{"product_id":"the-march-isbn-9780812976151","title":"The March","description":"WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD\u003cbr\u003eWINNER OF THE PEN\/FAULKNER AWARD\u003cbr\u003eNEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn 1864, Union general William Tecumseh Sherman marched his sixty thousand troops through Georgia to the sea, and then up into the Carolinas. The army fought off Confederate forces, demolished cities, and accumulated a borne-along population of freed blacks and white refugees until all that remained was the dangerous transient life of the dispossessed and the triumphant. In E. L. Doctorow’s hands the great march becomes a floating world, a nomadic consciousness, and an unforgettable reading experience with awesome relevance to our own times.“E. L. Doctorow [is] always astonishing. . . . In \u003cb\u003eThe March\u003c\/b\u003e, he dreams himself backward from \u003cb\u003eThe Book of Daniel\u003c\/b\u003e to \u003cb\u003eRagtime\u003c\/b\u003e to \u003cb\u003eThe Waterworks\u003c\/b\u003e to the \u003cb\u003eCivil War\u003c\/b\u003e, into the creation myth of the Republic itself, as if to assume the prophetic role of such nineteenth-century writers as Emerson, Melville, Whitman, and Poe.”—\u003ci\u003eHarper’s\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“An Iliad-like portrait of war as a primeval human affliction . . . [welds] the personal and the mythic into a thrilling and poignant story.”—\u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“Splendid . . . carries us through a multitude of moments of wonder and pity, terror and comedy . . . with an elegiac compassion and prose of a glittering, swift-moving economy.” —\u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“Spellbinding . . . a ferocious re-imagining of the past that returns it to us as something powerful and strange.”—\u003ci\u003eTime\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eE. L. Doctorow\u003c\/b\u003e’s works of fiction include \u003ci\u003eWelcome to Hard Times, The Book of Daniel, Ragtime, Loon Lake, World’s Fair, Billy Bathgate, The Waterworks, City of God, The March, Homer \u0026amp; Langley, \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eAndrew’s Brain. \u003c\/i\u003eAmong his honors are the National Book Award, three National Book Critics Circle awards, two PEN\/Faulkner awards, and the presidentially conferred National Humanities Medal. In 2009 he was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize, honoring a writer’s lifetime achievement in fiction, and in 2012 he won the PEN\/ Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, given to an author whose “scale of achievement over a sustained career places him in the highest rank of American literature.” In 2013 the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded him the Gold Medal for Fiction. In 2014 he was honored with the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction.\u003cp\u003eChapter 1\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eI\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAt five in the morning someone banging on the door and shouting,  her   husband, John, leaping out of bed, grabbing his rifle, and Roscoe at   the  same time roused from the backhouse, his bare feet pounding: Mattie   hurriedly pulled  on her robe, her mind prepared for the alarm of war,   but the heart stricken that  it would finally have come, and down the   stairs she flew to see through the open  door in the lamplight, at the   steps of the portico, the two horses, steam rising  from their flanks,   their heads lifting, their eyes wild, the driver a young darkie  with   rounded shoulders, showing stolid patience even in this, and the woman   standing  in her carriage no one but her aunt Letitia Pettibone of   McDonough, her elderly  face drawn in anguish, her hair a straggled   mess, this woman of such fine grooming,  this dowager who practically   ruled the season in Atlanta standing up in the equipage  like some hag   of doom, which indeed she would prove to be. The carriage was piled    with luggage and tied bundles, and as she stood some silver fell to the   ground,  knives and forks and a silver candelabra, catching in the   clatter the few gleams  of light from the torch that Roscoe held.   Mattie, still tying her robe, ran down  the steps thinking stupidly, as   she later reflected, only of the embarrassment  to this woman, whom to   tell the truth she had respected more than loved, and picking  up and   pressing back upon her the heavy silver, as if this was not something    Roscoe should be doing, nor her husband, John Jameson, neither.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eLetitia would  not come down from her carriage, there was no time, she   said. She was a badly frightened  woman with no concern for her horses,   as John saw and quickly ordered buckets to  be brought around, as the   woman cried, Get out, get out, take what you can and  leave, and seemed   to be roused to anger as they only stood listening, with some  of the   field hands appearing now around the side of the house with the first    light, as if drawn into existence by it. And I know him! she cried. He   has dined  in my home. He has lived among us. He burns where he has   ridden to lunch, he fires  the city in whose clubs he once gave toasts,   oh yes, someone of the educated class,  or so we thought, though I never   was impressed! No, I was never impressed, he was  too spidery, too weak   in his conversation, and badly composed in his dress, careless  of his   appearance, but for all that I thought quite civilized in having so   little  gift to dissemble or pretend what he did not feel. And what a   bitter gall is in  my throat for what I believed was a domesticated man   with a clear love for wife  and children, who is no more than a savage   with not a drop of mercy in his cold  heart.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIt was difficult to get the information from her, she ranted so. John    did not try to, he began giving orders and ran back in the house. It   was she,  Mattie, who listened. Her aunt’s hysteria, formulated oddly in   terms of the drawing  room, moved her to her own urgent attention. She   had for the moment even forgotten  her boys upstairs.