flaming sentinel of vigil, of faith in righteousness holy spirit.
So, the spirit takes the deepest of inhalations and sighs
like a great buffalo of the plains,
yet don’t let the candle go out!
It shudders from the hot-breath wind.
Flame rises again, its small, defiant fire.
Hard to believe but, hear this:
This Door County Candle Company has delivered
one million dollars of direct aid to Ukraine
from its army of blue-and-yellow sixteen-ounce candles!

If that is not one — bigger than who’d imagine –
answer to Richard Rorty’s plaintive question,
I don’t know what is!

Soon I’ll buy and light another candle.
The spirit flickers again,
Light amid the Blackness of this Darkness, spreading around the globe,
as surely as changing climes, enshrouding Mother Earth.
Can we ever feel their unfathomable pain?
That which is the world’s is Ukraine, Ukraine!

— Kevin Lynch, September 20, 2023

____________

Here is the link to the Door County Candle Company’s Ukraine candle. All proceeds go to Ukraine: https://doorcountycandle.com/products/ukraine-16oz-candle

  1. Robert Bly, James Hilman, Michael Neade, ed., Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart: Poems for Men, Harper Collins, 1992
  2. Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America, Simon and Schuster, 1992, 21
  3. Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg, 52
  4. For a book-length discourse on the relation between Moby-Dick and totalitarianism, see C.L.R. James, Mariners, Renegades & Castaways: Herman Melville and the World We Live In, Dartmouth, 1978
  5. Richard Rorty, What Can We Hope for? Essays on Politics, Princeton, 2022
  6. From whence come the political rationalizations of Christian Evangelicals, “speaking with God?” “(The mind is its own place, the mind has a mind of its own) This is a domain that, without ever having to name it, the right has always best known how to manipulate.” Jacqueline Rose, in “The Analyst,” a review of Jamaican-British writer/activist Stuart Hall’s memoir Familiar Stranger, The New York Review of Books, Sept. 21, 2023, 50.

 

 

Robert Stone’s Rugged Power and Glory Cast Light on Today

Review: The Eye You See With by Robert Stone (Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt)

As he traversed the earth, the sun also rose for the writer Robert Stone, even amid deep spiritual shadows. And the hardness of his courage shone in the glinting light, as many sweated, suffered, and died. As did he, eventually, in 2015.

He was like a carved-granite eagle in flight. He ventured to high vistas of perception, as an intellectual warrior, and dove, as a miner of humbled but ambitious soul, as it arose in the 1960s. He became very close to some iconic figures, including Ken Kesey, the acid- “enlightened” novelist (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) and charismatic leader of the hippie rogues, The Merry Pranksters.

But he’s worth revisiting or discovering for many reasons.

Though primarily a novelist, Stone re-emerged recently with a far-ranging posthumous collection of his non-fiction, The Eye You See With. 1 The title gains centrality this way: “The eye you see with is the one that sees you back.” That is Stone’s distillation of a sermon by Meister Eckhardt, and Stone  was “obsessed with the absence of God…everywhere we look there seems evidence of (the divine presence), and it never yields itself to our discovery.” 2

So, some of the most compelling truths remained the most elusive. Ah, but the world and universe the creator wrought were out there waiting, beckoning. Though a tough-minded man and Navy veteran, Stone’s poetic power and his Catholic upbringing braided his consciousness, and his nearly relentless questing for truth.

Stone’s big subject was America, which he said he was striving to define through his work, a measure of his ambition, though he never said he was close to accomplishing that. Yet he kept chiseling away at the stone by taking a global attack, traveling literally, and through his story-telling, to points as far as around-the-world, in the sea-faring novel Outerbridge Reach, and, in others, with intense focus, in Central America, The Caribbean, and the Middle East.

Robert Stone visually evoked, for a novel cover, his admiration of Melville’s genius  by borrowing one of Rockwell Kent’s iconic woodcuts for “Moby-Dick,” 1930 Random House edition. Amazon

And yet, for that ostensibly broad contextualizing perspective, his focus was always very specific in story and characters, whom he often prodded to evaluate America and pose questions about it and, by extension, humanity. 3

He first really caught my attention with his novel A Flag for Sunrise, nominally echoing Hemingway, which set an American anthropologist Frank Holliwell in Central America during the same era the U.S. was politically ensnared in the revolutionary chaos of that region. Local corruption interfaces with the religious, as Holliwell helps protect a Catholic mission from bad federales, he falls in impossible love with a missionary nun. His dilemmas, which include previously having been morally compromised in Vietnam, resound metaphorically with America’s.

