An Essay on the Dangers & Delights of Time Travel

Meredith Bean McMath

I'd just finished singing Civil War and folk songs to the group of third-grade students celebrating Lincoln's Birthday. Now a small knot of very excited youngsters clustered around me - well, as close as they could get to me there in my hoop-skirted dress. They exclaimed over the songs and my unusual dress. I was enjoying their attentions - feeling very regal, in fact - when I heard a shy voice down on my left.

"Lady?"

"Yes?" I looked to find a girl carefully touching the fabric of the large, round skirt. I smiled helpfully.

"Are you shaped like that under there?"

My love of living history began as a college student at William and Mary, where guides of Ladies Club ladies in polyester satin were finally being replaced with the real article: the Colonial laborers, upper class gentry, and slaves who once populated the streets, homes and taverns of Colonial Williamsburg. I saw the public light up and step closer. I heard the kids asking interesting questions. I couldn't forget the answers they heard. I knew as an educational tool living history worked.

Years later, a friend asked if I would come and sing Civil War songs for the children in her son's fifth grade class. I'd just finished writing a Civil War novel, and my head was swimming with stories. On impulse I told her I might be able to pull together a costume and come as (slightly older version of) the heroine in my book. I bought a hoop skirt at a flea market, sewed up an appropriate dress, and went to the class on the appointed day to present myself to the children as a Civil War lady.

'Lo and behold, they believed me. After a short talk on what life was like in Loudoun County, Virginia during the War, and then what it was like to assist my surgeon father at a field hospital, I opened the floor for discussion. The questions &emdash; intelligent, excellent questions &emdash; flew at me until I told them it was time for me to sing a few songs and go home &emdash; an hour and a half after I'd begun.

Performing living history is the most personally satisfying and rewarding method of teaching children this ex-sixth grade teacher has ever seen. A parent once told me, "Ever since you did your presentation, my daughter has dragged me to every reenactment she sees in the newspaper, reads every book she can find on the Civil War, and constantly tells me she wants to do living history when she grows up." Other parents tell me their children can't stop talking about the program when they get home from school. I'm sure the children themselves would tell me how good the program was, but, to tell you the truth, they never recognized me on the street.

I performed living history in the schools for about ten years before moving to other pursuits (now I prefer to write plays and yet the young girls act the heroine), but I'm glad for what I learned there and cherish the memories, and especially the thank you notes. "Thank you for giving me a better sight of life back then." "You helped me understand the war a lot more and I really learned a lot from it. I had no idea the women contributed that much, because all I really hear about is the men." "I really liked the song A Southern Soldier Boy, because it made me think who died and my great-great-great-great grandfather," and my personal favorite, "I like the way you stayed in the time of the Civil War. I liked your dress. It was unusual and huge." Some of the letters are highly creative, such as, "I liked how you acted like you were living in 1861-1865... Oh, no, I hear soldiers marching outside. I have to go see who they are..."

So, why is living history so effective? Well, who hasn't wanted to snatch a person from the past and have a nice long chat? The trick is to never, ever to break character.

"Was Robert E. Lee buried with Stonewall Jackson?"

"Young man, you've been sadly misinformed. General Lee is teaching at Mary Washington College."

"My great-great-grandfather fought with Colonel Mosby."

"Well, he must have been quite old, son, but perhaps he looks young. You know, the army doesn't usually take men over 50."

If I haven't known the answer, I'm usually able to explain southerners didn't have access to a lot of newspapers during the War - that I was left unaware of certain things. Sometimes that led to discussions about a woman's education, sometimes to the lack of goods, but always the questions lead to something interesting.

