Under Siege! by Andrea Warren

all the way through a hill. People could enter on one streetand exit onto another. Off the long hallway was a series of rooms, each with an outside entrance. Willie compared this layout to the prongs of a garden rake. He said there were many outside entrances so if “any one of them should collapse, escape could be made through the inner cave and its other branches.” Entrances also gave fresh air, for the caves were otherwise hot and airless. Each of the rooms provided quarters for a family. The only privacy came from hanging blankets or setting up screens. Some house slaves slept in their family’s quarters, while others slept near the entrances, as did soldiers recuperating from injuries. The rest of the hallway became a “commons.” In this space, Willie said, “children played while their mothers sewed by candlelight or gossiped, and men fresh from trench or hospital gave news of the troubled outside world to spellbound listeners.”

    Townspeople tried to make their caves comfortable. Sometimes prayer helped ease worry and fear.
    This cave, one of the largest in Vicksburg, was only one of an estimated 500 that dotted the city by the second week of the siege. There were so many caves that Union soldiers jokingly referred to the city as PrairieDog Town. Some caves were very small—just a dugout where people huddled for protection. Some had clusters of rooms and were elaborately decorated with carpets, mirrors, furniture, and beds. Townspeople brought their pillows and favorite quilts, musical instruments, china, and silver, and they hung pictures and built shelves to hold treasured photos, beloved books, and knickknacks or vases of flowers from their home gardens. Planks were laid on the ground to create flooring. Doorways were framed with wood, and walls were covered with rugs, pictures, or even wallpaper to give an illusion of cleanliness.
    Outside, many people set up tents near cave entrances to shelter the cooking and eating area from sun and rain and to provide private places to dress. Because of the fire hazard, cooking had to be done in open air. During brief interludes each morning and evening when the shelling slowed or stopped, slaves labored over fires and cooking stoves to prepare meals for their masters. If they heard incoming shells, they ran into the caves.
    As hard as people worked to make the caves comfortable, they were still dark and damp and home to lizards, mosquitoes, and other insects. Several days of heavy rains turned everything to mud. “It was living like plant roots,” one woman reported. “We were in hourly dread of snakes. The vines and thickets were full of them, and a large rattlesnake was found one morning under a mattress on which some of us had slept all night.”
    At first Willie loved cave life, thinking of it as “the Arabian Nights made real. Ali Baba’s forty thieves … lurked in the unexplored regions of the dimly lighted caves … and sent me off at night to fairyland on a magic rug.” But he worried when his father left each morning to go to work “and we only knew him to be safe when he returned at night.” He also grew tired of “squalling infants, family quarrels and the noise of general discord that were heard at intervals with equal distinctness.” Not surprisingly, his mother had the hardest time. She implored her husband to have a cave dug for their private use. Dr. Lord gave in and agreed to see to it.
    One of the other families living in this very large cave was Lucy’s. Her father refused to leave the family home, even though, Lucy reported, “aMinie ball passed through his whiskers as he sat in the hall, and lodged in the rocker of an old chair near him.” Still, her mother couldn’t budge him, so she had Rice and Mary Ann pack up necessities and she moved the rest of the family into the communal cave. Lucy thought there must have been about 200 people sharing this space, counting all the slaves and the recuperating soldiers. Class status