Stone’s most ambitious novel, Damascus Gate, mirrors in prose, Melville’s epic storytelling poem Clarel – both describing pilgrimage-like trips to The Holy Land by Americans, among others. That setting allows for powerful moral situations and conundrums, as well as plenty of human drama and suspense, set in the bloody dust of Jerusalem.

“Varieties of religious experience for the millennium,” wrote author Frank Conroy of the novel. “By turns scary, funny, and deeply moving. Prose at such a high pitch it sometimes seems hallucinatory. Stone is a genius.”

Accordingly, in the nonfiction essays of The Eye You See With, Stone addresses, sometimes at a very personal level, the dichotomies and contradictions of patriotism, and of religion, while scoring its relevance. His eyes and mind are flung wide open hearing jazz saxophonist John Coltrane’s spiritual fire.

He wrote prophetically in the mid-’80s that we should resist the facile “Great America” rhetoric, which has echoed from Reagan to Trump, because the nation has betrayed its own ideals so often.

Stone the reporter underscores this hypocrisy when he does door-to-door census polling in the slums of New Orleans, in the extravagant shadows of the Superdome, which supplanted an African-American neighborhood. One black family is grappling, it slowly dawns on him, with a dying family member. Yet with a calm grace they allow him in their front door for census questions. This family is about to become less, by one. Stone reflects: “Had this been a white, middle-class household, I would never have been allowed past the door… I would never have dreamed of entering a sick room, approaching a deathbed, asking cold, irrelevant questions of people who had come  to mourn and pray. What has happened here is entirely determined by the politics of race and class – how blinding it can be, how dehumanizing, how denying of basic human dignity.” 4

In “A Higher Horror of Whiteness,” an essay originally published in Harper’s, Stone also hitches up to Melville’s uncannily “prophetic” insights from the mid-19th century, on the mysterious qualities of “whiteness.”

Stone’s chapter, from 1986, draws deeply from Melville’s famous “Whiteness of the Whale” chapter in Moby-Dick, in contemplating the insidious powers and qualities of cocaine, not just it’s inherent whiteness but a “metaphysical whiteness” akin to that which Melville patiently draws out the horrors of. Early in his meditation, the elder author even acknowledges, amid an extraordinarily-suspended sequence of dependent clauses, the role the “colorless color” plays in “the white man’s ideal mastership over every dusky tribe.” Yet that notion slowly dissolves in irony under the ensuing complexity of associative, cultural and instinctive forces, the haunting horrors within whiteness, which Melville expands on. Stone follows Melville quite a ways in this chapter.

So Stone and Melville resonate to the moment, in which the instinct of possessing  whiteness in oneself seems a perceptual pitfall, “so that all Deified nature absolutely paints like the harlot,” as Melville asserts, near his conclusion. This delusory effect manifest itself as an anarchist, racist, and deadly mob attack January 6 on the U.S. Capitol, led by white supremacists and Neo-Nazi Trump-followers.

Stone quotes Melville: “but not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness, and learned why it appeals with such power to the soul… And yet should be as it is, the intensifying agent in things the most appalling to mankind…a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows – a colorless, all color of atheism from which we shrink.” 5

Updating the profoundly agnostic Melville’s context of the word “atheism,” the term takes various forms today. But the message here is the lack of faith – in pluralistic American values and democracy – which obscures those blinded by their whiteness and radicalized away from their own interests, in thrall of the demagoguery of a cult-like leader vying for totalitarian power. Or blinded, as Stone might say, by the white-bound limits of “the eye you see with.”

Many, including President Biden, have commented on the easily breached resistance to the mob by the undermanned (by Trump) Capitol police – compared to previous violent police crack-downs on peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters – as a prime example of “white privilege.” Melville, of course, created the archetypal American demagogue with Captain Ahab, who nevertheless plays out as a tortured, bedeviled hero, pursuing the truth behind “the pasteboard mask.” By comparison, Trump, and his lying and poisonous rhetoric, play out as something quite below, perhaps clinging barnacle-like under the nation’s hull, hidden in the whiteness of the prow’s surf.

In many ways, Stone addresses American experience in these essays, which often read as travelogues, making them extremely palatable when they venture into political and philosophical discussion.

He bravely called out the military kingpins for their corrupt power warfare:

“On one (Vietnamese) hill they lost 56 men, and a general explained that Hill ‘had no military value whatsoever.’ There seemed to be a contradiction.” 6.

