Assassination Vacation Page 8

  Not that I have much sympathy for Booth’s groaning, but I think I understand where his befuddlement comes from. Where could Booth have gotten the fantastical idea that committing political murder would be greeted as an act of heroism? Not from the South. I’m pretty sure he got that cockamamie notion from the North. A little poking around in the Booth biography uncovers his earlier rendezvous with history — the 1859 execution of John Brown.

  Booth was there in Charles Town, Virginia, witnessing Brown hang. He had been acting in a play in Richmond when he heard that a local militia, the Richmond Grays, was heading north to guard the execution. Like some teenage heavy metal fan worming his way backstage at a Metallica concert, Booth the John Brown fan charmed himself into the Grays’ company, bought a uniform, all so he could see his hero breathe his last.

  Booth’s admiration of Brown was not ideological. Of course, the racist, pro-slavery, future assassin despised the actual cause Brown was fighting for by attacking the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry — namely, to spark a slave rebellion that would put an end to slavery. But Booth adored Brown’s fight-picking, gun-toting methods. According to Booth’s sister, Asia, he said, “John Brown was a man inspired, the grandest character of the century!” Booth’s assessment was shared, based on the sermons preached in Brown’s honor after he died, the church bells that rang in his memory across the North, the tributes written for him by the likes of the revered three-named Yankee poets Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Julia Ward Howe (who said Brown’s martyrdom “would make the gallows glorious like the cross”), the fact that Union soldiers turned the marching song “John Brown’s Body” into one of the top-ten hits of the Civil War. So Booth isn’t entirely misguided in thinking he’d inspire a song or poem or two himself.

  I visited Charles Town with my aunt Fran and uncle Quenton. We found the site where Brown was hanged and Booth stood watch. A fine brick house was built there after the Civil War. The current owner, milling around, invited us into his yard, showed off his stained-glass windows. “They’re original Tiffany,” he says.

  “Imagine that,” Aunt Fran whispers. “Tiffany windows looking out on the place where John Brown was hanged.”

  The owner pointed at a tree on his lawn. “That’s where the gallows were.” A bird feeder is suspended on a limb of the tree, swaying back and forth where Brown’s neck swung. (It reminds me of North Elba, New York, where Brown is buried. Looming over Brown’s humble little farm is the mondo ski jump from the Lake Placid Olympics. A person going there to ponder the dour Brown can end up thinking a lot more about how much she misses the voice of sportscaster Howard Cosell.)

  From Charles Town, Fran and Quenton drive me to D.C., dropping me off at my hotel, the Washington Hilton. Later, I’ll read the caption on a postcard in my room with a photo of the brutalist white building. It boasts, “Curved at every point, the hotel is shaped like a seagull in flight.” It reminds me more of a spatula about to scrape a bowl. Then there’s a list of all the reasons a person should want to stay here — shuffleboard for instance — but no mention of the reason I want to. This is where Hinckley shot Reagan in 1981.

  Because of the news footage of the shooting, I’ve seen that bowed rock wall in the driveway, heard the shots hundreds of times. And looking at it I feel reverent, though not so much about Reagan, partly because he’s a person I find difficult to revere, but mostly because of the cheery way he yukked it up during his recovery. Not that I blame him. Just as he cracked to the doctors who were saving his life that he hoped they were all Republicans, the one time I came to in an ambulance (following a bike accident in which I hit a parked car) was during Reagan’s successor’s administration. The medic asked me who the president was and I answered, “George Bush, but I didn’t vote for him.” It pains me that, like Reagan, faced with the profundity of death my first conscious impulse was to act like a smart-alecky partisan jackass.

