Secret soldier
‘Lots of women disguised themselves as men and served in both the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, but Cathy Williams, to the best of my knowledge, is the first woman of any race to have enlisted in the peacetime U.S. Army.’ Sarah Bird
The story of Cathy Williams, who served in the U.S. Army disguised as man, isn’t in the history books. Hers is like many in African-American history that are lost, even hidden, in time.
It took Austin-based author Sarah Bird some 40 years to bring Williams’ story of her two years as a Buffalo Soldier to light. Her book, “Daughter of a Daughter of a Queen,” is a historical novel based on Williams’ life and military service.
Bird, who has penned nine novels and one book of autobiographical essays, “A Love Letter to Texas Women,” will be at Brazos Bookstore, 2421 Bissonnet, at 7 p.m. Wednesday to discuss the book. She talked with the Hosuton Chronicle about how she learned of Williams’ fascinating story and what she wants the world to know about her.
Q: The Buffalo Soldiers National Museum in Houston has spotlighted Cathy Williams. Did you spend time here researching?
A: Houston was very important in my research. First of all, the Buffalo Soldier museum, run by Captain Paul Matthews, gave me the opportunity to actually handle artifacts. That was very important to get a visceral feel, but maybe more important, Houston was where I first heard the story.
Q: How did you find out about her story?
A: It was in the late ’70s, and I had just finished graduate school in journalism at UT (the University of Texas at Austin). I specialized in photojournalism, so I was taking a lot of photographs and really fell in love with African-American rodeos. The big rodeos were on Juneteenth, and I was at a Juneteenth rodeo in 1979 at the Diamond L Arena on South Main in Houston. There, I first heard this amazing story of a woman who had disguised herself as a man and served for two years as a Buffalo Soldier. It kind of blew my mind because I had never heard this story before and because I grew up in a military family.
Q: Were you surprised that her story had never been told?
A: Yes! To me, it’s such a colossal story. Lots of women disguised themselves as men and served in both the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, but Cathy Williams, to the best of my knowledge, is the first woman of any race to have enlisted in the peacetime U.S. Army. I was riveted by the story, but at the same time I kept pushing it away because I felt like I wasn’t the right person to write Cathy’s story.
Q: Why?
A. Ideally, it should have been told by an African American, and ideally an African American woman. I was certain that this would happen. I did not want to enter into a realm of cultural appropriation. I didn’t want to tread on very valid sensitivities. … So I let it go and went on to write nine other novels.
Q: But you came back to Cathy’s story?
A: I’d been waiting since 1979 for somebody to tell this story. So, finally I just had to dive in. I loved her story and knew I couldn’t go to my grave without telling it.
Q: How do you create a fictional reality about her?
A: To me, Cathy was formed by the West and the freedom that was promised. I wanted to give her more of a Western than a Southern voice. I read lots and lots of 19th-century narratives, diaries, books, newspaper accounts. Her voice had to do with the big question that haunted me: Why did Cathy make this monumental majestic decision and no other woman did? At the end of the Civil War, which you know it was horrible. The South was a smoldering graveyard, and you could either go back into essentially legal slavery, be a sharecropper, be a prostitute or a laundress. So $13 a month in the Army seemed like a good deal.
Q: How much of the book is true?
A: It’s definitely a novel. We absolutely know that she joined, enlisted and served for two years as a Buffalo Soldier. She had been taken off of the plantation in Missouri. Clearly, all of the relationships in the book had to be invented. There’s absolutely no way anybody would know who she was friends with, did she fall in love with someone? She married later in life, so that certainly is a possibility. In reality, she was in the infantry, she was a foot soldier, but I had always from the very beginning imagined her on a horse. So I changed that; I put her on a horse.
Q: How do you feel about bringing to light the story of Cathy Williams that should be in today’s history books?
A: It’s very long overdue. Of course, it was illegal for slaves to learn to read or write. So they could not tell their stories, and they were not in control of their own history. Their stories were not entered into the history books. We’re now just starting to look at the actual reality of the West and the brutalities of it. I made Cathy slightly larger than life, but I think you have to be slightly larger than life to have done what she did.
Q: The book started as a screenplay. What happened?
A: The screenplay has sort of been under option. But my feeling about movies is, don’t buy your popcorn until you get in the theater because movie deals fall through. It’s very hard to get the financing together for a movie.
Q: What do you want people to take away from your book?
A: I would like Cathy Williams to be recognized as the first woman to enlist in the peacetime regular U.S. military. Two years from now, if someone Googles who was the first, I want Cathy Williams’ name and picture to appear.