Hell's Belles (Hell's Belles Trilogy Book 1) by Claire Alison

Author:Claire, Alison [Claire, Alison]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Published: 2017-12-06T05:00:00+00:00

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When I was fourteen years old my parents took my sister and I on a Civil War road trip tour. My mother was writing a book on it and she wanted to have us participate in her research. We started in Gettysburg (naturally) and worked our way south. We would have preferred a trip to Nags Head or even Myrtle Beach, but my mother didn’t believe in leisure, it seemed. She wanted every single day of our existence to be a learning experience. It was exhausting. Merritt and I just wanted to get tan and meet boys. We were not complicated girls.

After three long days in Manassas, we were spent. We told our parents we would rather stay at a hotel than listen to another tour guide go on and on and on about the conditions of a war we couldn’t find any sort of glory in.

“Why am I supposed to feel bad for the South?” Merritt asked as we drove our rental car down 95 toward Richmond, the capitol of the Confederacy.

“When did I ask you to feel anything about either side?” My mother turned to us. “It’s not about picking sides. It’s about understanding how we got there in the first place. You should be very grateful that you have the opportunity to see history up close like this. It’s not enough to read about it. Seeing it and feeling it can’t be taken for granted. Whether you like it or not, this is where you’re from. Or at least, where parts of your DNA are from.” My mother smiled and touched my knee. “Every history has an ugly side. But there is also always something to find in it, to learn from. That’s all I ask, that you keep your mind open to it. Try to imagine what life was like during this time.”

My mom was such a teacher.

Merritt and I both rolled our eyes and put our earphones in, escaping in our heads to the sound of pop music. I didn’t know about my sister but I was fantasizing about getting stranded near a beach where there wasn’t a historical landmark within a hundred miles. It was summer, after all.

That night we checked into the Radisson and had dinner downtown in an old tobacco warehouse on a street that was all cobblestones. As our van drove over it, I could feel the bumps in my bones.

Richmond was rowdy at night. College kids drunkenly walked up and down Shockoe Bottom. After dinner we had the best strawberry milkshakes of my life and wandered around near the floodwall. That night we slept like rocks.

The next morning, we drove down Monument Avenue. My mother explained who each monument was (Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, Stonewall Jackson, J.E.B. Stuart, Matthew Fontaine Maury, and Arthur Ashe) and Merritt and I half listened, half watched the numerous shirtless guys jogging down the sidewalks.

“Arthur Ashe and a bunch of old Confederate dudes? That sounds weird,” I observed.

“It was a bit of a controversy, yes,” my mother turned to me.

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