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- Oct 17, 2012
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Coaxing Stories from the Shadows
June 12th, 2014 by Brendan Wolfe · No Comments
Expired Image Removed
In his lovely book Bloody Promenade: Reflections on a Civil War Battle (1999), Stephen Cushman writes about acoustic shadows, a phenomenon in which people sometimes could hear battles from far away but not from up close. His research on the Battle of the Wilderness, which occurred 150 years ago in May, produced such a pocket of silence, he writes. Or at least it did metaphorically.
Black soldiers fought at the Wilderness, but they are rarely mentioned in traditional narratives of the battle. Primary records, meanwhile, obscure as much as they reveal. To the Union officer Morris Schaff the black troops "were not ordinary stragglers, and I remember no more pleading objects. Most of them had lately been slaves, and across the years their hollow cheeks and plaintive sympathy-imploring eyes are still the lonesome roadside's bas-reliefs."
In frustration, Cushman notes how such writing only "deepens the silence" that surrounds black soldiers "by representing them not as quiet men who suffer stoically but as sculpted figures raised just slightly above the background surface of the landscape."
For the rest: http://blog.encyclopediavirginia.org/2014/06/12/coaxing-stories-from-the-shadows/
By the way, the reader referred to in the next to the last paragraph was me.
June 12th, 2014 by Brendan Wolfe · No Comments
Expired Image Removed
In his lovely book Bloody Promenade: Reflections on a Civil War Battle (1999), Stephen Cushman writes about acoustic shadows, a phenomenon in which people sometimes could hear battles from far away but not from up close. His research on the Battle of the Wilderness, which occurred 150 years ago in May, produced such a pocket of silence, he writes. Or at least it did metaphorically.
Black soldiers fought at the Wilderness, but they are rarely mentioned in traditional narratives of the battle. Primary records, meanwhile, obscure as much as they reveal. To the Union officer Morris Schaff the black troops "were not ordinary stragglers, and I remember no more pleading objects. Most of them had lately been slaves, and across the years their hollow cheeks and plaintive sympathy-imploring eyes are still the lonesome roadside's bas-reliefs."
In frustration, Cushman notes how such writing only "deepens the silence" that surrounds black soldiers "by representing them not as quiet men who suffer stoically but as sculpted figures raised just slightly above the background surface of the landscape."
For the rest: http://blog.encyclopediavirginia.org/2014/06/12/coaxing-stories-from-the-shadows/
By the way, the reader referred to in the next to the last paragraph was me.
Bringing the