There is a tiny Southerner inside me. Whenever I try to sleep she sets to work kicking the soft sides of my stomach. At my in-laws’ house in North Carolina, I toss with her, hearing again what my husband’s father asked at supper, “Are you sure the sonogram was right?” He’s kept hope alive that my baby might be a boy, someone to carry on his family name. I thought he was kidding and I was wrong.

The picture was a little fuzzy, transmitted through flesh and fat but that doesn’t change what I saw on the monitor: a beautiful blank between her tiny legs like the white space between words, an emptiness that makes meaning. In bed, a cluster of other synapses gather: my hand held inches above my husband’s sleeping back, the unknown toss that turns a letter sent into a letter received, a lover’s longing, the distance and attraction between me—a Northerner—and this part of America. It’s late at night so somehow all these spark gaps make sense.

“Well, if she is a boy,” I’d answered him earlier. “She’s got a big problem.”

“What?’ he’d asked.

“No penis.”

Carrying a small stranger inside me has made the chance of ancestry first in my thoughts lately. There are such unbelievable odds against coming into existence. Every relation who had to perfectly line up, every death that could have precluded this birth, the slim chance that my husband and I ever even met each other. It’s a different sort of family tree, one with a billion leaves, all the near misses, all the ways that this baby almost didn’t get here and yet, somehow, here she is just as she’s suppose to be. A girl.

In the morning, my husband, my big belly, and I head even further south on a morbid mission. We’re hoping to unearth an understanding of the time my great-great-great grandfather John Luke spent fighting the Civil War. His story, as one of the billion pieces that had to fall into place to make my half-breed daughter, seems relevant right now.

The Civil War in my hands. From August 5, 1861 through June 5, 1862, John Luke sent twenty-seven messages home from an ever-changing roster of Southern battlefields back to his wife, Martha, and their two young daughters Mary Jane and Henrietta in Hell’s Kitchen, New York City. Time has had its way with the pages, leaving tattered edges and gaps in the transmissions. Here, these worn spots say, is the great hole of history where entire words, lines, and lives have disappeared. Still the letters create a carapace of truth in a way no history book ever has, cracking the past wide open.

Mary land
August 18th

… Dear Martha you want to know about the mus we had in our regiment I will give you a little sketch the regiment is New york state malitia so we thought we would get home when the 3 months was up and the leutenant curnal Elliet said we were going home but it was not so he told us so many lies that we could not believe what he would say any more so the time was up on the 13th of this month so we said nothing to the day after when we got orders to strike tents and march to maryland and and be in sickles brigade so we did not like that for he is a murdrer he is the same sickles that shot keyes and then we did not like to be in his brigade so we refused to strike tents or to march to maryland so then the fetched 2 regiments of the infantry and one of cavilry and 8 pieces of cannon to conker about 500 men we laughed at them we were not afraid of them altho we were few so we got redy and marched that night to our camp and remains there yet

I wonder which revelation surprises me more, that a federal infantry unit was used against a Northern militia to extend, by force, previously agreed upon service terms or that I’d never before heard of the tabloid-worthy story of Sickles and Key.

General Daniel Sickles, friend to both President Buchanan and Lincoln, came to power in New York’s Tammany Hall. At thirty-three, Sickles, a well-known womanizer, married the fifteen-year-old Teresa and then continued fraternizing with a pride of prostitutes, even presenting one to Queen Victoria. Teresa, left alone at home, took up with Philip Barton Key, son of the “Star Spangled Banner” composer. Upon learning of the affair Sickles caught Key waiting outside Teresa’s window. Within plain view of the White House, Sickles shot and killed his wife’s lover. At trial, Sickles became the first defendant ever freed by pleading temporary insanity. He then magnanimously proclaimed that he would remain married to Teresa, stating, “I shall strive to prove to all that an erring wife and mother may be forgiven and redeemed.”

That is the nature of a letter. Slip a sliver of your world between the open arms of an envelope and address it to the future, usually meaning sometime next week. I don’t think John Luke could have ever imagined that his letters would travel to the twenty-first century still reverberating with meaning. I wonder at his wonder had he known his private and sometime mundane thoughts would wind up in my Brooklyn apartment, a residence I share with a Rebel, in an era whose perimeters John couldn’t begin to fathom.