reeking black skin:
race, war, and ideology in ambrose bierce’s "the affair at coulter’s notch"

though most of ambrose bierce’s civil war tales take place on the battlefield, they locate within those battlefields problems of domestic and political identity that have no immediate relevance to the experience of combat. unlike, for example, young henry fleming in stephen crane’s the red badge of courage, bierce’s soldiers are always and doggedly more than soldiers: they are fathers and sons, lovers and husbands, citizens with often uncertain loyalties. in fact, for bierce’s characters being a soldier is often incidental to the elements of their personality that really drive their narratives. ironically, however—and this is largely the point of bierce’s best stories—the momentary demands of soldiering irrevocably alter the more permanent social and personal roles that these men attempt to fulfill. rather than finding in war the possibility of a new, complete identity (as in crane) or the realization of untested prewar tendencies (as in john w. de forest’s 1867 novel miss ravenel’s conversion from secession to loyalty), bierce’s soldiers discover that the experience of combat directly challenges what they and others around them had previously assumed them to be. one of the most tragic and complex examples of such identity revision occurs in the story “the affair at coulter’s notch” (1889) in which the act of successfully doing one’s military duty results in a disaster whose impact is at once personal and systemic. in this story, bierce demonstrates that the most efficient execution of combat duty corrupts the certainty of the very markers of identity—domestic, military, and especially racial—that establish the war’s own ideological meaning. [1]


"the affair at coulter’s notch" explicitly links the act of war to a process of personal transformation, but it makes that transformation dependent upon a character’s objectivity, his appearance in the eyes of a higher authority rather than a consistent representation of his own agency and subjective individuality. in “the affair at coulter’s notch,” a union captain in command of an artillery battery is ordered to move one of his cannons into position to shell a confederate gun emplacement situated on the grounds of a plantation house. captain coulter’s hesitation to do so is interpreted with suspicion by a member of his superior’s staff, who notes “there is something wrong in all this” because “captain coulter >[2]. when the artillery duel is over, coulter and his men, battered by enemy fire, have ceased to become soldiers soldiers and are barely men at all:

     the men?—they looked like demons of the pit! all were hatless, all
     stripped to the waist, their reeking skins black with blotches of powder
     and spattered with gouts of blood. they worked like madmen, with
     rammer and cartridge, lever and lanyard. they set their swollen shoulders
     and bleeding hands against the wheels at each recoil and heaved the
     heavy gun back to its place. there were no commands; in that awful
     environment of whooping shot, exploding shells, shrieking fragments
     of iron, and flying splinters of wood, none could have been heard.
     officers, if officers there were, were indistinguishable; all worked
     together—each while he lasted—governed by the eye. (51)

the threat inherent in this moment of savagery is not primarily to life and limb but to a recognition of individual value and personal difference. “indistinguishable” from one another and freed from the restraints of civilization symbolized by their forsaken uniforms, the men under fire renounce their humanity to become “demons of the pit” who exist only to service their machine. even the necessity of military authority—the chain of command—has been replaced by the mechanical process’s becoming a type of organic thing in itself, an “eye” that governs only by assigning death. though the men make no recognizable sound, the shell fragments “shriek” and “whoop” for them; human functional language is replaced by the primordial screams of their weaponry. men do not carry out acts of war; they become war. [3]

more subversively, this scene alters these soldiers by transforming their racial identification. naked, inarticulate, and working mechanically with skin that is “reeking black,” coulter’s men enact a ritualized parody of slave labor, ordered by white men to work themselves to death to destroy, rather than support, the plantation house and its orchard. the irony of this image becomes more apparent when coulter himself appears from among his troops: unrecognized by the superiors who have given him the order to attack the position, coulter has become a “fiend seven times damned” who watches his colonel “with an unhealthy regard, his teeth flashing between his black lips, his eyes, fierce and expanded, burning like coals beneath his bloody brow” (51). when the colonel dismisses him to the rear, “the fiend bowed in token of obedience” (52). surprisingly political in its satiric representation of slavery’s role in the larger ideology of the war effort, this scene mockingly suggests that slavery—a system of forced labor based on skin color—might find a parallel in the often arbitrary alignment of personality and military rank that structures the army. here, as in so many of bierce’s other war stories, the power granted by superior rank is put to needlessly tragic use by the flawed individuals operating behind the visible symbolism of their rank. [4] in the story’s final paragraphs, the union troops discover that their artillery fire has killed the plantation family. their bodies are found huddled with that of a dark man, who then turns out not to be dead at all: “suddenly the man whom they had thought dead raised his head and gazed tranquilly into their faces. his complexion was coal black; the cheeks were apparently tattooed in irregular sinuous lines from the eyes downward. the lips, too, were white, like those of a stage negro” (53). this “black” man is revealed to be captain coulter, and the dead woman and child his own family. coulter thus exposes his true identity as a southern husband and father, but he does so through his acquisition of that social figure’s ideological opposite: a dead black man returned to life.

