Marching off to seminar

My small son made me this nametag so that I can, to paraphrase him, wear it in Savannah so people will know my name and want to talk to me. He's concerned about me leaving him to go on my NEH fellowship and he's worried (in an oddly precise & frenetic five year old way) that I won't have anyone to talk to. Talking is the thing he loves to do most. It's not the thing that I love to do most; still I get where he's coming from, because I'm experiencing anxiety about leaving. I'm a little more "journey proud" each day.

We all probably have some kind of way that we prepare to go on trips. It's peculiar to be going through those preparations as I'm reading books about soldiers marching off to war.

I've been reading Chandra Manning's book about white Union, white Confederate, and African American Union soldiers. It's a lovely book: well-written, and interesting. I especially like how it uses soldiers' contemporaneous words to put slavery squarely in the center of the Civil War. I began with Manning because it's required for the first week of the seminar. At the same time, though, I'm reading Drew Gilpin Faust's Mothers of Invention, which looks at the war through the eyes of white southern elite women. These were women who were left home to manage plantations and slaves, after spending their lives learning to be ladies — something that didn't help them when the men left and they were left in charge. I don't have a lot of sympathy for these women on one level — they were slaveholder after all, and slavery revolts me — but I do think we need to see the past through the eyes of the participants in order to better understand it.

Going to Savannah for a month is really nothing like the experiences of a person going off to battle. My family will be safe at home, with food on the table; I will be staying at a nice hotel in downtown Savannah. No one will go hungry. Barring an accident, no one will die. We know that I'll be home by July.

Yet, preparing to leave home does make me wonder about the more mundane questions soldiers likely asked themselves: what will being in the army be like? Will I get along with my fellow soldiers? What will happen to my family when I am gone? How will we all be changed by this separation?