  The reason I well up with liturgical emotion on seeing that entrance to the Hilton is not because Reagan was attacked here, but because his press secretary, James Brady, was. That Brady will spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair is cause enough for empathy. That he and his wife, Sarah, turned this rotten luck into the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence is downright heroic. And not the soft-focus treacle that “heroic” often implies. I’m on their mailing list, and the most impressive, lovable thing about them is their rage. The last mailing I got, seeking help to close the gun show loophole laws that allow terrorists and criminals to purchase all the firearms they want as long as it’s at folding tables set up at fairgrounds, featured a letter from Jim that opens, “I’m sitting here in my wheelchair today, mad as hell, trying to control my anger,” and another one from Sarah in which she tells a story about how right after Jim was shot, her son was playing with what he thought was a toy gun in a family member’s truck, but it turned out to be real and when she learned this she stormed over to the phone and called up the National Rifle Association, telling them, “This is Sarah Brady and I want you to know that I will be making it my life’s work to put you out of business!” Unbelievably, two years after the assassination attempt President Reagan addressed the NRA’s national convention — the only sitting president ever to do so. Who should have known more than he that backing an organization lobbying against (especially) the control of handguns is against the self-interest of every president. After all, only John F. Kennedy was shot with a rifle; the other three successful presidential murders (and the attempted assassinations of Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Gerald Ford) were committed with handguns. In fact, Booth’s dainty derringer is on display across town in the Lincoln Museum at Ford’s Theatre. It’s downright pretty until you remember the damage it did.

  The next morning, Klam arrives in the driveway where Reagan’s car had been waiting. We’re going to pick up where we left off on the John Wilkes Booth escape route tour. We’re heading to the spot where Booth died.

  Not far from Port Royal, Virginia, there’s a sign. It reads, “This is the Garrett Place where John Wilkes Booth, Assassin of Lincoln, was cornered by Union soldiers and killed, April 26, 1865. The house stood a short distance from this spot.”

  Booth’s sidekick David Herold surrendered to the soldiers, so he would live to hang. Booth, however, holed up in the barn with a gun, refusing to come out. So the soldiers lit it on fire. There are conflicting reports about who fired on Booth — soldier Boston Corbett or a suicidal Booth himself — but shot, he staggered from the barn and lived long enough to die in Garrett’s living room. His last words, also in dispute, might have been “Tell my mother I died for my country.”

  It was here Booth’s body was wrapped up in a horse blanket to be taken back to Washington, where his autopsy would be performed. Surgeon General Joseph K. Barnes, after inspecting Booth’s corpse, ended his report, “Paralysis of the entire body was immediate, and all the horrors of consciousness of suffering and death must have been present to the assassin during the two hours he lingered.” Subtext: You’ll be happy to know he really suffered.

  Klam and I get out of the car and poke around on the side of the road. It’s scratchy, full of brambles, fallen logs, and yellow leaves. We can’t get far, not that we want to. After Klam kicks around an historic plastic bottle of Sprite, we head back to the car. That’s when he notices another sign, a mysterious pictograph of a hand with a finger pointing across the road.

  Following the finger, we come to a small, peaceful clearing. It’s on a wide wooded median between Route 301N and 301S. There, at eye level, hanging above a wreath tied with a black ribbon on an ornate iron gate is a photograph encased in plastic: a mustachioed head shot of John Wilkes Booth. Back in art school we would have called this setup an installation. What it really is is a shrine, a lovely, symmetrical, classical shrine. Two Roman-looking black planters of evergreen trees stand next to two Roman-looking concrete benches. It would be the perfect picnic spot as long as you’re fine with eating under Booth’s smoldering stare.

  I step up to Booth’s photo, yanking it off its perch to get a closer look. I’m so startled by the place that I accidentally drop it on the ground.

  “Careful,” says Klam. “That’s a hundred-thousand-dollar fine.”

  He gestures at a sign prohibiting the “disturbance of artifacts from these lands.”

  Down the road, in Port Royal, we stop for breakfast at a roadside diner cum gas station where we experience both the best (ham and grits) and the worst (Confederate flag crap) the South has to offer. After I polish off my grits I examine the Confederate flag memorabilia for sale — the shot glasses, the baseball caps, “Never Surrender” mugs. I am enthralled with a hideous, huge music box/snow globe of Robert E. Lee that plays “Dixie” when you wind it. I consider adding it to my snow globe collection, but that would involve having it in my house.