Nor does he slink from revisiting questionable in-country strategic calls:

“General Westmoreland was not a sophisticated man, and he appears not to have realized how gravely the cards were stacked against him. His declared tactics of search and destroy – finding and eliminating the enemy’s main force – turned to rubble in his hands.” 7

The more you read, the more you begin to understand the stony toughness of this writer, akin to, at least, the mythical Hemingway.

And Stone’s embracing of the relevance of religion reveals him unafraid to acknowledge a dark vision of God.

Cover of a book series edition Robert Stone contributed to. Amazon

The author comments:

“Because God welcomes all who give up their lives in his name. Because he will not be mocked. He wants his friends to kill his enemies. His beloved go forth to battle and leave heaps of slain.” 8

For all that, he’s also bracingly insightful about the faults of writers he admired, even with grave reservations:

Graham Greene “was tortured almost to a suicide by a grammar school mate.” This might explain Greene’s seemingly misanthropic spiritual malaise, his grieving, as a devout Catholic, of declining moral standards.

I allude to other iconic writers because Stone strikes me as a rare contemporary of our times who stands shoulder-to-shoulder with them, in ambition and talent, as if they’re aligned on a schooner ship that lists and tilts our perspective on them. Stone’s meaty topics and settings are engagingly rendered, and resonant — they grab the high winds, even if they be treacherous. He pulls you in with a pop-culture subject like Hollywood, then turns it inside-out to expose a rotting underbelly, the business that eats actors alive, but also the dazzle and beauty of the art remaining, damaged and infected, spotlighting the poignance of faded artistic power and grace. The drug and psychosis-effected narcissists in his novel Children of Light seem like names on a theater marque barely visible in a misty haze of dark impressionism, weak stand-ins for themselves — and agonizingly for one actor, Lu Anne Bourgeois, who feels deeply kindred to Rosalind in As You Like It, perhaps Shakespeare’s greatest female character, whom she’s played triumphantly in the past.

Shakespearean overtones, no less.  As Melville once proclaimed, praising Hawthorne, “Shakespeares are this day being born on the banks of the Ohio.”  Why not? Where does artistic rarity reside? Yes, Stone not infrequently achieves a resonance in time, a spiritual aroma that lingers like a haunting. That’s partly why he is always worth pursuing again, down the road. It’s why we’re thankful for novelist Madison Smart Bell for assembling and curating this collection. 9

Stone fearlessly casts a view ahead, and reports from the portal of the mortal or moral “heart of the matter,” to evoke Greene’s metaphorical courage and ambition.

But Stone was his own man, resembling, in words at least, the beautiful and sui generis human form the genius sculptor untombs with his chisel.

______________

1. Also worth reading is previous non-fiction by Stone, the memoir, Prime Green, Remembering the ’60s, P.S. Paperbacks

2. Madison Smart Bell, Introduction to The Eye You See With by Robert Stone. HMH, xxi

3. Stone’s National Book Award-winning novel Dog Soldiers takes aim at America’s greatest foreign policy folly to date, The Vietnam War, and was adapted into a 1978 film, Who’ll Stop the Rain, starring Nick Nolte. 

4. Stone, “Keeping the Future at Bay,” The Eye You See With,  179

5.. Stone, “A Higher Horror of Whiteness,” The Eye, 209

6. Stone “A Mistake Ten Thousand Miles Long,” The Eye, 41-42

7. Stone, “Out of a Clear Blue Sky,” The Eye, 104

8. Stone, Images of War (The Vietnam Experience), 104

9. Bell is also the author of Child of Light: A Biography of Robert Stone, Doubleday 2020.

 

A message to a great actor: Jim DeVita in the one-man play “American Song”

Jim DeVita, as a devastated father of a dead son from a terrorist gun massacre, in the world premiere of Joanna Murray-Smith’s one-man play “American Song,” at the Milwaukee Repertory Theater. Photo courtesy jsonline.com

I decided to post the e-mail message below, which I sent to actor Jim DeVita today, even though the brilliant one-man play American Song, which he delivered the world premiere of at the Milwaukee Repertory Theater, has closed.

I managed to get to the end of the play’s run, but I still wanted to offer my appreciation to him, and for those who may have an opportunity to see the play, and to see DeVita perhaps performing American Song elsewhere, or in other roles with Milwaukee theater companies, or in his long-time position as a lead company actor for American Players Theatre in Spring Green, Wisconsin.
Anywhere you see him, you will probably understand why The New Yorker critic Terry Teachout called him “America’s greatest classical actor.”

But in this case, DeVita played the heart and stone-burdened Andy, in an overwhelmingly up-to-the-minute play by Joanna Marie-Smith, and directed by The Rep’s artistic director Mark Clements. 1

The play’s title references Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, wherein the poet likens America to a song and its citizens as potentially a chorus, just as he celebrates American individualism, throughout the “Grass” collection, most famously in the poem “Song of Myself.”

