Numbering all the Bones

Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2002

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue-Chapter 4

Chapters 5-9

Chapters 10-13

Chapter 14-Author’s Note

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Prologue-Chapter 4Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue Summary

The story of Eulinda’s life at the Pond Bluff Plantation, the impact of the Civil War, and her unavoidable interactions with the Andersonville Prison is told as a memoir. Eulinda’s recollection of those events is stirred when she walks past a pawnbroker’s shop in Washington, D.C. and sees a ruby ring that she recognizes as the family treasure that played a huge role in her life. Clara Barton, the famous nurse who rose to prominence by founding hospitals to treat Civil War soldiers, is Eulinda’s employer. Clara encouraged Eulinda to write down the tumultuous story of everything that happened to her and her family. Eulinda acknowledges she has trouble deciding the focus of the story, then remarks, “People ask now, ‘How can you people have lived all around that place and not known what went on there, inside the walls?’ Nobody believes that most people didn’t, that people can go about their daily chores and live and tolerate evil amongst them. But many did” (vi).

Chapter 1 Summary: “Some Plain Facts, and How Sancho and Moll Came Home”

Eulinda begins by describing herself as a 13-year-old girl by the end of February 1864. A child with a white father and a Black mother, she is the illegitimate daughter of an enslaved cook, Mama, and Hampton Kellogg, the master of Pond Bluff plantation. Eulinda has many privileges, including living in the plantation house rather in the slaves’ quarters, and wearing hand-me-down clothes from Annalee, Hampton’s daughter with his first white wife, Miz Gertrude. While Eulinda does have many benefits denied to other enslaved people, Gertrude keeps her as her personal servant, controlling and mistreating Eulinda when Hampton is not watching. In the timeframe of the story, Gertrude is dead, and Hampton has remarried Mistis, who has taught Eulinda how to read, write, and speak properly.

The Civil War has already brought numerous changes to Pond Bluff, first among them the absence of many former slaves. Some, like Eulinda’s older brother Neddy, have run away to join the Union army and fight for freedom. Others have been conscripted by the Confederacy to support its war effort. Two more have lately been taken to help build a rapidly expanding prison.

Hampton and Mistis send Eulinda from the plantation house to the slave quarters with orders to bring back any gossip about the war and former slaves she might hear. The enslaved people understand this is happening and are circumspect about what they say in front of Eulinda. She is torn, feeling loyalty to the white family with whom she lives and the slaves of whom she is technically a part. Sancho and Moll, a husband and wife, who ran away to fight with the Union, have returned to the plantation. Sancho gives Eulinda the message that Neddy still has the ruby ring he stole, and he intends to use it when the war is over to start a new life in the West with Eulinda.

Chapter 2 Summary: “Remembering the Rabbit in the Celery Patch, and How I Saw My First Yankees”

Eulinda describes her delight in her little brother Zeke and her distrust and dislike for Gertrude, who mistreated her. She explains that Gertrude hated her because Hampton was Eulinda’s father, something Eulinda found out from Neddy when she was seven. Eulinda follows this with a description of the intrigue that ensued between her mother, Mama, and Gertrude. Zeke found a treasured ruby and gold ring that Gertrude lost. When he returned it to her, Gertrude accused Zeke of stealing it and sold him, which devastated Mama, Neddy, and Eulinda. When a cholera outbreak infected Mama and she was near death, she visited the main house and intentionally exposed Gertrude. Both women died of the disease. One year later, Hampton marries the slender, pretty Jennie Ambrose from Massachusetts, who is given in marriage by her brother Phineas, a successful Atlanta businessman.

Returning to the storyline, Eulinda describes the day she took her dog Otis with her to check her rabbit traps. She notes, “After they built the prison a mile from Pond Bluff, game got scarcer than horns on a rabbit” (20). Eulinda comes upon a bedraggled group of Union prisoners marching and being harassed by Confederate guards. Following them, she sees the prison for the first time. A Confederate soldier confronts her and points his gun at her, asking if she has a pass.

Chapter 3 Summary: “How the Yankees Almost Put Otis in a Stew, and Mr. Hampton Finally Decided to Act Like a Father”

After the soldier warns Eulinda away from the prison, he confiscates Otis with the intention of selling him to the Union prisoners for food. Eulinda runs to the plantation to find Hampton. She explains that Otis has been taken for food. Hampton responds by reminding her she was told to stay away from the prison. Regarding the prisoners eating Otis, he says, “Well, he’ll be tough. Not good eating. They’ll find that out soon enough” (27). Hampton’s attitude changes when Eulinda tells him the soldier pointed a gun at her and did not care when she told him she belonged to Hampton who was a man of “eminence around here” (27). He calls for his gun and Sancho to accompany him to the prison.

Later in the afternoon, to Eulinda’s great relief, Hampton returns with Otis. Mistis insists that Eulinda stay at the plantation house and have supper with them as a show of gratitude to Hampton. The trip to the camp has a bad effect on Hampton, who is not himself at supper. Eulinda goes to Iris in the slave quarters for one of her remedies. She overhears Sancho describing the wretched conditions in the prison camp.

