TerryB
Lt. Colonel
- Joined
- Dec 7, 2008
- Location
- Nashville TN
One of the CDVs in an old album I inherited was indexed as "Dr. Bonner." It was taken in Memphis in 1865. The doctor turns out to have been a neighbor of some of my ancestors who lived in Holly Springs, Miss. He had a daughter named Kate who achieved some literary distinction as a writer who was among the first to let black characters speak for themselves in their own dialect, as opposed to being seen and interpreted through the eyes of white folks. She used the pen name Sherwood Bonner, but her promising literary career was cut off by cancer in 1883. She somehow was able to get through the quarantine by train from Boston to Holly Springs in Sept 1878, where she nursed her father and brother until they died of yellow fever. She then managed to talk a Union officer into letting her board a train to escape the plague. One of her romantic associations was an older man, Col. Colton Greene of Marmaduke's Brigade, Sterling Price's army. Green served in the 3rd Missouri Cav and was passed over for promotion to general until the end of the war. He settled in Memphis and seems to have been one of Bonner's suitors, helping her financially. Whether they had a genuine affair is not known.