usadeepsouth.com
by Don Drane
By my math, he must have been somewhere around twenty-four, twenty-five, when he raised his hand and volunteered. His records say Co. A, 18th Regiment, Mississippi Infantry, C.S.A. His marker says most of that, plus it says Volunteer.
Like most, probably, Yancy didn't know what he was gettin' into or why. He was just reacting to what he had heard from older men at the store or what some man had said as he rolled through the crossroads on a wagon, something he had heard in 'town' or something somebody had got a letter about. All he knew was people they called Yankees were headin' this way with guns on wheels and big horses and they intended to stomp down anybody that got in their way and Yancy felt he had an obligation to raise his hand.
In Scott County, Mississippi, in 1850 you were a country boy. The only other option and the only other possibility was that you were a country girl. I imagine Yancy was farming or helping somebody farm, maybe doing some trapping and fishing, sellin' some, eatin' the rest. I know by his bloodline that he was working, not just sittin' around the store depending on somebody to give him what he had not earned. My guess is he could hand-grab a 50 pound catfish and whip a rattlesnake at the same time while doing whatever it was his mother or wife had told him to do in between.
Yancy lies in a real peaceful cemetery spot just off Highway 25, going north as you leave Madison County and enter Scott. The sign says 'Graveyard Road'. I like that a lot better than 'Cemetery Road' or some other name like memorial something or other. 'Graveyard Road' says it all. The cemetery is on a high spot, and the rain runs off the red clay dirt, down to the gravel road, and toward 25 where a state-laid ditch takes it south.
I woke up in the middle of the night two nights ago and couldn't think about anything but Yancy's marker. Last year I went over there by myself and took along my secret cleaning stuff that I use in old cemeteries. Yancy's marker was probably provided courtesy of Sons of Confederate Veterans or the agency that oversaw that kind of thing 75 or 100 years ago. Confederate markers have a special shape and they signal a special call and attract a special kind of attention. You don't walk past one without reading it. And you approach it silently, with reverence and respect.
Anyway, I cleaned Yancy's old marker; got all the algae and mildew and 60 years of stain off of it and all of a sudden you could almost make out what it said. I let that dry in the sun for a couple of weeks and went back and cleaned it again and poured three, five-gallon buckets of water over it. And I planted five nice, thick sections of sod on top of his grave. For way too many years Yancy had rested under a stained marker with no grass.
When I woke up the other night I kept seeing his marker with no words visible on it. The carving was there, very neat, very precise. But, it was white-on-white and couldn't be read unless you got down on one knee and looked real close with the sun right behind your back, and this would require that it not be past ten o'clock since his marker faced east. I kept seeing that solid white marker. I had cleaned it up so good you couldn't even tell what it said. I got up thinking about it.
Today I cleaned Yancy's marker again with some special stuff and sprayed most of it with black spray paint and immediately wiped it off with a rag saturated with Mineral Spirits. I was surprised it looked so good. The black paint went straight into the text which is carved about a quarter of an inch into the marble. When I wiped it off, all the paint came off except what was inside the carved letters. My God! Suddenly Yancy almost comes to life again. The dates he lived. His Confederate regiment. His Company. The fact that he was in the infantry, which means he didn't have the royal distinction of being a horseman in the cavalry or an officer, or a man with silver insignia and tall, shiney boots. Just a regular guy. A young man answering the call, volunteering to stand up against what he'd heard was some Yankees coming down here to kick him around and change his way of life. That's all he knew and that's all that mattered. He probably thought, "Them's fightin' words; where do I put my name?"
Today, almost 120 years after Yancy took his rest under that cedar tree, his marker finally speaks to anybody walking through to visit their ancestors. And the man on the lawnmower can hit 'neutral' and read about Yancy, finally.
And my wife will be pleased. Yancy is her great, great grandfather.
Note: The graphic of the battle at the beginning of this article is published courtesy of the Florida Educational Technology Clearinghouse. Description: "Confederate cavalry attacking a Federal supply train, near Jasper, Tenn. We give a sketch of the capture of a Federal supply train of several hundred wagons, loaded with ammunition and subsistence, by a large body of Wheeler's Confederate cavalry, near Jasper, Tenn., while on the way to Chattanooga. The guard made a stubborn resistance, but being few in number were soon overpowered by the Confederates, whose headlong attack and numerical superiority threw the whole train into confusion and prevented escape."— Frank Leslie, 1896
ADDENDUM
Don Drane writes: Several people from 'thu nawth' wrote me with critical remarks about boys in The South who would take up the mantel of slavery and fight in what I call 'The War of Northern Aggression'. My comment to that is this: Yancy was a 23 year old boy when he hitched up his overalls, raised his hand and penned his signature. There was little if any communication with the world outside Scott County, Mississippi; obviously no internet, no television, no telephone, no local papers, nobody coming by in an A-Model that had yet to be invented. He was a farm boy. I doubt he had much education at all.
I imagine his best friends and neighbors were black folks. He probably hung his clothes to dry on the same barbed wire fence they hung theirs on, and his hoe probably leaned right beside theirs in the shed and they probably chopped the same fields of cotton. They probably got a newspaper once a week on the train from up north and maybe somebody read it aloud. All these boys knew was that people in dark blue uniforms were on the way with guns and big horses and heavy steel guns to shoot them up and kick their ass and take their land. Yancy signed up in 1861 at 23 years of age, survived the war, lived another twenty-six years and died in 1887, probably never knowing much at all about the reality of the conflict, why it occured or what it would mean for eternity. He never knew why U.S. Grant was giving away sliced-up sections of their land or who these people were that climbed off the trains with bags that looked like they were made out of carpet. These were not bad people.
Don Drane, a native of the Mississippi Delta, now resides in the Jackson area.
Write him by clicking here: Don’s address.
Want to read more of Don’s USADS stories?
Bottletree: Out Of Nowhere
Deep-Fried Turkey
A Not-so-fond Memory
Mulberry Street
January Soup
And for more of Don’s tales, please check the USADS article archives.
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