The new play American Song, challenges Whitman’s optimism for an American populace singing in harmony. In fact, playwright Murray-Smith isolates one individual with almost cold-blooded scrutiny.

A father named Andy is hand-building a stone wall on his property while he struggles to come to grips with the harsh, devastating reality of his son’s recent death. The spectral back story is a terrorist gun massacre in the son’s school, which left nine people dead including his son and many injured, an all-too-familiar dirge of a song today. One wonders how Whitman would’ve responded to this numbing American refrain.

I will say no more about the story, only to add that the play’s scrutiny allows us to experience and feel the depth and array of feelings of this human being, an every man with warm blood and a lacerated heart.
In my message, I do try to express some appreciation of the power of the play and especially of DeVita’s astonishing performance.

Hey Jim,

I want you to know that my girlfriend Ann and I finally caught the last Sunday matinee performance of American Song. We were in the balcony in the middle. Both of us were greatly impressed by the play, and engrossed and moved by your performance.

Ann said that she felt on the verge of tears frequently. This is a tribute to you, and your uncanny ability — often in mid-set sentence — to shift into an emotionally charged tone. The audience senses, in the bat of an eyelash, the increased pressure and weight of that nuanced, yet charged, moment. The cumulative effect is draining yet quietly exhilarating.
Yet, the 90 minutes flew by with only you, and the text and stage direction, to sustain their flow and power.
I can think of very few actors who have such skills as yours, in this regard. You also commanded the narrative flow beautifully.
And I love the metaphor of you building the stone wall, it’s rhythm and symbolism, which is rich and open to interpretation.
For me, perhaps you are building a wall around your heart, to protect it. Of course, we never see you complete it because that is perhaps a lifelong project, at least internally, which adds to the play’s poignance and the footprints of personal history, your stone-hauling and pacing back and forth  — and talking to the sky in confounded wonder and anger.
The latter act evokes, for me, King Lear, before he loses it, and Melville’s “quarrel with God.” You recall, Melville also lost his oldest son, age 18, to a gun death, most likely suicide.
Thank you for an indelible experience,
Kevin Lynch
p.s,. Stay in touch regarding your performance and writing exploits, especially regarding Melville. Hi to Brenda.
_____________
1. Milwaukee Rep director Mark Clements approached playwright Joanna Murray-Scott about writing this play for the rep in 2012, “not too long before America and the world was shocked to its core by the fatal shootings of 20 children between the ages of six and seven, along with six other adult staff members, at the Sandy Hook elementary school in Connecticut., The director writes in his program notes to American song.”
Murray-Scott is an Australian playwright and novelist. Among her plays are Honour and Rapture, which both won the Victorian Premier’s literary award for best play.

The Day the United States Hanged a Woman — Mary Surratt

A Southerly Cultural Journal Vol. 3

“There is sobbing of the strong/And a pall upon the land/ But the people in their weeping/Bare the iron hand/ Beware the people weeping when they bare the iron hand.” — Herman Melville, “The Martyr” Battle Pieces and Aspects of the War

Amid a rousing theatrical comedy, a Derringer pistol bullet tore into the back of Abraham Lincoln’s head. Somewhere in the shadows of the tragedy stood Mary Surratt. The horror of John Wilkes Booth’s fanatical assassination of Lincoln turned the national government into a vindictive prosecutor and it most likely miscarried justice for Surratt, the first woman ever executed by the US federal government.

Mary Surratt

Nine Union military officers deemed her guilty of conspiracy in Lincoln’s assassination. Surratt however  doesn’t even earn an index mention in the exhaustive Oxford Guide to United States History.

Nevertheless her case is the most controversial legal decision to emerge directly from the assassination. The recent Robert Redford-directed film The Conspirator, now out on video, brings the hanged woman back to life in one of the most compelling historical dramas in recent memory.

It is a tragedy of the South – especially of a border Civil War state — Maryland, not unlike Missouri where I visited recently — both with complicated Civil War legacies. It speaks to the unpredictable ways that a wounded   democracy can assert itself, all too often in perversions of our Constitutional ideals.

And it is a story of womanhood wronged by political blood lust for revenge. At a time when a woman still could not vote, Surratt became a sacrificial lamb for a nation understandably lashing out. President Andrew Johnson limited voting to white men who “assured the dominance of lawmakers unsympathetic to the rights of free people,” writes Michael Les Benedict. 1 This led to the reviled “black codes” which “circumscribed black southerners’ civil rights.”

