©1996, ProMotion, inc.
www@bookpage.com
Maybe the story is too simple. After several recent articles and books, this disaster has failed to seize the imagination of American readers, even those who are endlessly fascinated with the Civil War.
Ironically, Andersonville prison, in novels, plays, movies, nonfiction works, including eyewitness diaries, has always commanded and held the public's interest. And yet not even irony serves to take us by the arm and hold us still long enough to grasp the impact of the Sultana catastrophe. The irony is this: many Yankee survivors of Andersonville and other Rebel prisons perished after all, or survived yet another descent into hell on the Sultana that spring night, as Lincoln's funeral train crossed the blood-weary land.
What will it take for this event, that caused such vexation on the Father of Waters for a few hours, to earn its rightful place as a symbolic expression, embodying every adjective for sad loss, of the tragedy of the Civil War? It will demand something that transcends Gene Salecker's excellent account.
All the facts, many recently discovered, and all the testimony, of hundreds of survivors and of many witnesses for the military investigation, along with photographs, maps, notes, appendices, glossary, and bibliography are here. What is missing is a conceptual imagination that will place the Sultana disaster in a tragic light. The darkness of that night still hangs, almost 150 years deepening, over the smoke, the screams and the prayers of the victims, and the compassionate cries of the rescuers. Only the light of an extraordinary imagination can unvex and raise this unique and complex, meaningful event from the bottom of the Mississippi.
Let us have faith. Faith that readers will buy this book and absorb into their consciousnesses its facts and the testimony of the survivors, the last two of whom held the last reunion near Knoxville in 1929; faith that at least some of them, in empathy and sorrow, will feel the sting of irony and the need, and the actual desire, to imagine that night in all its strangling humanity. Oh, we all admit the obligation. But that is as abstract as the death and survival count. As with the incomprehensible six million Jews of our era, we must count one at a time, if we are to retrieve and remember.
Start with Private Chester Berry, the survivor who compiled the first book of facts and testimonies about the disaster in 1892, Loss of the Sultana and Reminiscences of Survivors. He heard for the rest of his life the screams of one victim whom he watched step off toward safety from the burning, steeply slanting hurricane deck to the burning wheelhouse just as the wheelhouse broke up and mashed him, as in an iron vise, against the deck where he flailed about and burned alive.
I can testify from personal struggle that no one can fault those who have attempted to so seize our hearts as to activate our imaginations -- Private Berry, James Elliott, Jerry Potter, and now Gene Salecker, a campus policeman who has done here the work of an independent scholar. For 20 years, I have tried in vain to comprehend this simple event, emotionally, imaginatively, intellectually. A novel is rumored. A sensitive movie is imperative. Meanwhile, make Disaster on the Mississippi, that explosion, your own starting point.
David Madden is Director of the United States Civil War Center at Louisiana State University.
©1996, ProMotion, inc.