  We are near the battlefield at Fredericksburg. I’m going to give this place the benefit of the doubt and decide that that’s why all this stuff’s here and not the proximity to the John Wilkes Booth shrine. However, displayed right alongside all the Confederate flag paraphernalia is a bunch of American flag merch — American flag place mats, patriotic “body crystals,” flag stickers you attach to your skin. Personally, I’m small-minded and literal enough that I see the two symbols as contradictory, especially in a time of war. But I fear that the consumer who buys a Confederate flag coffee cup, which she will then put on her American flag place mat, is the sort of sophisticated thinker who is open-minded enough that she is capable of hating blacks and Arabs at the same time.

  Which brings me to the creepiest thing about Booth’s death spot — the sign. The signs were erected by the state of Virginia. Logically, they bear the state’s official seal. And that seal of course features the state motto, inscribed in Latin: Sic semper tyrannis. It is unfair of me to say so, but the slogan Booth shouted from the stage of Ford’s Theatre, the overblown, self-important, pseudo-Shakespearean blather, being etched on the sign marking his death feels like the stamp of approval.

  Klam and I pass other Sic semper ed signs on the way back to D.C., most of them devoted to the Civil War. I just sigh, happy that, unlike John Wilkes Booth, we get to get the hell out of here alive, driving toward what my favorite state slogan, that of Seward’s beloved Alaska, proclaims: North to the Future.

  “Is Baltimore made up entirely of slums?” my friend Brent asks on the road to Green Mount Cemetery, where John Wilkes Booth is buried. Entire blocks go by with nary a window intact. All the glass is cracked, smashed, or has been replaced with makeshift plywood. Tired-looking men and women loiter on stoops, the sidewalks piled with trash.

  Whereas the living of Baltimore could use a renovation, the dead rest in resplendent peace. Green Mount is one of those pastoral nineteenth-century graveyards inspired by Mount Auburn in Cambridge. Edwin Booth is actually buried there in Massachusetts alongside his first wife, but the rest of the Booths rest here in the Baltimore family plot.

  Brent, slowly navigating the car around the graveyard’s narrow curves, calls the layout “a Candy Land of death.” I locate the Booths by consulting a book on local cemeteries entitled The Very Quiet Baltimoreans.

  The white obelisk in honor of the patriarch, Junius Brutus Booth, also features an inscription in memory of his children. John Wilkes makes this list, along with his brothers and sisters, but his actual grave here is unmarked.

  Brent sits down on the grass. He’s wearing a T-shirt from the Emma Goldman Papers Project, an archive of the anarchist’s writings at UC Berkeley. The shirt says, “Out of the chaos the future emerges in harmony and beauty.” (What poppycock.) He listens quietly as I tell him about John Wilkes Booth. When I get to the assassination part, mentioning Booth’s cry of Sic semper tyrannis, he asks what that means.

  “Thus always to tyrants,” I say.

  “I wore the wrong shirt then! My other Emma Goldman shirt says ‘Woe to tyrants!’ ”

  It is interesting how, once one edits justifications for violence down to a length suitable for T-shirt slogans, political distinctions between left and right disappear. Emma Goldman, anarchist Russian Jewish advocate of free love and birth control sounds exactly like pretty boy white supremacist murderer John Wilkes Booth. Which, come to think of it, isn’t that surprising since Goldman, like Booth, was also a vocal member of the John Brown fan club.

  I tell Brent that in 1869, Wilkes Booth’s mother, sister, and brother Edwin petitioned President Andrew Johnson to have their relative’s body returned to them. The family, minus Edwin, held a secret funeral here. Some far-fetched accounts even say that when they went to view Wilkes’s body at the mortician’s, they passed around his decapitated head. According to The Very Quiet Baltimoreans, “Rector Fleming James of St. Mark’s Protestant Episcopal Church on Lombard Street attended [the funeral]. He was later placed under ‘ban of his church for having officiated at the burial of Lincoln’s assassin.’ ”

  A flock of black crows swoops in, landing on the tombstones and the trees, making a racket. We have Edgar Allan Poe on the brain, having stopped at his grave in another cemetery across town before coming here. Looking at the birds reminiscent of the raven Poe wrote his famous poem about flitting around the grave of John Wilkes Booth reminds me how much the two Marylanders have in common. Besides the fact that they looked alike with their dark hair, dark eyes, and dark moustaches, they were both the sons of actors who spent significant parts of their careers in the southern capital of Richmond — Poe editing the Southern Literary Messenger magazine, Booth performing in its theaters. Booth died as a result of shooting the president; Poe died — of what root cause, no one knows for sure, though possibilities include rabies, carbon monoxide poisoning, and dipsomania — at the end of a snowy Election Day, found slumped over in a polling place, probably because he had been hired as a “repeater,” i.e., a money-grubbing wretch who is paid to go from one poll to another voting again and again. In other words, both Booth and Poe died thwarting the will of the electorate.