And the Surratt trial also speaks to our post 9/11 era of sometimes reactive persecution of whomever might satisfy the lust for vengeance, disguised as justice for the sake of security.

The nine-man military commission appointed by Johnson to investigate the assassination  “was illegal in the sense that it should have been a civilian rather than the military proceeding “ and “seemed to be interested in vengeance, not truth,” Kenneth Davis writes 2.

The Conspirator reveals that Secretary of War Edwin Stanton (Kevin Kline) will settle for either Mary Surratt or her son John, who successfully eluded capture and was most likely an actual conspirator.

Robin Wright magnificently embodies the eloquently stoic suffering of Surratt, who spends a long time in jail as her case is processed. In reality Surratt suffered from extreme menstrual pain during this period.  This somewhat unseemly reality is glossed in the film which has her on a hunger strike which threatens her health.

Also excellent is James McAvoy as the young attorney Frederick Aiken, a former Union officer who is convinced of Surratt’s guilt though appointed to defend her. He gradually comes to understand the trial’s  injustice and fights valiantly, even despite Mary’s enigmatic recalcitrance.

Why is Surratt important? Because at a crucial point in our nation’s psychic history she showed how vulnerable our citizens and judicial system are to corruptions of self-righteousness.

It was like executing the mother of an accomplice of Lee Harvey Oswald because you couldn’t find the right man. Surratt ran a boarding house not far from the Ford Theater where she admitted John Wilkes Booth met with other men repeatedly before the assassination.

All the evidence against her was circumstantial. Knowing Booth, carrying a message for him to Lloyd (to have “the shooting irons” ready) and failing to recognize conspirator Lewis Powell one evening (after the assassination; she had poor eyesight) was the sum of the case against her, “none of which constituted a crime,” wrote historian Laurie Verge 3. Many testified that Surratt was actually loyal to the Union and took the “conspiratorial” trip in question only to collect debts owed her husband.

“She was simply an unsuspecting pawn of John Wilkes Booth,” Verge concludes.

Conspirator Lewis Powell a.k.a. Lewis Payne 

Given the ambiguity of her guilt, the real question is whether the gallows was the proper sentence for her. Thirty-one people testified for Surratt’s defense.  Among nine prosecution witnesses, only two provided notable testimony:  John Lloyd, who denied Surratt’s guilt then changed his story, and Louis Weichmann, who witnesses said was extremely intoxicated the night of the assassination but managed to fix a wagon wheel for Surratt.

President Johnson overturned Aiken’s writ of habeas corpus for a civil trial, (a war-era administrative power ironically enacted by Lincoln) and then denied seeing the clemency plea signed by five members of the commission. These circumstances became issues in his impeachment proceedings two years after Mary’s execution.

On July 7, 1865, at 1:15 P.M., a military procession led the four condemned prisoners through the courtyard and up the steps to the gallows. Each prisoner’s ankles and wrists were bound by manacles. Mary Surratt led the way, wearing a black bombazine dress, black bonnet, and black veil. More than 1,000 people—including government officials, members of the U.S. armed forces, friends and family of the accused, official witnesses, and reporters—watched.

Lincoln_conspirators_execution. (Mary Surratt hanging on left in gallows).

 

Powell, whose dagger failed to kill Secretary of State William Seward, swore to Surratt’s innocence shortly before he was hanged. “The worst pretense of all was to imagine the Civil War over,” writes historian Walter McDougall. The North “embraced the myth that the nation’s sins had been purged by the blood of their soldiers and president.” 4

Thus purged some became avenging angels. Director Redford infuses The Conspirator with deep shafts of sepia light evoking the “magic realism” of the proceedings and as  beacons for the truth in an era when men could bury it in the cold tombs of intransigent,  pompous hatred.

With all the technology that assists us today, DNA testing included, the truth and justice can still be just as elusive.

And sadly, violence — both legally codified and criminal — against women remains a topic of serious debate in 2012.

 

1 Michael Les Benedict “Mary Surratt” The Oxford Guide: United States History, Ed. Paul Boyer, 2001 Oxford University press, 406

2 Kenneth C Davis Don’t Know Much About the Civil War Avon 1996 415

3 Laurie Verge, The Trial: The Assassination of President Lincoln And the Trial of Its Conspirators, A Special Edition Of The Trial Transcripts. Ed. Edward Steers Jr. 2003 University Press of Kentucky.

4 Walter McDougall, Throes of Democracy: the American Civil War Era 1892 to 1887, HarperCollins, 2008, 492