Chapters 4 Summary: “How Captain Wirz Came, and I Find Out About Neddy”

Two weeks after the incident with Otis, Captain Henry Wirz, the commandant of the prison shows up at the plantation without warning. Hampton is away from the plantation and neither Wirz’s appearance nor his manner impresses Eulinda or Mistis, who deals with him firmly. Eulinda describes him as a “ridiculous-looking man” who is mistaken for a peddler, “an undersized toad of a man” (32). Wirz makes vague threats to hire Eulinda as a personal servant for his own wife and daughters, saying he has authority to simply take her. Mistis counters his claims by demonstrating her knowledge of the rights of landholders. When Wirz learns Eulinda’s brother ran away to join the Union army, he says he has Black soldiers at Andersonville, which he calls Camp Sumter. He describes the agony of a particular Black soldier and implies that he might be Neddy. Eulinda dashes from the house weeping. She reflects on the occasion when Neddy stole the ruby ring as revenge against the Kelloggs for selling Zeke.

That evening Hampton returns, and Eulinda sits with him and Mistis at the supper table. Eulinda overhears Mistis considering the possibility of sending her to Wirz. Mistis and Hampton discuss the possibility that Mistis’s “Unionist activities” might result in the Confederates confiscating their home. When asked by Hampton what these activities are, she replies, “Does it matter? You know that Phineas and I have many. If they prove it, they will come and destroy this place” (38).

After supper, Eulinda approaches Hampton and asks him to write her a pass so she can go to the camp to find out if Neddy is there. Hampton reveals he just learned that his son Julian is being held a prisoner-of-war in the Union’s Elmira Prison. Hampton is skeptical of Neddy’s willingness to return to Pond Bluff.

Chapters 1-4 Analysis

Eulinda acknowledges in her Prologue that, in retrospect, she feels in part responsible for the atrocities that occurred at Andersonville. This is not because of any specific action she did not take, but simply because she lived near the prison and knew what was happening there but did nothing to intervene. On the contrary to her sense of guilt, Eulinda did several things while the prison was still populated: she helped a Union captain escape; she talked her father into rescuing a teenage mother with a newborn child who was interred in the camp; and she tried to rescue her brother, who refused to leave the camp because doing so would mean returning to slavery. Despite what she did while the camp was filled with prisoners, and the work she did to create the memorial cemetery after the war, Eulinda is haunted by the feeling that she should have done more.

The lengthy, highly descriptive chapter titles serve two purposes. They offer ironic foreshadowing of the events to be described in the chapter. They also resemble chapter headings often used by nineteenth and early twentieth century writers. Thus, they add a degree of authenticity to a novel that portrays itself as a memoir from the late 1860s.

The revelation of Eulinda as Hampton’s daughter and the long-term fallout over that reality is used to disclose the depth of drama, plotting, danger, and intrigue that existed on slave-era plantations. Gertrude, a white woman, took revenge on Eulinda’s mother, a Black woman, by accusing Zeke of theft. Since Hampton—who would have intervened—was away, Gertrude sold Zeke without warning or even a comment afterward. Mama was helpless to get her son back. However, when Mama knows she is dying of a contagious illness—and Hampton once again is absent—she goes to Gertrude and embraces her. In effect, Mama murders Gertrude, though no one tells Hampton about Mama’s actions. It does not take long for the enslaved people to peg her successor, Mistis, as being equally wicked and devious.

The novel’s description of the Andersonville prison contains powerful, stark metaphors, intended to leave no doubt that it was an unearthly, inhumane facility. The prison is compared to a giant dead creature, a dragon, and “a nightmare come to life” (21). Before she sees it, Eulinda knows of it, since two slaves from Pond Bluff were conscripted to build it. By combining the description of the stockade with the mistreatment of the men, she conveys the wickedness of the prison from Eulinda’s first encounter: From the moment of its creation, it is a pernicious, malevolent place designed to annihilate human beings. Watching the Confederate soldiers drive the Union prisoners to the gates, she says, “Never had I seen white men treated so” (21). It is implied that it would not be unusual for enslaved Black men to be mistreated in such a way.

Eulinda sways Hampton to rescue her dog by saying that a soldier pointed a gun at her and that they had no respect for Hampton’s importance in the community. This exchange encapsulates the disconnect between the actuality of the prison conditions and the moral imperatives of area citizens: an innocent girl’s pet was going to be killed to be eaten and her father was going to allow it until he heard that she and he had been disrespected. Death is less important than disrespect. The greater irony is that the unnecessary starvation of the prisoners is never mentioned as the underlying reason they would want to eat a dog.

The third chapter contains several references to Hampton’s mental condition. His grasp on reality, according to Eulinda, has slipped since his son Julian has been missing in action, resulting in periods when he is not himself. As the narrative progresses, it becomes apparent that the slaves have little peace of mind when Hampton has a “spell” or loses conscious touch with the present. These episodes are another opportunity for Mistis to gain more control over the plantation and the slaves, which is something the enslaved people fear.

Wirz is a revolting, petty bully. In the Author’s Note, it is recorded that, following the war, Wirz was tried for war crimes and executed. One of the great ironies in the book occurs when, after Mistis orders him to leave their home, Wirz describes the way local citizens climb the parapets to look inside the prison and asks, “Vat kind of people you gott ‘rount here” (36). While Wirz questions the mindset of civilians who are intrigued by the teeming prison camp, he never addresses the underlying question: Why would he allow such atrocities to happen under his leadership? Wirz continually refused to allow the very local citizens he questioned to bring medicine and supplies inside Andersonville. Thus, when there were attempts by locals to render aid, Wirz prevented it.

In evading Hampton’s question about her Unionist Activities, Mistis is evasive and threatens Hampton with the loss of everything important to them. Mistis is not only trying to trick the Union and the Confederacy but is also successfully keeping her husband in the dark as she works to gain control of all his property.