this scene presents war as an inescapably domestic and racialized activity. moreover, the truth of coulter’s domestic roles is inseparable from his unnaturally volatile racial character—the southern sympathies that his fellow officers might suspect when they question his command potential before the battle become evident as truth only as they are juxtaposed with his appearance as a black man. in other words, coulter’s true identity is only realized in its association with a second one that is false. race therefore acquires a revelatory power, but one that is associated with powerlessness, based on an optical regime that privileges physical appearance as the primary source of the war’s ability to disrupt and alter (rather than establish and protect) systems of meaning. the experience of war in coulter’s notch redefines the work that people do as part of their racial association, and it removes hierarchies based on status but not linked (at least in the narrative) to particular abilities; rank is mentioned as part of the system by which objectives are determined and orders given, but it has no meaning as part of the story’s exposure of coulter’s conflicting roles as warrior and husband/father, and as a white man who becomes black. coulter becomes black for the same reason that the union protagonist in bierce’s story “one of the missing” seems to become confederate in that story’s final moments—because of the limited perceptions of the people around him (whose military presence defines their very limited ability to “be” anything at all). in other words, coulter’s final appearance as a minstrel show “negro” occurs because the experience of manning his gun has transformed not his actual role in the engagement but his physical appearance, which is in bierce’s world the only source of information available, even when it is wrong and leads men to fantasize, overreact, and self-destruct.

coulter’s abrupt transformation from white officer to black slave, then, is the product and the reflection of a racial definition imposed on him by an act of recognition. it occurs because of the visible effects of his having successfully carried out his military responsibility, an act that simultaneously marks him as black and destroys his family. coulter’s tears, which appear to the colonel to be “tattooed,” suggest the ambivalence of his new racial assignation: instead of performing their typical work—cutting new dark lines into light skin—coulter’s “tattoos” cut through an accumulated, external blackness to suggest the lighter skin beneath. coulter loses his own clothing in his battle, replaces it with new black “skin,” and then allows tears of grief to remind his commanders of the white skin “concealed” by his blackness. race is here at once a condition (of servitude, of degradation, of powerlessness) and a depositing of inadequate visible layers provided by the experience of war (black coal, mournful tears). race is heaped upon captain coulter by his work, by the dominant white gaze of the union soldiers, and by the story’s final revelation of his act of political passing (his southern family reveals him to be a "southern" husband in a northern uniform).

bierce’s vision of the association of race and family is so haunting and unstable largely because it denies a clear understanding of the iconic values upon which the war effort is based. captain coulter "becomes" black because he is destroying his family, but he also destroys his family through the process of becoming black. since neither his blackness nor the destruction of the home is his own choice—since both occur only as coulter carries out the will of someone else more powerful than he—the experience of war forces a prewritten system of family and race to deconstruct one another. the typical absence of consolation in bierce’s story emphasizes the unstable fragility at the core of turn-of-the-century sentimental memory regarding the war. when a man will knowingly destroy his own home rather than protect it, when battlefield success reveals not the destruction of the enemy but that enemy’s identity as part of the ideological self, and when northern conquerors assume the likeness of slaves as part of the military campaign that freed those slaves, then much of the vocabulary that underlies the larger war effort war becomes open to further revision.

furthermore, the story’s emphasis on these transformations and reversals as more perceived than real casts bierce’s net of scorn far beyond the actions of the men involved. bierce also levels his critique at those, including his readers, who believe themselves able to believe what they see. by the time of this story’s publication in 1889, the war existed in american cultural memory primarily in the dissemination of literary reconstructions of events long past. sensationalism and profit contributed as much to the textual commodification of the war as accuracy and realism, and bierce must have been aware that his own fiction was part of that process by which real suffering had become spectacle. [5] as daniel aaron has wistfully suggested, the "ache of despair overmatched the pleasures of nostalgia" in bierce’s life as well as in his work. [6] the tension in "the affair at coulter’s notch" between seeing and believing, and between being and being seen, implicates literary production and consumption in the horrible dissolution of personal identity that is so central to bierce’s fiction.

part time jobs from home for housewives

part time jobs from home for housewives stephen crane, the red badge of courage: an episode of the american civil war (new york: d. appleton, 1895); john william de forest, miss ravenel's conversion from secession to loyalty (new york: harper & brothers, 1867.)

part time jobs from home for housewives ambrose bierce, "the affair at coulter's notch," in the midst of life: tales of soldiers and civilians (new york: citadel press, 1993), 49. all citations hereafter cited parenthetically within the text.

part time jobs from home for housewives james dawes evaluates the ontological implications of the civil war’s staggering numbers of soldiers and casualties and notes that "war had revealed the cohesion and consequently the power made possible through the tendency of numerical accumulation to flatten out difference and distinction." as i will argue, in coulter’s notch this flattening out of difference reveals fissures in that cohesion. see dawes, the language of war: literature and culture in the u.s. from the civil war through world war ii (cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 2002), 26.

part time jobs from home for housewives for a further analysis of the implied hostility between coulter and his superiors, see donald t. blume, ambrose bierce's civilians and soldiers in context: a critical study (kent, oh: kent state university press, 2004), especially 186-92. see also christopher d. campbell, "conversation across a century: the war stories of ambrose bierce and tim o’brien," war, literature, and the arts: an international journal of the humanities 10.2 (1998), 267-88.

part time jobs from home for housewives for a thorough analysis of the civil war literary industry at the end of the nineteenth century and its particular intersection with racial politics, see david w. blight, race and reunion: the civil war in american memory (cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 2001).

part time jobs from home for housewives daniel aaron, the unwritten war: american writers and the civil war (new york:
oxford university press, 1975), 192.