  Out of fairness, I should mention the generations of conspiracy theorists who believe that John Wilkes Booth is not buried here at Green Mount. But really, I bring up the following story for one reason and it has nothing to do with fairness. I’m in it for the mummy.

  Suppose, the story goes, Booth, in collusion with the Andrew Johnson government, escaped from Virginia and someone else was killed, and thus buried in his place. He traveled west, assuming the alias John St. Helen, where, in frontier Texas, he confessed his true identity to a local lawyer, Finis L. Bates, who defended him in 1872 against charges of selling whiskey and tobacco without a license. Booth a.k.a. St. Helen felt free to reveal his real name thanks to the code of silence that is the attorney-client privilege. St. Helen eventually moved away, and Bates never heard from him again. But in 1903, Bates spotted a newspaper article reporting that a man named David E. George had committed suicide in Enid, Oklahoma. Before he died, George confessed that he was John Wilkes Booth. Bates made a beeline for Enid and saw the body, claiming that though twenty-five years had gone by, he recognized George as St. Helen.

  George’s body was then mummified. Surprise, surprise, the academic record on a mummy made out of an Okie suicide thought to be John Wilkes Booth turns out to be rather dodgy. Whether Bates bought the body and had it mummified, or whether it was the Enid undertaker, someone toured a Booth mummy around in carnivals and freak shows for decades. The mummy’s whereabouts are currently unknown.

  Still, the legend of David E. George, to say nothing of the mummy sightings, inspired a group, including John Wilkes Booth’s great-great-grandniece and his first cousin twice removed, to petition the Baltimore City Circuit Court in 1995 to exhume the body buried at Green Mount in order to identify it. The judge denied the request, partly because of the strong historical evidence that Booth has been buried at Green Mount all along, and partly because his precise location in the Booth family plot is unknown, so that exhuming him would involve a lot of distasteful digging up of everyone in the vicinity. The petitioners appealed the judge’s decision but they were denied.

  The collection of the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia includes a number of attention grabbers. There is a skeleton (deformed from “overzealous corset-wearing”), a wax model of a small pox–infected arm polka-dotted with pustules, a deceased obese woman whose ample fat morphed postmortem into a waxy blob (thus earning her the nickname “the soap lady”), a display case full of old skulls, the two-man plaster cast made during the autopsy of conjoined twins Chang and Eng, and the “mega colon.” But I’m here to look at this thing floating in a glass jar labeled “Piece of John Wilkes Booth, Assassin of President Lincoln.”

  Beige and bloated, the Booth bit resembles a crumpled paper towel. It is part of an exhibit called “When the President is the Patient.” It sits among displays devoted to Lyndon Johnson’s gallbladder surgery; Grover Cleveland’s secret operation to remove a cancerous growth from his cheek that took place on board a yacht in Long Island Sound; a copy of the Twenty-fifth Amendment to the Constitution (ratified in 1967 in the wake of the Kennedy assassination) outlining presidential succession due to incapacity, resignation, or death; photographs of aging white men in shorts labeled “President Carter Jogging” and “President Clinton Jogging”; and, interestingly, another jar with another wadded-up looking item identified as “Portions of the brain of Charles Guiteau, Assassin of President Garfield.”

  The Mütter Museum is a thing of beauty, a cozy, old-fashioned throwback. Its polished wood curiosity cabinets are clues to its origins. Founded in 1856 when Thomas Dent Mütter, a professor of surgery, donated his collection of medical specimens to the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, the museum’s mission was educational, to help med students and practicing doctors learn about disease and thus its treatment.