Upon learning this new information, May set out to find her great-great-grandparents’ story. What she found shook her to the core. Henry S. Wellbeloved was a Welsh blacksmith who immigrated to the United States in 1831 at the age of twenty-two. Back in Wales, he had developed a ploughshare edge that was considered state-of-the-art in its day. Tales of the American notion, Cotton is King, had made it to Wales, and the young Wellbeloved journeyed to America with dreams of financial prosperity dancing in his head. He landed in Savannah and opened a blacksmithing operation, which became moderately successful. He was never more than a homestead landowner, but could afford certain luxuries that made life easier, such as horses and a yoke of oxen to pull a laden Conestoga wagon around to potential customers. Henry traveled the Deep South, scouring for business, selling his ploughshares to farmers of cotton, barley, corn, and wheat, finally settling down in Johnsonville in 1849 after nearly twenty years on the road. Still unmarried, he bought a one-acre farm on the outskirts of the town. He also bought a slave, Wormley, and his pregnant wife, Ursula, from a cotton farmer in Atlanta known to mistreat his slaves. Henry, as an abolitionist, had seen so much violence and agony inflicted upon slaves that he vowed to one day help in any way that he could. He took the couple in and treated them as equals and privately manumitted them, understanding that Georgia law prohibited slave owners from freeing slaves. The three worked the small farm together, sustenance farming and sharing in its bounty, and early in 1850, Ursula gave birth to a daughter, who they named May Bell after a particularly genial house slave at their former owner’s cotton plantation.
Life was easy for the trio until the Civil War broke out. Even then, as a foreigner, Henry could remain a pacifist without recourse, only pledging allegiance to the Confederacy to keep him and his adopted family safe from harm. Johnsonville didn’t see much in the way of combat until Sherman’s March to the Sea. Being southeast of Atlanta, Johnsonville was besieged by General Howard’s Union Army of Tennessee. Howard’s XV Corps, commanded by Major General Osterhaus, swept through the area. Under General Sherman’s scorched-earth policies, Johnsonville was razed, along with scores of other Georgian towns between Atlanta and Savannah. Wormley, who was pressed into service by the Union Army, proudly served his emancipating country, but never returned to Johnsonville, a casualty of war. Ursula, May Bell, and Henry escaped to Lafayette in hopes of waiting out the conflict, but all three of them contracted typhoid, and Ursula died. She was only thirty-two.
Henry, now the ward of a fifteen-year-old ex-slave in post-Civil War Georgia, returned to his property in Johnsonville, where he met Lonnie Calef, a northern man half his age, but equally as ambitious to rebuild the community. The two set out to reconstruct the town, and with the townsfolk’s help built Calef’s Country Store and the infrastructure that would become modern-day Johnsonville. Henry and May Bell cohabitated for the next ten years, which was forbidden under Georgia’s miscegenation laws. They loved each other very much despite the age difference (Henry was forty-one years older than May Bell) and racial divide. Lonnie, who was the only man Henry trusted with his secret, told Henry that his home state, New Hampshire, had no anti-miscegenation laws and thus it was perfectly legal for interracial couples to marry. Henry asked May Bell to marry him, and after a few months of apprehension she finally accepted, and the three of them traveled to New Hampshire in the spring of 1876 where Henry and May Bell were married in Lonnie’s hometown Methodist church.
Upon returning to Georgia, the couple honeymooned in Savannah, but the trip turned tragic when it was discovered that they had been married in a Union state. A local member of the Ku Klux Klan named Raymond Edgar (a cotton exporter with an office directly on River Street in Savannah) challenged Henry to a duel (though a dying form of violence, duels were still fairly common in America’s south in the late nineteenth century). Henry, who rarely used his sidearm — even while roaming the violent south selling his ploughshares — never even fired a shot before the bigot felled him with a bullet through the chest. May Bell, who barely escaped the frenzied, racist mob, made it out of Savannah and back home to Johnsonville. Upon hearing the news of Henry’s death, Lonnie traveled to Savannah where he buried his friend in the place where Henry had begun his American journey. May Bell, who was pregnant, gave birth to Josiah Wellbeloved, May’s great-grandfather, and the man who had built the Sparrows’ house. It wasn’t until May Bell’s death that Lonnie commissioned the headstone to be erected in their honor. By then, the memory of the duel was long forgotten.
And it was that photo of her and Winston, taken in 2010, standing outside of Flannery O’Connor’s childhood home, with the inscription Me and May in Savannah, 2010, just after May had discovered her family’s headstone, that she now studied as it hung on the wall inside the apartment while thinking of the story of her family during the Civil War.
May was going stir-crazy. Winston could see it in her eyes. They had now been trapped in the apartment for fourteen days and found themselves spending the majority of their days under the blankets and listening to the activity outside. Occasionally, Winston peeked out of the slits, but it always seemed to be the same show — soldiers coming and going, a constant stream into and out of the port-a-potties, the generals emerging from the house and using Medusa’s stump for daily briefings and lunch — it was all fairly mundane, and Winston could tell the time of day by the noises he heard outside. He and May were just about out of water and on a rationing regimen to conserve what remained, and his concern grew that they would run out.
Fewer and fewer patients were being treated inside the barn now, and on the seventeenth day, two days after they ran out of water, the cots and medical devices, doctors and nurses, and generator were evacuated from the barn, along with most of the medical supplies, packed inside a Tigr troop transport and carted away. Winston assumed that they were relocating the facility to somewhere up the road, closer to Atlanta. He also decided that he would venture out of the apartment later that night to have a look around. He had been scheming since before they took up residence in the apartment, and was confident that his plan would work. He and May were thirsty, and Winston was ready.
Water, Water, Everywhere…
Winston saw that the front of the property was the PLA’s main fortification and heavily guarded, but he had no sightline to the back yard, which was bounded by Robin Lake. And from the comings and goings of the soldiers, he comprehended that their back yard was where the soldiers lived in their tents when not on patrol. However, Winston suspected that because they had not engaged in conflicts since occupying the Sparrow residence, the soldiers had somewhat relaxed their guard. That evening, he kept tabs on the few dozen or so that made camp in the backyard. May had been sleeping since nightfall and didn’t awaken when Winston donned his black hoodie and slipped out of the apartment at one a.m., three hours since lights out, when the three giant lights lining the driveway and one of the big generators were switched off. He took three empty plastic milk jugs (tied together with a length of rope knowing the filled jugs would weigh about twenty-five pounds), the stepstool, and his .22 rifle.