Introduction to Ghost
In 2011 I was visiting on the east coast and spent a few days in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, which was chartered in 1762, making the town thirty years older than the United States. Shepherdstown is also located in the heart of the Civil War Heritage Area. It is fifty-one miles
from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, four miles from Antietam where the bloodiest day of the Civil
War was fought on September 17, 1862, and one mile up the Potomac River where 48 hours after the Battle of Antietam the Battle of Shepherdstown was fought.
Given its strategic location so early on even before the Revolutionary War, it is no surprise that
there are multiple graveyards in Shepherdstown and in the surrounding area. I was walking
around with a few friends from college days, and we wandered into a very old graveyard. The marble plaques and grave markers were slowly disintegrating, but if you looked closely, you could make out the names and dates. Many were dated just pre- or post-Revolutionary War, and some were before, during and after the Civil War. The grounds were not exactly neglected because it was clear that care was still given to the preservation of the graves. But the plants, wild grasses and over-grown bushes evoked an atmosphere of a time long ago. And of course, there was the ethos of spirits, or ghosts, lingering.
At the time, I had finished my first novel, “Ancestors,” which dealt with the spirit world of
African Voudou. I was wondering what I would use as the background for my second book that
would include six of the same characters, including two Chow dogs, with my plots originating in
Berkeley, California where I live. It was in that Shepherdstown cemetery that the plot to use a
ghost from the Civil War hatched in my mind. I was still a long way from conceiving how my
Zakariah Monroe ghost character would play out in a plot, but the seed was sewn. My first plot
question was, how do I get from Berkeley, California to the Civil War in the east, and make it
work?
It has been surmised that ghosts linger around the living because of unresolved personal matters. And what would these ghosts who fought in our Civil War tell us if we could listen to them?
At the time I was in Shepherdstown the country was into the first few years of the Obama
administration. The division between the so-called red and blue states was growing. Historically
I have always been aware that the writers of the Constitution of the United States, our
Founding Fathers, left the issue of slavery up to future generations. And for good reason. Many
of them, including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin,
Alexander Hamilton, to name a few, were slave owners. Slavery was a thorny issue that
festered for another 79 years until the Civil War ended.
For most Americans we learned that the Civil War ended slavery in the United States. But what
did not end was the racism that fueled slavery.
The Civil War apparently produced more ghost citings than any other war. That fact propelled
me to think about why. And here’s what I came up with. It has been surmised that ghosts linger
around the living because of unresolved personal matters. And what would these ghosts who
fought in our Civil War tell us if we could listen to them? I decided that whether the ghost is a
Confederate or a Union soldier, they want to believe what they fought for was at least for
something important – preferably some kind of peaceful reconciliation between the north and
south, white and black America.
I decided to write about a microcosm of an immediate plot between real characters living now,
and the macrocosm – the unfinished business of the Civil War that permeates all of us now.
As I wrote Ghost, Zak (Zakariah) became the warning voice for an immediate danger facing the
character of Daniel Perry through Benjamin Monroe’s festering vengeance, and the future
danger of our divided world where neither side seems to have the capacity to listen to the
other. That leaves all of us with the biggest dilemma of all: What and how do we tell our
younger generations about who we are now?