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThey are coming, Mattie, they are marching. It is an army  of wild dogs   led by this apostate, this hideous wretch, this devil who will drink    your tea and bow before he takes everything from you.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAnd now, her message  delivered, her aunt slumped back in her seat, and   gave her order to be off. Where  Letitia Pettibone was going Mattie   could not get the answer. Nor how much time  there was, in fact, before   the scourge arrived at her own door. Not that she doubted  the woman.   She looked into the sky slowly lightening to its gray beginnings of  the   day. She heard nothing but the cock crowing and, as she turned,   suddenly  angry, the whisperings of the slaves gathered now at the   corner of the house. And  then with the team away, the carriage rolling   down the gravel path, Mattie turned,  lifting the hem of her robe, and   mounted the steps only to see that horrible child  Pearl, insolent as   ever, standing, arms folded, against the pillar as if the plantation    was her own.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ejohn jameson was not unprepared. As far back as September, when  the   news had come that Hood had pulled out and the Union armies had   Atlanta,  he sat Mattie down and told her what had to be done. The rugs   were rolled, the  art was taken down from the walls, her needlepoint   chairs—whatever she valued,  he told her—her English fabrics, the china,   even her family Bible: it was all to  be packed up and carted to   Milledgeville and thence put on the train to Savannah,  where John’s   cotton broker had agreed to store their things in his warehouse. Not  my   piano, she’d said, that will stay. It would rot in the dampness of that   place.  As you wish, John had said, having no feeling for music in any   case.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eMattie  was dismayed to see her home so depleted. Through the bare   windows the sun shone,  lighting up the floors as if her life were going   backward and she was again a young  bride in a new-built unfurnished   manse and with a somewhat frightening husband  twice her age. She   wondered how John knew the war would touch them directly. In  fact he   didn’t, but he was a man whose success gave him reason to suppose he    was smarter than most people. He had a presence, with his voluminous   chest and  large head of wild white hair. Don’t argue with me, Mattie.   They lost twenty or  thirty thousand men taking that city. There’s hell   to pay. You’re a general, with  a President who’s a madman. Would you   just sit there? So where? To Augusta? To  Macon? And how will he ride,   if not through these hills? And don’t expect that  poor excuse for a   Rebel army to do anything about it. But if I’m wrong, and I pray  God I   am, what will I have lost, tell me?\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eMattie was not allowed to disagree  in such matters. She felt even more   dismayed and said not a thing when, with the  crops in, John arranged to   sell away his dozen prime field hands. They were bound,  all of them, to   a dealer in Columbia, South Carolina. When the day came and they  were   put in shackles into the wagon, she had to run upstairs and cover her   ears  so as not to hear the families wailing down in the shacks. All   John had said was  No buck nigger of mine will wear a Federal uniform,   I’ll promise you that.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBut for all his warning and preparation she could not believe the   moment had come  to leave Fieldstone. The fear made her legs weak. She   could not imagine how to  live except in her own home, with her own   things, and the Georgian world arranged  to provide her and her family   what their station demanded. And though Aunt Letitia  was gone, she had   infected them with her panic. For all his foresight, John was  running   around this way and that, red-faced, shouting and giving orders. The    boys, roused out of bed and still only half dressed, came down the   stairs with  their rifles and ran out through the back.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eMattie went to her bedroom and stood  not knowing where to start. She   heard herself whimpering. Somehow she dressed and  grabbed whatever she   could from her armoire and bath and threw everything into  two   portmanteaus. She heard a gunshot and, looking out the back window, saw   one  of the mules go down on its knees. Roscoe was leading another from   the stable,  while her older boy, John Junior, primed his rifle. It   seemed only minutes later,  with the sun barely on the treetops, that   the carriages were waiting out front.  Where were they to seat   themselves? Both carriages were loaded with luggage and  food hampers   and sacks of sugar and flour. And now the morning breeze brought the    smoke around from the stacks where John had set the fodder alight. And   Mattie  felt it was her own sooty life drifting away in the sky.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ewhen the jamesons were  gone, Pearl stood in the gravel path still   holding her satchel. The Massah had  only glanced at her before laying   his whip on the horses. Roscoe, driving the second  carriage, had come   past her and, without looking, dropped at her feet something  knotted in   a handkerchief. She made no move to retrieve it. She waited in the    peace and silence of their having gone. She felt the cool breeze on her   legs.  Then the air grew still and warm and, after a moment in which the   earth seemed  to draw its breath, the morning sun spread in a rush over   the plantation.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eOnly then did she pick up what Roscoe had dropped. She knew immediately   what it  was through the cloth: the same two gold coins he had showed   her once when she  was little. His life savings. Dey real, Miss Porhl,   he had said. You putem ’tween  yer teeth you taste how real dey is. You   see dem eagles? You git a passel of dese  an you c’n fly lak de eagles   high, high ober de eart—das what de eagles mean on  dese monies.