What do fourth and fifth graders ask most often, you might wonder? Well, they seem to be fascinated with the fact soldiers could always find whatever the citizens tried to hide. We explain that the soldiers had done searches a thousand times before and knew just where to look, how they'd become expert at using their bayonets to search the yards, for example, and how, by the end of the war, they would tear up the houses every time they came through, but the vast numbers of soldiers are difficult for students to comprehend. Sometimes we try to break it down for them. For instance in describing the awesome numbers of casualties, we tell them to imagine a place at your dinner table left empty when you've lost someone in a battle. "Now imagine ten of your neighbors table's with one empty chair. Now a hundred. Now a thousand neighbors with a chair left empty. At Antietam, 12,000 men were lost in one battle in one day."

"Personal" examples are used as often as possible to reinforce the lesson: for instance, if they ask about the large ring on my right hand that holds a stone of black jet, I explain it is a mourning ring, worn in honor of my cousin who died at the Battle of Fredericksburg.

Then the students' eyes grow wide and I know they've heard me.

Generally speaking, boys ask slightly more gory questions than girls. There was one boy whose line of questions I'll never forget. I came to wince every time I saw him raise his hand. "Where did the soldiers bury amputated arms and legs?"

"With the bodies, if they could."

"Where did your father put them after he cut them off?"

"In a bucket under the surgeon's table."

"How high were the piles of arms and legs?"

"Depended on the battle, son."

"What was the worst wound you ever saw?"

Oh, my goodness.

I thought hard on it, picked my poison, so to speak, and then told him, "Actually the very worst was one I never saw, but I cannot forget the image. It was a story told to me by a soldier who survied the Wilderness Campaign &emdash; he'd taken a moment during a lull in the fighting to look over at his dear friend. From behind the safety of a five-foot wide tree, his friend was smugly smiling as he wrote a letter home. In the next instant a shell tore through that five foot tree, taking his friend's head with it."

The boy asked no more questions.

The girls generally ask a bit more about the costuming, but everyone is amazed to discover how much the average lady wore: a chemise, pantaloons or an under-petticoat, stockings, boots, a corset, a corset-cover, hoops, at least one petticoat to cover the hoops and more usually two, then her dress, a shawl or manteau, gloves, a reticule (purse), a bonnet or a hat, and often a parasol. Shew. And, yes, the women did pare down to the basics around the house and garden, but surprisingly little.

After an hour, I would take out my guitar and sing with them. Their all-time favorite is "Goober Peas." After that famous ode to peanuts, the one most often appreciated in thank you notes is "The Battle of Shiloh Hill," a sentimental ballad written by a fellow who was there. Third favorite is "The Homespun Dress," a song for Southern ladies who were doing without.

Often when I was about to leave the classroom, they'd ask how I was going to get home. "By car?"

"Do you mean a train car? All to ourselves? Heaven's no, I was brought here in our carriage."

Some of the funniest moments occurred when the true lesson was over, and I'd ask them about their "modern" world. A boy once asked my fellow performer, Joyce Carrier (playing the part of a laundress) how she dried the clothes. She explained and asked him how he dried his clothes.

"We don't have to dry our clothes outside on the line. We have a dryer."

Joyce replied, "You mean you have someone you hire just to dry your clothes?"

"No, no. It's a box that dries your clothes."

"You put your clothes in a box to dry them?"

"Yes, it's hooked up to electricity."

We looked blankly at him and at each other.

He rolled his eyes and tried again, "It's a cord that goes into the wall and there's electricity in the wall!"

"You say you dry your clothes by putting them in a box and tying a rope from it to the wall?" By now he and the others had gone into conniptions trying to think of a way to get through to our pitiful, nineteenth-century minds.

A week later, one of those boys was making a point of spending the last paragraph of his thank you note carefully describing his family's dryer. I don't know how much history he picked up from our visit, but I'm fairly certain the boy has a future in mechanical engineering.

Truth is, we took it as a high compliment to be so "misjudged." I remember the boy who tugged on his teacher's sleeve and whispered to her as we finished, "Teacher, teacher... was that lady really born in 1833?"

His teacher looked to me, not knowing quite what to tell him, and I lightly answered, "You know, son, a lady is never one to tell her age."