Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell Page B

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.

    “I s 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