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePearl felt the hot tears in her throat. She went around the big  house,   past the outbuildings and the smoking fodder and the dead mules, and   past  the slave quarters where they were busy singing and putting their   things together,  and down along the trail through the woods to where   the Massah had given leave  to lay out a graveyard.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThere were by now six graves in this damp clearing,  each marked by a   wood shingle with the person’s name scratched in. The older grave    mounds, like her mother’s, were covered with moss. Pearl squatted and   read the  name aloud: Nancy Wilkins. Mama, she said. I free. You tole   me, Mah chile, my darlin  Porhl, you will be free. So dey gone and I is.   I free, I free like no one else  in de whole worl but me. Das how free.   Did Massah have on his face any look for  his true-made chile? Uh-uh.   Lak I hant his marigol eyes an high cheeks an more  his likeness dan de   runts what his wife ma’m made with the brudders one and two.  I, with   skin white as a cahnation flow’r.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePearl fell forward to her knees  and clasped her hands. Dear God Jesus,   she whispered, make a place fer dis good  woman beside you. An me, yore   Porhl, teach me to be free.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eslowly, the slaves,  with their belongings wrapped in bundles or carried   in old carpetbags, walked up  to the main house and distributed   themselves out front under the cypresses. They  looked into the sky as   if whatever it was they were told was coming would be from  that   direction. They wore their Sunday clothes. There were seven adults—two   men,  the elder Jake Early and Jubal Samuels, who had but one eye, and   five women, including  the old granny who could not walk very well—and   three small children. The children  were unusually quiet. They stayed   close by and made bouquets of weeds or pressed  round stones and pebbles   in the earth.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eJake Early did not have to counsel  patience. The fear they had all seen   in the eyes of the fleeing Massah and Mistress  told them that   deliverance had come. But the sky was cloudless, and as the sun  rose   everyone settled down and some even nodded off, which Jake Early   regretted,  feeling that when the Union soldiers came they should find   black folk not at their  ease but smartly arrayed as a welcoming company   of free men and women.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eHe  himself stood in the middle of the road with his staff and did not   move. He listened.  For the longest while there was nothing but the mild   stirring of the air, like  a whispering in his ear or the rustle of   woodland. But then he did hear something.  Or did he? It wasn’t exactly   a sound, it was more like a sense of something transformed  in his own   expectation. And then, almost as if what he held was a divining rod,    the staff in his hand pointed to the sky westerly. At this, all the   others stood  up and came away from the trees: what they saw in the   distance was smoke spouting  from different points in the landscape,   first here, then there. But in the middle  of all this was a change in   the sky color itself that gradually clarified as an  upward-streaming   brown cloud risen from the earth, as if the world was turned upside    down.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAnd, as they watched, the brown cloud took on a reddish cast. It moved    forward, thin as a hatchet blade in front and then widening like the   furrow from  the plow. It was moving across the sky to the south of   them. When the sound of  this cloud reached them, it was like nothing   they had ever heard in their lives.  It was not fearsomely heaven-made,   like thunder or lightning or howling wind, but  something felt through   their feet, a resonance, as if the earth was humming. Then,  carried on   a gust of wind, the sound became for moments a rhythmic tromp that    relieved them as the human reason for the great cloud of dust. And   then, at the  edges of this sound of a trompled-upon earth, they heard   the voices of living men  shouting, finally. And the lowing of cattle.   And the creaking of wheels. But they  saw nothing. Involuntarily, they   walked down toward the road but still saw nothing.  The symphonious   clamor was everywhere, filling the sky like the cloud of red dust  that   arrowed past them to the south and left the sky dim, it was the great   processional  of the Union armies, but of no more substance than an army   of ghosts.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eclarke  had in his foraging party a two-wagon train, a string of three   extra mules, and  twenty men mounted. General orders specified no fewer   than fifty men. He was several  miles off the column, and so, coming   upon the plantation, he resolved to make quick  work of it.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAs they rode onto the grounds he immediately saw, and ignored, the    slaves standing there. He shook his head. They had their old cracked   drummers’  cases and cotton sacks tied up with their things on the   ground beside them. He  posted his pickets and set the men to work. In   the yard behind the outbuildings,  the fodder stack was a smoking pile,   flakes of black ash blowing off in the breeze.  There were three mules   with their heads blown all to hell. His orders were to respond  to acts   of defiance commensurately. Nor was he less determined when the men   marched  out of the dairy with sacks of sugar, cornmeal, flour, and rice   on their shoulders.  In the smokehouse, the shelves sagged with crocks   of honey and sorghum. Hanging  from hooks were the sides of bacon and   cured hams the Massah didn’t have time for  the taking. And one of the   bins was filled with a good two hundred pounds of sweet  potatoes.\u003c\/p\u003eNew York Times bestseller","brand":"Random House Trade Paperbacks","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46305109606629,"sku":"NP9780812976151","price":17.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780812976151.jpg?v=1767740417","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/the-march-isbn-9780812976151","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}